A carefully-worked campaign to build awareness of an emerging artist that started 2015 with a small but passionate fanbase.
Note, the text that follows was provided by the team behind the campaign.
Company
Columbia Records
Team members involved
Simon Rollison, Digital Marketing Manager
Stacey Tang, Director of Marketing
Paula Hanley, Head of Digital Marketing
Callum Roberts, Digital Channel Manager
Nick Dearmun, Marketing Assistant
Campaign breakdown
Budget: £10k – £25k
Audience demographic: 51% female / 49% male, age 18-34, global
Overview of campaign
This year, in preparing for the announcement of Raleigh Ritchie’s debut album, we have been focused on building a social fan base & streaming audience to support a sustained album campaign.
Raleigh is a multi-disciplined talent whose fan base at the top of the year was passionate but relatively small; the task therefore on the one hand was to create opportunities to reach groups of potential fans who could advocate for Raleigh both off & online & on the other to formulate strategies to specifically engage fans on Spotify in order to prepare the ground for new music in 2016.
The former was achieved via carefully constructed content & social strategies & by working with a variety of brands & media partners while the latter through a mix of playlisting & innovative advertising.
Here are some examples: Partnered with Vodafone to produce the first 4G-powered, interactive 360-degree live stream. Partnered with TimeOut to premiere the Bloodsport video at the Prince Charles Cinema where Raleigh held a Q&A with the directors & screened one of his favourite movies. Partnered with Youtubers AllTime10s to film an episode of their Fact Wars series starring Raleigh.
A comprehensive content strategy that saw reach around key pieces being maximized via complementary meme-based & behind the scenes content. A strategic streaming campaign around the single Bloodsport ’15 that included targeted Filtr playlisting, digital spend, Spotify audio & video ads & an innovative interactive Spotify homepage takeover which asked fans to colour in the banner in order to listen to the track.
The curation of an artist Spotify playlist that is updated daily & used as a life blog to engage with fans on & off the platform.
Results and key learnings
Vodafone partnership was the best performing social campaign that Vodafone UK had ever carried out in terms of engagement & sentiment analysis.
Raleigh’s social & streaming growth increased by 60% around the event & video content from the event was viewed over 300k times.
Sold out UK tour including a London date at the 1500 capacity Brixton Electric.
AllTime10s video has so far been viewed over 120k times.
Meme-based behind the scenes content had over 10m views after hitting the front page of Imgur & Reddit. All the activity over the past 12 months has resulted in consistent growth across all social platforms with Facebook up by 22%, Instagram by 144%, Twitter by 70% & the email database by 20%.
The track has now done a combined 5.9m streams across all versions & peaked at over 100k streams a week globally with the campaign generating a 90% increase in streams within 12 weeks of release.
Our key learnings have been around artist-fan relationships & how to foster them through a comprehensive content strategy.
Focusing on super-serving the fan base, over the course of the past year in particular, has created a strong foundation ahead of album release next year & has ensured that we are speaking to a highly engaged group of fans & advocates clearly demonstrated by selling out a 1500 capacity venue in London before releasing an album.
Links and extra info
Meme-based content: http://imgur.com/gallery/lCFpt2R/comment/382315011
Rich Media ads: http://smarturl.it/rritchie-share
Alltime10s video: https://youtu.be/P3etIX6Alws
Vodafone partnership: http://blog.vodafone.co.uk/2015/01/16/30yearsvodafone-gig-live-stream-run-dmc/
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