Top 4 Mistakes to Avoid When Combining Audio and Digital Advertising

Creating a dynamic, engaging ad campaign that combines audio and digital can do amazing things for your company. Each type connects with audiences slightly differently and produces slightly different results. For instance, Google ads alone have an average lift of 14%. Radio ads can produce a 29% lift in Google searches. Combined with digital ads on Google and Facebook, audio ads created an additional 18.3% lift over digital ads alone.
Now that you know what you can achieve, it’s time to get started on your ads. Creating high-quality audio and digital ads that don’t break the bank is possible. However, you must be aware of some common pitfalls to avoid if you don’t want to waste your time and money.
Let’s look at many businesses’ top mistakes when combining audio and digital advertising.

1. Lacks Consistency Between Platforms

Consistency in voice and style across platforms helps your ads elevate your brand, affecting how the audience perceives your business. It communicates credibility, reliability, and expertise, letting your ads stand out on each platform and gain traction. On the other hand, a lack of consistency creates confusion and leads to distrust. There is nothing that sparks recognition and familiarity or lets the listener or viewer connect more deeply with your brand.
The most successful ad campaigns in history have made their brands instantly recognizable. If you hear “Jake from…” chances are your mind can finish it immediately with “State Farm.” The ads are funny and have a consistent theme, characters, and message, whether you experience them on the radio, streaming channels, or social media. Successful omnichannel campaigns use different techniques to make them memorable and identifiable with the brand, but they all are consistent across every platform. 

2. Messaging Is Too Cluttered

We’ve all seen or heard them: the pharmaceutical ads for new medications that will help those suffering from different conditions. They start by highlighting benefits, then go into the mandated side effect disclosures. It’s hard to remember what the ad is even about when what stands out is the extremely dense, fast-paced litany of remote or potential unwanted side effects.  Unfortunately, the most important points they want to convey can get lost in the long list of things that may or may not happen to one in 10,000 users.
While they don’t have a choice but to pack their message with too much information, you do. You don’t have to give every benefit or talk about your brand’s offerings in every spot. Make your message concise, with one clear point that customers will remember. Your ads will be more memorable and resonate more effectively with the audience.

3. Poor Sound Quality

While “can you hear me now?” may have been a great tagline for one brand, it isn’t something you want to happen in reality. Poor sound quality is a sure way to thwart engagement and have your audience tuning out. Poor sound quality can derail your ads in numerous ways, from voices that are too quiet to distracting sound effects or music that overpowers the rest of the audio. Ensure your audio and online ads have a consistent, high-quality sound level, even if the ads are simple. 

4. Not Tracking Your Ad Performance

It’s hard to understand why anyone would invest time, effort, or money in an endeavor without assessing its outcome. Imagine buying a car and not checking to see if you are getting the expected gas mileage, investing in a stock that you never checked the performance of, or taking a class where you never took a test to see if you were retaining any of the content. None of those scenarios make much sense and instead seem like a recipe for throwing money down the drain.
The same is true when investing in audio and digital ads to achieve your business goals, then never checking to see if they are accomplishing what you expected. When you track ad performance from the start, you can quickly see what works well and what doesn’t perform to the level you hoped. It allows you to make quick changes to optimize the performance and achieve a higher return on ad spend. 

Supercharge Your Campaign by Combining Digital and Audio Ads

 
Digital and audio ads are highly effective individually but create a powerful combined effect. They can reinforce brand recognition, create engagement, inspire trust, and lift search activity and site traffic. However, successful implementation requires observing some best practices to avoid common mistakes that could derail your efforts and damage your reputation. When approached with consideration and executed with high quality, combining digital and audio is a valuable strategy for any campaign.