Harness the Advantages of Audio Advertising for Your Marketing Efforts

Over the last few years, the global market for audio content has been growing at a rapid pace, as more and more audio streaming services are providing users access to diverse audio content. Following the increasing popularity of podcasts, music streaming, etc., audio advertising opportunities have been gaining significant momentum. Today, programmatic advertising platforms offer digital marketers the ability to reach highly engaged audiences through online streaming services, slowly but surely proving that brand promotions using digital audio ads can significantly help improve the effectiveness of digital campaigns.

What is Audio Advertising?

Audio advertising refers to a marketing approach that involves the creation of audio-based promotional content and programmatic audio ads that are served to a wide audience through audio platforms or audio-specific publishers, like music streaming services, podcasts, digital radio advertising, etc. Forming an important part of any brand’s content marketing strategy, audio advertising can include branded content, jingles, scores, and much more, helping listeners discover products and services that are relevant to them.

Then there is programmatic audio advertising, or simply, programmatic audio, which refers to the automated selling and serving of ads in audio content. Just like other forms of programmatic advertising, programmatic audio also allows for layered targeting to help ensure that the ad reaches relevant geolocations and is served to the right audiences.

Why Should Brands Use Audio Advertising?

Digital audio advertising has a number of benefits to offer to advertisers. It allows them to use a highly engaging form of content to build ad experiences that are relevant, memorable, and effective across streaming services. Audio advertising lets advertisers:

Effectively Reach a Wider Audience Base: Display or programmatic video in marketing have a wide reach. However, programmatic audio advertising lets advertisers go beyond regular digital channels to reach new audiences of highly engaged listeners.

Easily Target Specific Demographics: One of the best benefits of programmatic audio is the ability to ensure the high relevance of the ads being served to the audience. Advertisers can use data-driven targeting capabilities, based on the user information available at streaming, programmatic radio, and other audio-based platforms to deliver their ads to the right demographic.

Cost-Effective Way of Reaching Target Audience: Digital audio advertising involves standardized formats, which allows advertisers to create engaging programmatic audio ads quickly and conveniently. As there are no visuals in the ads, audio advertising has potentially high returns and is a great opportunity for brands to reach new audiences without having to put in a lot of time or money.

How to Build Compelling Ads for Audio Advertising

In order to maximize the benefits of your audio advertising campaign, it is crucial to keep certain things in mind:

Tips to Keep in Mind

1. Short and Sweet: Use persuasive techniques to build creative ads that capture the attention and keep listeners focused till the end. But also make sure it’s short!
2. Ensure Relevance: Don’t waste advertising budgets on generic ads. Address the interests and needs of your target audience.
3. Put it Out in the Open: If you want to increase conversions, your call to action must tell your audience clearly what they should do next.
4. Test It Out: Test your ads before they are launched to identify any issues that you may have missed.

Create the Right Script

Any successful audio campaign starts with the right script. You need to define the approach you will be taking and the optimum ad length, while also ensuring that the script is simple and concise and clarifies your position in a clear manner. Other things that you can keep in mind when creating the script for your digital audio advertising campaign are a conversational tone, the CTA, choosing the right kind of voiceover, etc.

Don’t Forget Audio Ads are Different from Radio Ads

Traditional radio advertising and digital audio advertising have several similar elements, like script writing, voice-over casting, etc. But you will do well to keep in mind that there are stark differences between the two. For example, radio ads used to be served based on geographic locations using different radio channels and delivered to every listener. But with programmatic radio or streaming platforms, advertisers have more precise targeting options, where they can define exactly what kind of audience they are trying to reach with their ads, and they are also not limited by geographical boundaries. It is not necessary for the right audiences to be in the same geographic region as the advertiser or brand either. So, when creating these ads, it might be beneficial to keep larger geographies in mind.

Here, advertisers can conveniently scale the production and delivery of their ads using online ad builders to optimize their audio advertising campaigns. There are several ad builders available today that accept MP3 format audios and generate universally compatible VAST tags to facilitate convenient ad serving across a variety of audio-based platforms, while also allowing advertisers to easily track the performance of their audio campaigns in real-time.

The future of audio-based platforms and services appears to be bright and full of promise. But even if you focus on existing opportunities that audio content has to offer for advertisers, audio advertising can be an effective tool of advertising for your brand. It makes complete sense for marketers to create well-rounded marketing strategies that include digital audio advertising campaigns as well, to effectively attract potential customers, engage existing customers, and improve brand awareness.