Now that we’ve convinced you SOBs (small owned businesses) to consider audio marketing strategy - let’s talk about your options!
This week on the S.O.B. (small owned business) Marketing podcast, Vivian and I discussing audio marketing options available to small business owners, including podcast sponsorships, AudioGo, voice search SEO, and more.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series, so be sure to check out Part 1 if you haven’t listened already!
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Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to SOB Marketing
04:10 Understanding Sonic Branding for Your Business
06:43 Direct Podcast Sponsorships
11:01 Exploring Spotify Ads Manager
17:32 Utilizing AudioGo for Advertising
23:19 Voice Search and Audio SEO
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𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓:
The Power of Audio Marketing (Part 1): https://youtu.be/mNrwCMZWzCs
New SEO Terms You Need To Know: https://youtu.be/iPVlLja8b58
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Chelsea: the key when it comes to voice search and to audio SEO is thinking about the way people...
*Intro*
Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...
Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
Vivian: We're back for our part two adventure, Indiana Jones style. What is this? The temple of the audio marketing?
Chelsea: I don't know. We talked about how I didn't watch Indiana Jones!
Vivian: All right. Well, tell us what we're talking about today.
Chelsea: Okay, this is the second part of our audio marketing series.
Vivian: Which, by the way, Indiana Jones has a lot of, what did we call it? Branding? Sonic branding in it.
Chelsea: Sonic branding, yes.
Vivian: Yeah, on its own I think.
Chelsea: Nice. Well, today is the part two. This is the last part. We only have two parts. We're not going to keep going. We're talking about audio marketing, specifically today we are going to be talking about audio marketing options that you have as small business owners. Last week's episode, do you necessarily need to listen to last week's episode first? No, but I would.
Vivian: Listen, if you're a bad boy, bad girl, you make up your own roles, you're anti-establishment, you do what you want. Go ahead and listen to episode, the second part first and then go back and do it just for fun.
Chelsea: Okay, just for fun. But if you don't know what's going on, then I mean, that's on you.
Listen to last week's episode. Last week we talked about what audio marketing is. We defined it. We gave some examples and we also talked about how it can help your small business. So today we are specifically going to go over some options.
I don't have a specific marketing hot take for this episode, because this is an extension of last week's episode. But last week we talked about how audio marketing is definitely underutilized by small businesses and that was the marketing hot take.
Vivian: Agree. So to start, why don't we talk about how this is, these options are options outside of you just giving this to a marketing agency and saying do this for me, hey I want to run ads in Spotify. I want to run ads on podcast. I want to do all that.
This is if you're scrappy, if you're a do-it-yourselfer business owner, which I guarantee most of you are because that's our type A personality. We love doing everything on our own. It's good because I feel like it gives you both the working knowledge of what it takes to actually put these ads out there and to reach your target demographic. And then on top of it, it gives you creative control to where if something's not working, you could pivot really quick.
Chelsea: Yeah. Like Vivian said, this, these examples that we're going to give are ways that you as the small business owner can handle audio marketing yourself. Of course you can give it to marketing agency and they can help you get it situated. There are other options out there for you, but I found the ones that we believe would be the best fit for small business owners.
Vivian: Awesome.
Chelsea: Great. Okay. Let's start with sonic branding, Vivian. Sonic branding is going to be the sounds that people hear and immediately think of you. Like a jingle, like Netflix's dun dun. What was the example you gave last week with a TikToker?
Vivian: "That'll do it." How she always says, that's her little tagline that she does intermittently throughout the videos. The other one is Tubi. I listen to Tubi. Or I watch movies on Tubi because they have the old school good movies on there. Lots of the brands are starting to actually do this. You can incorporate this in your own business. What opportunity specifically, Chelsea, did you want to talk about within sonic branding?
Chelsea: Well, I'm glad Vivian last week gave that example with the TikToker because originally I was like, I don't know. I feel like this is something that maybe you should reach out to a professional for. If you want to jingle or something like that. That's not as easy as you think it is. If you want like a full blown jingle, I would consider reaching out to a professional. But like Vivian brought that TikToker example, finding ways in your content to be consistent is always going to help you with your branding. If you can find an audio aspect of that to be consistent with, then that's a form of sonic branding.
Vivian: Absolutely. I think it helps with getting people, we were talking about recall last week, brand recall. This is some type of form of that, right? Every time they hear it, they kind of know that that's your thing. It's almost like your own little trademark on a specific sound or phrase or something that is audio related.
Chelsea: Yeah. I have an example for us. At the end of every episode, I say, go be the best S.O.B. you can be.
Vivian: There you go.
Chelsea: If you heard that out in the wild as an SOB, you would know where it's from.
Vivian: It's kind of like your cuckoo cuckoo. Your SOB call.
Chelsea: Exactly. It's the SOB call. Yeah, so sonic branding originally, I said, was something you should probably not do yourself, but you know what? You absolutely can do it yourself. I'm glad that I was wrong. Another thing that I brought up multiple times last week, but it needs to be said again in this episode. If you are looking to be on a podcast, to do a podcast ad, reach out to the podcast directly. For example, I mean, the SOB Marketing Podcast does allow sponsorships. So if you wanted to advertise on this podcast, you could reach out to us directly and then we will send you the information for our rates, for sponsorships and ads and all that stuff. Most podcasts will do that. They'll respond to you directly with their rates. Yeah.
Vivian: What I really like about instead of using a platform, but reaching out to these people directly is you're able to provide them all of the creative one-on-one, right? So they'll give you the rates, the information, what they need in what format, and then you have the capability to reach out to them and coordinate all that on your own. The other part of it too is if you're updating creative work, you have a streamed or a point of contact that you're working with to be able to get that switched out as quickly as possible. The other platforms, they do open up more opportunities because they're coordinating amongst several media companies or several podcasts, several stations, but this one-on-one, I think just kind of perhaps opens up other opportunities as well. Specifically sponsorships, you may be able to bake into a contract different types of sponsorships. Like, hey, by the way, if we had somebody that reached out to us and they were like, we want to...
Chelsea: Which you can.
Vivian: Yeah, they say "we want to be a sponsor $750" or something along those lines. Not only would we probably say, yeah, absolutely, we can run your ads on the podcast, but on top of it, maybe you have a future opportunity to actually come on and be a guest. There are things that you can negotiate in there so that you get more reach out of that opportunity.
Chelsea I also want to point out that when you reach out to the podcast itself, you are able to reach more people because, for example, I listen to most, if not all of my podcasts on Spotify. I have Spotify premium. I'm not supposed to get ads. However, because these ads are baked into the podcast, I still get them. They're not through Spotify. Spotify is not giving me any ads. The podcast itself is giving me an ad.
Vivian: There you go.
Chelsea: Yes. So that's a great way to reach people that you might not necessarily have been able to reach if you had just gone through Spotify.
Vivian: There are lots of these. Also, don't forget that a lot of these opportunities or if people are looking to build their audience as well, which every kind of podcast is looking to do. They have their own websites. Most of the time they have a part of the website where they actually list their sponsors or they list their advertisers because that gives you the advertiser extra visibility. That's another way that you're being associated with a particular brand, a particular business.
Chelsea: That's another backlink.
Vivian: That's right.
Chelsea: Good for your SEO.
Vivian: That's right.
*S.O.B. Community Ad*
Vivian: This episode of the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is brought to you by the S.O.B. Community. If you are a small business owner that is neglecting your marketing and you feel like you've wasted time and money on marketing help that didn't deliver. Or if you're just craving support from people who actually get what it's like to run and promote a small business, then our membership community is for you. Visit skool.com/sob to sign up today to get instant access and weekly support. That's S-K-O-O-L dot com slash sob.
*End of S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: Now, Vivian, I brought up Spotify. Spotify actually has an ads manager, that you can access yourself and you can create audio ads specifically for the Spotify platform. They have free production tools that you can use or you can repurpose existing display/video creative, very intuitive. To use the platform it's free, and then you can determine your own budget for your campaigns. The website says that they measure media mix modeling, conversion lift, website visits, app installs, so if you're trying to promote your app, multi-tool attribution, TV tune in, foot traffic, and online and offline sales.
Spotify has a lot going on and they offer audio, video and display ads.
Vivian: Yes, if you did not know, a lot of these primarily audio streaming platforms are now incorporating video just like everybody else. That's where maybe some of the display ads are starting to come in, Charles, because people are actually looking at their phone now while they're streaming audio-based material?
Chelsea: Yeah. Well, actually, the display ads are for, you know how when you're listening to something, you see the information on your screen? That's what a display ad is. The video ads are exactly what you're talking about. So now if you're watching a video podcast, because Spotify has video podcasts now, you can watch the video of this podcast on Spotify. They're inserting video ads in between or within the podcast, wherever they're putting them. They decide where they're putting the ad.
Vivian: So all that to say you guys have more opportunities based into this audio marketing than I think maybe you initially thought. The other thing is I love that they have their own analytics and all that and that you're able to create your ad within there and they have tools to help you create that. Just so you know, personal experience, they actually, when you are considering on some of these platforms, I think Spotify was one of them. I do know the next one we mentioned is going to be one for sure. They will, if you go on there and you start to build something or you're looking at it, it obviously triggers and knows that you're interested in potential audio marketing. It sometimes will then send you an email to say, hey, if you spend $500, we'll match it. If you spend $500, we'll give you $250. They do these little promos to entice you to actually pull the trigger because they're like, hey, this person's primed from wanting to advertise on our platform. So if they need a little nudge, we'll go ahead and nudge them. I bring that up so that you're aware that there are opportunities and they do have promotions where they will actually match or give you some money to help run ads through audio marketing.
Chelsea: Love that. I want to explain that Spotify, having their own ads manager is kind of an outlier, but it is one of the most popular audio platforms. So I absolutely wanted to bring it. But just so you know, while I was doing research, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, a lot of these audio platforms will allow you to do audio marketing, but they want you to reach out directly to them. So y'all can have any conversation about it first before you get into it. So it's a little less intuitive. You're not 100% in control. I know as small business owners, we like to be 100% in control. If that's really important to you, Spotify Ads Manager is an option. The second one we're going to talk about, AudioGo is also an option.
Vivian: Yeah, can I also mention though with Pandora and some of these other ones, when we're talking about audio ads as a whole, you had mentioned, Chelsea, think radio ads as well, right? With your traditional radio stations. There are a lot of radio stations now that have beefed up because they are under an umbrella of stations that can tap into big resources. They usually, in the last couple of years, have beefed up their capabilities to embed radio ads or just audio ads into some of these platforms. So that could be another opportunity. If there is a local station that you really like, if there's a station within your state that is maybe, I know we have, what do you call it here in South Carolina? It's like the educational TV part of it. Like an extension of NPR, SCETV.
Chelsea: I think so, yes. Yeah, that sounds right.
Vivian: Yeah, so they do, they're educational based. If that was more your speed and that tapped into your target audience, you could ask them and say like, hey, do you guys have any mechanisms? Do you have any capabilities to tap into the Pandora's or the other places? You may be surprised that they say, absolutely. We could get your ads on those platforms as well because they will partner with some of the bigger media channels.
Chelsea: I love that and I'm glad you brought up radio. Radio is a part of audio marketing and it's not dead. It's still a thing.
Vivian: Yeah, just like everything else, we want you to your due diligence to do the research and be sure that it aligns with your target audience. Just because some people may not listen to radio, the people that you're trying to reach may be people that are still listening to certain radio stations.
Chelsea: Yeah. So just knowing where your target audience is, is really important. But Vivian, do you want to go ahead and talk about AudioGo?
Vivian: Yes. So AudioGo is going to be similar to think of like a Spotify ads manager. However, it's going to be for more than just one particular channel.
Chelsea: They have a plethora of different platforms.
Vivian: Give us an example.
Chelsea: Yeah. We have Barstool Sports, Daily Motion, iHeartRadio, NBC, Pandora, Sirius XM, SoundCloud. Those were just the big brands that I saw. They had so much more too.
Vivian: So very similar. It is a place where you can pick the platform, the specific podcast, and then you create the account. You can create a free account. You could go in and start to create a campaign, upload your audio ad or you can request to see if maybe they can, I think it's a, that you could pay to have them make one, right?
Chelsea: Yeah, you can actually, so AudioGo will create an ad if that's what you want, they'll create a free one for you. You'll just pay it when you run it.
Vivian: Gotcha. So you do end up paying for it somehow. Yes.
Chelsea: You will end up paying for it, but it can be added on to what you're doing.
Vivian: That's the part I think that we love. It has the benefits just like any of the other ones do with the targeting options, right? Whether that be through location, demographics, device, interest, behaviors, all of that good stuff. What else am I missing?
Chelsea: Day of the week, time of day. If you want to get really, really specific, I think time of day is genius. Exactly at seven o'clock when everyone's in the car going to work.
Vivian: There you go.
Chelsea: You have your ad running then. I mean, that's great. You can do languages. They have English and Spanish. You can pick the position in the podcast that you want. So do you want it to be the first thing that they hear? So the ads at the beginning, do you want the ad to be in the middle? Do you want it to be at the end?
Vivian: The reason all of that can be important is because, you know, one of the biggest things with podcasting is complete, what do they call it? Percentage of completion as far as how long somebody listens to the episode.
Chelsea: Did they listen to the full episode? Did they just listen to like 10 minutes and then change it to something else?
Vivian: That's right. Those pre spots are probably going to be a little higher in cost because that's when almost everybody is still engaged and listening. Midway, maybe a couple people trickle off, don't get to the middle part of the podcast episode. Then towards the end, those may be a little cheaper just because they're like, how many people actually listen to 100% of the podcast?
Chelsea: Exactly.
Vivian: Those are all great options for you because you really get to tailor your campaign.
Chelsea: You really do. I have used AudioGo before. I was blown away by their targeting capabilities. I mean, you can get really granular with this. Also want to bring up when it comes to AudioGo, do they advertise on Spotify? Kind of weird. If you are using audio go to place an ad on a very specific podcast and that podcast is on Spotify, then people listening on Spotify will get it. They've baked it into the podcast. But if you're just trying to target, you're not picking a specific podcast, you're just picking a targeted audience, it will not be on Spotify.
Vivian: Okay. Interesting.
Chelsea: That makes sense?
Vivian: Yeah...
Chelsea: Does that make sense? Y'all in the comments, let me know if it doesn't make sense. Basically what I'm saying is, Spotify is handling their own ads across their platform. However, Audio Go, they do have relationships with specific podcasts. Those podcasts are still on Spotify. So you will hear an AudioGo ad on Spotify if you are listening to a podcast that has a relationship with AudioGo.
Vivian: Gotcha. That makes sense.
Chelsea: Yeah, it's not- you're not hearing the ad because of Spotify. You're hearing the ad because of the podcast.
Vivian: Glad we cleared that up.
Chelsea: Yeah, I want to make sure everyone understands that because Spotify, again, is one of the leading audio market- not audio marketing, just audio platforms. So if you are trying to specifically get on Spotify, probably want to go through Spotify ads manager.
Vivian: Gotcha. All right. So there are a lot of platforms that you could use to advertise, right? These are probably the two biggest ones.
Chelsea: Yes. These also, there are a lot of platforms out there for audio marketing. If you're not going to use one of these two, do your due diligence. Make sure it's a legit website. Make sure their capabilities are strong, the analytics that you get back, that's so important. Make sure it's legit.
Vivian, the last thing we have to talk about today is voice search and audio SEO. I did a lot of research on this because this is something that's fairly new. How do we do audio SEO? Interestingly enough, I feel like it's very, I don't want to say it's the same, but it's very similar to AI SEO. Okay. The GEO, AEO, the new SEO. We've had this discussion. Go listen to that podcast episode.
Vivian: If you don't know what any of those acronyms mean, go listen to our episode.
Chelsea: Yeah, exactly. It's very intuitive because the key when it comes to voice search and to audio SEO is thinking about the way people verbalize, search things. If I'm going to ask-
Vivian: Is verbalize a word?
Chelsea: Verbalize? Is that not a word?
*technical difficulties pause*
Chelsea: It is a word, okay? I'm correct. How you verbalize something. My point is, how are they asking the question? How are they phrasing things to Alexa or verbalizing to Alexa or to Siri? That's very similar to Chat GPT because the way that we use AI is usually very conversational. So this is going to be very conversational. For example, most voice searches are questions. So having an FAQ page. That's a very easy way that you can draw people in and make sure you're answering the questions completely. It's very clear. Having good quality content, of course, is important. But answer the question. Have the question on the page and then answer it.
It's also really important to make sure that your Google business profile is up to date and has all the necessary information because that's how, when you're asking Alexa questions or Siri questions, they're going to go through all of the content and then they're going to try to figure out who's a legitimate business, who is a point of authority, who is trustworthy. You're not going to be trustworthy if your Google business profile is out of date.
Vivian: Right, or it's halfway filled out or you haven't connected your website to it or confirmed your information on there or you're missing your store hours, all that good stuff.
Chelsea: Exactly. Make sure you have conversational long-tail keywords within your content. So for example, best pizza near me. Having a phrase like that somewhere in your Google business profile or in your website can be helpful.
Vivian: Okay, but how are you going to put that on your website, Chels?
Chelsea: Best pizza in Summerville, because when you say best pizza near me it's going to know that I'm in Summerville.
Vivian: It's using your geographic location.
Chelsea: It's using my geographic location. So if you have the phrase best pizza in Summerville on your website.
Vivian: Yeah, and let me also say this. I'm glad that you kind of bring this up because one of the things Chelsea says often is it's all connected.
Chelsea: Well, it is!
Vivian: It is. We're going to do, I'm going to do a video on a TikTok update that's going to be coming soon. One of those is actually they're adding a tab, a local tab to TikTok. They've already done such a good job of localizing the content and curating that on these TikTok feeds that now they're very specifically going to be doing that even more so. So having these type of geographic markers, like Chelsea said, best pizza in Summerville, South Carolina, best, you know, having that information out there is just going to help these other platforms as well.
Chelsea: You want to, that's great because another key to building up your audio SEO is to build up your local presence as much as you can because that's going to legitimize your business even more. That's so very important in SEO in general, but also for voice search specifically. So that could be Yelp, your local chamber of commerce, finding ways to connect with your community. Also Vivian, you and this is so important.
Vivian: I feel like she just did the gesture for like ringing y'alls necks.
Chelsea: No, no, no, I'm sweet. Make sure your website is mobile friendly and that you have good site speed because when people are asking Alexa questions, it needs to do it quick. If I'm asking Siri a question, that's my phone. It's going to pull up on my phone. If Siri pulls something up. Well, for one, actually, Siri is not going to pull it up if it's not mobile friendly. Because that's part of-
Vivian: The experience, and it wants you to have a good experience. We always tell you they're the matchmaker. A matchmaker's job is to be sure they're giving you a suitable suitor. They're not going to say, yeah, check out this website that shows up all jacked up on your phone because it's not mobile friendly.
Chelsea: So I think that was a great list for you guys of audio marketing options that you can look into as a small business owner. Again, if you didn't listen to part one, please listen to that part as well.
Vivian: If you have any that we left off that you've been using and you want to rave about, like you love it, let us know in the comments.
Chelsea: Absolutely. Please, we don't gatekeep here. Remember, this SOB community is about all of us helping each other to build our small businesses.
Vivian: That's right. So if you use a platform for audio marketing specifically and you want to share that, let us know.
Chelsea: Yes, and go be the best SOB you can be.