Audio Marketing

With the wealth of  what’s known as ‘web 2.0′ applications being more commonplace nowadays, I think it’s fair to say we’re living in a much more multimedia-centric society. We’re totally familiar with the likes of online radio, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook among many others. For the most part, these rely on rich media, namely images, graphics video and audio content.

Most definitely in the business world, we expect to see more of it on websites, rather than the static over-used stock images of people at water coolers looking like they’re fashion models for a catalogue. Using audio and video on sites nowadays is becoming more common; a short corporate video, an audio/video advert of some sort, a website welcome message of some sort be it audio or video.

Get your message heard loud and clear

With audio, there are many powerful ways of grabbing your audience’s attention when they arrive on your home page. For instance:

• website welcome messages, (I say they should always be opt-in – there’s nothing worse than things blaring at you without your permission!) that will direct you around the website;
• audio versions of your FAQ pages;
• radio style web adverts that can appear anywhere on your site and promote what you do or a special offer you currently have on.

In terms of quality, these would be similar to anything you would hear on a major radio station.

A new and different audience

The benefit with utilising multimedia is that it can immediately hit an audience you wouldn’t have had access to before. The basics of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) show that people absorb information in different ways, some prefer text, some images, some kinaesthetic, some video, and some audio. By companies adopting a mentally of ‘information access-to-all’, then they will be absolutely better off for it, and long term win more clients by freely giving across the relevant information in multiple formats.

Proactive audio marketing

Let’s assume then that you now have audio on your website; it’s only ever any good if people happen to be on your website to listen to it! This is where podcasts come into their own.

A podcast is like a mini business radio show, it’s audio that gives you that professional radio quality sound, branded up completely as your own business. in this you can talk about anything, current events, industry news, special offers or just general information that most people should find useful.

The benefit with podcasts is that they can be totally proactive, when integrated in your existing e-marketing campaigns, mentioned in the email as a link where people can click through and go and listen directly to the new edition that month for instance.

Because you have an audio option, more potential clients than normal will tune in as they can listen to it whilst doing other things. As soon as they subconsciously hear something that interests them, they tune in to it more, mentally. This could be just the thing that triggers them to pick up the phone and win you that new client.

The other benefit with audio: you can pack a lot into a short amount of time. One minute of audio is roughly the

BRING ON THE TRAFFIC

The biggest benefit with all multimedia is how viral it is. It’s material that is far more likely to be passed on to other people through social media channels for instance. In the case of Twitter, you could be quite surprised as to the amount of times things can be ‘re-tweeted’. Its ease of integration into social media such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or whatever you may use is very easy, and incredibly powerful.

By having any material you produce branded up with your company and web link, both in the content and the text/imagery that may surround it, you’re continuing to make it easy for people to click through to your site, which is exactly what you want them to do. Audio, in this way, is just another tool to help attract visitors to your website from the start, keep them there, and to make sure they come back regularly for more.