A large independent record label, ESL Music, was looking to generate buzz for their most successful artist, Thievery Corporation, with an online music PR campaign.
The record label ESL Music had a lot going on — they didn’t have time to manage every single task and the day-to-day reporting needed to run a successful social campaign. But they wanted to promote Thievery Corp’s new album release and upcoming tour.
ESL had heard of AE being used by the largest record labels and decided to give it a shot. After quickly setting up AE’s social listening, they started building out their first campaign.
In their words:
“AE was something unique in the marketplace. It didn’t take long for us to see the value. We were able to gather insights on fans from LastFM, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Best of all, we could build automated marketing campaigns and contests based on behavior that required little to no time for us to manage. It was a no-brainer.”
Phil Hawken of ESL Music
Goals, Goals, Goals
The record label had several goals for this campaign:
- Promote the new album
- Engage their fans
- Promote the tour
- Sell album, merch, and tickets
Typically for music PR campaigns online, we recommend picking a single goal, but this record label thought they could do it all.
And you know what? They did.
The Steps to a Successful Online Music PR Campaign
ESL Music built a campaign using the band’s website as the focal point for activity. Through the website, fans were informed of different social tasks and activities they would need to complete to climb up the rankings and receive rewards.
Here are some of the nuts and bolts of their online music PR campaign, and how they tied it in with AE’s data crunching engine.
- Fans used social sign-on to register for the contest. This action entered them into AE’s system so the band could track what their fans were doing.
- Fans earned fast points by following the band on Facebook and Twitter.
- As a task, fans were asked to listen to the band’s music over 100 times on LastFM.
- True fans were rewarded with points and climbed the leaderboard for buying the band’s new album or EP
- Fans earned points for sharing a photo of a security camera on Twitter and Facebook (it was a quirky/cool personal element of the band that resonated with fans and made for an awesome offline/online element of the contest).
- The contest encouraged fans to tweet about the new album and talk about it on Facebook by awarding points for those actions.
*(It was a quirky/cool personal element of the band that resonated with fans and made for an awesome offline/online element of the contest).
Raving Results
This record label hit it out of the park.
They were able to hit all of the goals they set out for their music pr campaign.
Here’s a recap of their campaign results:
- 16,000+ views of the band
- 10,000+ website visits
- ~ 2 minutes of time spent on the band’s website
- 1,000+ entrants into the competition
- Fans performed an average of 3 activities or “missions”
- 1,000 + mentions of the band on Facebook and Twitter
As they put it:
“The value was obvious. You hear about viral marketing and wonder how you can build something similar for your artists. AE gave us a tool that literally created viral awareness for our band. The coolest thing is being able to see all of the activity and measure performance from a single dashboard. We no longer had to manually create reports from different tools.”
If you’d like to start building similar campaigns and tracking your artists and fan behavior across all platforms like Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Deezer and more, click here to explore our plans.