Audio Marketing
In the current business world, we're becoming more and more tech savvy, and, to an extent, dependent on multimedia. We've got everything from YouTube to online radio, picture galleries and podcasts, amongst huge amounts of others.
Audio in Internet Marketing
Certainly in the business world, we're expecting to see more of it on people's websites, rather than just them being all text with the odd token stock image of people in suits standing by water coolers. The use of video and audio on sites is becoming increasingly common: either a short corporate video on the homepage, an audio welcome giving some simple website navigation advice or help, or as is becoming increasingly common, the on-screen floating presenter giving a visual welcome.
Get your message heard loud and clear
Audio wise, there are several impactful ways of attracting your audience's attention when they land on your home page. For instance:
- Online Radio Ads - just like regular radio ads that will talk about your business, but they're simply hosted online.
- Audio FAQ's - Gives your site more personality by 'personally' answering the most common questions people may have.
- Audio Greeting - a clip which welcomes people to your website, helps guide navigation and encourages the call to action.
All audio clips are produced to broadcast quality standards.
A new and different audience
The main benefit of using audio for your business is that it can 'hit' an audience that perhaps you wouldn't have had access to before. For those of you who have a basic understanding of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), wordy websites are great if the visitor prefers absorbing information in a text format, not so good if the person prefers to receive information in a visual, kinesthetic or audio way.
By using lots of different types of multimedia, you stand a far better chance of getting your message across to lots of different, and new, people, which ultimately stands you in better stead of winning more new clients from it.
Ultimately, it's also about being wholly accessible to many different types of people, following the same logic to the 'accessible to all' rules set out by the Disability Discrimination Act: giving across all your information in as many formats as possible to please as many people as possible. Whatever you are trying to achieve with your online marketing, it's crucial to ensure that your material is accessible to everyone.
Proactive audio marketing
So, by now let's say you have audio on your website. That's only really any good if people happen to be on it! You need to get the word out to people that you have lots of mutimedia for them to digest. Which is where we come on to podcasts.
A podcast can often be thought of as a mini business radio show. It's a piece of audio that gives a radio-style sound, that is totally branded up for your business, talking about current events, offers, news, and general information that your audience will find interesting and appealing.
Podcasts are a fantastic way of getting your message across proactively, especially when combined with an existing e-marketing campaign. With an audio option, your audience can be getting on with something else but taking in much of the information within that podcast subconsciously; like when you listen to the radio and suddenly hear your favourite song, or you hear your name mentioned, you just automatically tune in to the bits that are of interest to you.
The other benefit with audio: you can pack a lot into a short amount of time. One minute of audio is roughly the equivalent of one page of reasonably dense A4 text. Some people (non-text people) could be put off reading that much of a company's information, but don't feel that listening for 60 seconds is a long time.
Reaching a Wider Audience with the iTunes Podcast Directory
There is also an even better tool for opening your business up to an even wider audience. And that is the iTunes Podcast Directory.
This directory is accessible globally, and it's 100% free to include your own podcast stream within it. It has an audience of millions, if not billions of people, who can all, on their own computers, subscribe to your feed and automatically download all future episodes that you publish.
It doesn't end there. You also have the ability to maintain your corporate branding by having a dedicated 'cover art' image with your logo, and also displayed within your stream, or channel, a permanent link back to your website.
It looks a little something like this:
Bring on the traffic
The biggest plus point with audio and all multimedia is how viral it can be. It's material that is easily passed on to other people (for example, 're- tweeted' if you're using Twitter). It's ease of integration into social media applications such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever you may use is highly powerful.
It's relatively easy to publicise your audio and video clips in various social media campaigns to draw traffic to your site. In this way, audio is another tool to attract visitors from the start, keep them there, and also, in an ideal world, (with regularly changing content), keep people coming back regularly for more.