2. A glance at the Brand.
It offers an instant music streaming service and a simple way to access your
favorite music instantly and for free. The application runs on a ‘freemium’
model where it offers an hour of music playback, interrupted by three
minutes of commercials. With the phone application platform becoming more
popular over the time, websites are becoming lesser pertinent over time.
Through this presentation. we will try to research on some of the main
motives Spotify tries to follow and will try to shed some light on how effective
its website is in serving its purpose.
3. Inbound
Marketing
Using Buyer’s Persona
for Target Marketing.
Using Buyer’s Journey
to recognize any
challenges that the
current/future users
might face.
4. Content Marketing: This is
the main pillar Inbound
Marketing rests on. This
involves two main
platforms:
1. Facebook Posts
2. Blog Content
3. Monthly Emails
7. Online Advertising
Display Advertising
There are a lot of ways to advertise on third party websites to create more user
engagement.
Search Engine Marketing
This is very vital to get users to the door step of Spotify. The main search engines
are Google, Baidu, Yahoo.
8. Social Media Marketing
• Spotify is available on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Reddit and LinkedIn.
• While it does really well in creating a
following through those channels, there are
certain tweaks that could be made on those
to drive more user engagement.
9. Website & Social
Media
Main purposes of the website:
Log In/Sign Up
Access to Web Player
App/Download Spotify App
10. Search Engine
Optimization
Certain Key words are
important in a search and
more so for reaching
social media channels and
promoting the brand.
Notas do Editor
Buyer’s Persona: This paints a clear picture of the target audience and helps the brand tailor the product to them.
Buyer’s Journey: What the Buyer goes through while reaching out to the brand and any challenges that are recognized in the process can be worked on to eliminate.
When a buyer/subscriber/seeker is trying to digitally make a choice, the first venue they come a social media channel. We use the example as seen on the slide to create a buyer’s persona and imagine what a usual Spotify user looks like. This would give us a vision to come up with proper content for the social media channels.
Inbound Marketing would require utilizing various social media channels. The main thing that pushes a certain channel forward is the content presented on the website.
Spotify pushes content through these platforms very frequently which is key. The type of content matters too. Lately, Spotify’s strategy has been to promote newer artists through these platforms.
Blog Posts: Spotify has a high priority in promoting current and newer artists. With all the platforms being used for that, the blog can be used for announcements about the changes in the software and any updates that are presented to the software. This would increase transparency with the audience and they’d be able to voice their opinion on new additions.
Email Content: I love how Spotify uses Emails and tailors it for a particular user. Since I listen to comedy, I get emails about new comedians coming to my area in a monthly newsletter. Although once addition could be a monthly statistics about my listening activity and my interests in order for me discover more music of my liking.
Facebook Content: Facebook again recirculates the articles that are posted on he blog. Spotify does a good job with keeping up with the audience. Another focus is to again, promote new artists. The one thing that I believe they can do better is listening to questions and concerns of the public.
A direct link to the app: When users open the website, they could be directly taken to the application. Them being on phone makes it more feasible.
2) Card Layout: A horizontal layout make the website look much more organized and would make browsing through the sections easier. A vertical layout makes it hard for the user to explore everything on a first couple of looks on the website.
This is an example of Pandora’s web player.
I like the accessibility of features in the Pandora web player and they features it presents. Although the nature of the web players is different, some of the ideas from Pandora’s layout can be applied to Spotify as well.
What sites to target.
Sites that promote artists and musicians are a good route to take as well. We’d be able to find people who want to explore new music and through our app, they’d be able to get the desired songs.
News websites. These are the website that get guaranteed daily audience and for stations like, Fox and CNN, their own names legitimize the names of the brands that are present on their website for advertisement.
Netflix, Hulu and other show streaming websites. Given that Spotify already has a partnership with Hulu, we’d be able to reach out to people who support the online streaming culture and are okay with downloading desktop apps If required.
What should Spotify’s message be?
Since the beginning we have been focused on providing everyone and everywhere with the ability to stream music of their choice. Considering the sites that I mentioned, that would ensure we reach to people with the message that they too can get access to our service and hence stream their favorites from any style or genre.
A good idea would be to send them to our website which includes further links to all our social media. Another purpose that sending them to the website would serve would be that they’d be able to get instant access to music through our online player and hence try out the service.
Search Engine Marketing
One of the main strategies we can look at is to reach out to diverse audiences. The main outlet to do that would be frame keywords from different languages. For examples, for Baidu which is used by our Chinese audience, creating keywords in Mandarin would trigger better results in our favor on the search engine. In my opinion, focusing on ‘Meta-names’ would benefit us a lot (http://felixstechno.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-world-of-search-spotify-seo-and-ppc.html)
This is mainly because search engines speak the language of HTML codes and indexing a meta name in Mandarin would generate more online results in our favor.
Facebook: Being one of the apps that lets you use the application, I feel this we have fully utilized this application to get subscribers to the app. Because of the diversity of the functions on facebook, a user can toggle Spotify through a FaceBook search or go to the page which provides them with the updates. Following is a good examples of how something as simple as promoting an existing famous artist can drive huge engagement:
Twitter: Currently we are using Twitter to “cover all grounds” and make sure we’re reaching out to our subscribers who use that platform with newer deals and offers. For the most part, it mimics the Facebook updates and publicizes the updates Spotify has to offer. I would rank this below Facebook in generating future customer interest. One thing I would be more generating more twitter exclusive content.
Other brands like Pandora follow the social media platforms guidelines and generate more content that has limited number of characters, which allows them to generate content separate than their Facebook page and still market along the same lines of their regular agenda.
Instagram: This is one of my favorite social media platforms for target audience. Just because the nature of the app is to post clean and precise square pictures, we get the opportunity to stimulate audience interest by using the ‘A picture is worth a thousand words. Instagram gets us more engagement than some of the similar posts we do on Facebook. Below is an example of the Facebook post (left) and the Instagram post (right):
Reddit: This itself is a unique reach out to our audience and makes us stand out than the other streaming services. The reddit threads provides users with the all time favorite Spotify playlists and gives users to discuss and critique what that like or dislike about Spotify. Here is one example of a conversation which not only helps the user to figure out whether the service is good enough or not, but also gives us an opportunity to work on our flaws:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/78fg91/spotify_should_let_us_dislike_an_artist_on/
YouTube: The compilation videos that are marketed through facebook are put on our channel. One of the additions we can make it that we can allow actual artists to promote their Spotify channels by making advertisements through our channels.
Pinterest: This varies from Instagram because it lets the user collect photos promoting their favorite artist, hence encouraging them to liste to their music on Spotify.
LinkedIn: Like all the major corporations, Spotify also has a page on LinkedIn that post more information about the careers that are avaialable on Spotify and what the company does. It also links the users to the social media channels and helps them stay afresh on the updates from the company.
Spotify’s website design is a lot similar to Napster’s website in terms of the options it offers. In Napster’s early days, the phone applications weren’t so popular, hence it had to mainly bank on it website. Spotify, I believe is pretty successful in offering its users an “Warm Welcome” to its application by making its options clear and simple once you enter the website.
Most Spotify users prefer to have the application on their phone, and the application can be downloaded through the Android/iOS App stores. The website’s home page offers the option to instantly log in and go to the web player where the users can access their music and are introduced to the paid version of the application, which is the main business motive. Hence, I believe it’s pretty effective in guiding its first-time users to becoming permanent users of the service.
How successful has the site been?
Spotify lives by its brand recognition as a World of Music. With over more than 15 million songs, Spotify ties together social media and music and makes music more social.
Search Engine Optimization
What are some of the key-words that bring users to the website?
“free music”, “play music now”, “stream free music” are some of the popular searches that users make to find music through the popular search engines.
A lot of it depends on what the website includes in its “About” or mission statement and with Spotify’s tagline being “Music for everyone, it brings it to the limelight of all the internet searches.
Another interesting thing that I came across was the its inclusion in the searches that refer to downloading music, which is one of the application’s premium feature.
