Overview:

During my time at Warner Records, I had the opportunity to lead digital strategy for Bella Poarch, the 3rd largest TikTok account and the largest musical artist on the platform at 93 million followers and counting.

I worked with Bella during her transition from an influencer to a musician, beginning with the launch of her debut single, Build-a-Bitch in May 2021 and the follow up to Build-a-Bitch, INFERNO with Sub Urban, in August 2021. Both tracks amassed millions of streams on DSPs, record-breaking video views on Youtube and became top trending sounds on TikTok, establishing Bella as a powerhouse in pop music & internet culture.

My Role:

I led all aspects of Bella Poarch's social media strategy as connected to her music. Through content teasing, unique storytelling, and general fan engagement, I was able to convert awareness into activity in ways that led to music streams and purchases. Given this artist's unique space, I gained extensive experience in short-form content strategy and promoting music both on TikTok and across the digital ecosystem. My work led to my recognition as one of Business Insiders’ Top 23 Power Players using TikTok to shape the music industry in 2021.

Results:

Bella’s debut single “Build-a-Bitch” had a massive launch, reaching #1 on the TikTok Top Tracks and was used in over 1 million videos on TikTok within a week following its release. The music video was viewed more than 70 million times on Youtube in less than a week and reached #1 on Youtube, outperforming Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u”. The video also set the record on Youtube for the biggest debut ever for a new artist, dethroning Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”. At this time, she was named the #1 Asian-American influencer in the world and successfully launched her music career.

Strategy:

• Content Teasing: Knowing Bella’s influence on TikTok, utilizing the song on platform was a key part of our strategy. We led with an audio snippet on day 1 of our rollout, 2 weeks before release, to give fans a taste of what was coming and immediately, the song took off, generating hundreds of thousands of uses on the platform and morphing into multiple different trends that TikTok users and influencers were mimicking on their own profiles. This led to exponential growth in usage and demand each day leading up to the release.

• Pre-save Launch: Alongside the TikTok teaser launch, Bella posted a pre-save link to her socials, where fans could pre-save on Spotify, pre-add on Apple Music, or set a reminder for the Youtube Premiere. This built further anticipation, as well as Bella’s email database and gave us first-party fan data, allowing us to retarget fans in the digital advertising campaign upon song launch.

• Influencer Co-Promotion: After the TikTok sound launch, multiple of Bella’s influencer friends (some of whom were also featured in the music video), posted videos using the song to amplify the sound. Influencers included Mia Khalifa (37M followers), Dina (25M followers), ZHC (15M followers), Devon Rodriguez Art (33M followers) & more. As the song continued to grow, many of the influencers posted additional times and others joined in organically. We worked with a few of the influencers to allow them to film vlogs (i.e. Valkyrae) at the video shoot, which rolled out on their own Youtube channels following the launch and each got millions of views that helped drive traffic back to the official music video.

• Fan Engagement: Utilizing her 90M+ followers, Bella led the charge in promoting Build-a-Bitch on her own socials by participating in emerging trends and creating new ones. She was constantly engaging with fans in the comments, creating a loyal fan base around her music career. She incentivized fans to post about the song on their own social media accounts, by reposting fan TikToks on her Instagram Story.

• Partner Support: To amplify the promotion on Bella’s channels, I secured partnerships with partners like TikTok and Pandora where Bella was the face of the first TikTok Tastemaker playlist on Pandora and featured on their Times Square billboard and main banner in the app.

• Cross-Platform Promotion: I also set up a Youtube Premiere that featured a countdown and a chat room where fans could gather to watch the video virtually together. It made the video a destination to be at and drove significant views upon launch.To drive traffic to the Youtube Premiere, I helped organize an Instagram Live using their Live Rooms feature so Bella could go live with 3 other influencers who were featured in the music video (Bretman Rock, Valkyrae & Larray). Because we used this feature, followers of all 4 influencers were notified when they went live, so when the Instagram Live ended just before the music video came out, we were able to convert over 100,000 fans from Instagram to Youtube at that moment.

• Instagram Lens: Bella had a vision for an Instagram lens to promote the song, so I worked with Paige Piskin, an Instagram creator (850K+ followers), to create a custom lens to be posted on her own account and cross-promoted by Bella.

• Digital Advertising: Throughout the rollout, I utilized TikTok Spark ads to boost Bella’s TikTok posts, helping them to reach as many people as possible. The strategy I used was to boost videos that were performing well organically so when views started to slow, they continued to reach audiences outside of Bella’s own. After the song launch, I launched a digital advertising campaign across all key platforms - Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, Snapchat. This helped continue driving traffic to the song and video post-launch.