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SoundCloud Marketing Ideas

Prepared on 5/9/2011 by Maneesh Sethi maneesh@maneeshsethi.com http://facebook.com/msethi http://soundcloud.com/maneesh

Introduction According to Alexa rankings, SoundCloud is the 373rd most popular site on the internet, and the 322 most popular in the USA. After a conversation with Eric Wahlforss, I mentioned some ideas for increasing reach, engagement, and revenue for the SoundCloud product. This document is a shortlist of ideas that I believe will help improve the SoundCloud product and website.

About Me My name is Maneesh Sethi, and Im an Internet Marketer. Over the past several years, Ive built several online businesses, mostly through online advertising, SEO, PPC, and SEM. Ive also built large email lists of users in specic niches, and sold afliate offers and information products to them. Currently, I am a DJ/Internet Marketer in Berlin, but some previous work Ive done is 1) Study Marketing and Computer Science at Stanford University, 2) Author 6 published books, including an international bestseller 3) Program for several Silicon Valley startups in Ruby on Rails, 4) Become Internet famous with my Youtube videos (http://youtube.com/ maneeshsethi) and 5) Offer Marketing and Consulting services to dozens of small businesses online.
Me doing pushups on an elephant: This was the cover of Indias largest tabloid. See the full article here: http://manee.sh/9DDEOb.

Goals of this document I hope that the concepts and ideas in this document will serve to improve the SoundCloud product. Specically, I want to discuss some marketing methods to improve 1) Reach, 2) Engagement, and 3) Revenue

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

SoundCloud Demographics

According to QuantCast, the number of Global Monthly Users has steadily increased over the past 6 months, ranging from about 10 million monthly unique visitors in March to 14 million monthly unique users in August. This is an incredible increase, seemingly completely via word of mouth.

The top visiting countries are, in order #1 USA #2 Great Britain #3 Germany #4 Brazil #5 France

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

Some other interesting trafc results:

- Less than 1% of visitors account for 17% of visits - 71% of visitors are short term visitors, accounting for 1/3 of visits.

Based on US Trafc, users tend to be Male (60%), Young Adults in the 18-34 bracket (45%), Caucasian (65%) African American (14%) or Hispanic (15%), tend to have no children in the household, be less afuent (30% earn less than $30,000 / year) , and tend not to have any college degree (52%). The same results trend for most of the top ve countries, with the exception that more UK visitors have a University education. Only 11% of global visits tend to come from the work place, while 89% come from home.
Insights:

Its interesting to look at the demographic information because these numbers will allow you to tailor your product to your best tting customers. We can use this data to help develop a targeted marketing plan. The best marketing tactic that Ive used is to create a marketing prole for your targeted user. For example, we know that demographically, a SoundCloud user is a Caucasian, US Citizen within the Ages of 18-34 with no college degree and an annual income of less than $30,000.

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

Thus, lets imagine a user. This exercise may sound ridiculous, but I promise you, its not.

John Woodall, a typical SoundCloud User

John Woodall John is a 20 year old College Student, from the University of Virginia. He studies Economics but loves to listen to music. He is a junior, and often throws parties and would love to become a DJ or Producer. How does John use SoundCloud? John loves SoundCloud because he can share music freely. When he nds his favorite songs on Pandora, he is unable to share them; thus, he searches for the song on SoundCloud, and sends it to his friends. He does this by pasting the song on Facebook to his friends. How can we improve our marketing directly to John? What would improve his user experience? Some basic improvements would be 1) Easy sharing of his tracks on Facebook (via a Like button, etc) 2) SoundCloud recommendations on music he should listen to (people who liked this track also tend to like this track) and, perhaps, 3) Easy ability to buy the track if it is not downloadable. John would be much happier if he could automatically share any track, without having to copy and paste the link. This would also help increase SoundClouds goals of customer reach.

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

While this is a cursory look at customer analysis, its a great starting point. My recommendation to the marketing team: build up customer proles of your 3 or 4 most highly targeted users. Find photos of them. Print out these photos and paste them on your wall. These are your customers. Find a way to make them happy. Some other potential customer proles might be 1) A British, University Graduate between 22-28 2) An african american or hispanic American with 0-2 children, low income 3) A German Berlin DJ sharing his music to build his presence and nd gigs, etc. Target your most important users. Issue surveys to your users. Collect data and iterate.

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

Reach
Increasing Reach is the goal of getting more visitors to come to your site for the rst time. The goal here is to expose more visitors to your site. There are a million ways to do so, and I will list some ideas that I nd that are the easiest and have the highest potential to grow your brand.

1) Social Media Sharing

As of now, there is not even a simple Like button on each SoundCloud track. While this change would take seconds to implement, the results could be extraordinary. From personal experience, I often want to share a ton of tracks with my friends, but I am much too lazy to actually copy and paste each and every track. How about a Like Button that posts automatically on Facebook? Or a Tweet button, or a +1 button? Imagine:

Some other options: Tweet this Link, RSS Feed for the Artist, G+1 button, etc.
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2) Facebook Marketing
With the advent of social networks, we now have access to incredible amounts of data of many users. By utilizing PPC networks, we can develop a sales funnel that will increase the reach of the product. Imagine a Facebook Ad, like this: The beauty is that we can target this ad based specically on the user. We may look at people who have Liked Ableton Live/other DAWs, or users who have Liked competitors, or users who have Liked specic musical artists (and adjust the ad based on their preferences). Facebook Ads tend to cost little, especially in comparison to Google AdWords Ads, and have the added benet of existing on the prole FOREVER. Unlike Google Ads, which only exist when the user searches for a keyword, Facebook Ads remain on the users prole for the length of time that the Ad runs. This allows the ad to be seen very often, at a fraction of Cost-Per-Click. Ads can be bought for ~$0.25/click. One of the most powerful ways of using Facebook Ads is to link the ad directly to your SoundCloud Facebook Page. I recommend improving your Facebook page to improve engagement. Well talk about this more in the Engagement section. Additionally, we have to make sure that the cost of these ads is worth it. The ROI may be high or low, but we wont nd out without testing. The important point is to improve the funnel after a user reaches the site. Well talk about this more in the Revenue section.

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

3) Partnerships with other companies


A clear way to improve engagement is to make partnerships with other companies. While there are thousands of potential partnerships, here are some that spring to mind immediately:

1) Offer a free six month subscription to purchasers of a DAW Imagine a purchaser of Ableton Live. If they are offered a free subscription to SoundCloud, they will have the ability to upload as much music as they like for six months. After the period is over, many of the purchasers will already have uploaded more than their share of 120 minutes. Afterwards, they are presented with the option of paying to continue to host all of their music, or downgrading to a free version, where some of their songs will be invisible. This is a model that Flickr uses to great effect.

2) Coupon Codes Simply, offer big name bloggers and media outlets a coupon code, good for a few months of usage. Bloggers love to share coupon codes, and by doing so, will promote your product via their blog. Media may operate in the same way. An easy company to start with is http://appsumo.com, which is basically a Groupon for software deals.

Im sure you can brainstorm many other ideas in the same vein.

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

Engagement
An important metric for any business is the engagement of users. How often do your visitors return to the site? Do users simply use SoundCloud once, and then disappear? Or do they often return and make it one of their primary sites? Based on Quantcast data, we can see that 71% of visitors are Passers-By, meaning that they are non-returning users. Most of the visits are caused by Regulars, with 1/5 of visits coming from less than 1% of users. Some important questions at rst are: what is driving the Addict class? Why are they so highly engaged? And why do the passers-by leave so soon? How can we keep them on the page? Some recommendations that I have: survey your users. Find out who your addicts are, and nd out what drives them. You can offer surveys via your email list, or via popups on some pages. Your goal should be to turn all of your users into addicts (Facebook has been particularly successful at this, their data indicates that 76% of their users are Addicts, driving 97% of visits) While your surveys should be the real driver of changes to build engagement, I have some recommendations that I believe might instantly improve the product and user adoption. Remember, the major goal here is Keep users on your domain.

SoundCloud Marketing Ideas by Maneesh Sethi

1) Ratings and Recommendations


Pandora and Like.fm use this to great effect --- allow users to rate and review each song, and offer customized recommendations for users. Users will be much more likely to browse through the site if they have a customizable experience. This has some big ramications. It will allow users to be exposed to more music. If they have liked a track, and their cohort group likes another track, you can offer them the option to explore new music, instantly. Currently, the Explore Tracks option just links to the most Favorited tracks of the day--it isnt a customized experience. You could choose to allow users to rate based on a 5*star system (like Like.fm) or an upvote-downvote system (like Pandora)...either one will give you enough data to create a customizable experience. Users should also be able to share tracks to a specic follower----for example, if they want to post a track to a friends Facebook wall / SoundCloud dashboard, it should be easy enough for them to do so. Its slightly difcult in the current interface.

Sidenote: The SoundCloud Landing Page Currently, when I arrive at SoundCloud not logged in, I see the player with a specic track. Its currently a 2 second clip of someone yelling woohoo. For attracting new customers, it may be worthwhile to change this landing page to automatically refresh a new song after each play---so the user can continue to listen to tracks while browsing the landing page. At least, it should probably play a track and not a yelling woo-hoo clip :)

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2) SoundCloud Radio
By creating a recommendation and ratings engine, you can create an automatic player that updates with recommended tracks. Imagine a single page where you can hit play, and it will automatically play new tunes. This would be similar to Pandora, but it would use only publicly available SoundCloud songs. This could drive user engagement extremely high, because people will be able to let the app run passively in the background, just returning to rank songs and leave comments.

Your player is already quite complex, and it would be amazing if it could automatically load the next track. Adding a feature like this would absolutely drive up engagement. In this scenario, you could imagine taking on Like.fm or Pandora to become the online radio channel of choice---and because the songs are all hosted legitimately on SoundCloud, you wouldnt need to worry about royalty fees!

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3) Other Social Networking Features---Newsfeed, Suggested Users, etc.

To broadly increase engagement, you might consider building up the social network standpoint of SoundCloud. You currently have some great options---followers, a Dashboard, Commenting, Play Counts, etc. Here are some other ideas for social networking:

1) Add Recommended Users To Follow


SoundCloud currently lets me explore users, but I have no way of knowing which users play music that I like, etc. After implementing a recommendation system, you will have data that will allow me to nd other people to follow, and groups that I may be interested in. Creating a suggestion engine for followers will help users determine which other people they want to follow, thereby increasing the amount of music they listen to (increasing User Engagement)

2) Auto Updating Newsfeed


A newsfeed may seem like overkill, and it may not be perfect for your users, however, you might consider implementing an AJAX newsfeed that autoupdates every few minutes. If you implement a heavier following system and rating system, your users will be bound to have a lot more people they are following, and the ability to see new tracks and new comments will be very useful. This is a feature that is probably best left until after youve built the recommendation engine and increasing the average number of follows.

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Revenue
While this may not be a concern yet for SoundCloud, I see amazing opportunities for SoundCloud to increase its revenue and protability. Ive spoke about a few of these ideas with Eric, and I would be excited to see how SoundCloud utilizes its user base and connections to build revenue. SoundCloud has the unique position of having hundreds of thousands of users already, each uploading their own tracks (rather than using commercial tracks, like Pandora and Like.FM). This is great from a copyright perspective. Additionally, when signing up for SoundCloud, the option for Useful News is an opt-out, rather than opt-in checkbox. This means that you have access to probably hundreds of thousands of email addresses. If you currently dont use these email addresses for anything, there are amazing ways to use that data for both engagement and revenue.

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1) In-Player Sales
I think that this idea could revolutionize SoundCloud. Currently, uploaders can choose to make their track downloadable or not downloadable--there is no third option. But, what if a user could purchase a track by clicking the Buy button?

In my vision of this feature, users can offer their tracks as downloadable, or for sale. For sale tracks will cost a set amount (maybe $0.99? Maybe allow the user to choose?), and SoundCloud will receive 30%. This idea has the ability to make SoundCloud the go to source for independent music. According to Quantcast, SoundClouds following is already many times stronger than Beatports. By adding an in-app sales feature, you will be able to completely take over the market share, and earn a ton of revenue in the process. An issue youll need to worry about is copyright---that is; users shouldnt be able to upload tracks of different artists and offer it for sale. Im sure that there are solutions to this problem---a check to make sure the song isnt violating other copyright, much in the same way that YouTube uses a lter to stop videos from playing that are using copyrighted music. You might begin only by offering the option to highly prolic users before allowing everyone to use the app for sales.

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2) Email marketing
As I mentioned before, SoundClouds biggest advantage is the user base (and email addresses) to which it has access. In the Reach section, I spoke about how you might potentially use connections with other companies to build a larger number of users. In the same way, you can build revenue. The rst step to doing this right would be to launch an email newsletter. Why email? Email converts like crazy---it will bring you higher conversions than launching a passive offer on your site. If you create a newsletter, users will become accustomed to receiving information and deals from you. Once you have built trust with your users via email, you can launch an offer email. One example of an offer email would be a simple sales letter, offering a discount on your own SoundCloud product. By partnering with other companies, you can launch huge afliate deals. For example, by working with Ableton or a DAW producer, you might launch a sale recommending a specic product. When people buy the DAW through your link, you will earn income as an afliate. When writing sales emails, its important you build a strong Call to Action and write your emails in the correct manner. The art of writing a sales email is out of the scope of this document, but feel free to get in contact with me (maneesh@maneeshsethi.com) and I can teach you how to write high-conversion sales letters. (I sell a course about this online!)

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3) Afliate Sales and Advertising


In the same way that you can partner with companies to sell through email marketing, you can offer afliate deals with companies and build an advertising space on the actual SoundCloud page. I believe SoundCloud might already be doing this with Samplitude, as I noticed a link to the product on the sidebar of the dashboard.

This same location offers a great location for advertising and other afliate deals. By nding companies who wish to target music lovers specically (think concert promoters, new artists, record labels, etc). By building a sales team within the SoundCloud ofce, you could begin working to secure deals that appear depending on location and music variety, and turn these sales into income.

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Conclusion
This document has been a broad list of some specic marketing ideas Ive brainstormed for SoundCloud. As a Stanford student, programmer, and internet marketer, Ive put options like these into effect in numerous businesses and seen the incredibly effective results. Email marketing, for instance, completely revolutionized my business when I began using it. I recommend that SoundCloud take a look at this list and consider all of these marketing opportunities. As SoundCloud is one of my favorite companies, I see that it is moving in the right direction---and my only hope is that this document will help you reach your destination, faster. Ive extremely interested in helping SoundCloud grow. Please email me to talk about Internship or Employment opportunities. Contact me at maneesh@maneeshsethi.com, or via Facebook at http://facebook.com/msethi . Good luck guys.

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