How to boost your business with a Growth Marketing Framework – Zar Acoustic Case Study
Intro
Zar Acoustic is a fingerstyle musician and songwriter based in Dublin who won our contest: the Social Hack. The prize of the contest was a whole month of Social Media Management on us, but we took a step further by giving him a framework to use in the future.
Let’s introduce our winner: Zar, like many fellow musicians, was hit hard by the global pandemic. Performing live gigs in venues had become impossible.
Having lost his main monetization channel, he sought to find new ways to monetize his work, exploiting the digital channels and, in particular, Youtube.
Stratega (my agency – link here) was engaged with this objective: increase Awareness of his YouTube channel that had little numbers.
Step 1: Design persona
Every marketing or communication initiative starts with the customer in mind. Knowing your customer is a fundamental step to make sure you are delivering the right message and in the right channels. What do they care about? What captures their attention? Where and how do they spend their time online?
Consequently, our first step was to design a target Persona, which helped Zar to identify:
- Tailored triggers for copywriting, used on Social Media to lead the user towards YouTube
- The best channels (in this case, Social Media platforms) to use for our purpose, based on the consumers’ preferences and habits
- New ideas for targeted content, which we’ve used to build a compelling editorial plan.
(if you want to know how important is to design a buyer persona click here; if you want to build one click here)
Step 2: Digital Assessment
In parallel, we had to assess Zar’s online presence, analyzing the digital performance across channels, identify weaknesses and strengths and tailor a coherent communication strategy.
From the analysis it was clear that Facebook and Instragam would have been the best channels to drive awareness towards his new Youtube profile: up to then, most of his digital efforts were oriented on those platforms, and that’s where he had the best results in terms of engagement.
We also discovered the Audience’s favorite content, which we used to build the Editorial Plan and generate new content ideas to help us trigger the user and generate engagement.
Since Zar’s main demographic was between the age of 25 and 35 and located in Italy or Dublin, we decided to recreate fingerstyle versions of songs they used to listen to in their past, to capture their attention and engage with them.
Knowing the composition of your audience allows you to create content that is relevant and that resonates with them, generating increased effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Step 3: Competitor analysis
The next step was to analyze the digital presence, activities, and performance of Zar’s main competitors, across all channels. Assessing their strategy and results is key in understanding how a specific industry or market works online: what are the main investment strategies, what performs best online, what doesn’t perform at all, but also how we can differentiate ourselves in terms of communication.
The assessment gave us two main insights:
- We noticed a pattern in which each competing musician had only one specific channel which performed consistently better than the others. This suggested that most investment efforts were focused on one channel only, maximizing the performance of ads, and focusing on the most suitable content for the chosen platform.
This was a very important piece of information for Zar, as it strengthened the validity of his overall strategic objective: focus his efforts on Youtube in terms of content production to ensure long-term sustainable growth. - We analyzed the kind of content they produce and use on social media to identify the most engaging ones, as we wanted to outperform in a short time. This allowed us to identify formats to be used and schemes in terms of frequency.
Step 4: Design the strategy
Having finished the assessment and analysis phases, we were ready to start designing the strategy.
Each digital strategy starts with a clear and measurable goal.
So we set up a One Metric That Matters canvas, to help us identify the right KPIs to monitor and stay focused on the goal.
With the aim of using social media to drive traffic towards an external channel (Youtube), link clicks were the key metric to monitor for the success of the Strategy.
We established a 20% increase in a month as the client already had a pretty good engagement rate on social media. Even though such an increase was hard to achieve within our limited time frame, we believed that there was room to set such ambitious goals.
Having set the objectives, the next step was to design the road to reach them.
We built a Pirate Funnel to identify the Customer Journey towards the new YouTube Channel and to monitor the soft and hard KPIs which were established.
Having the aim of promoting a new channel, the Funnel phase we want to prioritize the most is Awareness.
In the figure below you can see the full extent of the Funnel, including the soft and hard metrics used to measure the customer’s journey throughout the funnel.
Execution:
The designed strategy was declined in three actionable initiatives:
- Define the Social Media Editorial Plan
- Implement targeted Facebook campaigns
- Set up the Youtube SEO
Editorial plan
Based on the analysis and strategy we created:
- Four different types of content based on qualitative and quantitative analysis (3 posts/week) to make engaging content, including a full song per week.
The content was distributed in a snippet format to build awareness, using short videos to push the user towards the full version on YouTube. - Tailored Stories (3x day) to engage with the audience, get feedback on the content, making them part of the creative process, and encouraging them to visit the new YouTube Channel.
- Tailored CTAs for Youtube on Facebook, and with a custom link on Facebook to make it easy for the fans to access the content on Youtube.
This was a fundamental step to make the Strategy successful as shortening the Customer Journey was extremely important.
Facebook campaigns
We implemented engagement campaigns, with additional CTAs towards YouTube, on all the posts we published, to expand the customer base and create interest in the artist. This allowed us to generate over 500 link clicks* and over 48.000 post engagements. This was also because we’ve planned a release of a single that we wanted specifically to promote.
*In the results we’ll be counting the organic reach and not the paid one so the results are net and not gross.
YouTube SEO
To promote the latest original artwork we used some YouTube SEO and we’ve correctly set up playlists and links to keep the user engaged.
This ensured we always rank his latest song on the main search page for the chosen keywords, which generated traffic towards the channel.
The Growth Hack:
Although we couldn’t retrieve the metrics there is an interesting Growth Hack I’m sharing with you.
If you add this little extra text to your link: ‘?sub_confirmation=1’ users will land on YouTube and a Subscribe pop-up will show off and ask the visitors to subscribe.
This is most definitely going to increase your conversion rate on subscribers 😉
Results:
We lost some engagement but it’s because of Paid ads, we’ve reached 80.000 people which is way more than normal.
Although between Facebook and Instagram Clicks we’ve reached a +180% which is 160pp more than the target we established at the beginning.
In the Acquisition phase, we had outstanding results as well, increasing engagement (comments are excluded, the total increase it’s over 100%) and we made a x4 on video views, smashing all the previous numbers.
Not only, but we were able to obtain the hardest result of all, we had an increase of subscribers of 13%.
Would you achieve the same results? Visit strategaco.com for more info.
Check Zar Acoustic music on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.
