Triggering 400% Growth For a Niche Artist
CLIENT:
Circus Trees / Five By Two Records
OVERVIEW:
When Robert from Five By Two Records approached us, Circus Trees had just started playing shows in their region. Robert wanted to build awareness around the band both to increase turn out at the shows, and to build proof needed to secure more lucrative guarantees for the band. Robert hired Standout Agency to build out a Spotify Growth campaign centered around the band’s existing catalog.
DIFFICULTIES:
Circus Trees music fits within the post-rock / doom / shoegaze sub-genres of rock. Far from being mainstream, the largest difficulty we faced initially was finding the right audience to convert into listeners, and fans.
OUR PROCESS:
Audience Research: Our first step was to research the world of the post-rock and doom rock genres. Not completely familiar ourselves, our team spent time listening through Circus Trees’ “fans also like” section on Spotify, and then expanding our research into blogs across the internet to get a good feel for the landscape of the genre(s) the band exists within.
Asset Creation: We modified video assets that the band had already created, using indicators from similar artists (drawn from our research in Step 1 above), to fit the overall feel of marketing materials used by larger artists in the space.
Campaign Launch - Audience Testing: The majority of the first 4 weeks of each campaign was spent testing different audiences. Gathered from the research in Step 1, we created multiple ad sets of different audiences and ran engagement-based campaigns until we found a winning ad set.
Campaign Launch - Creative Testing: Once our audience had been decided, we then tested the various creatives (ads or ad assets) against each other until we found the ad (or ads) that gave us the most high-quality conversions.
Campaign Optimization - Scaling: With our Audience and Creative optimized, we then scaled the campaign to hammer home positive algorithmic interactions.
RESULTS:
The combination of proper research, and rigorous testing, combined with properly-timed scaling led to multiple tracks being fed into Spotify’s algorithmic engine - specifically Discover Weekly and Radio. Recently the band has also unlocked access to Spotify’s Discovery Campaigns which will serve to further accelerate their growth on the platform, and reach the original goal of expanding the band’s reach to new fans.
Over a 12 month span:
Listeners up 396%
Streams up 442%
Followers up 1,832
READY TO GET STARTED ON YOUR CAMPAIGN?
Send us an email and let’s get to work!
