Award of Excellence
Best Marketing Program

Project Team

Coakley & Williams Construction - (General Contractor)

Project Description

At the beginning of 2020, Coakley & Williams Construction (CWC) built a Spotify social media account. The main objective of CWC’s Spotify account, with custom playlists embedded on our website, was to increase website traffic ultimately increasing brand awareness. As a local GC with a 60-year history, we wanted to stand out within the CRE industry in a truly unique and memorable way. One of CWC’s core values is to ‘apply expertise inventively’, which is exactly what we did. With more than 15 years of digital marketing & search engine optimization (SEO) experience, our marketing director flexed her innovative muscles creating this experience as a way to engage & connect with existing clients & employees, as well as catch the attention of thousands more.

An interesting piece of the Spotify story is that it began as a holiday gift in January 2020 for 100 clients. With $10,000 budgeted for gifts, we selected a branded Bluetooth speaker, custom-designed the box, and successfully came in under budget at $9,600 ($70 speaker + $26 packaging/fulfillment/shipping = $96 per gift). Next, the idea sparked to create a Spotify account, for an added cost of $120 for the annual Spotify subscription, which was advertised to those 100 clients on a personalized card insert. Then by mid-March, the country was in quarantine with the majority working remotely, so we wanted a way to stay connected with people. As John Oates said, “It’s the music that brings us together.” By quickly pivoting our focus, applying some strategy, and adding timely playlists (e.g., Work From Home & Virtual Happy Hour), we grew the CWC Spotify page to be the second most visited page on our corporate website.

We build custom playlists that reach users ranging from 18 to 65+, with the largest following in the 25-34 age group. Our followers, 57.5% male & 42.5% female, represent a diverse variety of positions and industries. The CWC Spotify account is continually promoted via our website, internal communication platform, direct email, our 10,000 social media followers, as well as with additional speaker gifts to employees, clients, subcontractors, and other project partners. These efforts have attracted more than 11,000 page views and 10,000 unique visitors between February 2020 - June 2021, a 9,900% increase from the original 100 targeted, resulting in Spotify being our most popular social media account. Our Spotify account produces 76% more traffic to our website than our other social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, & Vimeo) combined.

The success of this campaign can largely be attributed to strategic SEO efforts embedding keywords and local pop culture references within playlist titles (e.g., WHFStival & Oldies 100). This allowed ourplaylists to show in google search results, including those completely unrelated to construction or anything having to do with our company. Standard Google pay-per-click advertising costs range from $1-$50 per click, but we did not pay for any promotion. Instead, for the $120 cost of an annual Spotify subscription, we drove 11,000 clicks to our website - spending one penny per click - an extremely impressive return on our investment.

What started as a physical one-time gift grew into something much larger. We identified an opportunity and dove in headfirst. This cool idea consistently receives positive feedback from clients & employees. We took an uncommon approach to broaden our reach, capture attention, and ultimately get more eyes on our website - illustrating why Coakley & Williams Construction is a company to build with - and brought people together along the way.