iframe>
Many of our blog readers have asked us about the “Listen to this article” widget at the top (almost) of every post on our site.
To answer both you and our content marketing consulting team Question about this new functionality, my colleague Anthony Helmstetter interviewed me to learn more about our audio articles widget and how it helped us increase time on site from 4 minutes to over 9 minutes for the listener.
Let's dive into:
Anthony Helmstetter: Why did you decide to put “Listen to this article” on the Convince & Convert blog pages? Obviously, now you can go to the blog, and you can read the post OR listen to it – it doesn't make a difference. Are people taking advantage? What was the original motivation for doing this and where did the idea come from?
Megan Leap: Audio content and voice activated content had been at the forefront of Jay Baer (our brave leader) for some time. Last summer, he attended VOICE Summit in New Jersey and see impressive case study session from Alex Eremia in Bingewith . He immediately introduced me to Alex via email and told me to set up a demo with her to see if Bingewith was a good fit for our site.
I received a demo and sold quite a few. Since we are new to AI-generated audio content (but not audio in general), we decided to do a quick test and add the “Listen to this article” widget to four of the Most popular articles on our site and see if the function increases time on site.
Anthony Helmstetter: Okay, so what is the expected result? Is there a thesis?
Megan Leap: Yes, we will see an increase in time on site for people who have opted in to listen to the article. Alex explains that when people choose to listen to the article, they are more likely to stay on the site because some people prefer listening to reading.
Anthony Helmstetter: So time on site increased because people were actually listening longer instead of reading a paragraph or two and then walking away. That will eventually increase other more meaningful metrics, like total engagement or conversions.
Megan Leap: Yes, exactly. The increased time will lead to better engagement and overall more interactions and conversions.
In February 2020, listeners spent about 9:31 minimum on our site compared to readers, who spent 3:51 minutes.
Anthony Helmstetter: Did you consider other tools before deciding to test this program?
Megan Leap: Now that's a good question. Normally, I would suggest evaluating more solutions, but we liked Bingewith, it's easy to use, and decided to use it without looking around.
Anthony Helmstetter: Set up how?
Megan Leap: So as I explained, instead of rolling this out to the entire site, we picked some of our top articles and added the Bingewith plugin to those pages and we let it run for about 4 hours. week and the results are amazing. Time on our site doubles for those who listen instead of just read. So we decided to continue featuring Bingewith on our blog posts.
Anthony Helmstetter: So you've got a test in the test program so to speak, but it's not on the entire site. Is that intentional now?
Megan Leap: Bingewith continues to add the audio player to more articles each month. The player is viewing 600 articles on our website. Not all of our pages receive this much traffic. Some classic, non-optimized posts only get 1 or 2 hits per month or less (another thing is settlement – that's for another post), so the widget isn't on each post. I wish all 2400 articles on our site had significant traffic! We focus on getting Bingewith on the pages with the most traffic.
Anthony Helmstetter: It's the 80/rule, which can be for any site with any important content in it. Please clarify for us what pages Bingewith decides to activate by voice or do you decide that?
Megan Leap: At first, I decided. But they got over that. But I'm sure you know, if we want to get it on certain pages, we can. It is very easy. We can put it on any page of our website that we want.
Anthony Helmstetter: What is their business model? What is their success metric?
Megan Leap: Bingewith has a monthly subscription.
Anthony Helmstetter: Subscribers/publishers, in this case, Persuasion and Conversions, do they pay based on the number of audio posts? Or the articles heard?
Megan Leap: I wouldn't be surprised if that's ultimately where they go with it, but right now, it's really affordable. And that's $19.95 a month for our site. I wouldn't be surprised if the model or price eventually goes up. That's a great solution!
Anthony Helmstetter: So right now, in our case as a publisher, we pay a flat monthly fee of 20 a lot to have a meaningful piece of existing content audio. Is ours enabled by this feature? Right?
Megan Leap: That's so great. Yes!
Anthony Helmstetter: Why aren't any content sites testing this for $20 a month?
Megan Leap: I think they just don't know about it.
I'm sure it's hard to sell to some people because it's not a perfect solution. Apparently, the sound is generated by AI. A robotic voice, Vogue.com, can be difficult to sell to Anna Wintour. But we are a technology company, so all is well.
Occasionally we have people contact us and complain that it looks like a robot is reading the article. Out of our hundreds of thousands of readers, maybe three responded to our newsletter or emailed us to vent about “robots.” But that's how AI works. It is a robot. And we wouldn't be able to have any sound functionality without our robotic friends. Jay actually experimented with recording himself reading the day's articles. It was extremely resource intensive, and that initiative didn't last long. This is a much more affordable solution that doesn't require us to do anything.
They can also improve the robot's "voice" at some point and can reproduce Jay's Voice, mine, or yours. Great, isn't it?
Anthony Helmstetter: Okay, let's dive into that. Because so far, we've talked about how this works from our perspective as publishers. You mentioned feedback from users and visitors to the site. Your data and metrics say time on site increased, which is representative of engagement and interest.
What anecdotal feedback did you get from your readers, other than that it sounded like a robot?
Megan Leap: I asked for feedback many times in our newsletter, but no one gave us any. We could do a survey on people and ask them or some form that pops up on our site and asks them, but we didn't do that. We are continuing to use it based on results.
Anthony Helmstetter: What is the next step in the voice plan for this specific content site that you help oversee?
Megan Leap: There are two things I want to do in the future:
1) Since we are a website that educates marketers, I wanted to explain the audio widget included in/around the widget – so that our readers understand why we have it on our websites. our article and how useful it is.
2) I also want to see if Bingewith can reproduce Jay's voice so the robot doesn't sound more like Jay. That's what I believe they're working on.
Anthony Helmstetter: Is there a timeframe for that? I mean, I've heard rumors that they're working on the possibility of creating an AI voice synthesizer for a specific personality like Jay Baer. Have you heard of a possible timeframe within?
Megan Leap: I know they're working on it (or were)… Jay is all for it so we could definitely be a guinea pig and give it a try.
Anthony Helmstetter: The robotic AI voice translator can now actually take on an Alexa-type personality type for a specific individual, a celebrity, or a subject matter expert.
Megan Leap: Yes correct!
Anthony Helmstetter: Final question: are we compensated in any way for promoting this tool?
Megan Leap: Not all! Just big fans and excited to explain to our customers and readers how they can take advantage of the audio functionality in their content.
If you have any questions or would like to request a consultation with a content strategist on our team, simply fill out the form below. We'd love to chat with you about audio-powered content and content marketing strategies your own .
Post a Comment
Post a Comment