 What's going on? My name is Kory, music marketing co-founder, contraband agency. And today I want to go over a couple of alternate KPIs so you can tell if your marketing campaigns are actually working or not. Now, if you're anywhere in the advertising marketing space, then you know where the KPI is. But just in case you don't, I'm going to break it down for you. So KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator and it's basically a metric that you look at to determine if your marketing is working or not. And common KPIs of views, reach, clicks, view rate, all that stuff that does matter. Don't get me wrong, like it does matter. But I personally don't feel like it gives you the complete picture when trying to determine if your marketing is working outside of just the advertisements, right? Like there's some KPIs that let you know if the ad is working, but there are others that let you know if like stuff is really working. So I want to get into five alternate KPIs that I train my team to look at. We look at these when we're working with clients and artists that we deal with to determine once again, is stuff really working the way that we think it's working or do we just have a good ad? It's the network. So before we get into all of that, come and follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Links will be in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all of that good stuff. Also, we have Relunched, Brandman Network Elite. So if you're someone that's interested in learning music, marketing from me and Sean and all the other cultures that we brought on board, go and check that link out in the description below. I promise you it's dope. It's only getting better and you know what I'm saying? It's just dope. That's all I can say, like it's dope and it's only getting better. Now with that being said, let's go ahead and get into it. So one of the major KPIs that we look at during our marketing campaigns is playlist saves. And when I talk about playlist saves, I'm mainly talking about Spotify. And when I talk about playlist, I'm not just talking about editorial playlist or branded playlist or ones that do promo. We're mainly looking at how many fan playlists have they been added to since the marketing has started. So for example, if we start working with a song and let's say that it's in total 85 playlist, right? We can tell that five of them are branded promo playlists. And the other 80 are, you know, generally fan playlists, right? And at the end of that campaign, that client is now in 150 playlist or 200 playlist. And once again, we can tell that majority of them are fan playlists. To us, that is a good campaign because we have proof that real people are liking the music and adding it to their playlist, which when it comes to marketing in general, all the numbers are cool, you know what I'm saying? It's nice to say you got a thousand clicks and 20,000 views. But at the end of the day, people are showing that they like the music and the content, right? And it's a pretty easy metric to keep track of. You can just look at how many playlists are you in before the campaign starts, how many playlists are you being added to, you know what I'm saying? During the duration of the campaign and then how many playlists are you in once you stop doing your marketing efforts, like your ads and your influences and all that stuff. Keeping it in the world of Spotify, another KPI that we look at is Song Save. So Song Save to us indicates a lot of the things that we look at for playlist ads, right? It's letting us know that people like the music, they're saving it to their library because they want to come back and listen to it more or again. And an increase in saves on your song is a great sign because once again, they indicate that people like it and they like it enough to add it to that personal library and go back to it and all that stuff. And just to backtrack a little bit, the reason that we look at playlist saves and Song Save is because to us that represents the bottom of the funnel for Spotify, right? Like getting a stream is easy. Getting a listener is easy. That doesn't really tell you much, but getting someone to save your song to their playlist and then save their song to the library, that's a different type of flex, you know? So to us, these KPIs represent people that are engaged in the music, people that like it and it lets us know that we are targeting the right people. We are putting the music in the right spaces and that people are genuinely liking it. They want to check it out, they want to listen to it, they want to share it to their friends. So if you don't see these things rising during your campaign, you don't see your playlist saves going up or you don't see your playlist ads going up, you don't see your saves going up on the song, then it could be an indicator that you're either not pushing the music to the right people or that you're using less than desirable marketing services to do certain stuff. But to me, once again, to me, if things are going well and the music is good and you're hitting the right people, you'll see these two things grow. Another KPI that we look at is Shazam's on Apple Music. Now I've talked about this in previous videos, but personally whenever I run YouTube as I see Shazam shoot up for clients and that can be anywhere from a 30 to 50% increase all the way up to 400s or thousands of percent of increases depending on where the artist started. Now once again, we look at Shazam's because it represents to us discoverability, right? It represents to us that people are trying to find the song. For those of you that don't know what Shazam is, it's a voice recognition app that you can use to search songs. So you hear a song on a mall or on the radio or on your friend's car, you can just hit and go, hey Shazam, what song is playing? And it'll let you know what song is playing whatever environment that you're in. So when we see Shazam shooting up, that lets us know that one, people are listening to the music in a situation where they don't know what the song is, right? Either they're in a car or an environment with someone that's playing the music or maybe like the advertisement came across their screens in a place where they couldn't really like check into the song for whatever reason. No, like maybe they were like at the gym or actually I don't know, I honestly can't explain that but it lets us know that they're in a situation where for whatever reason they can't click to the song but they care enough about it to look it up. So when we see Shazam's rising, once again, it lets us know that, hey, when people hear this, they like it so much that it makes them want to actually go and find the music, which is a great sign because if people don't want to find the music they will not go look for the music, right? And then also when it comes to like Apple Music Analytics, like they don't show you how many playlists you're in, not like fan playlists, they don't really give you like a save metric. So Shazam to me is like one of the best ways to track Apple Music Growth. It's not the best, you know, like you can still look at your listeners and views but it's one of the more like alt ways to gauge your Apple Music Growth and once again to gauge if people are hearing the music and then once again caring enough to go out and find it. Now, another caveat that we look at is how much is the artist being tweeted about, right? So to me, Twitter represents conversation, right? If people are talking about you or people want to have a conversation around you nine times out of 10 they're going to do it on Twitter. So if when we started campaign, we see that, you know there's little to no tweaks about the artist or maybe there's a certain amount depending on how big the artist is. And as we're running those advertisements we see more people tweeting about the song or the project that we're working to us that is a good sign because once again it represents that we're hitting the right person or the right people in general and we're targeting our efforts to the right market. And then two, people care enough about the artist to go talk about it. You know how hard it is to get somebody to tweet about something let alone an artist they just found out about? You know what I'm saying, not too long ago but what I have noticed is that when people are really into an artist like they really, really like someone they just discovered one of the first things they want to do is go and tell their friends about it. And Twitter is the easiest way for most people to en masse tell their friends about something that they care about. So once again, we use that to gauge what does the conversation look like around your music? And a lot of the times that can be from a positive aspect especially when we're talking about, you know discovery and all that stuff. Sometimes it can be bad, you know like if we run a campaign and we see 20 tweets about how trash the song is then, you know, that lets us know something that lets us know something important and that that may need to be a pivot that comes up in the future or maybe we decide to keep it going because even though people don't like it they still talk about it, you know? So tweets are another important KPI because once again, it lets you know if there's a conversation around you do people care enough about what they're seeing to talk about it or talk about you and then already talking about the specific thing that you're pushing and you're promoting. And the last KPI I wanna talk about is looking at your profile engagement on your socials. Now, notice that I didn't say any particular social media platform and that's because this really comes down to what social media platforms do you care about the most? So whenever we do a campaign with an artist one of the first thing we ask them is like, hey, like what are you looking to grow? Are you looking to grow your YouTube? Are you looking to grow your Instagram? Your Twitter? Your Snapchat? Your Spotify? Your Apple? You know what I'm saying? Your TikTok? What exactly are you looking to grow? And then once we've assessed that and we know what's important to them, then those are the engagement metrics that we started to look at to determine if we're doing a good job or not. So if you in particular care about your Instagram account, then look at your Instagram engagement as a metric to let you know if you're marketing efforts are working or not. Now you can do it off of just gut feeling. So for example, are you getting more likes than usual on your posts? Are you getting more comments than usual? Are you getting more DMs than you normally would have gotten before you were running the marketing stuff? And then you can also use tools like Social Blade, right? So Social Blade is a free platform that lets you analyze the engagement of your different social media platforms. So what we'll do is we'll go in, look up the engagement of a client, before the campaign starts, and then we'll go check it once again once the campaign is ended. So if Instagram is important to them, and at the beginning of the campaign, they have a 2.5% engagement, saying percentage on their Instagram profile, and at the end of the campaign, it jumps up to a 3.3%. Once again, to me, that was a success because we are seeing an increase in engagement on the profile. And then from there, we can start talking to the clients about other ways to boost the engagement, and saying things they can do to make that number go higher, but it's a positive indication because things are moving up, you know what I'm saying? Things are moving in green. So just to reiterate, I can't say like what platform to look at the most because it really does come down to like what platform do you care about the most? But if you're not seeing an increase in engagement on the major platforms that you're pushing back to, so not an increase in followers or likes or all that type of stuff, then it could be a sign that what you're doing as far as marketing just isn't working, or you're pushing it to the wrong people, or the content that you're using just isn't the one. So just to go back to those again, the five alt KPIs, or five alt KPIs that we look at outside of just the views and the reach and the clicks and the click through rate, which once again, all that stuff is important. All that stuff will let you know from a very granular standpoint, if things are working, but I believe that you gotta look at the whole picture to really know if your music marketing is working. So just once again, to reiterate those five KPIs, that's playlist ads. Are you seeing the amount of fan players that you're being added to increase while you're actually running your marketing campaigns? That song says also on Spotify, do you see more people saving your song and adding it to their library? That's Shazam's on Apple Music. Are you seeing an increase in your discoverability? Are people actually caring enough to try to seek you and find you and look your music up? That's tweets, right? Is there a conversation around you? Are people talking about you while you're running your music marketing campaign? And then last, is your profile engagement or your engagement in general going up on the major platforms that you care about? So that's it guys, once again, those are the alternative KPIs that we look at when we're doing music marketing for clients. To be honest, these five are like five out of a long list of like maybe 12 to 15 other things that we look at. So if you're interested in me doing a video like this where I talk about other things you can be looking at besides just pure ad data, let me know in the comment section below. I may work on a part two or a part three to this. And then outside of that, I would love to know what KPIs are you looking at to determine if your marketing campaign is working? Are you looking at follower increases? Are you looking at streams? Are you looking at listeners? What do you look at to let you know if something is working or something isn't working? Drop that in the comment section below. Once again, I'd love to know what you guys are looking into and just, you know, I'm interested to see what you guys are looking into. Other than that, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.