Taylor Swift, a household name, a pop sensation and… a marketing genius? Recently, more than ever, it feels like everyone is gushing about Taylor being a marketing extraordinaire. With her being on tour, trending day after day, and speculations about her new relationship with Travis Kelce, there’s certainly lots of attention paid to her.
Swiftie Statistics
You can ask your sister, your mom, or your ah ma, and it is very likely that they all know who Taylor Swift is. That begs the question, what has she done that’s making her the talk of the town all over again?
Source: Fox Business
NFL Shake Up
Swift shook up the NFL space just by attending it. She has made about 12 appearances before, but more attention was drawn particularly this time because of the igniting romance between Swift and Travis Kelce, the tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs. She said “I love the players, and you love the game,” with this one.
After her appearance at the recent NFL, Travis Kelce’s merch sales increased by about 400%. Kelce is now one of the top five players in terms of jersey sales.
It also brought new eyes to watch the NFL. Kids who have never watched the Superbowl before started watching this time thanks to her attendance at the event. Check out this post, it speaks for itself:
Singapore’s Swift Deal
Swift’s influence is not only prominent in the West, let’s talk local for a minute. As part of the Southeast Asia leg of the Era’s tour, she only performed in Singapore. The Singapore Tourism Board signed an exclusive deal, forking up about 3 million Singaporean dollars per show (and there were 6 shows).
It was estimated that Swift’s concerts in Singapore generated about 500 million Singaporean dollars in tourist spending. Do you know how much that is in Malaysian ringgit?? That’s 1,758,600,791 ringgit! Phew, quite the economic stimulation.
Another crazy fact for you; the Swift concerts combined with the Coldplay concert hosted in Singapore were likely to contribute close to 0.25 percentage points to the country’s economy in the first quarter.
Embracing Social Media
Swift did not become popular overnight. Being a Swiftie has been a thing for decades now. Her strategy has always been fan-focused and she’s leveraged social media every step of the way.
She has over 283 million followers on Instagram and over 25 million followers on TikTok. From starting up hashtags to joining in on other trends, everything is usually a strategic move for viewer engagement. Across these platforms, her audience is largely made up of Gen Z-ers and is typically females. Interestingly, in the older demographic (35-44 age group), male and female fans are of equal amounts.
Although she joined TikTok only over a year ago, her audience are the most engaged on there if compared to Instagram. As of last year, when she had half the followers she did on Instagram compared to now, she was estimated to be earning $1,142,000 per post on Instagram.
Source: Taylor Swift
Building Anticipation
Swift is really well-known for building anticipation. When she was about to release her last few albums Midnights, Folklore and Evermore, she did not release any singles or music reveals until the albums dropped.
Instead, she had been releasing teaser videos on her social media, mainly TikTok, that features snippets of the new music or some type of hint for some context to the new albums. For the album Midnights, she released the tracklist on TikTok through 13 Tiktok episodes titles “Midnights Mayhem With Me”.
Not only that, she typically makes music that has references to her old music or personal events in her life. This keeps the audience intrigued and engaged throughout and after releases. Fans would be re-listening to her old music just to farm clues and find easter eggs in new music and its music videos.
Overdelivering
As an artist, she is also known to be one to overdeliver. It has happened a few times now. Following releases of her albums, she would release additional music or other versions of the songs found in the original albums.
When she released Folklore, she proceeded to release a deluxe version and “the long pond studio sessions” of the album. When she released “Midnights”, she released an additional seven songs called “Midnights (3am Version)”. These are just a few examples but there are so many more. Its like, she’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Aside from releasing additional music, she diversifies ‘how’ she releases her music too. Instead of just sticking to the digital releases, she releases CD and vinyl versions of her music following the album releases. These physical releases give fans a more personal attachment towards her and her music. With these releases, fans don’t only get to listen, they get “own” pieces of her work too. This is yet another tactic to sell.
Source: Pagina12
Leveraging FOMO
Swift recently announced that her new album “The Tortured Poets Department” will be out this April. However, even before she officialy annouced the release, her fans already sniffed that something had been up.
It started with her changing her profile picture on Instagram to something black and white. At first, Swifties thought that this could be the re-release of “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” but nope, that was not it. Her marketing team went on to include a cryptic message on her website that contained an error code “hneriergrd”. It turned out to be an anagram for “red herring”.
Then, she shared the album artwork on social media that included hand written notes with the cryptic message on her site. Within the first hour of the album’s announcement, there were over 250,000 mentions of the album title online and the post gained more than 2 million likes in less than five minutes.
This goes to show that, audiences not only enjoy picking up on clues, they in fact, do not want to miss out or be left out of the hype. Its a typical case of FOMO, a tendency we all have.
Source: mlive.com
How To Create The Taylor Swift Effect For Your Brand?
After all you’ve heard about the reach and influence that Swift has, you might be wondering how you can do the same for your brand. Whether you want to launch a new product or just expand your brand’s reach, there are several takeaways from Swifts branding strategy that we all could use.
- Relatability
Swift is a huge pop star. Her career professionally started at the ripe age of 14 when she was the youngest professionally signed artist. Now, she’s this international artist, rich and mysterious on some level. But how do people seem to like her so much?
Because they can relate to her.
So much so, that the government officials in the Malaysian Parliament were discussing being “Swifties”.
Her product is music. She connects to her fans through the lyrics in her music. Eventhough Swift is now a big shot, take a look at how she words her songs and what she says in them. She is usually reminiscing on the good times she’s had with her lovers or straight up ranting about them.
Either way, the things she sings about, are the things that everyday people go through. So, her fans find it easy to vibe to her songs depending on how they feel. Since Swift has been making music for so long and she releases so much, there’s always something of hers you can find to match your mood.
As brands, you have to pay more attention to what you are delivering to your audience. Obviously as you build your product or service, you’d be asking yourself “do my customers need this?” question. Same is true for your brand.
How can you stand out to your customers? How can you be relatable to them? How at home can you make them feel as a brand? These are all valid questions to explore.
- Storytelling
It is a given that Swift is a great storyteller. It started with the lyrics in her songs, and now as full blown marketing strategies. Referring to the example at “Leveraging FOMO”, notice how Swift is bringing in a storyline before releasing her album? As we inch closer to release date, she would most probably dropping more hints here and there.
Brand can very well use this tactic too. There could be a backstory to the existence of your brand. You could talk about your missions and your visions for the future. These things can be good reasoning for people to like you as they may find comfort in the message you deliver.
Once your customers are attached to your brand, they will likely stick with you for a very long time. We humans are creatures of familiarity, we look for things that are familiar. And when we do find them, we won’t let them go.
That’s what we do here at Brand360, we help you create a story and get your story out to your audience. Not only that, we help you tell your story in the most impactful ways possible.
- Partnerships
Partnerships are very important to brands. Its how a brand can expand and introduce itself to a new audience or demographic. It is a way of emperimentation and penetration.
Swift’s partnerships are usually with other music makers. She has collaborated with a huge number of artists of different genres throughout the years. She’s a pop artist but when collaborating, she does not just stick to artists of the same genre. She’s made music with the like of Kendrick Lamar, T-Pain, Ice Spice, Zayn and honestly, the list goes on.
With the partnerships to bring the songs to fruition, she is experimenting across genres and introducing herself to newer audiences. That way, she becomes more discoverable.
With the same notion, brands should approach partnerships. Partnerships within brands can be done through offering products and services in collaboration with each other or solely through marketing strategies. This would expose your brand name and if you are creative with your marketing, you might make a good name for yourself.
To Conclude
Started with a simple question, is Taylor Swift really a marketing genius? After diving deeper, perhaps she is. From her appearances at the NFL to her sold-out concerts in Singapore, she knows how to capture people’s attention.
By using social media, teasing her fans with hints about her music, and always giving them more, she keeps them excited and engaged. Brands can learn a lot from her, like how to connect with customers, tell a great story, and form partnerships to reach new audiences. Taylor Swift’s success shows us that with creativity and strategy, any brand can make a big impact.
Source: The List
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