Digital Audio Drives ROAS for CPG Brands—Check These Results

In marketing, timing and audience are everything. But are your advertising campaigns aligned with the amount of time audiences are spending with various media channels?

Though consumers spend 31% of their media time with audio, advertisers are only investing 9% of their media budgets with the medium. This tends to be even lower for CPG brands. So, as listeners tune into music, podcasts, and live audio content throughout the day, your brand messages may be missing an opportunity to reach them.

Let’s see what happens when a CPG brand invests in audio advertising.

A Food Brand Seizes the Audio Opportunity with Big Results

A major CPG food brand ran a digital audio campaign with Pandora streaming, including connected car, connected home, and mobile audio. They reached a general audience as well as targeted parents, and the results exceeded norms. The campaign delivered 68M impressions, driving a 3.4% sales lift and a $3.84 return on ad spend (ROAS).

The personalization and portability of digital audio proved to be wildly successful. In addition to boosting sales with previous buyers, an incredible 42% of sales came from new or lapsed buyers. These results are particularly impressive when you consider this brand is already a household name with high baselines.

Curious about how you can achieve similar results for your CPG brand? Let’s dig into some best practices from this campaign.

Digital Audio Campaign Best Practices for CPG Brands

Your CPG products are everywhere, and consumers encounter them all the time. With digital audio, your brand messages can be there with them as they’re getting ready for the day, enjoying a meal, road tripping, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and more. Audio can reach them at pivotal moments when your ads are most likely to resonate, and when visual messaging may not be an option.

Take a Multimedia Approach

Adding digital audio to your overall media strategy provides complementary and incremental reach to linear TV, AM/FM radio, CTV and social media effectively. But you should also be diverse with your audio-specific approach across platforms and formats. This can not only help you reach new and different consumers (like getting +43% incremental reach by adding podcasts to a campaign), but it can also help you achieve optimal frequency and reach buyers at key moments (like hearing your ad through a connected home device as they cook dinner.)

In the successful CPG campaign described above, the food brand reached 25M people with a 1.5x average weekly frequency. And that massive scale was complemented by the variety of ways consumers could encounter the messages (like through their phone, in the car, or on the couch.)

Balance Broad Reach with Targeting

Some CPG brands need mass reach across broad demographics, while others need niche audiences based on use cases, and some benefit from a mix of both. Digital audio provides the opportunity for mass scale in addition to granular targeting, and the agility to optimize between the two. For example, many people use lotion, but women may be more likely to buy it regularly. That’s why it’s best to balance your targeting approach to reach both specific audiences and the general market at scale for optimal results.

To achieve sales lifts with both new and existing buyers, the CPG food brand opted to scale their message across audiences as well as target parents specifically.

Customize Messages for Both Timing and Target Audiences

SiriusXM Media and its platforms like Pandora, SoundCloud, podcasts and SiriusXM satellite can not only help you reach specific audiences (like millennials) at specific times (like when they’re winding down for the day), but we can also run ads that are customized for that audience and/or the activities in which they may be engaging. For example, an organic hair care brand might want to run three different messages:

• A general market message boasting the products’ cleaning and conditioning power 

• A message touting the benefits of organic ingredients for millennials who have previously purchased organic products

• A message focusing on how safe and gentle the products are that runs in the evenings targeted to parents 

Personalized ads can have a significant impact when paired with matched audiences (built using first- and third-party data). Our recent study with MAGNA Global showed +12 pts higher brand favorability when customized ads were served to matched audiences.

The CPG food brand saw the strongest lift with their message personalized to parents, driving a 3.77% sales lift and a $4.31 ROAS.

Leverage an Audio Creative Agency

Some marketers may think visual first when it comes to their campaigns, but audio is just as effective at reaching and motivating consumers, and a critical tactic for incrementality. A recent study with dentsu and Lumen Research showed audio is more effective at getting attention. Audio ads received 50% more audience attention than benchmarks across video, TV, social, and display—and it was more cost effective.

Creating compelling audio ads is a science (and there’s some magic to it). That’s why SiriusXM Media has an in-house audio creative agency. Studio Resonate collaborates with brands and agencies to translate their brand assets and visual campaigns into ads that stand out in the best way for an audio environment to capture attention and inspire action. 

For this CPG food brand campaign, Studio Resonate collaborated with the agency’s creative team to write the scripts and produce the spots. 

Ad-Supported Audience Size is Key

When considering any streaming platform, it’s important to note the size of the audience that is ad-supported as opposed to behind the paywall. Make sure to ask the question, how much of the total audience do you as a marketer have the opportunity to reach? SiriusXM Media is the biggest name in ad-supported audio, where you can reach 87% of our 150M listeners who enjoy their music, podcasts, and live content with ads. This is an under-leveraged opportunity to move the needle in driving sales for CPG brands, solving for several challenges with other media channels that may not be working as hard as they have in the past.

Let’s plan your next CPG campaign.