Boosting your Instagram Reels is a great way to expand awareness about your artist brand. 

It’s also an excellent way to build a retargeting audience that you can use in your ads to send people to Spotify, Apple Music, and more. 

Now, there are a few different ways to go about this, but because I am such a fan of orchestrating everything inside my Business Manager account, here’s how I like to do it. 

Choosing the right objective

We can start by choosing from two campaign types—Awareness and Engagement. 

Because we’ll be optimizing for video views, either one of these will work. 

With an Engagement campaign, we also have the option to optimize for post engagement (e.g. likes, comments, and shares), but this time around, we’ll start with an Awareness campaign. 

Once we’ve selected our objective, we can adjust the title, set our budget, and move on to the ad set level. 

Targeting and placements

At the ad set level, I like to stick to the countries where I want to grow my fanbase on Spotify and beyond. 

After all, the end game for this campaign is to pull these viewers into an audience that I can retarget to send people to my music and, hopefully, earn their email addresses to sell merch and more. 

Here’s how I set up my targeting:

Once I’ve set my targeting, I’m only going to use placements on Instagram because the byproduct of this campaign that I want to pursue is for people to click through to my profile to follow me. 

Once my placements are set, I’ll switch the optimization objective to “ThruPlay” and move on to the ad level. 

Creating the ads 

At the ad level, we have the option to either boost an existing Reel or we can simply upload our video as we usually would. 

The downside here is that if you have used your “official” song in your Reel on Instagram, it won’t let you boost it in an ad. 

Bummer. 

But, we can upload that same video as an original video to use instead.

After all, we own the audio and video we’re using. 

These views won’t map to the live version of the Reel on our profile, but that’s ok. It’s a small price to pay to achieve our long-term goals. 

After we’ve selected our video, we can add some primary text, change our button to “Watch Now”, drop in the link for the Reels section of our Instagram profile, and hit publish. 

Now all we have to do is sit back, let the views roll in, and dump them all into an audience to use in our retargeting campaigns down the road. 

Piece of cake.