How to optimize Spotify marketing tools: Enhance your audience engagement
Unlock the secrets to improving your Spotify engagement by making the most of the features in the Spotify For Artists app, including how to turn data into deeper connections and boost your music career.
by Randi Zimmerman of Symphonic Blog
It’s no big secret that Spotify offers some amazing tools for artists looking to grow their fanbase. These tools can help you see exactly how your fans are discovering and engaging with your music with detailed stats like Segments, Listener Conversion Metrics, and so much more. In this post, we’ll break down how these tools can help you not only understand your audience better, but use that information to grow your fanbase to new heights. Here’s the rundown…
Audience Segments
In Spotify For Artists, your Audience Segments are made up of three segments that make up your total audience.
- Active Audience: Listeners who have intentionally streamed your music in the past 28 days from active sources like your artist profile, your release pages, or their own library and playlists.
- Previously Active Audience: Listeners who used to be in your active audience but haven’t intentionally streamed your music in at least 28 days.
- Programmed Audience: Listeners who have only streamed your music from programmed sources like editorial playlists, Discover Weekly, Radio, Autoplay, or playlists by other listeners at least once in the last 2 years.
Your Active Audience can be broken down into three sections as well: Super Listeners, Moderate Listeners, and Light Listeners.
Your Super Listeners are your most dedicated listeners from the past 28 days. These are your biggest fans who you can consistently count on to engage with your music. Moderate Listeners may not be quite as engaged as your Super listeners, but they’ve still intentionally streamed your music multiple times in the past 28 days, making them the easiest to convince to engage further with your music. Light listeners may not have engaged with your music as much as the other two groups, but there’s still potential to get them more engaged over time.
By understanding how your audience is segmented, you can target certain groups through more personalized campaigns built specifically for each group. For example, Spotify recommends artists “Encourage active streams by creating a Marquee campaign or a Showcase campaign, updating your Artist Pick to attract more streams on your artist profile, or sharing a Promo Card to your social media.”
On the other hand, Spotify also mentions, “…listeners in your programmed audience may be discovering your music for the first time through channels like editorial playlists or radio, so they may be primed to go deeper into your catalog in the future and join your active audience.”
Listener Conversion Metrics
When someone starts listening to your music and joins one of these segments, that doesn’t mean they’ll stay there. Your Listener Conversion Metrics are what help track these changes so you can see if your efforts are working or if you may need to rethink your strategy.
- As you run different campaigns and engage with your audience throughout the month, you can then check your New Listeners to see how many new fans you’ve gained from your efforts.
- Your New Active Listeners are those fans who had already streamed your music before, but they’ve now been reintroduced to your music and started streaming again.
- The fans who haven’t interacted with your music for over a month may return as Reactivated Listeners, which shows whatever you’ve been doing to get those listeners back is working.
As you continue to market your music through efforts like staying active on socials, interacting with your fans both online and in person, posting music videos to go along with your releases, etc., these stats can help you see what’s working and what isn’t.
Share of Streams
The Share of Streams tool tells you exactly how much each of these segments has been contributing to your streams in the past 28 days. This data helps you understand which segments are contributing the most to your overall streams, so you can refocus your efforts on the segments that need a little more attention.
Source of Streams
The Source of Streams graph shows where on Spotify your listeners play your music. You can see these on the:
- Audience Stats tab.
- Songs tab when you tap into any song.
- Audience Engagement tab, where it includes more data and more sources (desktop only).
Each source of streams graph shows how many listens are from:
- Your artist profile and catalog
- Listeners’ own playlists and library
- Spotify editorial playlists
- Spotify algorithmic playlists
With this information, you can better understand where your fans are finding your songs and which sources are doing the best. And if you get featured on a playlist, knowing which one helps you better understand what mood your music puts people in, how it resonates with them, and can give you a better idea of which playlists you should pitch your music to in the future.
If you’re a Symphonic client, you can also check out what position your track is on the playlist right in the SMS. So, if you have a song that’s doing really well, promote it! Post it on socials, and share it with your audience.
Fan Study
Fan Study offers an in-depth collection of data-driven insights to help you develop your fanbase through suggested actions powered by Spotify’s own research into fan behavior around the world. From data about playlisting, Super Listeners, your back catalog, how to improve your engagement and so much more, Fan Study offers valuable statistics designed to help you reach your streaming goals and stay on top of global trends. Check out those insights right here.
What now?
With this data, it’s time to hit the ground running with your marketing efforts. One way to do this is through utilizing a Spotify ad campaign. Year after year, Spotify’s ad format has proven itself to be more engaging and successful than traditional display ads. With 602M+ Monthly Active Users globally 100% logged in, all the time, running ads on Spotify can significantly improve your reach on the platform. In turn, getting you more engagement and more streams.
The foundation for building your campaign starts with Spotify Ad Studio. This tool is where you’ll build and manage your ad campaigns for your releases. Spotify’s platform makes it easy for anyone to create and manage audio ads. Spotify Ad Studio gives you the ability to:
- Create audio ads on the platform
- Reach unpaid Spotify users (these are users who haven’t subscribed monthly to the service)
- Target users based on demographics, interests, mood, music preference & platform type
- Target specific artist’s fans (only if you are an approved advertiser that is clearly promoting the artist(s) or an event that they are performing in your ad)
- Forecast impression estimates
- Retarget users that have engaged with your previous ads
- Create sequential messaging to tell a story about your brand
- Track campaign results
To learn more about advertising on Spotify with the Spotify Ad Studio, check out, “The Artist Checklist to Advertising on Spotify” to learn everything you need to know about the process and how to get started.
In Conclusion…
In today’s digital era, streaming platforms like Spotify are essential for musicians looking to gain exposure and connect with their audience in a more meaningful way. Now, it’s crucial to understand how to interpret your music’s performance through tools like these in order to make better informed decisions about your music marketing strategy. Whether that involves focusing more of your efforts through Spotify features like Artist Pick, Canvas, or Discovery Mode, reworking your current ad campaign, or many other music marketing tools at your disposal, understanding how your fans are engaging with your music can help you streamline your efforts to a T.
Good luck!
