Hit the right note for student recruitment.
Every swipe, search, skip, and shuffle tells us a story about your audience.
The music industry isn’t changing anytime soon, meaning Spotify’s technology is sticking around. The Spotify group is now the world’s largest streaming service with continual impressive growth figures quarter by quarter.
Spotify for consumers – what’s not to love
Spotify’s relevance is backed by investors, Barron’s magazine recently compared Spotify to Netflix, saying it could become the Netflix of audio. ‘Investors love Spotify because it checks so many boxes: a fast-growing, youth-focused, cloud-operated, subscription-based music streaming service with a visionary founder. And Spotify is now investing heavily in podcasting, a nascent business whose U.S. revenues are expected to more than double, to about $659 million from 2017 to 2020.’
Musicality
Known for saving the music industry, Spotify offers heaps of various advertisements you can buy from fast sound scraps to full-page takeovers. The key is to have an exceptionally engaged target gathering of people. By using Spotify’s audience targeting options, you can choose from age, location, specific genre’s and playlists to create highly targeted adverts.
Clients who tune into the free form of Spotify hear these promotions between songs, and advertisements are likewise put along the base of the page for an extra showcasing opportunity.
Youth-focused
No one loves a discount more than a student. Spotify like many other platforms took note of this, offering a 50% discount on their premium services to student’s who can verify their active enrolment in a university. Spotify has the most youthful user base from any other music streaming service, with 50% of users under the age of 34, TechCrunch, 2017. To prove their commitment to being razor sharp on millennials, they even have a live real-time stream ‘Hear what Millennials are listening to’.
An article by The Guardian (February 2016) revealed “We compared Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Deezer and Amazon Prime Music” the biggest contenders in music streaming and concluded “It’s perhaps no surprise that Spotify is the most well-rounded streaming service”.
Segments
Spotify Audiences can be reached in a number of ways to ensure your campaign is specifically targeted towards your target market:
Age ranges are between 13 – 65 years old showing a great breadth of ages to target – think 15/16 year old’s for Colleges and 17/18 year old’s for University as an example.
Genre – There is a wide range of genres to target within the platform, ranging from Blues, Classical, Country, Hip Hop and Metal. For most campaigns we’d recommend targeting the all music feature and optimising the campaign to where you see the results. You never know how many of your target audience will listen to specific music channels depending upon age but the data we’ve gathered to date shows us some great insights for any future campaigns.
Playlist category – This is more interest based and helps you to identify your target market. Playlists include cooking, gaming, holiday, travel and workout. These will help you to pin down your target market when overlaid with genres and age targeting.
A handy feature within the platform is that we can identify your audience and how likely your budget will be delivered effectively. This will show whether:
- The budgets assigned are feasible
- We get an indication of the audience sizes
- Prevents a loss on your ROI:
So, is Spotify effective to attract students? Now that we have established Spotify’s popularity and status, how can universities use this streaming music royalty to their benefit.
It’s no secret students enjoy music, whether during studying, working or just cleaning up, reaching potential students is now easier than ever. Through Spotify, universities can capture students without being disruptive and overtly advertising. As mentioned earlier ‘sponsored playlists’ mix ads with playlists and native ads, providing a great opportunity to reach Spotify’s 200 million daily active users.
Whether a university is seeking students of specific age or location, or even students who are listening to particular genres of music, Spotify has it all.
Top 3 ways to cleverly target on Spotify
#1 Sponsored Playlists
Spotify announced, “sponsored playlists”, one of several advertising options available to marketers, MarketingWeek, 2019. Sponsored playlists allowed brands an opportunity to specify the audience they have in mind, essentially this made it possible for marketers to match with suitable playlists of their desired target audience.
#2 Sponsored Session
“Sponsored Sessions” or as Forbes refers to as a ‘Video Takeover’, allows brands to offer their audience the gift of 30 minutes of ad-free listening for watching your brand’s video. Incentivizing the ad to your audience by rewarding 30 minutes in exchange for 15 – 30 seconds is a great way to catch your audience’s attention.
#3 Leaderboard
Spotify even has visual advertising; Display ads are shown through a Leaderboard format at the bottom of the streaming app or website. These ads will take users to your desired landing page. Best of all, all eyes will be on your ad, no other display ads are shown at the same time as yours, DittoMusic, 2016.
Speak to us.
Contact our Ad-Ops team about advertising through Spotify, email sayhello@crunchsimplydigital.com.
