Audio Ads Beginners Guide.
Target Your Customers When They Are Streaming Music or Podcasts
What Are Audio Ads?
If you’ve ever listened to music or podcasts using the Spotify free-service then you’ve heard the audio ads that come with it. This is an emerging marketing channel which is regularly changing with audio ad space now available on SoundCloud and YouTube Music. But in our opinion the Spotify ad platform is the most widely used and best developed for audio ads with a studio full of various voice artists that you can send your scripts too. All you need to do is spend the minimum in your local currency of 250.00 for this audio ad service. But with specific targeting settings for age, gender, location, interests and based on what activity they could be doing in the moment. So you can be a lot more targeted than the traditional alternative of radio.
Why Work With Audio Ads?
To reach your target audience at every moment possible it could make sense to invest in audio ads. Users are not always looking at device screens, so digital audio ads provides a great opportunity to capture your targeted user in these moments when they’re listening to music or podcasts. As of March 2020 Spotify had 163 million users for it sponsored-streaming service.
Previously radio advertisements have been the best way to reach large scale audiences through audio ads. Although you would receive statistics on predicted listener figures and demographics from the radio station. This would still be a rough estimate and expensive. But now with digital audio streaming services like Spotify you can be more targeted with who hears your ads and get specifically accurate listening data. Meaning with audio ads you can target with age, gender, device type, location and interests all based on listening history.
Of course, audio ads are still fairly new and have limitations for still quite an expensive channel compared to social media and Google Search. Spotify doesn’t use Cookies so you can’t re-market to users or set up audiences based on user browsing history. All the targeting is worked out by IP address and user listening history with Spotify. But this is being developed so it’s a good time to get use to the interface.
Audio ads tend to be associated with ‘Awareness’ in the funnel. It doesn’t make sense to offer a specific product or service that will not be appealing to a large audience.
How To Do Audio Ads Yourself
There are a few emerging audio ads platforms but the Spotify Ad Studio is certainly the best in our opinion. As you can use the studio to easily create ads, then potentially use these created ads on other platforms. The Spotify platform is the most widely used and a good starting block for digital audio ads.
Starting Out
Before starting on the platform you might want to consider building a landing page specifically for audio ads. As touched on before most audio ads platforms don’t use cookies so it can be difficult to remarket or pool you’re Spotify listeners, a solution for this is creating a specific landing page for these users.
Signing up to the platform is pretty easy, you may need to create a company Spotify account. So just follow the instructions, you will need a debit or credit card but you will only get charged when the campaign is live.
Educate Yourself
The Spotify platform is pretty simple and will give you a pretty accurate predicted reach so you can see if Spotify is worthwhile for your business. You will notice while changing your budget and targeting options your reach will change. If you narrow your targeting this will also likely see your estimated average ad frequency increase, meaning a Spotify users is more likely to hear your ad multiple times.
With Spotify not using cookies, it is harder to track what users are interested in when picking targeting options in the campaign. But for those of you that work with Google ads or Facebook you will already have an idea what your customers are interested in, so therefore you could mirror your targeting and copy it over for Spotify. I’d recommend before getting to grips with audio ads to have a basic knowledge of other paid channels to get the most out of this basic platform.
When it comes to ad creation Spotify have provided a helpful guide for best practices. As highlighted in the guide the first six seconds are very important so try to introduce your product and brand to grab the users attention. For any YouTube advert this is also the case as most users will likely lose attention after the first six seconds, So if anything getting your brand mentioned before interests level drop will at least help you with brand. Stating a clear call-to-action like ‘click the link’ or ‘tap the banner’ will help drive traffic to your website.
The Future
Once you’ve got to grips with Spotify you can look to re-use your ads on SoundCloud. Although you don’t get the same targeting options, its worth testing. YouTube Music already uses video ads but you could look to use your ads on this platform through Google Ads by creating a combined audience using the YouTube Music URL as a custom affinity audience. You will need to convert your audio into a video platform and also add an image if you can.
If you want to build brand awareness a sponsored podcast with Acast could be a good move. Acast is the biggest audio ads agency and has the largest network of podcast influences that can work with brands of all sizes. The other option is to contact podcasters directly most will have a website with contact details.
Audio ads are still very new so they have some issues. But with targeting likely to continue to develop this is a good time to start. Although due to the broad targeting option available its not ideal for niche products and services just yet.
Useful links:
Spotify Ad Studio – Manage and create ads to be heard by Spotify’s ad-supported listeners.
Spotify Ad Guidelines – Best practice for audio ad creation.
SoundCloud Promoted Content – Contact SoundCloud for a chance to launch your ads across there network.
Acast – The largest network of podcasts for sponsorship opportunities.
Google Ads – Manage ads for YouTube Music.
Our Blog – Learn about our work with banner ads.
How We Can Help.
Audio Ads platforms can get a bit overwhelming, you need to put a lot of time in to master this channel and with many audio platforms regularly adding new features and making changes. We’re here to help! Drop us a message and we can provide some free advice. If it still proves to much you can potentially hire us for marketing help. Find the contact form here.
The Author.
Tom Haynes
Worked with Spotify Audio Ads since 2019, has experience running audio ad campaigns in the travel industry. Regular Podcast guest for Morning Marketing Memos.
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