Social Listening Lets iHeartRadio Find Passionate Influencers to Amplify Their Signal

UNDERSTANDING FANS IS CRUCIAL TO FINDING THE RIGHT VOICES TO SHARE YOUR MESSAGING

At A GLANCE:

Reaching the right target audience is important for iHeartRadio. It’s how they’ve gone from successfully navigating traditional radio to ruling the digital radio space. Their approach relies on understanding and empowering music fans by identifying influencers to create fan armies, leading to major engagement and interest in the iHeartRadio Awards.

RESULTS:

Key influencers identified empowered for various artists

Several fan armies voting and engaging across a number of social channels

Huge engagement for iHeartRadio as well as the artists in contention

CHALLENGE:

REACHING THE MILLENNIAL AUDIENCE AUTHENTICALLY ON A NUMBER OF CHANNELS

Thriving in the digital world requires commitment to evolution, something iHeartRadio exemplifies in their business practices. Their goal is to continue growing their huge social media presence by keeping their messaging relevant, authentic, and engaging among the right target audiences at all times.

They see themselves as catalysts creating opportunities for fans to speak to their favorite artists on a variety of platforms – not just one or two. Using research through first-party and third-party data, they’ve learned it’s not enough to simply create a hashtag for a campaign to succeed.

They wanted to create an “omni-logue” with fans to generate excitement and engagement for the iHeartRadio Awards and other events – and they wanted to grab the attention of the Millennial audience in particular.

For this they looked to NetBase’s suite of social media analytics tools.

Hetal Patel (Consumer and Corporate Insights, iHeartRadio) discusses how iHeartRadio stays relevant in the social space and powers their influencer marketing campaigns with the help of NetBase. Out of a variety of competitors, IHeartRadio prefers the flexible and user-friendly nature of NetBase that allows them to find and craft compelling stories for clients.

SOLUTION:

IDENTIFY INFLUENCERS AND EMPOWER THEM TO DEPUTIZE OTHERS

Leading up to the iHeartRadio Awards, iHeartMedia used NetBase to attract Millennials with a strategy incorporating five key principles:

Leveraging relationships with artists by creating multi-platform engagement with fans
Driving social conversations using fans and people as their own ambassadors
Adapting content for emerging social platforms vs. limiting to the two or three “big ones”
Tailoring strategies to employ the strength of individual mediums – like a heart for Instagram, etc.
Humanizing artists and audiences with authentic two-way conversations vs. scripted messaging

They used these principals along with NetBase analytics to identify influencers in a unique way – giving power back to the fans. Influencers over- indexing for a particular artist would be recruited and then nominate others to create relevant social chatter.

RESULTS:

PASSIONATE FANS LEAD TO WINS ALL AROUND

The result was several passionate fan armies, voting for artists and competing against one another to win the Best Fan Army award. But the real winner was iHeartRadio, who didn’t have to pay for influencers.

Key influencers identified empowered for various artists
Several fan armies voting and engaging across a number of social channels
Huge engagement for iHeartRadio as well as the artists in contention

I’ve probably used 10 to 15 services in the last 10 years of my career for social media measurement. NetBase is so flexible and nimble that it lets me slice and dice the data in so many different ways and levels in real-time without going through multiple iterations. It’s very efficient and has helped immensely. NetBase has been critically important for me because the tool is just so user- friendly. It lets you look around the data, play in the data, find those right compelling stories that you want to craft out for the client

Hetal Patel

Vice President, Consumer & Corporate Insights, iHeartMedia

Download a PDF of the iHeartRadio case study

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Social Listening Lets iHeartRadio Find Passionate Influencers to Amplify Their Signal

UNDERSTANDING FANS IS CRUCIAL TO FINDING THE RIGHT VOICES TO SHARE YOUR MESSAGING

At A GLANCE:

RESULTS:

CHALLENGE:

REACHING THE MILLENNIAL AUDIENCE AUTHENTICALLY ON A NUMBER OF CHANNELS

SOLUTION:

IDENTIFY INFLUENCERS AND EMPOWER THEM TO DEPUTIZE OTHERS

RESULTS:

PASSIONATE FANS LEAD TO WINS ALL AROUND

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