What Is Audio Marketing and How to Use It in Your Campaign?

By definition, audio marketing refers to marketing initiatives where the output is audio content, versus written or visual content. While companies have been using audio marketing effectively for decades, it’s just now starting to play a key role in businesses’ marketing strategies.

If you’ve been thinking about getting started with audio marketing or thinking about going all-in, right now is a great time to take advantage of all the different ways audio can play a role in your marketing.

What Categories Are Included in Audio Marketing?

There are a number of different categories under the audio marketing umbrella. Some of the most popular include:

• Podcasts

• Podcast advertising

• Radio

• Radio advertising

• Voice search via Google

• Alexa skills

• Voice-enabled advertising

How to Create an Audio Marketing Strategy

There are a number of different ways you can implement audio marketing into your overall marketing strategy. Here’s how you can create an audio marketing strategy.

What’s your goal using audio marketing? You always want to set goals for your marketing initiatives, so you need to think about how audio marketing can help feed the growth of your business.

You can use audio marketing for:

• Branding and awareness

• A new lead-generation channel

• To sell products and services

• To increase voice SEO keywords and rankings

Creating Content for Your Audio Campaigns

One of the biggest challenges we see with companies is their ability or inability to create consistent content for their audience. Everything moves fast and if you’re not creating content regularly, it’s going to be a huge disadvantage for your business.

If you don’t have the budget or resources to create consistent content, you better make sure every piece of content you do produce is leveraged to your best ability. If you’re producing content assets or blogs, you can use those for your audio marketing. You can turn those blogs into podcasts — that is one way to maximize the content you already have published.

If you have 40 blogs published, you can now take those blogs and create 40 podcasts. The same can be true for your emails: those can also be turned into audio assets. With the popularity of podcasts showing no sign of slowing down, there’s likely an audience there you haven’t tapped into yet.

Another big benefit of having a podcast is the fact that you can use podcast ads. Podcast advertising can help you get a 30-second ad in front of your target audience. Podcast ads are often cheaper than other advertising options, so you can get more bang for your buck. A 30-second ad can range from $20-$30 CPM (cost-per-thousand).

How to Get Started With Podcasts

If you want to learn how to get started with podcasts, the process is relatively simple.

(1) SEO and Keyword Research

Your first order of business is getting familiar with SEO (search engine optimization). While most business owners are now aware of what SEO is, few know how to get results from their SEO.

No matter if you’re doing SEO for your blogs or SEO for your podcasts, the first step is keyword research. You can use SEO software such as Ahrefs to evaluate keywords and keyphrases.

Now, if you sell a product, your keywords need to relate to the product. If you sell a service, your keywords need to relate to the services you offer. You’ll want to make a list of keywords and pay attention to the amount of searches that keyword gets every month. Keyword search volume will give you an idea of how popular the keyword is. You’ll also want to research topics that are being talked about a lot, you can go to Google trends to see those topics.

If you’re going to get serious about your podcast, subscriber growth should be a main focus for you. You need to think about what your perfect subscribers listen to. It can take some trial and error to get this dialed in, so make sure you’re talking to your subscribers and getting feedback from them on the topics they want to listen to.

(2) Staying Organized and Focused

Making sure your podcast runs efficiently can be a challenge if you’re not organized. You’ll want to make sure you create an outline for:

• Structure of your podcast

• Topics and content

• Calendar for publishing podcast episodes

• Podcast episode content

The key is staying organized and publishing your podcast on a set schedule. Schedules are vital to growing podcast subscribers, so you want to set specific times so subscribers know when new content will be released.

Remember how we told you to create podcasts from your blogs? Great news: once you have a podcast published, you can create blogs out of your podcast episodes.

(3) Recording Your Podcast

There will be specific podcast equipment you’re going to need to produce a quality show. You’re going to need to invest in:

• For speaking: a microphone with a USB or XLR output

• For recording: a computer or smart phone

• For music: A single-track license or a license subscription

• For editing: Use a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Audacity

A common question we get all the time: How long should my podcast be?

It all depends on the subject matter. Most podcast episodes are generally 20-30 minutes long. In the beginning, that is usually a good starting point to target. As your audience and popularity grow, you can experiment with longer podcast shows.

Make sure you're communicating with your subscribers. You can ask them how long they prefer the podcast to be. That feedback loop is vital to your success, so make sure your podcast becomes a community.

How Can I Distribute My Podcast?

When it comes to distributing your podcast, there are a number of great platforms out there that can help you do just that. Platforms like Anchor.fm make it simple to upload your podcast audio and distribute it to popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and more.

Anchor also provides some basic analytics about your listener audience. If you’re more focused on embedding your episodes on your website and not as concerned with distribution, you can use an audio-hosting platform like SoundCloud that will help you meet that goal.

You can also utilize YouTube for embeds and community.

We’d also recommend reaching out to other podcasters and becoming friends with them. Don’t do it just for the relationship, be honest with yourself and reach out to like minds. These relationships can help both parties grow their podcasts, as well as bring around additional opportunities to grow your brand and business.