With the latest Nielsen report stating that 43% of companies are planning to increase spending with their agencies over the next 12 months, along with the end of Q2 approaching, it’s a good time to review your digital marketing strategy to see what’s really working and what’s not!
With marketers getting excited about omnichannel marketing at the start of this year, something many may not have considered as part of this mix, is voice search and audio advertising.
With the sales of digital assistants projected to rise to 15.1 million by 2020 now really is the time to start incorporating voice search and audio advertising into your long term marketing plans.
According to Vaice,
85% percent of brands are now working on their voice strategies, this includes looking at the way they write their SEO metadata, what PPC keywords terms they’re bidding on and how they present their brand in an audible way.
As voice search picks up the way that people actually speak, as opposed to the way they may write something, SEO and PPC bidding strategies need to adjust to the subtle differences between spoken and written word. The main, most obvious difference, is that people speak in sentences which are generally longer than when they write something. We’ve all become used to typing just a few words into a search engine and finding what we want, for instance we could type in ‘Cambridge weather’ and Google would probably give you results for the weather right now in Cambridge, whereas you’re unlikely to voice search in this way, you’d probably say something more along the lines of ‘could you tell me what the weather in Cambridge is like?’.
When deciding what matches to set your PPC keywords under you need to assess how to make sure you’re not cutting out voice activated search by using too specific phrase or exact match keywords, as this could severely limit your reach when it comes to catching people using voice search.
Similarly, when writing SEO metadata copy you now need to bear in mind the fact that people are searching in full sentences and not just in short snippets as they were before. Make sure you’ve got the best matching meta data for both voice search and text-based searches. This takes some time to get right, but worth it in the end!
Something which also needs considering is how to represent your brand through audio and put some thought into how your brand translates into this different medium. If you’ve spent eons of time carefully creating and nurturing your brand, you don’t want to negatively impact your customers impressions with a poorly thought out audio ad.
It’s well known that music and emotions are closely linked, and music and tone of voice can have a huge impact on how people relate to your brand and the feelings they associate with it.
The agency PHMG did some interesting research around the link between music and emotion. They discovered that strings playing short sharp notes had a positive impact, whereas music played with a shift between major and minor keys made people feel unhappy.
When choosing the music for your audio ad it’s well worth doing some consumer research to see if the music and tone of voice you think should go with your brand is the same as how your actual customers see and feel about your brand. Some companies want people to feel uplifted when they think about their brand, whereas others want people to feel empowered. Music and tone of voice must correlate with your key brand values so your audio ads don’t feel completely out of place.
You’ll also want to make sure that you change your audio advert message to match whatever campaigns you’re running on your other channels, to present your brand as one collective package and reach your customers across different touch points.
Above are just a few things which you might want to think about as part of your audio strategy, with Spotify raising it’s advertising game and digital assistants becoming ever more popular, now is a good as time as any to start working on your audio advertising strategy.
Posted 2 July 2018 by