If you’ve been here for a hot second, you know I’m completely OBSESSED with Voice. I predict it will be the biggest game-changer we’ve ever seen marketing-wise. Yes, even more than the internet was a couple of decades ago.
One of the things we haven’t talked about yet is Voice advertising. Newsflash: right now, it’s good. Shortly? IT. IS. GOING. TO. BE. KILLER.
WHAT IS VOICE ADVERTISING?
Voice advertising has been around for about seven years.* It’s become more buzz-worthy in the last 3ish and has become much more sophisticated and frankly usable in the past 18 months. (Alexa has been around since 2014.)
People use many different names to talk about Voice advertising (i.e., dialogue advertising, command advertising, talk-back advertising, voice-activated advertising, audio advertising, voice-enabled advertising, voice-assisted advertising, permissive advertising, and so on.) Although there are idiosyncrasies between many of them, I’m going to lump them all into one VOICE ADVERTISING bucket for this article.
Voice advertising is the delivery of ads in an audio format.
Voice ads can be delivered through streaming platforms (for example, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Music) and podcasts, online “radio” shows, and the like. They can also be delivered through your phone, voice assistant, appliances, cars, computers, watches, tablets, Smart TVs, and anywhere else you have access to Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or whatever Flavor du Jour digital assistant you use.
A voice ad can be standard (aka “plain” or “bench”) or actionable/interactive. We’ll talk more about the actionable/interactive ads later in this article. As much press as the interactive ads are getting, standard ads are still being used much more frequently now. (Amazon launched their interactive audio program in December 2021, and the news reporting has run amok since then, so one may be inclined to think otherwise. Their program slaps, but it’s still in its infancy.)
Voice, as an experience/platform, is growing faster than any other channel, including Mobile. In fairness to Mobile, it’s easy for Voice to grow faster because the payment stuff has already been built out.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF VOICE ADS?
There are several benefits of today’s Voice ads…
First, Voice advertising reduces friction from the jump and throughout the process. You no longer need to remember the name of the product or service to interact with it. Hear something you want to know more about? Start talking, shaking, or signaling. With Voice ads, listeners/users can speak directly — and actively engage — with ads and the brands that support them. (Almost all Voice ads can be interacted with by speaking directly to the ad. Some ads allow you to shake your phone and/or push buttons to respond.)
Friction is reduced in proportion to how well your site/organization can handle dialog.** If you have prepared your site for Voice, your Voice advertising can/will be far more sophisticated. The listener must take a call, answer a text, or cook dinner during the conversation? No problem. The system remembers who they are and what they want so they can stop and start the conversation as they wish. It will pick back up right where they left off whenever they’re ready.
Does the listener have objections or reservations about your product/service? No need to invent a story or wait for an answer from the brand; they can just state their questions and comments anytime. The process follows the “conversation” every step of the way. When they finally reach the cart/checkout, there’s no need to stumble through the ordering process; they can just use the predetermined payment methods they’ve already set up. (Just imagine the immediate reduction in your abandoned carts! Yowza!) It’s streamlined and efficient AF. (In a lead generation business? This all works the same way.) Is everything as picture-perfect as I described right now? Yeah, that’s a hard no. But it’s getting there, and all the elements are available now if you use them.
For the most part, Voice ads are powered by artificial intelligence. Thanks to machine learning, natural language processing, and many other things, Voice ads enable you to have an ongoing and/or interactive conversation with the listener. This dialogue evolves based on the listener’s responses/intent and diligently works toward your goal. (You set the goal – a sale, an inquiry/lead, a store visit, a webinar/whitepaper sign-up, etc.)
Remember, AI processes and analyzes oodles of data – in real-time and at scale – and learns as it goes. This means AI is continuously developing and progressing. It also allows you to reflect on past (historical) and current (real-time) data.
ARE THERE OTHER BENEFITS OF VOICE ADS BESIDES BEING POWERED BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND REDUCING FRICTION?
Yes, many. Other benefits of Voice ads that companies realize now…
The user/listener is involved in the process, which boosts conversion rates, engagement, and recall. As an aside, traditional paid vendors like to debate this. I understand that AI-powered ads have been in play for years sans Voice. Research shows that there’s a difference brain-wise between you clicking on a dynamic ad while scrolling and interrupting Alexa to hear more about a product/service/brand you are interested in. Don’t believe it? Try it yourself. Will this “new” feeling/behavior last? Probably not, and my guess is we have at least a couple of years to take advantage of it.
Every ad experience can be customized to the individual’s unique wants, interests, and habits/behavior, making the ads more of a warm invitation and less annoying interruption. Over the years, we’ve seen how much difference hyperpersonalized journeys can make. This will be no different. (Please note that with Voice, this can include things like languages spoken, gender of the speaker, tone, vernacular, and so on.) When used correctly, this has positively impacted customer acquisition and retention.
Ongoing conversations (aka continuous dialogue) mean that the data is cumulative and what you know about the user builds and grows in a way that is difficult and more time-consuming to do with other channels. If you sell chi-chi-la-la leather bags and advertise them via voice ads to a vegan, the vegan can tell you, “Hey, I don’t use any animal products,” and stop advertising to them immediately or swap out your faux leather bags instead. The more sophisticated your conversation tree, the more equipped you are to pivot and/or overcome user objections. Add profiled data to this (yours or others), and it becomes a powerhouse.
Eliminates the middleman. Like many aspects of Social, Voice ads also allow the listener/user direct access to you (the brand), creating a seamless engagement and strengthening the engagement.
Dynamically adjusts to real-time behavior on an individual level and a universal level. In other words, ads are fluid for each person, less interruptive, and more inviting, and can also be immediately changed based on current events. (The latter has become more critical for many companies in the past few years.)
Laser-targeted responses and content are delivered more efficiently. This is important from a spend perspective. Instead of bombing your audience with eleventy bazillion of the same ads about X, you can precisely target your ads and the creative/offers/messaging as well as the frequency to the audience. (This has become more important as the news/political landscape has become increasingly polarized.)
Ads meet the user where they’re at. One of the most significant selling points vendors make regarding audio ads is that they’re less intrusive than traditional/legacy ads. This is true, especially when your data is in good shape and you can optimize accordingly. Besides being less interruptive to the listener, they also tend to be more helpful (no more remembering offer codes or complicated URLs) and better at determining where the user is in their buying/inquiring journey. (Staged/stepped questions that the user interacts with yield a plethora of information if you do it correctly.)
Immediate feedback. In my previous life, I worked with many two-step companies that relied on infomercials and TV ads. One of the things I absolutely LOVED about it was that you got a boatload of information in a very short period of time. It was like running Superbowl commercials throughout the year – whether you had a 30-second or hour-long spot after the ad ran, you knew conclusively whether it resonated with the audience or not. Voice ads are just like that! You get concrete, orders-in-the-basket feedback and/or responses immediately.
Even better, more data is captured, so you know who is interested and who is not. This allows you to follow up (or not) accordingly and is a money saver. It also allows you to push the fence sitters to your side if you’re so inclined. Plus, it can engage with people who had no response whatsoever, but I’d save that one till you have a solid foundation as it can be a bit tricky to get right at the beginning.
More accessible from a hands-free and/or multi-tasking perspective and an inclusivity perspective.
Better analytics. AI is a prediction machine that processes and analyzes oodles of historical and real-time data. It’s incredibly beneficial when it comes to reporting. AI compounded with Voice allows you to get more robust, immediate analytics.
DO CUSTOMERS REALLY LIKE VOICE-ENABLED ADS?
The “research” on Voice ads is overwhelmingly positive. This is somewhat like the fox telling you that the chickens love being guarded by him. That said, if you’re a person who likes/needs the industry stats…. Adobe found that 38% of consumers that have come across Voice ads have found them to be less intrusive than traditional ads, and 39% believe that the ads are more engaging. Non-voice vendors who conduct similar studies report pretty much the same numbers.
Let’s be frank, however… Not enough companies are using them yet, and it’s still too early to tell anyway.
Based on the results I’ve seen (including huge wins and spectacular fails), my feeling is that companies who figure out how to best talk WITH their audiences instead of AT their audiences will win the Voice ad game early on.
Vendors say that the #1 benefit is that the personalized experience can’t be beaten. From my perspective, the real magic happens with Voice because you reduce the friction, especially in your cart/checkout and lead capture forms. Plus, the data you collect along the way? SO. VERY. JUICY.
The caveat will be when (let’s face it, it’s not an IF) we go too far with the artificial intelligence and/or become “too aggressive” in the listener’s mind. Folks who argue against this say that the fatigue isn’t the same because AI is FAR superior to changing it up, especially compared to legacy audio ads. This is true – AI is amazing at personalization and solid at constantly developing new ad creative – however, it’s likely that this isn’t going to give marketers license to oversaturate the message/ad like they’re hoping. The takeaway from this is to push things to the max but measure your success in increments over a more extended period so you know what your max actually is instead of what your vendors tell you.
HOW DO VOICE ADVERTISING RESULTS COMPARE TO DISPLAY RESULTS? WHAT ELSE SHOULD I BE MEASURING WHEN IT COMES TO MY VOICE ADS?
By answering this, I open myself up to oh-so-many missile emails from squawky vendors but alas…
I usually see 8-13% response. However, I’ve witnessed 4-5x that several times. Yes, that means 50%+. And I’ve seen a whole lot of 20% response rates. No matter how you slice it, this is A LOT more than traditional display ads.
A couple of things to note… First, just like with Paid Advertising, pretty much anyone can get great results right out of the gate. The key is figuring out whether you have a viable strategy long-term and/or outside of your target’s refined bullseye.
Second, your product and customer data significantly impact your results. The type of Voice ads you use should reflect how much you can maximize your data AND your user experience.
Keep track of both your positive and negative say-through rate and your overall rate (combined.) With Voice ads, the say-through rate is a measure of verbal engagement. Many vendors recommend that you only track the positive engagement but measuring both positive and negative gives you a clearer picture of who is interested and who is not interested in your audience. It’s better for segmentation and future follow up. (If you’re running a screenless engagement campaign – like a shake campaign — you’d track the positives and negatives of the shake indicator instead of the “say.” Same with tap campaigns.)
The more they say, the more they pay. Tracking quantity/number of interactions is beneficial too. The rule of thumb is that the deeper they go into your process, the more propensity they have to purchase.
As an aside, repetition can be the kiss of death. Don’t get me wrong, repeating audio ads is okay, but you can play them too much. Your ads will have different sweet spots – the length of time you can play them without a decline in your results or without alienating your audience. So, look at your results by ad. (It’s important to note that you can typically replay your most successful ads for a long time if you’re employing breaks in between.)
For this article and whom I know our primary audience to be, I’ve lumped all Voice ads into one bucket. Most of my readers are dabbling with Voice ads, and I mean, toe-hovering-the-water dabbling. (In the South, you’d say fixin’ to get ready, which is basically getting ready to get ready. Our average reader is doing a lot of that.) Interactive ads can be more lucrative and beneficial in other ways, like branding and engagement. However, and this is a VERY BIG, HOWEVER if you’re not equipped for interactivity, I’d highly advise trying some “regular” Voice ads first.
Dynamic ads powered by artificial intelligence without back-and-forth between you and the user are a solid place to start. They’re also a great place to delineate your audiences further; refine your segmentation, develop creative controls, and, frankly, make (cheaper) mistakes. Many of the best (and most aggressive) vendors in the space are of the interactive persuasion, and they will try their hardest to get you to jump in with “short surveys” or “question of the day” type things. If you have money to burn, go wild. However, please remember, this Voice stuff is here to stay; it’s rapidly becoming more critical than other channels in your mix, AND the more you learn now, the better off you’ll be. As Voice heats up, space becomes more limited and/or costly. Now is your time to learn as much as you can while the space is still affordable and easy-to-test.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BEST TIPS FOR AUDIO ADS THAT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT? I’VE FOUND 1,000 ARTICLES ALL LISTING THE SAME FIVE THINGS, BUT THIS IS NEW TO US, AND WE NEED SOMETHING DEEPER THAN “FIND A GOOD PARTNER” WRITTEN BY AN AGENCY.
I got you. Here are some of my best tips for making audio ads work.
Measure success by more than just overall sales. Far too many marketers throw great Voice ad campaigns in the trash because they’re only measuring bottom-line dollars. Sadly, folks miss that things like speed/performance and friction have a HUGE impact on your conversion/success. I measure a lot of success by adoption to cart or adoption to goal in lead generation. I also like to look at things like AAUS (Average Active User Session – the length of time people stay actively), path behavior (how visitors maneuver your site), and internal text search use.
If you’re conducting the whole transaction within Voice and not on your site, you’ll want to measure time spent, number of successful steps (or yeses, if you prefer), and repeat visits will be key. Incidentally, one of the reasons why so many companies love interactive audio ads is that you get to learn why people aren’t interested in your products/services and if they will be interested down the road. If you are doing them, tracking the good, the bad, and the silence is fruitful. (Silence = people who don’t engage at all with the ad.)
Select your audiences strategically. Where available, use your own data to create your initial audiences. Many vendors try to talk you out of this – hold firm; it’s worth the fight. Also, please don’t just duplicate your display program and call it a day. I see far too many companies fail (especially beginners) because some wackadoodle told them it’s best to just duplicate their existing selections. Don’t get me wrong, it will work, but it’s such a limiting strategy. Try for a broader audience and then scale back as applicable. Your mileage will vary here, and a lot of it will depend on how good your first-party data is. The big takeaway is to work your data first and not be so conservative that you squeeze yourself into a corner.
Establish your frequency capping protocol. Frequency capping limits the number of times your ads are presented to the same person. Frequency capping has been used for years in display advertising, and it’s also used in audio and video advertising. It works differently on every channel. One of the biggest mistakes I see in audio ads is that folks don’t use frequency capping properly. They either don’t use it all; they use the sellers/channels/networks’ out-of-the-box recommendations without testing them first; or they take their rules from other mediums, dump them on audio and never test against it.
It’s vital that you figure out your own rules for audio and that you constantly test against them. Vendors will push you for open windows (aka never-ending) or long durations (30+ days.) I’m not a fan of the former, but the latter can work, depending on your audience and how quickly your ads are fatiguing. All companies are different, so you need to figure out what works best for you. (For people capping at 6x+ a month, please track this over 3-6-12 months. The downstream on this can be a problem.)
Speaking of creative… Creative is critical, and you’re likely going to need to test a lot of it to find out what works for you. Vendors will sell you that “artificial intelligence will handle all the creative.” It’s capable, kinda sorta some days. Should you allow it, especially when you’re first starting out? Hard no. Develop some control ads (more than 3) that you’d bet your house on. With proper oversight, you may be able to let the AI iterate from there. Remember, your success will depend on a listener taking the next action, then the next action, then the next action, until the goal. Your CTAs need to be clear, concise, well-planned, and well-executed.
Know your #1 objective before you build your campaign and proceed accordingly. Marketers can be extraordinarily creative with their Voice ads. This can be a good thing – especially if you’re trying to get press. However, please remember that the broader (read: more generic/innocuous/insert-better-word-here) the ask is, the less meaningful the responses may be and less helpful in getting people toward your goal. I know. I know. I get nailed for being “no fun” on this topic a lot, but it’s important to note that asking a broad audience to say “yes” if they want to hear a joke or “the fact of the day” may get you many responses but not a lot of inquiries/orders downstream. Yes, I am aware of the 3-yes logic and the other sales pitches vendors use to get advertisers to “have fun with it,” but when you’re starting, determine your goal, figure out your audience, and then build out your creative accordingly. Your flexibility will revolve around your budget and your audience.
Start simply. I’m as enamored as the next person with some of the incredible things you can do with audio ads. The combination of hyperpersonalization and laser-targeting is inspiring. However, most listeners are new at audio advertising, especially interacting with audio advertising, so it’s best to start with simple response options. There are more exciting things that you can do, and it’s important to remember that, for the most part, listening has been a passive activity. Getting people to talk back to their refrigerator or phone is relatively new and takes a bit of getting used to. The more hoops the user needs to jump through, the more time they’ll need and the more direction/instruction you’ll likely want to give them. Start with yes/no questions and move on to things like “send me more information” or “add to cart.” (If you’re doing a lot of ads on voice assistants, “remind me” is also worth testing.)
Figure out how many asks you can handle and then do less of them. Yes, less. It’s better to nail your process than to stumble and lose the listener. Building out listener paths, journeys, trees, or whatever you want to call them is a great exercise no matter how sophisticated your program is—smart small. Grow big.
If your average listener has never heard a Voice ad before, you may want to start your creative by alerting the listener that this is a different kind of ad, something along the lines of “you can talk to this ad.” (If you’ve heard a lot of Voice ads, you’ve heard variations of this.)
Pay special attention to the days of the week and times of days your ads are working. Yes, this seems like a “water is wet” idea, but media folks often dismiss it or advise you against it. When you’re first starting your program, it can make a substantial difference. By the way, test it yourself, don’t blindly follow the cookie-cutter recommendations. Keep solid data on what works best for you. (You’ll thank me for this as you’re buying space. The more you know about your performance, the easier it is to wrangle deals.)
Last impressions are helpful, especially in interactive ads. You know that saying you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig? It’s the same with ads. No matter how sophisticated our ads are, they’re still ads. Even when you do everything right, most people will still not respond. With that in mind, do two things. (1) Make sure your call to action is clear. Voice ads are similar to old-school commercials in many ways, but they’re not the same, and giving eleventy bazillion choices of things the listener can do next is ineffective. “You can call! You can write! You can visit our website! You can send us a smoke signal! You can text us! You can send us a telepathic message!” It’s just too much and will confuse/overwhelm the user. Be clear and concise in what you ask the user to do next. Then… (2) Make your outro memorable, gracious, or just a rock-solid transition. This improves brand recall, and it’s shown to make a difference in the response your listeners make to your future ads.
Use automatic opens to bring your listeners to the right place. When available, you can set your ad to automagically open the site after a listener expresses interest in something they’ve heard. Just remember, it’s almost always better to take them to a landing page, a product detail page, or something specific to what they heard instead of dumping them on your home page, hoping they can find their way.
Be sure to have your house in order BEFORE you start doing commerce ads (aka actionable audio ads) – selling products that can be directly added to your cart. Look, these things are still new – in other words, the novelty has NOT worn off – and they can perform like crazy when you’ve worked out all the kinks in advance.
Optimization is critical. Run your ads, analyze the results, tweak accordingly and try again. Many vendors sell audio ads as set-it-and-forget-it, “let the AI do all the work” advertising, and at some point, it typically is. However, that point/day is not now. The more time you spend honing your ads, the better they will work and the longer they will last. Like other ad creative, audio creative fatigues quickly these days. However, unless the ads are seasonal/time-oriented, the fatigue is typically in the segments that have heard the creative before. Being able to develop control ads for new audiences in your target market is one of the great benefits of AI-assisted audio ads right now.
When buying space, be sure to ask what their consent policies are. Have the listeners specifically opted in for advertising? If so, how? If not, what’s their opt-out policy? Do the segments they list on their one-sheets reflect the opt-in numbers or the overall numbers? Depending on the channel, the latter can be incredibly important. You may think that there’s this HUGE audience awaiting you, only to find out that none/few of the listeners in that group are in the ad program. This happens a lot with the older (age) marketers and B2B. If you’re dealing with interactive ad sellers/marketplaces, you’ll also want to know what they use the names for and if they sell them to your competitors and/or use them themselves. (This can impact how you develop your ads, so it’s best to figure it out upfront.)
As your program grows and gets more sophisticated, you’ll likely want to work on your progressions, so track them from the jump. Marketers call “progressions” different names, but it’s basically a user path for voice. “Working your progressions” means figuring out what to do with your listeners at each place they’re at. If I ask you if you want to learn more about my amazing X and you say no, it doesn’t mean that you’re a dead lead; it means that I need to try something else. Incidentally, even if you never do anything with your progressions, it’s helpful to track them. Hence, you have an idea of what percentage of initial responses are “yes” and which are “no,” as well as what kind of responses you get for each additional push on your path. If you haven’t done a lot of Voice before, you’ll likely think this idea is garbage for about six months. Then you’ll start playing around with them to see if there’s any life and realize that there’s a big group of people who say no when it’s just not time yet.
Last but certainly not least, you’re going to want to develop some Voice rules for your audio ads that fit into your overall Voice brand strategy (aka sonic brand strategy.) If you don’t have a Voice brand strategy, you’ll likely want one. Yes, I roll my eyes at it too, but you’ll want a voice or personality that your listener associates with your brand. There are many ways we can talk to people now that we didn’t five years ago – chatbots, Voice ads, interactive videos, and so on. As an aside, this is one teeny bullet in a 6000+ word article, but this Voice/Sonic brand topic deserves some deep thinking. Voice, language, tone, character, etc. all come into play here.
For B2B Marketers: Many people will push you to measure downstream intent. It’s helpful; I’d pay attention to it as well. With audio ads, you will also want to determine if you’re getting to the right player and/or a person with purchasing authority. (This is especially true in industrial advertising.) It’s ok if the listener isn’t the person who can actually pull the trigger and place the order as long as you have a way to help them get the ad to the person who is. I’m mentioning this because I’ve seen many people so focused on measuring one specific item that they forget they can influence the behavior if they have a system to close the loop(s).
I SENSE THAT THERE’S AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM YOU AVOIDED ABOVE. HOW MANY POUNDS IS IT, AND IS HE FRIENDLY?
Audio ads are {insert expletive} amazing. I love them, and I’m more cantankerous than the old man in Up. The traditional ones are low maintenance — it’s easy to put together campaigns that will work. With that said, my Spidey sense, combined with ample data, shows that the interactive ones are where the biggest payoffs will be. They’re not impossible by any means – in fact, execution is much easier than one might think – but the more interactive your ads are, the more prepared you need to be. Having watched marketers blatantly ignore must-do speed/performance and accessibility requirements as well as low-hanging fruit conversion recommendations for years, I think it’s going to be tough for people to pull them off without an outside vendor or throwing caution to the wind and ONLY working through the marketplaces. (The latter, which I’m vehemently against, I might add.) The bottom line is that you should test them at whatever level you’re at, knowing that the more conversation you create with your listeners, the better you’ll be.
I’M HEARING MORE AND MORE ABOUT INTERACTIVE AUDIO ADS. ARE THEY THE SAME THING AS VOICE ADS AND VOICE DIALOGUE ADS?
I understand why all this new lingo about AI-related topics drives people bonkers. There’s little (read: absolutely zero) consistency and every vendor has their unique name for what they do. It’s equal parts confusing and exhausting.
In the marketing world, Voice ads are typically broken down in two ways. (1) dynamic(ish) ads within a station/channel/streaming service like Spotify, Pandora, or Apple Music. (2) Ads from a voice-activated device. This could be your Echo, HomePod, appliance, car, watch, etc. Ads can be instigated (you ask for them – “what are today’s deals?”) or in context (“because you are listening to Bobby’s Bacon Show, we’re pleased to tell you how you can buy Bobby’s Bacon. Say oink to learn more.”)
Interactive Audio Ads became a bigger thing when Amazon officially launched its version in December 2021. According to Amazon, they “make it easier than ever before for listeners to engage with brands or services whose messaging they find relevant using just their voice. When listeners hear an interactive audio ad they’re interested in while listening to an Amazon Music ad-supported tier on an Alexa-enabled device; they can simply reply to the call-to-action by voice to take actions such as adding an item to their cart, requesting more info via email, or setting a reminder, without disrupting the streaming audio content.” Interactive Audio ads fit in part 2 of the Voice ads breakdown above.
Are there other types of Voice ads? Yes, many. I wouldn’t get twisted up in the lingo, however. For now, I’d just learn about how you can use Voice ads to your advantage and if/how you want your users/listeners to be able to interact with them. (Real talk: this interaction thang is where companies often struggle. If that’s you, please don’t let it keep you from trying Voice advertising in general. Getting in now before there’s a ton of competition could be a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket for you.)
When starting an interactive Voice ad program, one of the keys to your success will be figuring out the right exchanges you’ll need to get a sale, inquiry, or whatever it is you want. (Exchanges are the back and forth between you and your listener.) Marketing folks new to audio ads tend to get overly excited about continuously dialoguing with their users and extend the conversation too far. If your number of exchanges is over 4, you may want to see if there’s anything that can be streamlined.
Please note: There are also interactive ads designed to be placed within video. You may have seen these on your SmartTVs.) These work differently and will be covered in a future article.
WHAT IS A CALL-TO-ACTION CARD?
Call-to-Action cards are a Spotify thing. They appear in the Spotify app when a podcast starts playing and reappear later as you’re using the Spotify app. They make it easier to remember the products and services you’re most interested in. (No more of those awful Vanity URLs and 12-digit alphanumeric promo codes filled with too many zeroes and Os!)
Many companies find that starting with ads on Spotify is an easy foray into Voice. They also have video ads, polls, and Q&As to help you engage your listeners. If you’re diabolically opposed to Spotify, try Amazon. Or better yet, try both. If you hate both of them, try something else.
IS VOICE ADVERTISING GOING TO WORK FOR BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS MARKETERS?
Absolutely! Right now, most of the Voice Advertising case studies are B2C, but that doesn’t mean B2B folks haven’t been dabbling in audio advertising because they certainly have. B2B Voice advertisers tend to fly under the radar a bit because their target audiences are often so refined that if you’re not a part of them, you don’t even know they exist. Also, B2B call-to-actions are typically a bit “softer” and more tailored. For example, many medical and industrial advertisers push you to your sales rep, not a site/landing page.
If you’re in B2B, the other thing to remember is that things like computer vision and natural language processing get better every day. Still, they’re definitely behind the 8-ball for many B2B products. This is not an insurmountable issue; it just means that you may need to do more behind-the-scenes work to recognize your products/services. Incidentally, Experts wildly disagree about what level of understanding AI is at. Still, most pinpoint somewhere between toddler and first grader, so if your lingo isn’t in that range, it may not make enough “sense” to have back-and-forth conversations. That doesn’t mean audio ads – or other AI-enabled paid ads – aren’t for you. It just means you may not be able to take advantage of the same capabilities that a mass CPG company can
Are you using Voice Ads? Have any tips you’d like to share? Or perhaps you have a question/topic you’d like addressed in a future article? Tweet @amyafrica or write [email protected].
*I Spidey-sense the missile emails that will arrive shortly from the traditional radio advertising folks. As someone who has done more than her fair share of radio advertising, I believe in radio, and it’s nothing – and I mean NOTHING – like Voice advertising. With that said, if you’re a legacy radio advertiser, many of the same rules apply, especially regarding creative.
**Friction is one of the biggest problems plaguing marketers today; too few people talk about it. Friction, which is any sort of resistance that prevents a user from moving to the next step, impacts the amount of quality of traffic we receive; where and when people bounce and abandon; how much adoption to cart we get (one of THE most critical determinants of a successful site); and much more. The more you reduce friction, the more successful your marketing efforts will be. Full stop.
