Solved: Tips for advertising online radio station

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on this. It's a common situation to be in – you've built something you're passionate about, like your new online radio station, and now you're faced with the slightly daunting task of getting it in front of the right people. You're right to be cautious, the advertising platforms are full of options and it's incredibly easy to waste money if you don't have a clear plan.

The good news is that the core problem here isn't as complex as it seems. The solution isn't about finding some hidden button or secret setting within Facebook Ads. It's about a fundamental shift in how you think about advertising, away from just "promoting" and towards creating a system that consistently finds and attracts your ideal listeners. I'll walk you through how I'd approach it.

We'll need to look at your actual objective, because "promoting a post" is a trap...

First things first, let's talk about your idea to "promote a Facebook post directly". I'm going to be brutally honest here: this is almost always a bad idea and likely the quickest way to burn through your budget with very little to show for it. The 'Boost Post' or 'Promote' button is designed by Meta for one purpose: to make it incredibly simple for them to take your money. It's a trap for amateurs.

When you press that button, you're essentially telling the algorithm to optimise for "engagement" – likes, comments, shares. Or maybe "reach", which just means showing it to as many people as possible for the lowest price. Neither of these things are your actual goal. You don't want likes, you want listeners. You don't want people to just *see* your ad, you want them to click, land on your website, and press play. These are very different actions.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about how these platforms work. When you tell the algorithm to find you the cheapest possible reach or engagement, it does exactly that. It goes out and finds the people within your target demographic who are the least likely to ever take a meaningful action. Why? Because their attention is not in demand. They are the chronic scrollers, the serial 'likers', the people who will never click a link, never sign up for anything, and certainly never become a loyal listener to a new radio station. You're actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your station.

So, what's the alternative? You need to use the full Ads Manager interface and build a proper campaign with a proper objective. In your case, the objective should be 'Leads' or 'Sales' (Meta keeps changing the names, but it's what used to be called 'Conversions'). This tells the algorithm, "I don't care about likes or shares. I only care about finding people who will perform a specific, valuable action on my website". You'll then need to set up tracking (the Meta Pixel) to define that action – in your case, it could be a 'Listen' event that fires when someone clicks the play button on your station. This is a non-negotiable first step. Without it, you're flying blind and optimising for completely useless metrics. It's the difference between getting 1000 likes and zero listeners, versus getting 50 clicks and 10 dedicated new listeners. I know which I'd rather have.

I'd say you define who you're *really* for, because 'everyone' is 'no one'...

Once you've got the technical objective sorted, the next, and arguably most important, part begins. Who are you actually trying to reach? A common mistake I see is defining an audience with broad, useless demographics like "Men and Women, aged 18-55, who like 'Music'". That tells you nothing and will result in generic ads that appeal to no one. It's the marketing equivalent of shouting into a hurricane.

You need to forget demographics for a moment. You need to define your customer by their pain. Now, for a radio station, the 'pain' isn't a business problem, it's a cultural or emotional one. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. What is the musical nightmare your station solves?

-> Are you for the person completely bored sick of the same 40 songs on repeat on commercial radio?
-> Are you for the music nerd who feels Spotify's algorithms just don't get their specific taste?
-> Are you for the person who misses the human element of curation, of being introduced to something new by someone who cares?
-> Are you for the fan of a hyper-specific sub-genre (like 90s UK Garage, or modern atmospheric black metal, or brazilian funk) who has nowhere else to go?

Your ICP is the person experiencing that frustration. They feel musically homeless. Your station is their refuge. Once you understand that specific pain, you can start building an audience profile that's actually useful. It's not about age or gender, it's about psychographics and behaviour.

For instance, if your station plays obscure 70s prog rock, your ICP isn't "males 45-65". It's people who follow pages for bands like 'Camel' or 'Gentle Giant', who buy 'Prog Magazine', who might have an interest in 'Moog synthesizers'. These are targetable interests on Facebook that contain a high concentration of your ideal listener, and a very low concentration of everyone else. If your station is all about cutting-edge electronic music, your ICP are people who follow labels like 'Warp Records' or 'Ninja Tune', who read 'Resident Advisor', and who have 'Boiler Room' as an interest. This is the level of detail required. You need to become an expert in their world. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

You probably should find them where they live and what they like...

With a clearly defined ICP and the right campaign objective, you can now start building your campaigns inside Meta Ads Manager. This is where you translate your research into a targeting strategy. Given your goal is likely acquiring new listeners, you'll be focusing primarily on what we'd call 'top of funnel' (ToFu) audiences.

I would structure it like this:

Start with a single campaign with the 'Leads' or 'Sales' objective. Within that campaign, create several different 'Ad Sets'. Each ad set will target a different audience so you can see which one works best. Don't lump all your interests into one massive ad set – that's another common mistake. You need to isolate them to understand what's working.

Here’s a demonstration of how you might structure ad sets for, let's say, an indie/alternative rock station:

You'd let these run for a few days (or until each ad set has spent a reasonable amount) and then analyse the results. You're looking for the ad set that gives you the lowest Cost Per Listener. Once you find a winner, you can put more budget behind it. The ones that dont perform, you turn off. It's a process of systematic testing, not guesswork.

This kind of direct-to-consumer audience building is very powerful when done correctly. I remember one app growth campaign we ran for a client in the events and eLearning space; by using this kind of structured testing on Meta, we were able to drive over 45,000 signups at a cost of under £2 per signup. For you, a "listener" is effectively a signup. It's an acheivable goal if the strategy is sound.

Later on, once you have enough data (at least a few hundred listeners tracked by your pixel), you can start creating Retargeting and Lookalike audiences, which are even more powerful. But you have to walk before you can run. Start with well-structured interest targeting.

You'll need a message they can't ignore, so your ads must stop being boring...

Having the perfect targeting is useless if your ad itself is bland and uninspired. Your ad creative and copy needs to work hand-in-glove with your targeting. It has to speak directly to the pain point you identified earlier. "Listen to our radio station" is not a compelling message. You need to enter the conversation already happening in your prospect's head.

I like to use a simple copywriting formula for this: Problem - Agitate - Solve.

1. Problem: State the problem they're currently facing. Hit the nerve.
2. Agitate: Rub a little salt in the wound. Remind them why it's so frustrating.
3. Solve: Position your radio station as the perfect solution.

Let's look at how this plays out in practice. Here's the difference between a typical, lazy ad and one built with this framework.

For the visual part of the ad, you need to match this energy. Don't just use a generic stock photo of someone with headphones. Use a gritty photo of a featured artist. Create a short, punchy video that cuts between album covers of the kind of music you play, with a high-energy track in the background. Show a clip of your studio or the DJ speaking passionately about a song. You need to convey the vibe and culture of your station in about 3 seconds.

You'll need a realistic budget and to know your numbers...

So, what is all this going to cost? This is the million-dollar question, and the honest answer is "it depends". But we can build a model to give you a realistic ballpark figure. This is crucial for planning and for judging the success of your campaigns.

Your main metric to obsess over is your Cost Per Listener (CPL). This is the total ad spend divided by the number of people who clicked play. Here’s how we can estimate it:

First, we need to estimate the Cost Per Click (CPC). For well-targeted ads in developed, English-speaking countries (like the UK, US, Canada), you're often looking at a CPC in the range of £0.50 to £1.50. It can be higher for very competitive niches, or lower if your ad is exceptionally good.

Second, we need to estimate your website's Conversion Rate (CR). This is the percentage of people who click the ad and then actually press play on your station. This depends heavily on your website design. If you have a massive, unmissable "LISTEN LIVE" button right at the top, your CR could be quite high, maybe 30-40%. If it's hidden or the page is slow to load, it could be 10% or less. Let's be reasonably optimistic and assume a range of 20% to 40%.

Now we can do the maths:

CPL = CPC / CR

This table tells you that you should probably expect to pay somewhere between £1.25 and £7.50 to acquire a single new listener at the beginning. Your entire job as an advertiser is to start somewhere in this range and, through relentless testing and optimisation of your targeting, ads, and website, push that number down towards the lower end. If you start out with a CPL of £4, that's not a failure – it's your baseline. The goal is to get it to £3, then £2, and so on.

This also helps you set a starting budget. If you want to acquire your first 100 listeners, you should be prepared to spend somewhere between £125 and £750 to do it. I'd suggest starting with a daily budget of maybe £20-£30, spread across your test ad sets, and letting it run for a week to gather enough data to make informed decisions.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot of information to take in, and it's a world away from just 'boosting a post'. But this systematic approach is what separates campaigns that generate real results from those that just waste money. It's about building a predictable engine for audience growth, not just randomly throwing things at the wall. To make it more concrete, here is a summary of the action plan I would recomend.

As you can probably tell, getting this right involves a fair bit of work upfront and a disciplined, analytical approach to testing. It's a skill, and like any skill, it takes time to develop. Small mistakes, like choosing the wrong campaign objective or having a poorly configured pixel, can invalidate all your efforts and waste your entire budget before you even get started.

This is, frankly, what we do all day, every day for our clients. We take the guesswork out of it and implement strategies like the one I've outlined to build predictable growth engines. The value of getting expert help isn't just in the technical setup; it's in accelerating that learning curve, avoiding the costly mistakes most new advertisers make, and getting you to a point where you're acquiring new listeners profitably, much faster.

If you'd like to chat through your specific station, music genre, and plans in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can audit your current setup (or plans for one) and provide some more tailored advice. It might be a helpful next step for you.

Either way, I hope this detailed breakdown has given you a much clearer roadmap than you had before. Best of luck with the station.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh