Guide To Using Spotify To Promote Your Next Release

If you’ve got new music primed to drop and are looking to widen the scope of your exposure, Spotify for Artists has several great features for helping you get out the word, from codes, to embeddable players, to whole advertising campaigns.

Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog

Looking to increase exposure on your latest release? When it comes to promoting your next banger, you want to make sure all your bases are covered. No matter your audience, Spotify for Artists has some dope features to help you spread the word to as many people as possible. Here’s how to use Spotify to promote your next release…

How to Use Spotify to Promote Your Next Release

Spotify Codes

With Spotify Codes, you can share any track, album, playlist, or artist profile with the click of a button. If you’ve got a Spotify URI for it, you can generate a Spotify Code.

Since Instagram makes it hard to link followers to external URLs, consider sharing a picture of your Spotify Code instead. Ask fans to take a screenshot, and then they can link right to your music.
Spotify Codes are perfect to use on visual media such as posters, flyers, and merch, but also on Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

To find a Spotify Code, click on the ellipsis (“…”) next to the artist, song, album, or playlist you want to share. Then, you’ll see the code on the bottom of the artwork. Click on the artwork with the code, then save the image to your camera roll by clicking, “Save to Photos”.

Now, share away!

Utilize embeddable players

Embedding a music player to your website will ensure your fans can easily listen to your music with the click of a button. An embeddable Spotify player is essentially a short piece of code that you can include on any website to generate a quick and easy music player just for your music. Check out Spotify’s widgets guide to learn how.

You can also embed a follow button on your site to turn listeners into followers almost instantly.

Set up an advertising campaign

Spotify’s ad format has proven itself to be more engaging and successful than traditional display ads. With an average of 4,000 – 10,000 ads being seen every day, audio is steadily climbing the charts. Not to mention, audio ads drive an 81% lift in ad recall and a 26% lift in brand awareness in comparison to its traditional display ad counterparts.

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, ~135m users)
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.

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Learn more…

Spotify Ad Metrics

How Spotify Ad Studio Works and Why You Should Use it

Get Real Time Stats with the Spotify for Artists App Update

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Share on socials

As you probably know, social media platforms make it easy to share your tracks with the world. On Twitter, sharing a Spotify song link creates a custom, playable audio card. On Facebook, you can copy song, album, or playlist links right into the status field. On Instagram Stories, you and your fans can share Spotify albums, tracks, artists, and playlists that link directly to the Spotify app. Additionally, you can keep your YouTube descriptions up to date with links to your tracks on Spotify as well.

(Pro tip: When sharing on socials, always try to use popular, relevant hashtags on Instagram, Twitter & Facebook, etc.. Things like, #NewMusicFriday, #MondayMotivation, #ThrowbackThursday, and #FridayFeeling etc. will help you reach a wider audience.)

Sharing via social media is promotion 101, but to truly master your social media strategy, you need to do more than just share links. Spotify encourages artists to use these additional best practices alongside your link sharing endeavors:

Add Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and/or Wikipedia links to the About section on your Spotify artist profile.
Encourage fans to save and share your music. — Copy and paste one of your Spotify links into the Twitter search bar to find Spotify listeners who’ve shared your music, then like/reply to their tweets. (or give shoutouts on Instagram, etc.)
Share playlists that feature your music — playlists drive the maximum amount of streams per listening session.

In conclusion…

Hopefully these tips will help you start off on the right foot. With consistent effort and a great advertising strategy, your promotional efforts can thrive with the help of Spotify for Artists. You got this!

Thursday, May 7, 2020