Independent musicians often have to find creative ways to stand out to potential listeners without the help of a major record label promoting their work. For this reason, Langston decided to get people talking about his music using something many consumers love – free downloads.
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Guest post by Erin Hadden
Independent musician Daniel Langston was looking for a way to expand the reach of his music on social media. He was already sharing content on Facebook, but was only seeing an average of one share per post. To extend his reach, Langston decided to create a campaign on Grabbr, a social referral marketing platform that he co-founded. With the help of Grabbr, Langston created a “share this to get this” campaign that rewarded users who shared his custom post with a free download of his song.
Langston wanted to utilize Grabbr to pique consumer interest and drive social sharing through the offer of digital rewards, which in this case was a free download of one of his songs. To give indie artists a better understanding of where their content is being shared, real-time analytics are run, which allowed Langston to follow his own progress as his music went global.
Rewards-based marketing can be a successful tactic for any independent artist and with a data-driven platform that incorporates predictive analytics, like Grabbr, it’s possible to get an artist’s music in the hands of many people in a short amount of time. Langston was able to quickly share his music with 185 people in 22 countries. These listeners shared Langston’s music across five different social platforms in exchange for a download of his song, boosting his shares by 18,400%. Additionally, the campaign saw:
- 104 new customers opting to receive future emails from Langston regarding his music.
- Shares of Langston’s original post appearing in over 184,777 newsfeeds across six platforms – three of which he had not used before. These included:
- Facebook: 94 shares
- Email: 64 people shared the message with two friends, resulting in the message reaching 128 new users.
- Twitter: 13 shares
- Pinterest: 9 shares
- Google+: 3 shares
- LinkedIn: 2 shares
- 30 individuals clicking through to purchase his song, effectively monetizing his Grabbr campaign.
- An expanded international reach, with individuals in 20 countries sharing Langston’s music.
- A low-cost campaign, totaling only 20 cents per share.
“No one outside of the U.S. ever purchased my music before. No one other than friends had ever shared my music,” said Langston. “Within seven days of running a campaign on Grabbr, people in 22 countries shared that they were listening to my music. I increased my Facebook following by 5% and my Instagram following by 20% during this seven-day period with listeners from around the globe. I collected 104 email addresses to further market my music on a regular basis and a healthy percentage clicked to purchase my music.”
The predictive analytics integrated into the Grabbr platform provided Langston with recommendations for future campaigns including where to invest his marketing efforts and budget moving forward. Grabbr suggested that Langston consider increasing the number of campaigns he implements on Facebook and growing his follower base there, since that platform yielded the most referrals. In addition, it suggested that he begin sharing on new platforms that saw engagement from cross-platform sharing during his campaign. These included Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn. Finally, Grabbr analytics encouraged Langston to spend more time building his email marketing campaigns and growing the number of contacts on his distribution list to increase his click-through rate.
Langston went on further to say “It was very inspiring to see that people were willing to share what they were downloading with their friends in exchange for gaining access to one of my songs, and even more inspiring to know that the platform would work well for other artists that are in their prime.”
Overall, Langston was pleased with the results of Grabbr not just as an artist, but as a co-founder of the platform, “If I had come across Grabbr as a platform to market my music back when I was performing regularly and trying to get it out there, l would have used it over and over again. It is exciting to use the very platform that I was instrumental in building.”