The 4-Step Checklist for Launching your Digital Marketing Campaign
/Wavo Boost is a platform that allows clients to promote their content on music sites through native, below-the-fold advertisements.
Wavo Boost amplifies exposure and shares content through the world’s top music publishers.
Earlier this month, Wavo launched a native advertising campaign with Jazz Cartier to promote his new single, “Lil Wayne.”
Ultimately, the campaign was able to reach over 500K tastemakers, who frequent sites like FactMag, HypeM, and DJ Booth.
“Lil Wayne” quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of plays on Soundcloud and generated media pick-up from sites like Complex and HYPEBEAST, eventually prompting recognition from Lil Wayne himself.
In terms of engagement metrics like clicking, subscribing, commenting, liking, and sharing, the Jazz Cartier promotional proved to be one of our top performing campaigns ever. While we’d love to take all the credit, much of the campaign’s success can be attributed to the right mix of careful planning and creativity, as established by Jazz Cartier and his label.
We wanted to take a deep dive into Jazz’s roll-out in order to determine some of the factors that contributed to its success.
Regardless of your choice of promotional avenue or format, we believe that by investing in these 4 areas, you too, can successfully amplify your music marketing efforts.
1. Creating the Artwork
First thing’s first, when it comes to your cover art, keep it simple. As is the case with any kind of advertisement, you need to be able to capture the attention of the public quickly and efficiently. The best performing Wavo Boost campaigns incorporate artwork that’s bright, unique, and contains minimal writing. Remember you’re not designing a physical CD case anymore! Many details like song and artist name are included in the text that accompanies a release on a digital platform. Particulars like these on the artwork itself can become redundant and create visual noise, contributing negatively to your results. If you’ve got more complicated artwork, consider testing a picture of the artist instead. Often visuals like these will perform better, increasing artist awareness in the process.
The Jazz Cartier campaign is a testament to the power of great cover art. With no written words to speak of, Jazz’s artwork centered around a bright, graphic portrait. It also didn’t hurt that his track played homage to one of rap’s most iconic figures: Lil Wayne.
2. Choosing the Right Audience & Targeting Effectively
The success of your digital marketing campaign can be largely attributed to your targeting methods.
It’s important to set out a clear goal for your music and choose your audience and means of reaching them appropriately. Do you want to sell tickets to a show in New York? You’re going to want to make sure you don’t advertise to fans in Hong-Kong! Campaigns don’t necessarily have to cost a lot of money to be successful, so long as they’re targeted correctly. At Wavo, we spend a great deal of time trying to understand what combinations of technology and targeting criteria work best for specific goals.
Wavo’s native ad product — Boost — promotes content next to editorials on a number of sophisticated music sites. Because of it’s ability to reach music’s most eager fans on the sites where they are in the mindset of discovering and learning about new artists, utilizing Boost was a natural fit for Jazz’s campaign. Through Boost, Wavo was able to serve Jazz’s advertisement to the top tier of hip-hop tastemakers.
As an artist, it’s important that you identify your aims beforehand. Do you need 100,000 views on Youtube? Or do you want to reach a hundred key label A&Rs? With research and creativity, both can be achieved without a massive budget.
3. Optimizing Your Campaign
Once you’ve got a clear goal in mind and an initial idea of the targeting you’ll use to reach your audience, you need to test the two in order to optimize your campaign. The combination of tools and targeting you’ve chosen have yet to be proved until you’ve tested them — Beforehand its really just a hypothesis. Ultimately, ad-optimization is key in ensuring lower prices, higher click-through rates (CTR), more conversions, and a greater return on investment. Even the lowest budgeted campaigns must be monitored with a critical eye, in order to ensure value is maximized. Though the Jazz Cartier campaign began with unusually high metrics, Wavo still worked to make sure that reach and engagement were optimized throughout the campaign.
Ultimately, the success of Jazz’s campaign is a testament to the power of strong artist and team involvement, because — as one would anticipate — it’s much easier to optimize something that’s already producing results.
4. Ensuring the Quality of Your Music
Last, but certainly not least, quality is king. If you’re promoting content you’re not completely satisfied with, chances are, your audience won’t be either.
Undoubtedly, the quality of Jazz Cartier’s music contributed to the level of engagement generated in his Boost campaign. Though arguably lesser known than some of Toronto’s other hip hop protégés, Jazz has twice been long-listed for Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music prize, and recently performed at Montreal’s Osheaga music festival. The quality of his work ensured that once he was able to reach the correct crowd, they would be receptive towards his music.
Let’s recap. When you launch a digital marketing campaign, make sure that 1) the image you’re using is bright, clean, and attention grabbing, 2) you determine your goals as an artist and select the best targeting to reach your audience, 3) ensure you monitor and optimize your campaign throughout, and 4) boost your best work!