Spotify
Driving engagement for Spotify users
An engagement strategy comprises of 3 parts:
Trigger - Trigger for the user to perform the desired action in the product.
This trigger could occur naturally to the user or could be carefully manufactured by the product team. Examples of manufactured triggers for Spotify could be a mobile notification, email, social media post among several others.
Action - This is the action that the user performs when they get the trigger.
In this case for Spotify it would be clicking the play button of a song/ playlist.
Reward - This is the reward that the user gets to perform that action.
In this case the reward would be listening to the song.
creating a compelling trigger
Artist based promotions have long been a very successful strategy adopted by the music industry to drive more engagement. And Spotify is no stranger to this, the music streaming platform posts extensively on social media about various artists and their albums to increase engagement and growth.
Takeaway:
Theme: Focus on artist based promotion.
Content: Animated posts for creating an engaging experience for followers.
the making
A compelling trigger also requires a strong visual. Videos are one of the most engaging mediums that strike an instant connect and illicit a strong emotional responses. For this concept project I chose the Rotoscopy animation as the primary method to create the trigger.
I sourced the base footage of Beyonce’s song ‘Put a Ring On It’ for the animation. It was important that the footage was full of dynamic motions (hip movement, the foot tapping, the ring gesture) and exuded fun moves to motivate the audience to go back and listen to the song.
I converted the footage into Photoshop layers for a 6 second animation with 72 frames. I hand drew sketches frame-by-frame at 12 frames per second (fps) on a Wacom tablet using to create the final animation.
The illustrations and animations were drawn using:
A variety of brush styles to show varied textures
With an array of colors for adding a peppy vibe
Stylizing loud dance moves, for visual surprises
Alternating colors between frames for interesting visual engagement
Switching between full bleeds and no bleed frames for more dynamic visuals
Because the potential user should feel inspired and motivated to go use the Spotify app and listen to the song, the promotional post was a fun animated version of the original video supported by a trigger in the end - the Spotify logo and a prompt to go ‘stream now’.
some other examples using different animation methods
Parallax Animation
Cinemagraphs