4 ways your business can leverage Spotify

You probably use Spotify to some capacity on a personal level, but have you thought about using Spotify from a business perspective? It’s time you started. Here are 4 ideas for how to use Spotify as a business or professional.

First things first: if you plan to play Spotify in a business, commercial or public setting – make sure you sign up for Soundtrack Your Brand, Spotify’s platform for businesses. Soundtrack allows you to play Spotify in commercial/public settings and even offers you several tools including explicit music filtering, the ability to schedule your music and the ability to turn playlists into soundtracks.

1. Staff-Based Playlists

This one is particularly good for those in the service industry. Have your staff create a playlist with some of their favourite songs. As the saying goes, music is a window into the soul. Having staff-created playlists is one way to help your customers get to know and connect with your team, makes interesting blog and social media content, and gives a behind-the-scenes look at your team.

One similar example to this is how the Hamilton Ticats football team used Spotify for the 2019 season. They created a series of playlists, each featuring a different player’s pregame playlist (what they listened to as they prepared for that particular game). They released one a week on game days, throughout the season. This offered a connection to the team and players as well as a chance to listen to the same music that the player’s did as they got ready for the game.

2. Event-Based Soundtracks

Hosting an event, conference, festival, or market? You’ll likely have background music playing, you might even already be using Spotify. Instead of finding and using someone else’s Soundtrack or channel  – why not make your own? Like the staff-based playlists mentioned above, event-based soundtracks would make awesome blog and social media content. You could make it into an ongoing interactive component to your social media posting schedule by getting your audience’s ideas on what songs to add, using the polls feature on Instagram and Twitter, and making the audience part of the decision making process. Edmonton art and craft fair, The Royal Bison has playlists for each of their fairs that are accessible to the public. They also have an awesome podcast called Makers Moment where they feature different local makers each episode. The Royal Bison is an excellent use case for how to leverage Spotify for your event.

3. Knowledge-Based Podcast Playlists

Many companies have their own podcast. If you do, great! If your business doesn’t have a podcast that’s okay too. You can still use Spotify in a curative way, by building a playlist of podcasts episodes. There are several different routes you could take with this.

One way would be to create a playlist each week/month/quarter with podcast episodes that people in your office are listening to/like.

Another way would be to curate podcast episodes that are good resources for customers. For example, if you are a realtor, you could curate a playlist of useful resources for first time home buyers. This list could be embedded into a blog post, used as social media content, etc.. This approach is particularly actionable for businesses in the service industry, but if you’re a product-based company, you could also curate playlists based off audience interests (what people who use your product would be interested in). For example, if you sell outdoor adventure apparel, you could make a playlist with podcasts on camping, hiking, geocaching, climbing, etc..

Finally, if you sponsor podcasts, your playlist could be episodes that you’ve sponsored from different podcasts. Assuming you’re sponsoring podcasts based on audience interest, there would naturally be some connection between the episodes on your playlist.

4. Mixed Music + Audio Playlists

A mixed music + audio playlist is ideal if you have a product or service that aligns with an activity. For the music side of things, fill your playlist with songs that align with your customers. For the audio side of things, make little segments (15 to 30 seconds long) with product info, tips, faqs, sales, etc and upload each as an episode to a podcast. Then, intermittently drop the podcast episodes (aka audio segments) throughout the music in your playlist. This provides a mix of music with conversation/actionable ideas for a unique outcome.

TLDR: Get creative and leverage Spotify for additional social media and blog content, in every day capacities and to grab your audience’s attention in unexpected ways.