I believe this is one of the most impactful, innovative and revolutionary music marketing campaigns to date. I wasn’t just a fan of her beauty when I saw this campaign, I became a huge fan of her marketing team and I wish I could of been there when they pitched this marketing strategy to Columbia Records.
This digital marketing strategy worked because it took all of her fans by surprise. No one was expecting it, at all. It was released on midnight December 13th and was primarily digital and video based and her album was only exclusively sold on iTunes until the 20th December, at which point only physical copies of the album could be purchased. This essentially gave her fans minor panic and she managed to sell over 1 million albums on iTunes within 5 days of the release – Need I say more?
This marketing strategy is revolutionary and I can certainly see not only further music groups marketing this way, but other businesses marketing in this way also, which Twitter, Facebook, Vine, LinkedIn (and the rest…) would be useful tools to create anticipation and a loyal, focused and resourceful following for this sort of marketing to work.
Although saying that, this marketing strategy was a complete surprise and 'social media’ didn’t really play a part of this marketing campaign until after the launch. The videos and ‘people talk’ did most of the of the promotion for them. It created such a buzz amongst the people and music industry all of the marketing team just sat back and relaxed whilst watching the fans drown in amazement of Beyonce’s new videos.
This strategy was much cheaper than marketing ‘normally’ - there were no singles released prior to the album and therefore, no audio marketing to anticipate the album release. No banners on city busses, no TV promo performances. This digital marketing strategy was primarily digitally based, the results showed it worked, and I’m confident this is a breakthrough for further digital marketing strategies. Businesses, keep an eye out for video.
BEYONCE
AT
MIDNIGHT