How Spotify Uses Data As Marketing Content
Level up your digital marketing at: http://joshdviner.com/
Another year is soon coming to an end. That means another year of Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” marketing campaign. This campaign brilliantly uses data to provide premium subscribers with a deep dive into the music that shaped their year, ending with a playlist of their most played songs of the year. On the flip side, it also gives artists an ultra-sharable card of their top stats of the year. Spotify generates millions of pieces of content by using data not only to drive strategy but as the marketing content itself.
Let’s dive into some other examples from Spotify…
Valentine’s Day Campaigns
In 2015 Spotify launched its Valentine’s Day playlist generator called “Sweet Spot” (no longer available to my knowledge). The website curated a set of songs based on you and your loved ones favorite artists. It then gave you a nice and sharable card with a degrees of separation between your favorite artists.
In 2016, the company followed up their “Sweet Spots” campaign with “Love Notes.” Their 2016 campaign took a personal message from your and turned it into an acrostic poem with each letter corresponding to a different song, curating the perfect playlist for your loved one.
Spotify Rap Caviar Day 1 Club
This past year, Spotify launched Day 1 Club. This website encourages users to “prove” that they’ve been listening to their favorite rappers since Day 1. After logging in through Spotify, they “calculate” which rappers you’ve been listening to the longest and then presents you with a flurry of fun facts about the rapper you’ve been listening to the longest. At the end of the experience, the website provides you with, once-again, some nice sharable cards about your listening relationship with your favorite rappers.
Soundtrack Your Workout
Another campaign Spotify launched this past year was “Soundtrack Your Workout.” After logging into Spotify, the website asks a series of questions: how long your workout sessions is, if you would like music and/or podcasts in the mix, the type of workout, who you’re working out with, your workout “vibe”, and preferred genre. Finally, it presents you with a beautiful playlist of your favorite artists set to your specified workout session.
The Weeknd x Spotify
Perhaps Spotify’s most unique campaign was a collaboration with The Weeknd called “Alone With Me: An Experience With The Weeknd.” After connecting to Spotify, users are told facts about their listening history with The Weeknd by the man himself. By utilizing artificial intelligence, The Weeknd thanks you by name for being a fan and shares how you’ve streamed his music over the years. Afterwards the site turns into a dynamic listening session of his latest album, After Hours, with visuals that evolve with the music.
Spotify Wrapped
So here we are with another year of Spotify Wrapped. Spotify followed their popular formula — presenting users with data about their listening history with beautiful and slick animations. They’ll present you with your top streamed song, artist, podcast, and so much more. They also introduced categories for your style of streaming — Tastemaker, Pioneer, and Collector, giving users a fun way to show off their consumption habits. Click into the hashtag #2020Wrapped or #SpotifyWrapped and you’ll see hundreds of thousands if not millions of graphics, all with Spotify’s branding on it. It’s an incredible example of using data as the actual content of a marketing campaign.
How to Use Data as Content For Your Marketing Efforts
How can you use data as content? Well, you probably don’t have as much data as Spotify does. But on a small scale, social media, whether it be through IG Stories Stickers or Twitter Q&A/Polls, allows you to create opportunities where fans/users can offer up some information about themselves. You can then potentially convert that data into beautiful, sharable charts and graphs for followers to see and share. On a bigger scale, you can partner with a company that owns the data that would be interesting to your fans/users, similar to The Weeknd’s collaboration with Spotify. Data is always only thought of to be used to drive marketing strategy but using it as the actual content opens up interesting possibilities worth exploring.
Clap 👏 👏 if you liked this article to help others find it
Comment 💬 if you want to discuss (or just say hello! 👋)
