Once in a while, a successful viral marketing campaign CAN turn an artist into an overnight sensation.
This is what happened for Cody Simpson. He had a small cult following, but his label wanted to uplevel his status and generate a lot of buzz for him.
AE’s real-time customer insights made it the perfect fan data analytics software to manage this task. Here’s how the label set up and ran a successful viral marketing campaign using AE…
The Results
- 4,000 fans participated in the campaign
- Each fan completed a minimum of 2 activities in the contest
- 39,670+ mentions of the artist across Facebook and Twitter
- 5 Million + people were reached during the campaign
- Insights into the fans’ preferred social media (Twitter)
- Insights into top fan geographies (USA, Australia, and Canada)
Campaign Design
The record label wanted a competition where fans completed specific tasks for a chance to be the “Top Fan.” Along with this title, they would win a trip and get a VIP ticket to one of the artist’s future shows.
A big priority for the marketing team was to automate as much as possible. They knew how time-consuming it is to sort data and were looking for fan data analytics software that could do the work for them.
The top campaign goals were to:
- Promote the new EP.
- Increase fan engagement.
It’s here! my new official fan club is at http://t.co/exLI8J85YB pic.twitter.com/JuktvaTb4H
— CODY SIMPSON (@CodySimpson) August 26, 2014
Automation: the Key to a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
AE was used as the command center for all the marketing and social activity. It helped build, track, and reward online fan behavior, automatically.
With AE, this record label was able to quickly build and track a high performing marketing campaign — without having someone spend hours trying to manage and report on all of the details.
Instead, fan data trickled in automatically and accumulated in the AE dashboard. With just a few clicks, the label could see which fans were the most engaged and watch as the campaign progressed!
The Steps to Increasing Fan Engagement
The record label started by adding AE’s social login app directly on to the artist’s website. Social login was critical to the success of the campaign because it was responsible for tracking fans and rewarding fan behavior.
Next, they built a social media marketing campaign using AE to take advantage of Cody Simpson’s passionate fans. The campaign included:
- Asking fans to talk about the artist’s new EP
- Having fans change their avatar photo to his album cover
- Loving the artist’s videos on Youtube
- Sharing the iTunes link for the EP
- Liking, following, mentioning him on social media
These and other tasks were used to score and rank fans, allowing AE to find the ultimate “Super Fan” who would claim the prize. Fans were instantly able to see how they ranked relative to other fans, which also helped drive a social community for the artist.
Fans were able to see where they ranked in comparison to others and view the top users of any given moment.
Viral Music Marketing Made Easy
As a result of the marketing campaign, the artist generated over 38k mentions on social media and was viewed by over 5 million people!
If it wasn’t for AE, the record label would not have had the tools and automated features they needed to make this a successful viral marketing campaign.
As they explained it:
“AE is more than just a tool for insights on fan behavior. It helped us to consolidate the tools we used into a single place and save time on day-to-day reporting. There is no other tool on the market that makes it as easy to automate and build viral marketing campaigns for music artists.”
If you’re ready to transform your customer data into insights and start creating fan engagement that leads to successful marketing campaigns, click here to explore our plans.