B2B audio marketing offers a scalable channel, allowing marketers to reach their niche audiences. With the help of audio marketing, firms can communicate their message better, building brand awareness with positive brand association.
Moreover, audio features and audience listening habits make the audio campaigns well targeted as per the firms’ needs, interests, and challenges. It transforms the way the brand’s message is received.
Charlie Brooks, Director of Revenue at Octave says “One of the biggest advantages with a digital audio buy is the 30 seconds of uninterrupted time with the consumer. Attention is high with no competing content like other digital display formats. This enhances more complex or brand building messages and allows them to resonate with the listener.”
Strategies to Implement B2B Audio Marketing
- Target Niche Specific Audiences
Programmatic audio lets marketers refine their targeting. With the correct data, they can ensure that their audio reaches the specific demographics as per their online behavior and location.
Refined targeting will drive strong performance results. Moreover, marketers can have access to reporting metrics that they can use to optimize future campaigns.
- Attract the Audience by Conveying Brand Personality
In B2B marketing, brand image expression is vital. Brand personality helps marketers align and connect with the right customer. This way, companies can elicit a positive emotional response from the target customer.
Audio ads creates ample opportunity to express brand personality. Therefore, it creates a more lasting and memorable impression, boosting customer engagement.
- Use Audio Ads to Educate the Audience
Marketers must use B2B audio campaigns to build awareness, recognition, and interest. For instance, companies can pinpoint an issue or challenge the audience faces. Then, they can explain how the product or service will help resolve the issue.
The explanation in the form of audio helps the message resonate with listeners and attracts them to the solution the company offers. Audio ads educate the audience and allow companies to introduce their service or product. It builds trust between the offering and the audience. Adds Harry Williams, Senior Marketing Manager at AMA, “Audio is also a deeply intimate channel, plugged directly into our ears, and incredibly emotive. This gives listeners a totally unique experience in that moment, even compared to others nearby.
The combination of passive consumption and intimacy plays a huge part in driving these engagement levels and makes audio a perfect channel to educate your audience”.
- Retargeting
Marketers can gather the audience that has completed listening to the audio. Then, they can retarget them with native ads on their devices. It helps in moving the audience further in the funnel.
“Programmatic audio gives advertisers access to much of the same targeting capabilities that they are familiar with from other digital channels. However, they also get the added benefits that are more unique to digital audio, such as a highly engaged audience, passive consumption and dynamic creative capabilities”, adds Williams.
Audio advertising enables companies to reach target audiences in an engaged frame of mind. Using audio ads to educate the target audience, marketers will have their undivided attention.
Impacts of B2B Audio Marketing
- Helps Reach New Audiences and Get Engaged Listeners
With numerous digital channels, it is challenging for companies to maximize their marketing budgets. A well-defined programmatic audio reaches the audience efficiently and at scale.
Programmatic audio ads uniquely connect with listeners. It offers greater freedom for listeners since the ads are played in the background or while they are engaged in another task.
- Better Sales and ROI
Advertising campaigns’ ultimate goal is to maximize sales and ROI. They can target the customers using specific data points, such as geographic location or website interests. These insights can help companies to reach key people likely to purchase.
- Solid Analytics and Real-Time Measurement
Marketers can track their campaigns’ effectiveness in real time with advanced analytics within platform dashboards. These metrics help companies to analyze number of impressions and exposure times.
Moreover, it helps track ad engagement levels by analyzing the percentage of users who listened to a full audio ad and those who heard part of an entire audio ad.
“Contextual decisioning enables advertisers to make the listener feel as if the ad has been created just for them, building on digital audio’s higher than average engagement levels and helping the company to increase awareness and drive a purchase,” says Williams.
At the same time, marketers can track ad exposure and engagement levels in real time, making adjustments as needed.
- Brand Awareness
Audio ads help in making customers aware of the brand. It enables marketers target customers who do not have time to read long-form content or long video ads.
Rightly curated audio will enable them to hear and absorb informative messages about the company, product, or service.
- Minimal CPM and Creative Costs
Marketers can create programmatic audio ads quickly and at a low cost. As audio requires no visuals, it is not very expensive to develop.
It is an excellent opportunity for marketers to attract audiences without a lot of time or costs that offer high returns. Moreover, audio ads offer lower cost-per-thousand (CPM) rates than other digital media channels.
- More Room for Creativity and Better Media Flexibility
Better customization and personalization help reach the audio to interested listeners. Marketers can use the tools that help them deliver dynamic ads as per the audience.
It helps them provide numerous ad variations that are highly targeted. Companies can also target ads to podcast audiences allowing them to efficiently engage with them.
Brooks agrees, “Podcast growth and the affinity it produces are a great environment for marketers to really engage with audiences and build brand affinity, and given that podcasts are particularly listened to by the hard to reach younger demographics, they’re a great choice for brands wishing to target those groups.”
Conclusion
The campaign execution for programmatic audio functions just like any other automated advertising. It allows marketers to integrate audio with a holistic plan alongside other channels easily.
Brooks also adds, “Data solutions, coupled with Dynamic Creative creation, have proved to increase performance. At the same time, interactive ads that engage the consumer and we have seen that voice commands in ads also boost favourable brand recall.”
Including audio in a multi-channel strategy helps B2B marketers reach their ideal audience throughout the entire funnel. It creates a cohesive story across audio, native, display, and video.
