What do you do when you are in a traffic jam in the beltway? What about when you're trying to break your personal best in the 10K? What about when you're in the shower? Let me guess: you listen to Spotify!
I know, it really seems like I know you very well. In fact, you and I and 299 million other people have something in common: we use this streaming audio to take us through every moment of the day.
Playlists, radio, authors and podcasts: Spotify is not just a music container, it is a content distributor with staggering data. So why not take advantage of this enormous potential and start running promotional campaigns?
Let's give some numbers
With 299 million monthly active users, including 170 million with free subscriptions, Spotify reaches as many as 92 markets. An extraordinarily large user base, in which specific personas and clusters of interests can easily be identified.
Who are the Spotify subscribers?
Men and women in almost equal proportions (46 percent women, 54 percent men), the majority of users belong to the youngest age groups, among the most coveted by advertisers and brands: as many as 34 percent are between the ages of 18 and 24, 27 percent between 25 and 34, and 14 percent between 35 and 44.
Audience data can go into even more detail, revealing, for example, that podcast listeners are on average more educated and have greater purchasing power than the average by age group (source: Spotify First Party Data 2020 and Global Web Index 2018). In short, Spotify with its first-party and third-party data allows it to reach specific audience segments based on demographics and interests identified by analyzing users' streaming habits and music tastes.
Finally, a small dutiful mention of the platform's content: more than 60 million songs, more than 1.5 million podcasts, and 4 billion playlists. There really is something for every taste (and genre).
Reaching an engaged audience
Millions of people accompany their most important moments with Spotify music. Daily listening fuels streaming intelligence: first-party contextual data that reveal to us mindset and tastes of the moment.
And it is precisely the enormous variety of data that is the sure added value of this tool. On Spotify, your audience is perfectly targeted not only on the basis of demographic data, which is common to so many other platforms, but also and above all because of the knowledge of users' moments and habits .
Spotify knows what time you go running on Sunday mornings (and when you decide not to), whether you love listening to podcasts on Greek mythology or experiential marketing, and whether you had a romantic dinner or pizza at home with friends last night.
People share information and opinions with the platform, communicate their preferences so that the algorithm can offer them audio content that is increasingly related to their interests.
You choose, the algorithm learns, and the data is refined.
By analyzing users' streaming habits and music tastes, it is possible to reach highly profiled audience segments based on
- Demographic data (gender, age, geolocation real-time streaming, etc...) provided through user registration;
- musical tastes (Children's Music, Alternative, Classical, Rock etc... totaling over 30 genres and subgenres) to broadcast commercials immediately after listening to a specific genre;
- Behaviour (analysis of activities, moods, habits) through the analysis of personalized playlists;
- device (desk, mobile, tablet, car, connected gaming devices etc...) to reach users with your campaigns dynamically based on the platform they are currently using.
It seems that all that remains is to place your campaign at the right "moment" with the right person, with almost surgical precision.
Engaging advertising formats: there's more besides audio!
Spotify offers several spot formats: audio is definitely the most popular, but it is not the only one.
Since there are multiple devices and platforms that can play streaming, there are also multiple advertising formats, which adapt to the action that the user is presumably taking.
The planned formats are:
- Audio Everywhere: audio spot that allows you to reach your target audience on any device, in any environment, at any time of day;
- Videos (Sposored Session and Video Takeover): high impact, high quality videos shown only in the foreground open platform and accompanied by clickable banners;
- Display (Overlay and Homepage Takeover): clickable banner that makes your Brand the center of attention (and screen);
- Sponsored Playlists: allow you to optimize brand awareness through exclusive sponsorship of the best content, i.e., editorial playlists.
Use a combination of audio, video and display content with uniform messages to ensure your brand "ubiquity."
SPOTIFY AD STUDIO
It is the platform from which to schedule a campaign. The mechanism is very similar to other social ads platforms, albeit with some slight limitations probably due to the "young age" of the tool.
The classic Campaign - Ad Group - Ad structure allows you to select objective, duration, format and hit targets based on interests, real time context, music genres or no specific interest, to craggiate just about everyone.
But the real revolution is the possibility of creating through the platform and totally free of charge (with no additional costs compared to the advertising investment) a voiceover with actors: a guaranteed professional result.
Easy, fast, measurable and targeted, advertising on Spotify sounds really good!
Case History, or "Why didn't I think of it first!"
If you struggle to imagine campaigns with great potential and winning results, I invite you to look at the case histories listed at https://ads.spotify.com/it-IT/case-history/ for inspiration.
Playlists for dogs, symphonies composed from potato chips, sounds that become cooking recipes, and more... not just Awareness and Reputation, with Spotify advertisers are seeing a significant increase in brand metrics, on a global scale and in numerous vertical markets.
3D audio, interactive content, apps to download, sites to visit: big brands have rethought the brand experience by offering new, innovative, curious and interesting material. Listening to Spotify marks moments that, if well understood and leveraged with creative value messages, will significantly increase your SOV.
Yes, all clear, but how much does it cost?
Here I now unveil the biggest and most important news: recently Spotify decided to revise its marketing logic, lowering the minimum campaign investment budget from $1,000 (in the beginning costs were even higher, tens of thousands of dollars) to 250 euros.
To recap: audio format and uniform messages tie into the everyday moments of an effectively engaged target audience that is inclined to remember and research (and consequently buy).
A brand digital strategy on Spotify is a harmonic symphony of measurable progress and maximum creativity-a winning mix that can be played right away, like a beautiful Playlist.
Francesca Vanolo
Web Marketing and Social Media Ambassadors - Digital Innovation Days