How to promote a playlist: A Case Study

This real-life case study showcases how a product – in this case, an indie playlist – moves through the marketing funnel, effectively engaging and converting consumers at each stage.

from THE ORCHARD ADS TEAM

Goals

Perfect Havoc is a UK dance and house record label, management, and events company responsible for breaking talent such as Joel Corry, PS1, Karen Harding, Kokiri, Tobtok, Oliver Nelson and Just Kiddin’. Last year, they acquired a playlist on Spotify named ‘Summer Mix 2023’ featuring EDM music with summer vibes. 

Campaign Objective: Grow playlist followers and increase streaming for the ‘Summer Mix 2023’ playlist on Spotify.

Strategy

The strategy was to follow the summer season around the globe starting with the Southern Hemisphere from February to April and then transitioning into the Northern Hemisphere.

We divided the campaign into 2 phases:

• Phase 1: Awareness/Consideration – We executed video view-optimized campaigns aimed at expanding the label’s social platform engagement audiences. This strategy involved targeting broad audiences, focusing on lookalikes of current engagers, as well as users with diverse related interests such as fans of similar artists and dance music genres.
• Phase 2: Conversion – We launched a conversions-optimized campaign with a retargeting strategy to engage users who interacted with Phase 1 ads. Our goal was to convert these users into loyal playlist followers and active streamers, leveraging their initial interest to foster deeper engagement with our content.

Platforms & Targeting

We strategically selected Instagram, TikTok, and Audiomob as our platforms for the campaign. Audiomob uniquely offers audio ads paired with click-through banners on mobile gaming apps which are served in a non-intrusive way. We decided against using Spotify Ad Studio due to a lack of attribution functionality with playlist ads.

Phase 1 Targeting:

• Instagram – Target users interested in artists similar to those featured on the playlist, as well as those interested in EDM-related events, press, and radio stations, and leverage data from similar Orchard artists.
• TikTok – Utilize TikTok’s third-party interest and hashtag data to target users with the same interest and social behavior criteria as the above.
• Audiomob – Leverage the platform’s dance and electronic genres, festivals, partying, and vacation interest audiences.

Phase 2 Targeting:

• Instagram – Retarget Phase 1 Ad Engagers.
• TikTok – Retarget Phase 1 Ad Engagers.
• Audiomob -– Target the same audience as Phase 1, due to a lack of retargeting capabilities on the platform.

Creatives & Results

Phase 1 Creatives: 

The label provided a series of assets that were vetted by us including meme-like creatives for TikTok, more traditional dancing and partying footage for Instagram, and a banner ad with associated audio message and background music for Audiomob. We used a short-link destination that drove people directly to the Spotify playlist.

Phase 1 Results: 

Ads served over 14.7 million impressions and drove 10.7 million video views plus 29K engagements. There was a notable increase in playlist consumption rates and follower numbers (2,019) despite that not being the primary focus of this phase.

Phase 2 Creatives:

We revamped assets and drove retargeted users to a link focused on saving and streaming the playlist.

Phase 2 Results:

During this second phase, we successfully tracked conversions from our Phase 1 engagers, attributing these conversions to our comprehensive full-funnel strategy. The playlist gained 11,572 Spotify Followers with an impressive 79% to  89% Click To Service Rate on orcd.co links used for TikTok and Instagram ads. The Audiomob campaign delivered a 1.21% Click Through Rate and 84.12% Listen Through Rate,smashing the 0.2% CTR and 50% LTR benchmarks, respectively. To quote Rob Davies, Co-Founder of Perfect Havoc:

“The playlist has been generating between 8k to 10k daily streams which is impressive and it continued to grow without advertising. […] UK streams have increased significantly and our position SEO ranking in Spotify has gone from 44th to 26th place.”

Check out the Summer Mix 2024 Playlist here.