May 2021 - The fastest-growing mobile ad categories post Covid-19

Post Covid-19 advertisers are looking for more authentic ways to reach an intimate audience.  Mobile ads are delivering and the categories above are the fastest growing.  Now is the time to tap in and generate new revenue through 360 marketing programs that enforce that you can listen 'anywhere, anytime on any device'.

Looking for some case studies?  email clientsupport@AirKast.com

AirKast: Tips for promoting your Alexa Skills from Amazon!

Amazon recently released some best practices to market your Alexa Skills.  

Here are 7 steps to achieving greater distribution:

With so many skills for customers to choose from in the Alexa Skills Store, developers are vying for their attention and seeking ways to increase engagement with their skills. And now that developers can earn money for eligible skills that receive the highest engagement, it’s an even more exciting time to optimize your skill and its presence to reach more customers.

Ensuring your skill is engaging and aligns with consumer expectations for voice-first experiences is the first step to creating a top-performing skill. The next step is coming up with creative strategies and using the right tactics to promote your skill to eager Alexa users. Here are 7 things you can start doing to make your skill more discoverable both in the Alexa Skills Store and through your existing network.

Add the Right Finishing Touches 

In addition to delivering a consistent and engaging skill, you want to think about your skill’s finishing touches to help attract new customers. 

1. Optimize Your Skill Name and Invocation Name

Give your skill a clear and intuitive name that speaks to its purpose and value. The name should set clear expectations on what your skill can do and what the customer experience will be like. For example, when you hear the name for a skill called Twenty Questions, you immediately know what the skill will do. Also, make sure your skill name doesn’t overpromise and set false expectations. If, for example, you name your skill Email Manager, make sure it enables customers to send and receive emails by voice.

Your skill name should also be easy to remember so customers can recall it when they are ready to activate your skill. One good way to test memorability is to say your invocation name aloud in context, just as a customer would. With a skill like Twenty Questions, it’s easy for a user to simply say “Alexa, play Twenty Questions” when they are ready to begin the game since the skill name is short and intuitive. Also, try to avoid names that are long, hard to pronounce, or hard to remember.

2. Write a Clear, Value-Rich Description

When customers visit the Alexa Skills Store, they have tens of thousands of skills to choose from. Along with an intuitive skill name, a well-written skill description will go a long way in drawing customers’ attention and convincing them to give your skill a try.

Make sure your skill description clearly articulates the value of your skill. Share how your skill makes a task faster, easier, or more delightful with voice. Include details and utterances that showcase your skill’s key features and pique customers’ interest. And use keywords that may help customers discover your skill.

If you intend to regularly refresh your skill’s content, include that information in your description. Share how often you plan to update your skill so customers will know to keep coming back for more delightful interactions.

3. Add an Eye-Catching Skill Icon

Along with a description, every skill in the Alexa Skill Store has an icon to help the skill stand out. Even though your Alexa skill is a voice-first experience, the skill icon is important because it will help differentiate your skill from the tens of thousands of other skills in the Alexa Skills Store. Use your beautiful skill icon as another opportunity to grab customers’ attention.

Keep in mind that your icon doesn’t have to be flashy; in fact, some of the best icons feature thoughtful and intuitive design that visually speak to what the skill is all about. As you’re designing your skill icon, keep in mind a few design best practices:

• Keep it simple. Avoid cluttering the icon with fine detail, which will be hard to see in small sizes.
• Keep text to a minimum. If you have to include text, make sure it fits in the boundaries of the icon frame, and make it big enough to be legible even at the smallest sizes.
• Avoid using photographs. They quickly become hard to see at smaller sizes.
• Make it recognizable. Customers should be able to identify your icon at a glance and have some idea what the skill represents.

Spread the Word

Now that you have an engaging skill with a beautiful skill store presence, you can start telling people about what your skill can do. Here are a few ways you can market your skill to attract new customers.

4. Send an Email to Your Network

The easiest way to attract new users is to let the people you know that you have a new Alexa skill. Friends, family, colleagues and other people in your network will likely want to check out your latest innovation if you let them know. Send your network a quick note with a link to the skill on the Alexa Skill Store along with the instructions on how to enable and invoke it on Alexa.

If you already have customers who are using one of your products, you can also easily let them know about your new Alexa skill. Send them an email or include details about the skill in your newsletter. Include a few sample utterances to pique their interest and help them get started.

5. Add to Your Email Signature and Update Marketing Icons

Your email signature is prime real estate for important products or messages you want to promote. Include a quick description and a link to your skill to build awareness for your skill. You can also include an image of your skill icon and a sample utterance to help users get started quickly as soon as they click to learn more and enable your skill. And now that you have a beautiful new Alexa icon to showcase your skill visually, add it to your social, mobile and other marketing icons.

6. Feature Your Skill on Your Website

Your website is a great location to showcase news and important announcements, including the launch of your new Alexa skill. Once your skill is published, craft a message for your homepage announcing your skill and pointing customers to it in the Alexa Skills Store.

You can also make the announcement and introduce your skill on your blog. Your blog post should outline what your skill can do, why you built it, and how customers will benefit from using the skill.

7. Promote Your Skill on Social Media

Amplify the news about your skill and expand its reach to thousands (or millions) of potential users on social networks. You can post a link to your skill in the Alexa Skills Store or share a link to the blog post you wrote announcing the skill. You can also share your skills directly from the Alexa app.

To create a more enticing social media post, try to take a short video of your skill in action and post it on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other social network. Make your video short and engaging, highlighting the most compelling ways customers can use your skill and how to invoke it.

Engagement Factor: The Tale Of Two News/Talk Radio Stations

All Engagement Factors Are Not The Same

Here's a story of two AirKast mobile clients, both owned by the same company, both the same format in different major markets.  Both have award-winning legendary status, both deliver amazing local content and their AirKast "Engagement Factor" is almost identical but what's driving their mobile engagement is entirely different.

The station above is a major market Northeast radio client.  Their monthly engagement factor is driven by their podcasts on mobile with social media close behind.  These are in addition to the streaming audio they deliver.

This station is in the South.  Granted the news content varies by region, you can see how active their social media feeds are on mobile.

With streaming services looking more like traditional radio these days, from music to podcasts, broadcasters need to understand that mobile streaming and social are not silos.  They work in tandem to drive audio engagement.  

Set and keep track of your monthly KPI's, don't waste time on content that isn't resonating.  Take a deep dive into what fans are actually 'touching' in your app and tell your story better.

Use your AirKast "Engagement Factor" as a guide to help you stay informed and share best practices.

Need more staff training...email clientsupport@airkast.com to setup a refresher course.

Hey Siri...Open MY app! (Google does it too!)

VOICE ACTIVATION AND YOUR MOBILE APPS

Apple released a series of announcements at their recent developer conference one that included access to local radio stations using Siri.

As an AirKast client did you know that you can already launch your local mobile apps by voice on your phone?  It works beautifully with Siri and Google Assistant on your phone.  All you have to do is ask them.

Voice activation is everywhere, that's why AirKast builds Alexa Smart Speaker skills for free as a companion to your mobile app, we're about audio everywhere!

We're also working with some companies right now to test voice-ads for Podcasters and new ways to share snackable audio in your mobile apps.  If you're interested in learning more email clientsupport@airkast.com

Happy New Year! New Dashboard and Live Analytics including Social Media!

New Year...New Dashboard! Throughout 2018 we have been listening to you about the need for new analytics that truly gives you the information you need to drive monetization and engagement.  Thanks for your input, we listened and you're going to love what we've done! Your new dashboard has a new look, live analytics at a glance both the Corporate and local level help you identify wins and losses.  Plus, new social media metrics, listener heat maps, and affinity categories help you make more informed decisions for Sales and Programming.  No more guessing and a faster path to revenue and more quarter hour listening. Your proprietary AirKast "Engagement Factor" helps you compare your monthly performance by giving you a common metric to measure your growth by looking at engagement across all aspect of your audience usage including podcasting, smart speakers, mobile streaming and social media channels.  Make decisions faster and more accurately with big data!

What's New!   "Engagement Ring" creates new mobile measurement performance standards New Dashboard layout with real-time analytics Social Media performance metrics Peer to peer performance comparisons Secure admin group analytics for Corporate management New "Affinity Categories" reveal new mobile sales opportunities CMS Integration - web promos go mobile with one-touch publishing See your current and previous month Engagement Factors along with Monthly Sessions at a glance! New interactive charts at both the corporate and local station level help you identify new mobile opportunities for sales and programming! New Age, Gender and Affinity category data that keeps you and your team informed as your mobile strategy and engagement grow!

Social Media Engagement Ever wonder how your mobile audience engages with your social media posts?  Track which posts get the most click-throughs and see the content that grabs the attention of your audience! Affinity Categories Turn mobile big data into Sales Now you can see what product categories your mobile listeners are most interested and target new clients with data! One Touch Promotional Scheduling  Now every time you add a piece of content to your website promotion slider it automatically appears on the homepage of your mobile app! Get the performance metrics and upsell your clients! Contact clientsupport@airkast.com to get it turned on!

Need training for Programming and Sales departments? Contact: michael.fischer@airkast.com

Microsoft's Cortana and AirKast: A Match Made In Heaven.

It's nearly impossible to turn on a television, open a magazine, walk into a retail store, shop online or turn on the radio without hearing about a new smart speaker.  The world is rapidly changing to a 'screen-less' world and your voice, now more than ever is in control.

This holiday season, smart speakers will be the hottest gift item due to their low cost and infinite power as a digital assistant.  Simple tasks such as finding time and weather, recipes, sports scores and news headlines become as easy as saying "start" or "play".

AirKast is proud to have been asked to be a beta partner in the development of Cortana smart speaker skills for Microsoft.   The newly released "Invoke" speaker from Harman-Kardon is the newest entry into the home entertainment world.  It's sleek design, numerous speakers for high fidelity playback and tap pad for shortcuts are just part of this amazing new product. Inside the Invoke are three woofers, three tweeters, two passive radiators, and a 40 - watt amplifier that creates a 360 degree sound that can fill a room and seven microphones so it can hear you from anywhere. Check out the full capabilities here.

What also differentiates the Cortana is that it not only works with smart speakers, it's compatible and/or pre-installed on all Windows 10 personal computers and Xbox and even your Android and Apple phones; opening up a whole new world beyond its competitors.  This ubiquitous distribution across multiple platforms is the first step in voice activation, anywhere, anytime and on any device.  It integrates with Skype, Linkedin, Outlook and Office 365 to name a few creating seamless integration into your daily personal and business life.  Another difference is that Cortana works with "AI or Artificial Intelligence" Bot's, little pieces of code that control your voice commands.  No more need to install skills or say "Alexa play" all you have to do is tap Cortana say "Start" and your audio session begins.

The world of AI in 2017 will be everywhere from personal assistants and smart speakers to industrial automation, the power of the human voice is changing the world at lightning speed and AirKast will continue to build smart speaker skills on all platforms for our clients as they emerge.

Best Practices: If You Use Push Notifications...Don't Be Pushy.

One of the most powerful tactics in your mobile arsenal is the use of push notifications.  It's important to remember that fans have self selected to 'opt-in' for the information and with that comes great responsibility.  More than any other mobile feature the acceptance of a push notification implies that the user trusts you'll be respectful of their time.

Marketing Land authored recently published "5 must-do push notification best practices for mobile marketers".  The article makes light of some key things to take into account when planning a push strategy.  If you don't have a long term, measurable strategy you're just using the tool as a tactic for short term gain.

Here's what they recommend as best practices:
1.  "Think Big"
2.  "Segment Smartly"
3.  "Define your KPI"
4.  "Timing matters and so does testing"
5.  "Use proven words and CTA's to entice users to take action"

Think Big
In an on demand world everything is breaking news, so how do we define what's "BIG"?  Think of it this way, scarcity and limited time events create interest and fear of missing out.  So ask yourself "Is this push notification exciting and relevant enough to have engagement impact".

Segment Smartly
The more relevant the information to the user, the greater the response rate.  Are you doing notification blasts and hoping for the best or have you researched and segmented your database before you set your push strategy.

Define Your KPI's
Is it downloads?  Is it click throughs?  Is it UGC?  How will you measure your results and benchmark it's success?

Timing And Testing Matter
Ready, Aim Fire!  Be sensitive to the scheduling of your messages.  When do you see the biggest usage peaks in your mobile app?  Are you using intelligent sending?  Are you using multi-language support?  Are you geo-targeting your messages?  These are critical things to think about before you send to the masses.

Use Proven Words
Words sell, it's that simple. Do your homework and think high impact/low word count when crafting your messages.

How Far Is Too Far?
Broadcasters need to be mindful of what they push out.  Irrelevant sales promotions will be your death knell so filter your opportunities wisely.  Push notifications should be about experience first and sales second.  "Wendy's wants you to sit in the first row for free" is different than a "2 for one"   Remember points 1 and 2 before you send a message, always question yourself "is it big enough and relevant enough" to use this sacred form of communication.

If A Picture Is Worth A 1000 Words...How Much Is A Video Worth?

If a picture is worth a 1000 words how much more value does video bring?  There are some impressive statistics to back up the use of video in your marketing efforts.

A May 2017 artictle on Tech.Co lists some of the staggering engagement numbers about video engagement and in particular, mobile.  Here are some very compelling reasons for you to include video in your mobile app.  It's not just for breaking news but retail views!

"More Than 50 Precent of All Videos Are Viewed on Mobile

Not only are more than 50 perecent of videos viewed on mobile, there’s been a 233 percent increase in viewing since 2013. It should be noted at the vast majority of views are through phones and not tablets. Mobile is also behind an overall 33 percent increase in video views. Anyone interested in mobile, video market should also know that their target audience members are frequently watching videos that are five minutes or longer."

And when it comes to making retail purchases the numbers are even more impressive.

"90 Percent of Users Say That Product Demo Videos Help Them Make Decisions

Using video helps customers through all parts of the consumer journey. This includes the phase where customers are narrowing down the products that interest them. By including product demonstration videos, brands can build goodwill by helping customers through the decision making process."

Mobile: Sure They Listen But Do You Know Where They Live?

One of the greatest challenges is working to identify who your mobile fans are.  Given that latitude and longitude are the most common data points; how do we as marketers build a profile of these active fans.  Most mobile apps will ask you to log in with a social network enabling them to capture some first person data that can help you start to build a profile and that's a great start.  When we build our apps we think about the audience first.  Not only what functionality will keep them engaged but what we do with the data we collect to build out new features.

There a number of easy ways to capture mobile user data.  Single sign on (SS0) is one such tactic but there's so much more that can be done.  If you don't have the ability to buy big data and overlay your audience you can start by doing some basic things:

1.  Mobile Only Contest Registration:  This may be one of the simplest things you can do by building hidden web pages or in app contest entry pages that allows you to collect first person data that can be merged with other user profiles.

2.  Gated and Windowed Content:  By creating content that is only open to premium users you can drive registration data.  An ongoing release of gated and windowed content allows you to create small chunks of bite size data on a regular basis which has high appeal (do your homework first to find hot topics!)

It's important to understand that mobile listening is different than desktop or listening and collecting mobile listener locations during live streaming will more than likely produce migration patterns during the day due to portability.  This is actually one of the greatest assets of mobile user data as it can give us insights to how people move around a city during the day.

Heat Maps and Retail Beacons

Heat Maps have been used in marketing research for decades and now that mobile users are not only receiving information they are also sending a wealth of information back to service providers.  At AirKast we allow our clients to quickly see where their mobile listeners are streaming from in a market down to County level.  Yet another data point that can be leverage for radio sales or programming or any advertising buyer who wants to know 'where do your users live'.

Below is a snapshot of a major national Conservative talk show host.  Not only do we see heavily concentrated listening areas but fringe areas where they are popular.  When working with national advertisers this is a great visual to explain where to aim your marketing.  The next immediate layer of data that will help guide your advertising efforts could be retail foot traffic attribution within these key states and counties.  You've now started to create a behavioral profile of your mobile audience.

Here are some quick stats on beacons:

65% of retails who employ the beacon technology claim they are able to target customers “down to the aisle level”;

24% of beacon adopters have registered a steady growth in sales;

59% of customers who receive beacon notifications feel more engaged in stores.

If relevancy drives engagement this combination of data can be a very potent mix for your mobile marketing plan.

Mobile Engagement. Is It Happy Ever After Or Death Do Us Part?

Cigar Dave Live from Las Vegas

The advertising world is abuzz with some key words when it comes to mobile users.  How many times have we heard the term 'immersive',  'engaging' and 'sticky'?  Bottom line is great content drives engagement.  The biggest challenge is how do we as marketers keep the content consistent with what the user expects (relevancy) and deliver that message without becoming annoying.

It's pretty hard to argue the facts:

"Mobile marketing's awesome potential in 2017 is reinforced with reports like this one: research firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that U.S. mobile-ad spend will exceed $40 billion -- and the industry can expect that number to pass $65 billion by 2020. Last year, mobile digital ad-spend fueled mobile-side growth on a path to outpace desktop ad-spend. Meanwhile, smartphones and tablet devices account for 51.3% of Internet use. By year's end, 75% of online content consumption will be mobile, media buying agency Zenith forecast late last year."

The value of video experiences continues to grow and when done in combination with programmatic and behavioral targeting campaign performance continues to prove its value.

The report later continues:

"New ways of approaching the mobile ad unit will drive a focus on key ideas, such as non-intrusive mobile experiences, dynamically animated and adhesive banners, and ad delivery that dovetails even further with consumers' locations and activities. Mobile video ad-spend is projected to exceed $6 billion by the end of 2017, meaning 2017 will be a prime moment for mobile marketing to capture its share of resulting media allocations."

Recently one of our clients "The Cigar Dave Show" took advantage of our in-app live video capabilities to help expose their clients at the Las Vegas International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers trade show  The goal was simply to give fans a behind the scenes look at some of the best new cigars and products.  Through a combination of push notifications and publishing a broadcast schedule in his app and email, nearly 600 fans turned on the live broadcast to watch Dave talk to his clients.

How well did it do in driving fan engagement?  How about a CTR over 3.2%?  Why did it work so well?  When fans can gain access to exclusive content that is timely and meaningful their curiosity gets the best of them and they become 'engaged'.  What's even more intriguing is that the broadcast was concurrently shown on YouTube and and still drew a significant number of fans to the mobile app. 

While most brands are fascinated with Facebook video, the only company that monetizes that activity is Facebook.  AirKast believe being in the path of the fan at all times is important but we shouldn't do it at the expense of brand control.  

How is your brand using mobile and video to drive engagement, relevancy and stickiness?