Breaking Records in a Hyper-Competitive Music Landscape: The Power of Paid Advertising
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Brendan Neal
Vice President, Revenue Operations at Wavo
Wavo Blog: This series shares information that’s most relevant to music marketers around the globe.
“Social media is now ‘pay to play’, making it essential to leverage paid advertising in the launch of a successful single.”
Context
In today's music landscape, it's more competitive than ever to break a record. With the proliferation of streaming, artists not only have to compete for fans with a global set of new releases but also with a vast back-catalog of resurfaced music. On social platforms, artists must battle influencers, movies, news, and updates from friends and family for the attention of fans. As we’ve shared before, social media is now ‘pay to play’, making it essential to leverage paid advertising in the launch of a successful single.
Paid advertising is a powerful tool for artists to cut through the noise of streaming and social platforms and reach their biggest fans. With high speed to market, precise targeting, and guaranteed results in terms of reach and frequency, paid media has the unique ability to help increase brand recognition and drive the awareness and engagement that create hit records.
As both an agency and analytics partner, Wavo offers a unique advantage with its specialized focus on the music industry. This allows us to deliver the high-quality planning, benchmarking, and reporting essential for making music marketing predictable and scalable. Plus, with Wavo you can leverage a suite of tools to validate this marketing strategy, ensuring that you hit the right targets and can better attribute marketing efforts to sales and other important results.
“A single can’t succeed unless fans and potential new fans hear the music.”
Our Approach
One common reason a single fails when it may otherwise have been successful is a simple lack of awareness. A single can’t succeed unless fans and potential new fans hear the music, and the cost of this missed opportunity can be significant for an artist's career. Flops come with both short-term financial losses and negative PR that can have long-term consequences for the artist's career. With increasingly sophisticated digital advertising options there's no excuse for a good product not reaching the right fans.
To help artists overcome these challenges and successfully launch their singles, drive sales, charting, acquire new fans, increase brand recognition, and generate revenue, we have developed a marketing strategy with four main objectives:
Reach a high percentage of an artist’s core fans on their primary social channels with the announcement of the single within release week
Leverage the release to grow an artist’s share of voice and fanbase by developing new audiences most likely to stream and become fans
Drive streaming and new listener conversion on Spotify through Audio and Marquee advertising
Drive video viewership on YouTube
These objectives are supported by specific creative, targeting, and budgeting strategies to ensure the highest likelihood of each objective achieving its goal:
Reach Core Fans:
Build awareness with core fans by choosing creative that feature the artist specifically addressing them. Targeting core fans and retargeting audiences wherever available is a priority, as audiences who have already shown interest in the artist or their previous work are the most likely to support new content.
Wavo’s Analytics platform
Develop Prospecting Audiences:
Engage potential fans with music video cutdowns and DIY artist-created videos on social media platforms. Targeting the artist's closest collaborators, contemporaries, and competitors through keywords and related artist targeting allows advertisers to reach users who have shown adjacent interest in the artist's domain of work.
Drive music video views:
Develop views on YouTube with YouTube in-stream ads. Advertising on YouTube is cost-effective and helps increase public view counts, which in turn, positively impacts algorithmic discovery and builds social proof. To target audiences effectively, we balance broad, TV-style audiences with genre and artist brand interests, along with niche and pointed action-based targeting such as Keywords and Retargeting.
Generate streams on Spotify:
Increase streaming on Spotify by reaching both artist fans and new, prospective fans who are likely to drive future streaming. Spotify Advertising is the optimal platform for achieving sales, charting, and direct consumption through streaming. It offers direct attribution to streaming results, is cost-effective, and reaches fans while they are in the mode of listening to music. To maximize the impact of our advertising, we use both Audio and Marquee ads to reach both free and paid Spotify users. Our creative strategy focuses on using a voiceover from the artist, rather than a voice actor, and ensuring that the hook of the song plays without any voiceover for the first 10-15 seconds.
Budget:
To budget correctly, we use reach and frequency planners along with past campaign data and current costs and trends, to ensure that we are not under or over budgeting across each objective in our plan. Ultimately, we aim to achieve the maximum reach and ideal frequency for our campaigns up to the point where the efficiency in our results begin to diminish substantially. While there may be specific situations where we are ok with paying higher amounts per view or stream, this gives us a minimum baseline for what should be invested to ensure the most impactful paid advertising campaign.
Validate:
When measuring the results of a campaign, an invaluable tool for validating your Instagram marketing strategy is the Instagram Reach & Engagement Dashboard that we have created. This tool helps track both organic and paid reach for your Instagram account, providing insights into how your content is performing and who is engaging with it. By using this tool, you can determine if your targeting and messaging are resonating with your audience, if your release announcement is achieving enough reach across your fanbase, as well as surface opportunities to amplify high performing organic content with your paid advertising.
“Wavo’s single release strategy is data driven and intuitive, focussed on ensuring and attributing tangible results.”
Key Takeaways
The power of paid advertising is an essential tool in helping artists achieve their goals and break records in today's hyper-competitive music landscape. Creating effective ads and allocating an appropriate budget is the best way to reach the key audiences that drive streaming sales momentum. Wavo’s single release strategy is data driven and intuitive, focussed on ensuring and attributing tangible results that lead to sales, charting, fan development, and increased revenue and market share.
Written by Brendan Neal, Vice President, Revenue Operations at Wavo
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