Guide

Audio marketing and advertising explained

Audio marketing is a type of marketing that uses music, podcasts, and other sounds to promote your brand. Audio advertising differs from other forms marketing in that it can be very experiential and engaging.

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Audio marketing helps brands extend campaign messaging beyond the screen. Audio marketing includes a broad spectrum of content, including jingles, scores, and branded content. It also includes audio ads. Audio advertising can be an important part of content marketing, and by integrating ads into audio experiences such as ad-supported music streaming or podcasts, advertisers can help customers discover products and services that are relevant to them.

Why is audio marketing important?

There’s a growing amount of options for advertising within audio marketing, including streaming audio in addition to more traditional audio done through radio. Digital marketing can reach customers where they are, on social media, apps, audiobooks, podcasts, or audio versions of blog posts.

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Benefits of digital audio advertising

There’s a variety of benefits to integrating audio advertising into a digital content strategy. To begin, smart-speaker ownership has grown by 77% over the past two years 1. Audio ads can help brands meet audiences where they are when listening to ad-supported premium content throughout different points in their day. And by reaching audiences in different contexts, such as during screenless moments with tech or within interactive content, audio ads can help effectively engage audiences in new ways.

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1. Audio advertising has a wide reach

The wonderful thing about audio ads is that they can run in a variety of ad-supported locations, including music and news streams. Amazon audio ads are programmatic, so your brand’s clip can be featured in a variety of places. This can help brands share their campaign messaging far and wide to connect with more customers.

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2. Audio consumers are paying attention

A recent Veritonic study found that 60% of consumers remember audio and podcast ads more than they remember billboards2. Hearing relevant ads when listening to ad-supported music or news streams could help consumers find the products they need on a daily basis.

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3. Audio advertising can be interactive

Additionally, customers could have the opportunity to interact directly with audio advertising. Smart speakers can allow customers to make hands-free purchases, for example, or podcasts can have clickable companion banner ads in apps. By reaching audiences in different contexts, audio ads can help effectively engage audiences in new ways.

Creating an audio advertising strategy

There are several factors to be aware of when creating audio for your content marketing strategy. Customers use a variety of channels, so brands should be aware of what would work best for their audio ad campaigns to share the messaging in the right places at the right time, to be the most relevant to those listeners. Finally, measuring the results of the audio campaigns will help determine success.

1. Decide on a channel

There’s no wrong answer for where to provide your audio advertising. You could add a companion banner for an ad in a playlist, for example—there are lots of options for audio advertising within music alone.

2. Know your audiences

Think about the ideal audience for the ads in your content marketing strategy. Consider what customers are looking for and what topics may be most interesting to them. There’s a broad spectrum of audio content, including jingles, scores, and branded content, that could help brands determine the messaging and creative for their audio ads.

3. Consider the results

Audio is primarily a brand-building tool for advertisers. That said, there are certain performance analytics metrics that could be useful. Measurements of reach, frequency, and audio completion rate are a good place to start, as are brand reach and lift for considering how audio can improve brand presence.

Create engaging audio ads with Amazon production services

Did you know? With a qualifying Amazon Ads audio campaign, we provide creative services for the end-to-end production process, from the initial idea to the ready-to-run audio ad. Get in touch to learn more.

Get started with Amazon audio ads

Amazon audio ads are a great place to get started with audio content marketing. To begin, brands can get in touch with an Amazon Ads account executive and start to use audio to expand their reach. Brands can then add their audio ads to the ad-supported tier of Amazon Music. That also includes mobile and desktop.

Reach options

Whether or not you sell products in the Amazon store, you can still buy audio ads. They’ll show up across first-party and third-party streaming audio services, including the Amazon Music ad-supported tier, Alexa News, Twitch, and Amazon Publisher Direct (APD). Your audio ads will be available on desktop, mobile, tablet, connected TV, and smart speakers devices (e.g., Echo, Fire TV, and third-party Alexa-enabled devices).

Reporting capabilities

For Amazon audio ads, the available reporting metrics include impressions, average impression frequency, cumulative campaign reach, audio start, audio complete, effective cost per audio complete (eCPAC), and more. Using these details can help you optimize your audio ads strategy to ensure you’re reaching your audience where they’re most likely to listen.

Optimization and cross-sell opportunities

Alexa-enabled devices deliver the majority of Amazon audio ads. These can also include interactive ads that allow customers to reply directly to your brand, improving engagement. Beyond that, you can also create Twitch ads to complement your audio ads.

Conclusion

Amazon audio ads are a great place to get started with audio content marketing. To begin, brands can get in touch with an Amazon Ads account executive and start to use audio to expand their reach. Brands can then add their audio ads to the ad-supported tier of Amazon Music. That also includes mobile and desktop, as well.

1 MRI-Simmons Cord Evolution Study, Winter 2020 vs. Winter 2022, US, 18+
2 Veritonic, US, 2024