‘Tis the (streaming) season! Check out this company’s most wonderful BEATS of the year!

12 Days of Christmas FROM THE DESK OF MILES EVERSON: We’re down to our last 3 guerrilla marketing features for the Christmas season! I really like campaigns of this type. Aside from they’re fun, they help us get into the Christmas spirit even more. For today’s highlight, I would like to share with you a digital guerrilla marketing campaign that became successful with the help of customer data. This campaign began in 2016 and because it became a hit among consumers, it became a part of the company’s annual tradition until now. I’m talking about this popular music streaming platform: Spotify. Keep reading to know how this company gained more users through its year-end playlists that started in 2016. CEO, MBO Partners Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute

‘Tis the (streaming) season! Check out this company’s most wonderful BEATS of the year! Spotify is an audio streaming platform that revolutionized the way people pay for music. Launched in 2008, the platform now has over 70 million tracks that you can listen to for free or for a fixed monthly price. It also has more than 356 monthly active users, approximately 4 times more than what its main competitor, Apple Music, has. How did the company get word of mouth that is that good? For one, there is something Spotify is famous for: Holiday marketing campaigns. These campaigns hit the company’s target audience straight through the heart. Let’s take a closer look at each of these! 2016: Thanks, 2016. It’s been weird. Trump… Brexit… celebrity deaths… the Mannequin Challenge… 2016 was indeed a weird year! 2016 was also the year when Spotify first made a data-driven marketing campaign that connected the platform with a lot more users. Through this year-end playlist, the company showed that its staff pay close attention to users’ personal music choices and life in a good way along with billboard messages that united the audience with Spotify and with each other. With personalized data like these, don’t you just want to share these information with your peers? 2017: 2018 goals #goals was a popular hashtag during this year. So, on Christmas 2017, Spotify made a campaign where it highlighted different goals for the next year―2018. Just like last year, the platform once again put up billboards that talked about music and revealed the habits of other Spotify users… and they are hilarious! The campaign was a success: Spotify saw a rise in its numbers of subscribers, increased brand awareness, and its revenue grew by 40%! This further reinforced how the company is very good with personalized content! 2018: #2018Wrapped Spotify knows what you listen to when you’re sad, happy, or when you’re using the shower. That’s why in 2018, the company decided to use this information for a marketing campaign. The next big thing is knowing the current trend for the year… and for 2018, it was an auditory illusion: In a brief audio recording, around 53% of over 500,000 people answered on a Twitter poll that they heard a man saying the word, “Laurel” while 47% said they heard a voice saying “Yanny.” Spotify jumped on that trend. This enabled Spotify to enter pop culture and make its audience want to join in on the music-streaming fun! 2019: Music for every mood One of Spotify’s goals is to connect with millennials and Gen Zs. What better way to do that than using memes? Because of that, the company highlighted how millennials love self-irony and billboard like these appeared: The campaign also promoted Spotify Podcasts and let users know that the platform has a “podcast for every mood.” 2020: #2020Wrapped Spotify’s #2020Wrapped campaign gave users a personalized review of their listening habits for the year. Aside from that, the campaign was in honor of musicians and podcasters who kept us all “entertained, grounded, and informed” despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign turned into a short review of the eventful year through the musical preferences of different nations. As a result, Spotify’s mobile app downloads increased by 21% in the first week of December. The campaign also helped drive audience growth, increasing the number of monthly active users by 29% from a year earlier! All these were definitely clever marketing tactics by Spotify. *applause* As independents, what can you learn from the platform’s strategy? Make use of big data. Personalization is essential in marketing and product development. Using collected data to make customer experiences better is what responsible brands and businesses should be doing. Make use of user-generated content. The best ads aren’t about your company but about your customers. Let your customers tell a story about themselves then see what you can do with it! You don’t need to be a copycat to achieve your brand’s own goals. You and your business have your own strengths that you can take advantage of. In the meantime, add some Spotify-like magic to your future holiday marketing campaigns! Hope you’ve found this week’s guerrilla marketing insight interesting and helpful. Follow us on LinkedIn.     Stay tuned for tomorrow’s 12 Days of Christmas article! Do you want to learn about how one company left a lasting impression on its target market during the Christmas season of 2010? See it in the next 12 Days of Christmas article!