Whether you love her, hate her, like her music or couldn’t bear to hear “Shake it Off” one more time, there is one thing you can’t deny — you’ve heard of her. Taylor Swift started out as a young girl with big dreams of becoming a country singer and, just as her music evolved, so did her marketing skills.
I worked at a country radio station last summer, and one of the DJ’s recalled meeting Swift in her early teens before she commanded the charts. She came into the radio station, pre-record deal, pre-Grammys and pre-straight hair, pulled out her guitar, and began playing an original song. She told him that he would be playing her records one day. Sure enough, she was right.
Even as a teenager, Swift had an aptitude for selling herself. Swift and her mother Andrea went from station to station and event to event in hopes that they would meet the right person that would take her on and help turn her dreams into a reality.
Fast forward almost 10 years through seven Grammys, three sold-out world tours, and 30 million albums sold, 24-year-old Taylor Swift is one of the most popular names and faces in the entire world. On Oct. 27, Swift released her much anticipated fourth album, 1989. It is the star’s first exclusively pop album and from the moment she announced it, she went full-speed ahead with marketing and promotion for the album. This month alone, Swift is on the cover of 23 global issues of Cosmopolitan magazine.
She leveraged her intimate connection with her fan base first. Swift hosted “1989 Secret Sessions,” where she invited fans that she found on social media to her various houses around the country-and in London—to be among the first to listen to her new album in its entirety. She filmed the sessions and posted them on her YouTube channel, making all of her other fans infinitely envious and itching to get a listen at the first opportunity.
Swift then tapped into her social circle. Taylor has recently befriended the likes of superstars Lena Dunham, Karlie Kloss, Lorde, and Selena Gomez often posting Instagram pictures of their fun times together baking and hanging out like any other 24 year old would. In return, they all shared news of Swift’s single and album releases to their vast social networks. Because BFFs should always promote each other’s albums and work to their millions of followers, right?
On Aug. 18, Taylor hosted a livestream where she dropped her long awaited first single from her latest album, “Shake it Off.” During the livestream, she also premiered the music video from the single, released it on iTunes, and revealed the title, cover art, and release date of the new album. Similar to Beyonce’s unexpected drop of a secret album during the winter of 2013, this brand of ambush marketing built immediate hype and drove people to purchase the music right away. “Shake it Off” debuted at number one with sales of 544,00 in its first week and has since gone double platinum. In its first week, 1989 sold 1.287 million copies in the U.S., making it the best-selling album of the year and the fastest-selling album in 12 years. Fellow musician Nick Jonas called it “one of the greatest album rollouts” he’d ever seen – an ode to Taylor’s skillful promotion and increased social media engagement.
Nonwithstanding a risky breakup with Spotify, Swift has become her own best PR practitioner. She knows the power of promotion and – with appearances on 23 magazine covers and a world tour in the works – Swift appears to have all but conquered the marketing world. One thing’s for sure, this woman knows what she’s doing — the numbers prove it.
All photos from taylorswift.com