Social Media Audit and Marketing Plan
Spotify: Music for Everyone
Kaitlin Dunbar, Maddie Goscha, Claire Hoffman, Troy Jaremus and Margaret
Reed
Kelly Crane and Luxi Chai
Marketing 443: Digital Marketing and Social Media
December 13, 2017
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Social Media Audit and Marketing Plan
Spotify: Music for Everyone
Kaitlin Dunbar, Maddie Goscha, Claire Hoffman, Troy Jaremus and Margaret
Reed
Kelly Crane and Luxi Chai
Marketing 443: Digital Marketing and Social Media
December 13, 2017
Table of Contents
- Introduction…….…………………………………………………………………………… 2 a. Who We Are b. Who Spotify Is: Mission, Vision, Purpose
- Executive Summary………………………………………………………………………… 3
- Situation Analysis / Business Strategy……………………………………………………... 3 a. Business Vision, Mission and Value Proposition b. Internal Environment c. External Environment d. SWOT Analysis
- Objectives…...……………………………………………………………………………… 5
- Define the Target Audience ………………………………………………………………... 8
- Social Media Marketing Plan ………………………………………..……………………. 10 a. Social Media Audits b. Social Media Plan Recommendations i. Very little Expansion ii. Minor Tweaks iii. Complete Overhaul c. Four Social Media Zones i. Social Community ii. Social Publishing iii. Social Commerce iv. Social Entertainment
- Experience Strategy …………………………..…………………………………………… 18
- Activation Plan ………………………….…………………………………………………. 19
- Management and Measurement Plan ………………………………..…………………….. 21 10. References ……………………………………………..………………………………….. 23
and how they run their business in an increasingly competitive world. These values include being innovative (we’re all pioneers), collaborative (we’re all Spotify), sincere (we mean it), passionate (we feel it) and they are playful (we say yes to fun).
2. Executive Summary Spotify is a well known music streaming application that has rapidly grown in popularity since its founding in 2006. Even though it is extremely popular and has over 140 million active users worldwide, it has some aspects it needs to improve on to increase cohesiveness and synergy among its social media sites and its users and followers. Our objectives include increasing millennial engagement, increasing high school age premium subscribers and to create a more cohesiveness via message and connection between all of their media sites. To do this, we will establish partnerships with artists on Spotify, we will incorporate new experience promotions and develop a messaging application on Spotify to make it more interactive and allow listeners to talk and interact with their friends and favorite artists. 3. Situation Analysis and Business Strategy As explained above, Spotify is one of the most versatile music sharing platforms that reaches a wide range of media outlets. Users can reap Spotify’s benefits with an easy- to- use interface via mobile devices, smart televisions, computers, and any innovative technology outlets in between. Spotify’s mission statement, “To help people listen to whatever music they want, whenever they want, wherever they want” emphasizes that users have the power to choose and customize their options to create a personalized listening experience. This short, yet meaningful mission statement stresses Spotify’s objective of providing music in a convenient way for any type of user. With over three hundred thousand signed labels and accessibility in fifty eight
countries, Spotify has established a steady market for itself. To dive deeper into Spotify’s situational analysis, it is important to examine the internal and external components of the music sharing platform. By looking at the internal strengths and weaknesses, and comparing external opportunities and threats, there are several apparet components that have a large effect on Spotify's competitive advantage and position within the market. Looking at strengths first, Spotify offers over thirty million songs and over 1.5 billion playlists. Since Spotify was one of the first music streaming platforms, it is accompanied by a sense of credibility and gained a headstart with trusting and loyal users. The user interface is easy to navigate and is available on seemingly any international platform, from IOS and Windows to other softwares such as Meego. In addition, Spotify serves as an attractive advertising platform. Since Spotify offers a free option, some audio listeners claim that commercials are a fair price to pay for the amount of content they can access at no cost. That being said, advertisers look to market through Spotify since the consumers are forced to listen with the free subscription. Lastly, Spotify allows Premium users to listen completely offline. Therefore, Spotify proves that it can be utilized anytime or anywhere. From an opportunities standpoint, Spotify has room for growth in several areas. As users are growing, the amount of data to analyze is skyrocketing. With this data, Spotify can create algorithms for enhancing recommendations and content discovery. Spotify also has growing opportunities to work directly with artists in order to personalize playlists or even promote upcoming releases. In addition, Spotify has opportunities to explore higher levels of streaming, such as live concerts or interviews.
In order to appeal to those who are near the lower cut-off of the millennial category, it is important to increase our number of users that are not yet in college and are in high school. We will implement a discount where high school students will be offered a discount similar to that of college students and will be given the ability to receive a discount on Spotify premium. A normal premium account costs $9.99 a month meaning that college students, with valid college email, only pay $4.99 a month. High school students typically rely on their parent’s financial support and have a more of a disposable income than college students. Because of this, Spotify will discount the premium service to 30% rather than 50% which will provide an incentive for these younger students to purchase premium because they feel as if they are getting a bargain. There are roughly sixteen million students enrolled in high school currently in the United States and by offering a discount to this target group, Spotify has a great opportunity to increase their premium subscribers (“The NCES Fast Facts Tool Provides Quick Answers to Many Education Questions”), which, in turn, will increase revenues. b. Create Cohesive Message Across Platforms - Informational Site Spotify currently struggles with consistency throughout their social media platforms. Some platforms post more frequently than others and even if they do post frequently, the information communicated between the media sites are all over the place. The “about” and description sections on each individual platform is inconsistent, causing confusion as to what they actually are, what they do and what services they offer. This is a huge problem because new customers, who may not know a lot about Spotify, need to do a lot of research to find the information they want instead of just finding it on an informational website of sorts. Spotify
needs to have a coherent slogan and either an “about” page or a link to an informational website that can be clearly found throughout all platforms. Spotify already has a help link attached to the home menu on their main website. However, you have to search for it and once you get onto that part of the site, you still need to search for an answer for whatever question you may have. To improve this section, we will completely reconstruct it. We will start by giving a general information about Spotify, what types of services they offer and what they are all about. We will also connect links to their social media sites along with their blog that talks about their background, their employees and more personal information about the company. We will include a FAQ section where you can find quick fixes and will showcase our video tutorials for those who need more detailed help. By posting the link to their informational website and all other social media pages, Spotify will provide their customers with the ability to learn more about their service, hassle free. To test the effectiveness of the informational website and the cohesiveness of our media sites, our team plans to create interactive surveys that customers can complete. These surveys will display branding techniques of the original website and the updated version. We will implement screen tracking technology to see what the most effective utilization of the website and their social medias will be to our customers. Over time, we will continue to make improvements, according to customer surveys and tracking technology, to our platforms until we reach significant customer satisfaction. As an incentive to test out these sites, each customer who completes our poll will receive a free month the test out the premium membership package. c. Increase Millennial Engagement
others among the spotify platform. Our secondary positioning will be how consumers can use their existing social network to see what their friends have been up to in the social music scene. The Positioning statement will be: Spotify is the only music streaming service that offers full integration with all social media platforms and seamless upgrade to their premium version. This allows people upgrade to a full account without losing any of their playlists and preferences. This will key in order to create a fully integrated marketing plan over all the social media outlets. The Buyer Persona that we are looking to create is a Millennial Spotify user that enjoys listening to all sorts of music and wants to tell others about what they are listening to. The persona would hint to the idea that the account (a good example is on twitter) is not just a company, but has a personality. The personality we would be going for is free spirited event goer that may see multiple concerts in a month and tweets about the music they saw in a sort of relaxed kind of way, almost seems as they are never in a hurry. This is because music is never about the destination, but the journey to get there, no one listens to a song just to hear the end and say “i've heard it’ they listen because something intrigued them throughout the piece. One of the problems we discovered when doing our research is that Spotify has trouble connecting to its customer when a problem arises. They do not provide a phone number on their website and if you are send an email it could take days before you get the response you need. One way to solve this is to use the persona that is created in order to answer questions over the platforms. The way they can do this is by keeping the same tone across the board, if they are a little sarcastic (like VML’s Wendy’s) then they need to make sure that they keep that persona across all the platforms, or at least have a uniform persona per platform. However we would advocate that they stick to the one we recommended above.
6. Social Media Marketing Plan Spotify’s entire business is centered around social media and music. It is crucial for the company to have an effective online presence. Currently, Spotify has active accounts on most social platforms; however, many would benefit from some improvements. Over the past few months, we have analyzed the company's account on multiple platforms. After conducting our research, we have identified what Spotify is doing well and what they should improve on. A. Social Media Audits i. Facebook Spotify’s Facebook page is one of their better social media accounts. Their cover photo and profile picture is clear, engaging, and inviting. The cover photo depicts a positive and fun atmosphere of people at a concert, but leaves viewers curious to explore the page more. The about section of Spotify’s Facebook page adequately discusses who they are and other ways to contact the business. The biggest issue we found with the Spotify page was the lack of engagement. The engagement was only at 0.06%, which is extremely low. Although Facebook may not be the top site for millennials, there is still a huge amount of Spotify’s target audience available to market to on Facebook. Spotify does an efficient job of constantly posting on Facebook. However, they need to alter what they post. A lot of their posts are music behind the scenes with artists, music videos, etc. These posts are not bad, but they fail to encourage much customer interaction or retention. ii. Snapchat Spotify’s Snapchat account can benefit from some major improvement. This account is by far the businesses weakest link. Ironically, Snapchat is millennials most used form of social
maintaining variation among their posts. With that being said, some of the posts are confusing. As an uninformed outsider, it is difficult to understand the meaning behind some of the posts. Spotify does a satisfactory job of using hashtags to help engage and track posts. One of their recent hashtags is, “#spotifyfansfirst”, however, this does not appear to be a consistent brand hashtag for Spotify. By implementing a brand hashtag, users may be more likely to engage in conversation; therefore, this is a step in the right direction. In contrast, Spotify’s Instagram could improve in their bio. Their bio currently is mediocre. Their biggest mistake is not putting their website in their bio. Currently, they have a link to a playlist by the name of the “rise” in the bio. From our understanding, they continue to feature certain playlists in their Instagram bio. We find this ineffective and confusing. B. Social Media Plan Recommendations While Spotify is doing a lot of good work among their social networks there are areas that are prime for growth and be greatly improved. After analyzing each social media site in great detail we narrowed sites into categories of improvement. These categories include: Very Little Expansion, Minor Tweaks, Complete Overhaul. i. Very Little Expansion The Social Media sites that fall under this category include Facebook, LinkedIn, and social gaming sites. With Facebook they are doing a lot right, they have a chat service that responds promptly to troubleshoot issues with consumers, they have create engagement through the automatic linking of ones spotify account. This is important because Facebook will then share what music said person is currently listening to onto their friends timelines. The only weak point is the fact that do not have links to their main page in thier cover description.
The second site that falls into this category is LinkedIn. The LinkedIn page does not need many changes as it looks very professional and does everything that Spotify would need it to do. Finally we have social gaming, Spotify is doing an excellent job partnering with game developers in order to create sound tracks and tournament specific music for the rising e-sports market. ii. Minor Tweaks The second category we created was the sites that only needed minor tweaks and those included: Twitter and Instagram. Spotify's twitter has been rather active with trying to create new content and bring more users into their circle. The small tweaks they can make in order to perfect their site are updating the generic cover photo and start following people. If they were able to update their cover photo even on a six month basis to shots from recent concerts that they have sponsored they will increase their reach tenfold as many more people will click on the picture to find out what the concert was. As for Instagram they already do a great job sharing photos with information about bands that will be playing at upcoming shows. However they are missing a link to their homepage in the bio and they do not have their posts linking to either Facebook or Twitter. iii. Complete Overhaul The last category covers the sites that are a either neglected and don't have any kind of plan implemented or they need a lot of help in order to do so. This includes Pinterest, Snapchat and Youtube. Pinterest is the best of the three, when they do post, it is good content, however it is so rare that there is no engagement. They have not linked any of their accounts to any of the others and they are not following users nor pinning on a regular basis. If they are able to create a
see and how they would like to see new information come out to them. We would like to see these posts increase by 15%. These would only be around times when we are researching for new innovations, new app developments, etc. This would be around once a month to keep up with current and increasing trends. On Facebook, we would like to increase Spotify’s interaction between artists and their fans by increase the number of live Q&A sessions that fans would interact with. These would be advertised ahead of time to inform as many followers as possible. We would also implement more contests for free tickets or free trips to visit listeners favorite bands. To enter into these contests you would need to like, tag friends and/or share the post on their Facebook pages and will be randomly selected from those. This will increase the views on Spotify's page and increase customers interest in interacting with them by following them to keep up to date with new and interesting events or experiences they may be sponsoring. As we transition into an increasingly social media based market, we want to transition Spotify into a social media site in and of itself. They have started transitioning into the social media game by letting customers connect to their Facebook accounts to show and see what they are and what other are listening to at any given time. We want to create a community messaging tool where customers will be able to privately chat, comment and interact with people they follow or that follow them to talk about songs, playlists and artists. ii. Social Publishing In addition to high user interaction and activity through social communities, it is important for Spotify to directly communicate with their consumers. The social publishing zone involves channels that allow organizations and users to communicate information and news
which may take the form of blogs, news networks, and media sharing sites. This content that Spotify distributes allows for an inside look on the platform and provides a social object for community participation. By utilizing both owned social media channels and publishing in social channels, Spotify can influence brand attitudes and drive traffic to the company’s owned media. For example, Spotify takes advantage of data driven advertising to influence community interactions. By analyzing the big data of the user’s streaming patterns, the company draws in customers on a personal note. For example, Spotify created an ad with the text, “ To the 1,235 guys who loved the ‘Girls’ Night’ playlist this year, We love you.” This ad exemplifies how Spotify took organic user data and humorously applied it to an ad, thus drawing in consumers personally. This personal draw can then enable consumers to gravitate towards Spotify’s owned content. In addition, Spotify publishes copious amounts of information via their blog. The company distributes interesting news such as the most-streamed artist of the year and interesting current events involving Spotify. The Spotify Team updates users of any changes and exciting launches through their blog as well. Lastly, Spotify publishes via LinkedIn to update potential employees and inform users of internal company activity. For instance, Spotify has several posts throughout LinkedIn that update the community of expansions, conferences, and job openings as well as personal insights of working at Spotify. In all, Spotify does a successful job of capturing news and content to inspire additional interaction with the community and provide the user with useful and effective content. iii. Social Commerce
also have moved into the TV realm when they partnered with Hulu. Right now if you pay for a Spotify premium student account you also receive a full subscription to Hulu. They also have expanded into the professional gaming market. This is especially true where the game League of Legends is involved as their multi million dollar tournament always has a song made for each season which has been featured and released on spotify exclusively. They also use celebrity spokespeople by asking them to come in and “host” a Spotify playlist. This creates engagement with new music and tries to get the word out on struggling artists that are just looking to break through. Overall with their recent expansion into gaming and TV Spotify has really tried to dive deep into the social entertainment realm if they contine these endeavours and expand into other Esports besides just League of Legends they will be able to expand their reach and market share even more.
7. Experience Strategy Based off of the analysis and recommendations made in the four zones, our experience strategy will revolve around partnerships and experiences with artists and entertainment platforms. Ultimately, we want to connect with other laid back concert goers and music lovers through social media platforms. We can achieve this by finding new ways to connect the consumer with their favorite artists and sponsoring live events. Partnerships with artists will highlight several social media platforms. One idea is to create Spotify sponsored Q&A sessions with fans on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Spotify can also give artists the freedom to create their own playlists. This will hopefully lead to promotion of Spotify on those artists’ social media platforms. In many ways, Spotify already has obvious opinion leaders. Popular musicians have a lot of pull with their fan base (for example
Taylor Swift and her approval/disapproval of Spotify), and can be a great resource for directing traffic to Spotify’s website. The second part of our recommendations is to continue partnerships with other entertainment platforms like Hulu, and League of Legends. These platforms are already established and help Spotify spread brand awareness even more. Heard a great song on a show being watched on Hulu? Well now that song can be immediately found and played through Spotify. Spotify can highlight these platforms and partnerships through the messages put out on social media. If there is a highly watched show on Hulu, then they could capitalize on the hype by referencing the music involved on all social platforms (snapchat a scene, post the song on FB, etc.) By partnering with these platforms that host millions of users daily, Spotify is bound to benefit. The final component of the experience strategy will be to sponsor and highlight more experiential interactions with the brand. One form of this is through concerts. Specifically, putting together established Spotify playlist concerts. For example, Throwback Thursday, is a popular playlist on Spotify and features artists such as Red Hot Chili Peppers and Madonna. Hosting such an event is specific to the Spotify brand, increases brand recognition and can be talked about and promoted through all social media platforms. Another idea is to host a live “listening” party. This could feature one specific artist who selects and listens to favorite songs and talks about the influence the song has had on them. This would be conducted through social media platforms which have live tools like Facebook and Snapchat. Ultimately these strategic partnerships and events can lead to the objectives mentioned earlier in the paper.