Taylor Swift cracked open the marketing vault with her 1989 Google puzzle campaign

It’s no surprise to anyone that US singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is also a marketing maestro.

From breaking the internet as fans scrambled to secure tickets for her ongoing Eras tour to causing a literal earthquake at one of her concerts, there’s nothing Swift cannot do.

Swift recently made history by snagging nine awards at the MTV VMAs 2023, including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year for her album Midnights. And just when you thought there was nothing left for her to do, she pulls out Easter eggs from the proverbial hat. (Don’t ask me what they mean. I don’t know what they mean — but hey, that’s the power of Queen Tay Tay, you just… know).

So what did she do this time? After a dispute with music manager Scooter Braun, Swift is re-recording her previous albums so that she can own all the rights that come with them. The latest album to be re-released is her smash hit 1989. The marketing around her new albums has been focused on them being released from a “Vault” which includes songs that never saw the light of day previously.

And well… Taylor Swift has built an actual virtual vault that her fans need to unlock to find out what surprise lay inside. She took to Instagram this morning to post a cryptic video and a “punny” caption that her fans have come to love her for:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

So what is the now-solved search?

Turns out, when a person Googled the name of the singer, a vault showed up on their screen asking them to solve a puzzle related to her. The goal? To have 33 million puzzles solved for the vault to open.

Source: Google

When the author saw the global progress first, the number stood at 15.2 million. About 25 minutes later, the number had crossed 17 million. If that isn’t a stroke of genius, I’m not sure what is.

Source: Google

Not that Swift needs a surge in her SEO, but Google Trends also shows an abnormal spike in traffic after her announcement. Take a look at those crazy lines:

Source: Google Trends

But hey, once a person types in the answer into the search bar, it also technically increases the traffic on all the other search terms related to her.

Inside the vault lies another genius

It didn’t take long for Swifties to solve a whopping 33 million puzzles to open the vault. In fact, they exceeded the goal by 2 million.

Looks like you guys have solved 35 MILLION total #1989TaylorsVersionVault puzzles! Already outdoing the goal. 🤯

Think we can solve 5M more in honor of #1989TaylorsVersion? 🩵🩵🩵🩵🩵 https://t.co/s11YqIjoU5 pic.twitter.com/IIuTKBoF66

— Taylor Nation (@taylornation13) September 20, 2023

Now when users go to Google and search for her name, the vault plays a small voice message by none other than Swift herself congratulating her fans on unlocking the vault and sharing with them the four new titles from the vault which will become a part of the album 1989 (Taylor’s version). These are ‘Is it over now?’, ‘Now that we don’t talk’, ‘Say don’t go’ and ‘Suburban legends’. The message ends with Swift telling her fans that she “can’t wait for you to hear them”.

While it may not be as easy for smaller brands to pull off such impressive numbers, Swift’s marketing strategy does hold some important lessons for businesses. The most important of which is catering to your core audience and keeping them engaged. Swift is known for sharing certain tidbits of information with her fans that make them feel special. Whether it is finding those Easter eggs mentioned previously, or looking for names of her upcoming songs or albums in a music video, keeping them at the front and centre of all her moves is a reason why she is loved so fiercely by them.

It might be worth taking a leaf out of her playbook.