Audio and Digital: What’s the Proper Balance?

Businesses today have multiple avenues to reach their target audience. No single channel reaches your entire audience. Instead, the level of success you seek requires adopting a multichannel strategy. Having a strong presence on multiple platforms makes your brand stand out and resonate more with customers.  

A strategy that combines audio and digital advertising is an effective and efficient way to reach a vast and diverse audience. Furthermore, combining radio and digital campaigns led to the highest increase in your ROI. While each channel works well individually, their effects amplify when used in conjunction. Implementing this strategy lets you reach your existing and potential customers where they spend their time and in a manner that encourages the most engagement. Here we’ll discuss how business owners can leverage the power of audio and digital to supercharge their marketing efforts.  

Radio Commands the Industry   

Radio is a powerful medium, having generated over $10 billion in revenue in 2020. Technology has allowed it to grow and reach new consumers, whether they listen in the car, on computers, or through smart devices. In 2020, $940 million in revenue came from online radio streaming alone. Public radio’s influence is also growing, itself generating $970 million in 2020.  

Radio’s power partly comes because it triggers emotional responses, either with songs that take you back to another point in time or with inspiring stories of people who sacrifice for others. It allows the listener to become invested in the radio personalities they listen to daily and trust them. Radio not only holds a significant emotional command but can encourage audiences to take broad actions or lookup trends. 

Digital Advertising Reaches Broadly and Specifically  

Digital marketing covers many techniques, strategies, and platforms, whether SEO, SEM, PPC, social media, email marketing, or business websites. Analytics comes from data about who takes which actions online. Setting and monitoring metrics allows you to determine whether you meet your goals. That helps you target consumers most likely to be interested in your business and will enable you to retarget groups and maintain relationships with customers directly. 

Tips to Combine Audio and Digital Strategies  

Audio and digital strategies help you achieve different objectives. Radio reaches broad audiences that can still be highly geographically specified based on station location, while digital is targeted based on demographics and customer behavior. Radio encourages customers to look up products online. Having a solid digital presence helps them find your company while letting your company retarget to them.  

Target the Best Customers  

Highly successful marketing occurs when there is sufficient analytics to let you target the consumers who will be most interested in your brand. Collect data from your digital efforts to learn about your target customer’s demographics and habits, then use that to create customer personas. Choose the channel that appeals to them to reach and engage them more effectively. You can also use geo-targeting to reach specific customers within a particular zip code. 

Maintain a Consistent Voice  

A consistent voice across platforms matters more than you think when fostering customer confidence. Maintaining a tonal consistency with both platforms that customers will quickly recognize is vital. One survey determined it can also translate to up to 33% increased revenue. Developing a style guide can also help facilitate and reinforce a consistent voice.  

Choose the Most Relevant Platforms  

The good news is that there are many channels by which you can reach your target customer. The caveat is that you should carefully consider which stations and online platforms are best for sharing your message and engaging your audience. Some companies concentrate on channels that best reflect their business, such as LinkedIn for B2B companies or Instagram for visual artists. Others favor platforms used successfully by their competitors. 

However, your goal is to influence your ideal customer and entice them to your site. By conducting analytics and observing listenership ratings, you can find which sites and social media platforms your customers use. These ratings help you know where to concentrate your efforts to optimize your marketing spend and increase ROI.  

Let Analytics Help You Determine the Best Mix of Audio and Digital for Your Audience 

There is no hard and fast ratio of audio to digital that works for every business or even every campaign. That’s why a strategy that leverages audio and digital is so effective. These mediums naturally balance each other out based on the audience, reinforcing your message on multiple platforms. Some radio campaigns may trigger additional website and foot traffic to local establishments, while others may trigger high engagement through streaming and social media.   

Audio and digital work well together because they are complementary. Radio reaches a vast audience each day, with listeners tuning in during their work commute, school runs, workdays, afternoon errands, weekend road trips, and more. It informs, entertains, educates, soothes, and excites. It is also an incredible lead generation tool.   

The new information consumers hear on their favorite station almost instantly spurs searches for the product or business from interested listeners who want to learn more.  The key is having a high-quality, engaging audio ad with a clear call to action. Conversely, a targeted social media or search page ad can attract subscribers to your sponsored podcast. Work with an experienced media partner to help you achieve the best results for your audio and digital marketing campaigns.