We’ve recently had the pleasure of working with Confidence Man, an electro-pop 2 piece from Brisbane, and thought we’d let you in on how we curated a few key fan activations to take their campaign to the next level for the release of their single ‘First Class Bitch’. 

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Objective 

Our objective was to provide Confidence Man with significant growth on both social and streaming, sharing their music in engaging, thought provoking and authentic ways. A large focus of this was on growing audiences in key international territories, particularly the UK.

In our audit we discovered an opportunity for growth within community engagement ie. replying to comments, engaging with fans on stories, providing opportunities for the fans to be involved. This fuelled the ideas in our digital strategy. 

There’s a number of different (and outrageously fun) strategies we proposed to propel both engagement and reach. We knew fans were eager to engage so it came down to what opportunities we could curate and provide that would activate and drive the release of ‘First Class Bitch’ on a global scale. 

Strategy

Giphy stickers are a powerful tool for brand awareness and engagement, especially when delivered in a way that is relevant to the brand. These short looping videos and designs are fun, they exhibit your brand and they can exponentially extend your reach. Confidence Man were most well received by their existing audience when they were being playful and irreverent. We created sassy pink text stickers reading ‘first class bitch’ or ‘FCB’, as well as video stickers of the pair in fur coats, flicking the cocktail stick from their martini class, or eating sushi off of a naked torso in order to really lean into the identity of the single.

For their single ‘First Class Bitch’ we built Confidence Man a fun AR filter which asks, and then answers, ‘what percent bitch are you?’. A fun AR filter is the perfect way to authentically involve fans; it directly places them into the First Class Bitch world. A successful AR filter is brand or product referential (just like this one), and encourages more users to try it out for themselves, thereby exposing their own followers to your filter and expanding your reach. This is a great tool to market internationally at an incredibly competitive price, if activated effectively.

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Another great strategy to expand international reach is the involvement of Influencers. Though this does come with overhead, consumers now trust influencer endorsements more than they do your average run-of-the-mill movie star, and they’re usually much cheaper! Having an influencer with a large multinational following use your song, or even hashtag, is sure to redirect their followers to your page. Moreover, thoughtful influencer alignment can indicate a shared sense of ideals, aesthetics or sentiments to the product you are marketing, which in turn builds credibility and reaches a more targeted audience.

Finally, we instigated #firstclassconman as a means to follow the entries into Confidence Man’s dog show competition, encouraging fans to directly interact with the band by posting a slow-mo video of their prepossessing pooches for judgement. This type of original event marketing is great for generating hype, however its dependence on audience engagement is double edged. If it kindles no interest, it’s a flop, but if it works you have a powerful, low budget strategy in which the audience is fully engaged and the potential for the activation of new users is uninhibited. Make it fun, make it easy, and make it shareable.

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Results  

Confidence Man saw massive increases in growth across the board. Most notable was a 29.8% increase in TikTok followers, a platform on which #firstclassconman has 1.5 million views (and counting!). Paid influencers Plastique Tiara and Jake Warden garnered the band some serious engagement and even some ‘duets’ from other users. This sort of marketing is likely why we saw more growth in territories outside of Australia.

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The ‘what percent bitch are you’ AR filter no doubt had an impact on the band’s Instagram engagement, which now sits at 6.41% - over double the typical level of engagement across the platform. Notably Sofi Tukker, a grammy nominated house-pop duo with a sound comparable to Confidence Man’s, used the filter, consequently reaching a large international audience with a high potential to become new fans. The filter’s announcement post garnered a whopping 9% engagement, proving the fans’ enthusiasm for the band and their release. Similarly, the announcement of the dog competition brought in a huge spike of engagement on Facebook. 

There are always things to learn from a marketing campaign. For us, this was the consideration of inter-territorial music licensing on TikTok. Users in Australia couldn’t access the sound on an American video, and vice versa. This dampened the spread of a fledgling viral trend and hindered our ability to monitor international content. Consider the licensing deal you’re moving forward with in your campaigns and how this may affect meeting your objectives.

A huge 7.9% growth on Spotify proves all this to be worth it, signifying strong cross promotion across platforms and towards streaming. The majority of streams coming from playlists, both personal and algorithmic, means we’re reaching a targeted audience who want to keep listening to Confidence Man and music similar to Confidence Man - a loyal following which will now be exposed to more of their music, past and future. Success.