How to Use Music in Marketing Paid Campaigns

Everyone loves music. Using it in your paid ad campaigns is a powerful way to catch people’s attention or appeal to their emotions.

The right music, leveraged in the right ways, has the potential to positively affect metrics like CTR and traffic to your website.

Why is Music in Marketing Paid Campaigns Beneficial?

Over the past few years, we’ve seen some incredible marketing happen with the marriage of music and marketing.

Remember when HP worked with Meghan Trainor to help promote their HP Pavilion x360? With this creative ad, HP saw a 26 percent increase in revenue from the previous 12-week average.

Why do music and paid campaigns work so well together?

Firstly, we have to understand the importance of music as a whole.

How much music do you listen to? If you’re an average American, this will amount to around 16 hours per week.

While we all might have our favorite genres, most people listen to a variety of music styles, including pop, rock, country, indie, folk, hip hop, etc.

Since music is a part of our everyday lives, it makes sense to connect what people love to our marketing campaigns.

There are many reasons music works in marketing. Some of the most notable are:

1. Music Evokes Emotions

We’ll discuss this in more detail later, but for now, it’s essential to know that numerous studies have shown that music has the power to evoke many emotions.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise because with music, people can get cheerful, energized, relaxed, nostalgic, and so much more. If you can identify the right music for your ads, you can evoke the right emotions from your targeted audience.

2. It Can Help Your Audience Identify Your Brand

With the rise of digital marketing, both small and large brands are constantly trying to get their audience’s attention.

It’s not easy, especially because it can feel like so many brands follow identical or similar trends. This, unfortunately, results in them looking and sounding the same.

Introducing music in marketing campaigns can help your brand stick out in the oversaturated virtual crowd.

3. Increase Brand Awareness

This one on our list is a continuation of the last point.

Brand awareness has become increasingly challenging. However, the more your audience associates certain songs or music with your brand, the better they’ll remember and recognize your brand.

5 Ways to Use Music in Marketing Paid Ads

In advertising, there is no full-proof plan you can follow that will guarantee your success. However, the following tips will help set you up on the right path.

1. Set the Mood

When you’re in the process of creating a video for your marketing campaign, it can be easy to forget about the music you’ll be using.

Many people tend to focus on the other aspects of creating a video: script, casting, storyboarding, etc., and only think about music when it’s time to edit the whole piece. When you start considering the music at the end of the video creation process, the music is at risk of sounding like an add-on rather than an intrinsic part of the video.

Instead, think about the mood you want to create from the get-go while you’re still working on the script and other essential basic elements of your campaign. Considering both visual and music elements from the beginning will ensure that your paid ad campaign communicates a cohesive message.

It’s also important to know the exact mood you’re trying to evoke with your paid ad. A number of studies have shown that different styles of music will evoke different emotional reactions from listeners.

For instance, one study reported that 90 percent of listeners found acoustic guitar sounds to be sophisticated and calming.

This same study also reported 87 percent of listeners found strings that played in sharp and short notes in a major key elicited excitement.

On the other hand, when these major keys were shifted to minor keys, 83 percent of listeners reported that feelings of sadness came about.

This shows that various chords, key shifts, and melodies have the power to evoke very specific emotional responses in listeners. That’s why it’s essential to be intentional with your music choices from the beginning of the creative process.

You and your team should ask: What specific emotions are we hoping to elicit from our target market? After watching our ad, what do we want them to do, and how do we want them to feel?

The answers to these questions will guide the music selection process so that you choose the music that will be the most appropriate for your ads.

In addition, remember that you can set the mood with music during moments when your characters aren’t speaking. Sometimes there are silent moments in the intro, middle, or end of the ad. These have great music potential.

To help you get started on some ideas, here are some basic moods you may want to convey in your video ads:

• humorous
• whimsical
• tense
• mysterious
• dramatic
• light-hearted
• gloomy

2. Evoke a Certain Emotion

This is tied to the previous point. While it’s crucial to think about the mood you’re trying to convey, it’s also important you don’t get carried away.

While you’re trying to pick and choose the right music for your marketing campaign, remember to keep things simple and try not to mix too many moods in one campaign.

Too often, advertisers will try to do too much when it comes to music. It’s essential not to overdo it because instead of creating a memorable ad that your audience will enjoy, you’ll just end up overwhelming or confusing them.

The old adage “less is more” couldn’t be more appropriate.

Choosea particular emotion that you want to evoke and let that emotion be clear from the beginning of the ad.

Is your ad a PSA, and you want to inspire your audience to take a specific action?

Are you promoting a luxury brand, and you want your audience to associate the product with prestige?

Be clear on what you’re trying to promote, and what action you would like your audience to take.

This can be your guideline on emotive music that can best help convey this message, but also the visuals, editing, and every other element of the ad.

3. Make It Memorable

Have you ever heard a song and immediately thought of a certain place or time in your life? Or even better: your mood immediately changed?

Why does that happen?

It all has to do with how we process music. Studies show that we process music by using the same part of the brain that processes memory and emotions.

In a nutshell, this means that if you can evoke the right emotions from your audience through music, the ad will naturally be memorable to them.

For instance, if your ad is set in a certain era, you can use music from that period. This will help your audience not only remember your ad but immediately start to reminisce.

As highlighted above, effectively adding music is about trying to bring about a certain emotion and if you get it right, your ad will be memorable.

4. Enhance Your Message

One of the best ways to enhance your message is through storytelling.

There’s a popular marketing phrase that you might have come across at some point: “People buy from people they know, like, and trust.”

A huge part of knowing, liking, and trusting anyone is connecting with them on a personal level. Stories help us achieve that. Just think about the last time someone told you a personal story. Didn’t it make you feel more connected to them?

There are various ways to tell a compelling story in ads. Most of the time, you don’t even need to say a single word. You can let the visuals and the music drive the story.

Let’s have a look at one ad that managed to connect story and music effectively.

In 2005, Sony created an ad to advertise their new HD LCD televisions.

In this video, they wanted to highlight the incredible color that the TV screens will give buyers. To do this, they threw 250,000 balls with different colors down the streets of San Francisco. This incredible visual was accompanied by the sounds of José González’s “Heartbeats.”

This ad was striking because the visual and sound elements connected so well. The colored balls are, of course, very visually striking and will instantly grab your attention.

The melodic music, together with the slow motion, ultimately creates a more engaging quality. You can’t help but stare at what you’re seeing.

These types of ads become more engaging and memorable.

5. Entertain Your Audience

When you’re choosing the music to use in your paid campaigns, it’s all about your customers.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking about your own music tastes and assuming that your audience will also love it.

When it comes to music in marketing, it’s about giving your audience the music styles that they already favor.

One ad that managed to do this perfectly was a 2004 Pepsi ad.

We know that Pepsi loves using popular acts in their ads. However, this one will probably go down in the history books as one of the most iconic because Pepsi decided to use not one, but three of the biggest pop stars at that time: Beyonce, Pink, and Britney Spears.

The pop stars alone could have caught the attention of millions of fans, but Pepsi went even further by ramping up the entertainment value.

In the ad, the artists acted out a short piece and also sang their rendition of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” They performed this in the Colosseum while dressed as gladiators.

Conclusion

Using music in marketing is an essential part of your paid campaigns. As discussed, this can help you elicit specific emotions from your audience, increase brand awareness, and encourage conversions.

However, getting it right isn’t as easy as many might think. There are many elements to consider. You have to set the right mood, make the ad memorable, enhance your message, entertain your market, and not overdo it by communicating too many messages at the same time.

If you want help kicking off a paid campaign that uses music and other creative elements, our agency is there to help. We also offer content marketing and SEO services.

Have you used music in your marketing campaigns? What interesting and fun tips can you share?

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