Songfinch

The Objective

Delivering happy tears and improved ROAS

Songfinch gives consumers the opportunity to create custom made songs for their loved ones by matching requests with independent songwriters and artists. In as easy as 1, 2, 3 the affordable service taps into an artist community that will turn a customer’s unique story into a one-of-a-kind memory they can listen to on repeat forever. Looking to activate on TikTok for the first time, Songfinch looked to the platform and it’s community of North American music lovers to accelerate growth by engaging its 18+ target audience authentically with an always-on approach. Launching their campaign exclusively on TikTok, the brand wanted new ways to enhance performance and drive conversions, while finding efficiencies in ad spending during key dates including Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

The Solution

Striking a chord with the TikTok community through authentic reveals

Songfinch’s unique product offering found its home on TikTok by engaging the community with customer-led videos that showcased real emotions sparked by the gift of music. The videos distinctively didn’t focus on selling a product, instead, they centered on the emotion their product provides, while using an always-on advertising strategy to reach new audiences. But the brand hit its stride when it embraced a test and learn approach to meet its goal to drive increased conversions at a more efficient cost.

Songfinch worked with their agency Pilothouse and TikTok's Client Solutions team to use in-app video creation tools to create authentic and raw videos obtained from customers that resonated with the community. For the creative, the brand leaned into their key branding elements of highlighting real people and real emotions, showcasing actual customer reveals that shared how their loved ones reacted when they first heard their custom song. The unique videos were powerful and incredibly genuine, generating gallons of happy tears with the TikTok community instantly. Songfinch also leveraged TikTok’s Automated Creative Optimization (ACO), a tool which helps manage ads more efficiently by automatically identifying high-performing combinations of their creative assets, to test creatives and then allocate more budget towards them. It was also a great way for the brand to get more quality ad traffic, as the system automatically matched the target audience and creatives, thus improving traffic quality.

Meanwhile, Songfinch also utilized TikTok’s Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) tool, a feature that allows brands to optimize their budget at the campaign level instead of the ad group. By using CBO, the brand was able to apply a single set of budget optimizations to all the ad groups that belonged to their campaign for optimal level testing and to help identify top performing audience targets – ultimately aiding in more effective budget allocation to efficiently hit their cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand (CPM) targets. Finally, following TikTok’s recommendation, Songfinch tested Automatic Targeting, a feature that dynamically optimizes audience targeting criteria during the campaign delivery, which contributed to enhancing their overall return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

The Results

Real results for custom songs

Talk about real results worth singing about! Songfinch saw firsthand the power of an engaged TikTok community and the importance of the creative assets used. During the three-month flight period the brand tested over 120 creatives, each showcasing real, raw emotions that ignited happy tears for users. The heartwarming videos ultimately had a tremendous impact on overall performance, generating a notable average watch time of 6 seconds per video, and rapidly achieving an impressive +3,500 conversions in the first three months.

When it comes to direct-to-consumer brands, conversion and return-on-ad-spend are critical, and Songfinch’s test and learn strategy was such a success that the brand increased its always-on campaign daily spend by 5200%. By working closely with their agency Pilothouse and TikTok’s Client Solutions team, Songfinch leveraged several platform ad tools and followed recommendations to continuously improve its campaign performance, surpassing its reach and performance goals with an impressive 24% lower CPC and 33% lower CPM on average compared to other platforms. Together, the strategy allowed Songfinch to effectively test performance on the platform while tracking results and making updates in real-time, ultimately leading the brand to exceed its conversion goals. A winning campaign we’d be happy to play on repeat!