To complete the marketing challenge of coming up with a June-December launch plan for a music community with a target of 500K users I would need access to customer segmentation data, and the current customer personas. But let’s just have some fun without that standard data and have a look at comparing Facebook vs Extole, following yesterday’s blog post on the social referral platform.

Given the challenge of finding 500K subscribers over 6 months it’s an interesting fact that 478K Facebook users aged 18-55 in the UK currently list the Apple iPod as an interest. You could therefore work backwards from this figure, and breakdown the demographics into their component parts, thanks to the Facebook ads tool, and in fact 373K of that group are 18-year-olds.

To deliver the core community base you need at least one core ‘killer’ channel which will deliver the kind of numbers you want, at a cost you can afford. The options that spring to mind are:

(1) Facebook adverts – e.g. ads for a 1 month’s free subscription offer incentive.

(2) A social referral campaign – a gift in return for a subscriber using a top class platform like Extole which will track the metrics. You’ll see from the attached deck that music is on average the top performing social referral sector.

There are plenty of great supporting ideas such as partnering with National Express who have already run a music festivals comp’, running affiliate ads, or working with a mobile company at festivals to save on costs while promoting your new music app. But the bottom line is that there needs to be one central channel for delivery so I’ve focused on that.

A top level view of the big numbers, based solely on the 373K 18-year-olds as a way of exploring the options:

Facebook

• Users: 373,620 x 0.94 cost per click = £351,202.8 (frequency and duration determined by ppc budget)
• Cost of 1 month’s music app free subscription at £1 a pop = £373,620
• Total cost = £724,822.8

• Platform cost: $5k implementation to build and launch the program. $3k monthly subscription for management and optimization with a 12 month contract, total = $41,000/£25,870 – costs may vary for a June – Dec time frame though as a rule of thumb the longer these social referral campaigns run the more effective they are.
• Incentive cost: 1 month’s free subscription to both referrers and sign-ups = £373,620.
• Total cost: £399,490

This is without the benefit of your market segmentation, but I trust it is shows what the core acquisition channel might look like. There is of course the connected issue of retention of the ‘1 month subscribers’ to consider too.

On a qualitative level I believe a good foundation of the online marketing strategy retention would be to follow the GiffGaff community-led model where you would take the ‘bull by the horns’ and make the product feedback very open to customers to build advocacy and loyalty, as well as build a community peer-to-peer playlist swapping etc.