Every now and then we work in industries that market a little differently. The music industry is one of those.

When the vast majority of your audience is on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it is not too difficult to measure campaign success. You look at your social posts, use UTM parameters, or measure lead-to-conversion journeys. Simple, right? But when you throw in additional platforms like Spotify and Pandora, what do you do?

Yes, there are social listening tools that provide data and insights. But being able to use data to find the next big artist or sound is not enough today. Record label and music industry marketers need tools that let them automate the marketing process and drive artist awareness.

Marketing campaign examples for record labels

Whenever we look at marketing campaigns, we focus on the buyer's journey. In the case of record labels, we look at the fan's journey. The main question we ask is: how can we take a fan's behavior and turn it into revenue?

The key is a marketing automation platform built for fan interactions. Each time one of your artist's fans interacts with a page or plays a song on Spotify, you can segment and automatically message them. For example, as a fan listens to their latest hit, you can automatically message them about show schedules, new album drops, or similar songs.

A sample campaign looks like this. A fan likes your artist's page, then listens to a song on Spotify. Your automation tool adds them to a segment based on the artist, something like "Fan of X." Once added, they enter an email campaign:

  • Email 1: reiterate the song they just listened to and provide something of immediate value, such as more songs by that artist they might like.
  • Email 2: generate more buy-in and investment in the artist's brand, such as a playlist of the artist's inspirations or other songs from your other artists.
  • Email 3: introduce merchandise, shows, or something to push the artist.

After you have tried to generate revenue from that artist, you can temper it down and introduce fans to more artists from your label that they might find interesting. Keep building the sequence and iterating based on performance. Bottom line: marketing automation is a must, but you really need the power of segmentation to get the most from it.

Building marketing campaigns through fan segmentation

Segmentation is the backbone of all marketing, and especially of automation. This is universal across industries, and it is exactly how you turn fans into revenue or help them find the next big sound. At the simplest, you can drill fan segmentation down to two levels: a segment based on artist, and a segment based on genre.

Artist segments let you automate messaging to fans based on the specific artist they were originally interested in, pushing products, music and tours directly related to that artist. You will see your highest conversion rates through that segment. Genre, as a secondary segment, gives you the ability to push other similar artists and songs, cross-selling fans to other artists on your label and giving them more awareness and a greater audience.

Segmented email campaigns consistently outperform non-segmented ones on both open rates and click-throughs, often by wide margins. If you are not currently segmenting your audience, you are seriously missing out. Segmenting provides better revenue channels as well as greater insight into your audience. If you would like to learn more about segmentation or the tools we have used to help record labels grow revenue and fan engagement, let us know.