About
Vertical Spice’s patented design is a premium storage solution that offers a compact product to easily and conveniently organize spices in the smallest of spaces.
We launched a brand awareness campaign on Spotify ads, a new channel for Vertical Spice, to help them reach different audiences. We tested a couple of ad versions over the course of one month to test the impact of messaging and sonic brand identity on engaging new users.
Spotify ads are a perfect addition to top-of-funnel campaigns as they enable businesses to expand their reach and connect with new customers in key moments. The purpose of Vertical Spice’s Spotify campaign was to boost brand awareness and recall, so our goals focused on impressions and ad completion rates.
Together, NetElixir and Vertical Spice peppered a lot of content into a small ad space.
Achievements
Exceeding Spotify’s Benchmarks
Spotify has a benchmark CTR of 0.04% and completion rate of 91%. Through our understanding of our client’s branding and target audience, we achieved a 0.23%+ CTR and 94%+ completion rate for our ads.
Future-Proofing Brand Strategy
Because Spotify exists as a walled garden by managing its own audiences, targeting, and ad creation, the streaming service is a viable platform for advertising in the cookieless world. By A/B testing now, we are establishing brand best practices for Vertical Spice to ensure a smooth transition and streamline new ad formats for future promotions.
Connecting With Customers In Screenless Moments
Prior to audio advertising, Vertical Spice relied on imagery that showed the before and after visuals of organization. However, by crafting an auditory branding experience through a conversational tone, we connected Vertical Spice to new customers through solely audio cues.
Challenge
Because Vertical Spice was new to the audio ad space, the team needed to strategize the right mix of messaging, background music, and audio cues that would make the most impactful ads. Spotify tracks their listeners within their own platform, so to measure the true impact of the ads beyond impressions, we had to map Spotify’s customer data with Vertical Spice’s Google Analytics.
Solution
Based on the team’s experience with audio ads and audience targeting, we know that many users listen to podcasts and music with specific real-time interests, such as when they cook or eat — Spotify even has its own Cooking & Dining genre! By honing in on listener’s relevant interests on when they’re likely to turn to Spotify, we found a perfect opportunity for Vertical Spice to increase their brand awareness.
Because of the strong relationship between our two teams, Vertical Spice was open to testing new channels to diversify their audience. After careful collaboration with the social teams for overall direction, our award-winning content team wrote the script for the ads. Initially, we were conservative with Vertical Spice’s ad budget to learn what type of ad would resonate best with Spotify’s audiences.
We started with two ad variations: V1 had a more conversational and light-hearted tone that ran without a background track; V2 was more informative and product-specific with a peppy background song. Ultimately, V2 had a higher completion rate and reach, but V1 had a higher CTR. Even with a small budget, we reached almost 100,000 listeners at a 94%+ completion rate — exceeding both our initial estimates and Spotify’s benchmarks.
We created a winning strategy supported by customer insights to drive considerable results for Vertical Spice. Through our ads, we could introduce new audiences to spice organization methods and reach them in screenless moments. We added UTM parameters within the destination link on Spotify ads to track new users back to Google Analytics. As a successful branding initiative to reach new audiences and boost current paid social efforts, we plan to implement more audio ads with Vertical Spice. Spotify ads could play a crucial role in winning new audiences for Vertical Spice during peak and holiday seasons.
The Role of Audio Ads
Audio advertising adds significant value to existing branding efforts. With potential new customers to reach and highly selective genres, audience segments, and listening moments, brands have an enormous opportunity to create a carefully curated campaign to reach their ideal target persona on Spotify.
Success on Spotify and other audio streaming platforms relies on understanding which audiences to target, testing out different scripts, and matching clients’ personas to relevant targeting options within a walled garden platform like Spotify. Spotify’s differentiating factor is its ability to target audiences solely on first-party data based on the user’s listening habits and interests. This ability will be increasingly valuable as we enter the cookieless future.
Read More About Audio Ads
