5 Lessons for Better Audio Integration in Your Marketing Strategy

Grow Your Presence in the World of Audio

The audio-friendly content space is multiplying by the minute. Modern consumers have an overwhelming amount of audio content to choose from, whether audiobooks, podcasts, smart speakers, music streaming, voice assistants, or connected cars. This brings new opportunities for brands looking to grow and connect with their audience further. However, to navigate these flourishing sonic mediums that rely on sound, voice, and music, a comprehensive strategy must be in place. Your brand must either grow its presence in this brave new world of audio or risk falling behind the competitors who have put effort into their audio branding.

1. Look At the Broad Picture

Brand sounds can be anything. If you think about it, they are already everywhere. The voices, tones, and noises your audience encounters when they call your customer support,t watch your video ads, or use your products. Even the ‘pling’ from the chat function that springs up when they visit your website counts. For example, just think of the rustling sound of a Doritos chips packet or the engine roar from a Harley Davidson motorbike. Both iconic sounds that we automatically associate with these brands.

Consider the sounds, music, and noises your customers encounter when they get in touch with your brand. Is there any consistency in the way your company uses sound to engage your customers? Even silence is a way to brand yourself, and conscious use of sound can enhance the consumer experience and help customers make positive associations with your brand.

The total sum of your brand’s sonic output makes up your company’s audio identity, so it is important to put some thought into even the smallest sound.

2. Choose a Strategy for Building Your Audio Brand

There is more to audio branding than simply exposing your audience to pleasant-sounding music designed to make your brand seem more approachable. Audio branding requires an extensive strategy that, via thorough analysis, determines which sounds, music, and voices are most in line with the message you want to convey.

To build your brand’s sound, you must create audio guidelines, just as you have guidelines for your visual branding. This ensures that your audio brand accurately represents the company’s values and identity, and it will work as a building block to form a mental image of the brand in the minds of your customers.

3. Let Your Audio Theme Evolve

Don’t be afraid to give your audio theme a facelift. You are not married to a specific music number simply because it has been chosen for your previous brand campaigns. Just as visual campaigns are rarely entirely identical, but can change colors, fonts, and features over time, so is your musical themes bound to change. The important thing is to keep the core of your audio brand but let it gracefully evolve as time and audience taste change.

When creating an effective audio strategy, bear in mind that your audio theme has to handle a lot of wear and tear. Cultivating the brand sound can help your audio brand retain a timeless air without losing its allure because there is room for variation. The McDonald’s audio logo is an excellent example of how a brand’s sound can appear in various styles without compromising its core identity.

4. Analyze and Keep It Objective

It can be a tricky business to transform a visual brand into an audio style. Interpreting a brand’s attributes into sound and music isn’t always easy, especially since music is a highly subjective experience. While some people prefer the warm sound of an acoustic singer/songwriter tune, others might connect better with upbeat pop music or the jam of a guitar-heavy rock song.

The sheer range of individual preferences can be enough to make any marketer hesitate to choose a specific song to represent the brand.

The analytical process of objectifying music, voice, and sound and aligning them to brand values is the benefit of audio branding. Once a set of audio guidelines have been established, and the core elements of a branded sound are in place, individual preferences become less of a roadblock. While they are still important to consider, the result of sound analysis now provides a range of top choices to pick from. The marketers can then go ahead and choose the juiciest tune to match their audio campaigns.

5. Find Your Place in the New World of Audio

Visual branding methods have had decades to develop, as new channels have popped up over time. The last significant change had happened just recently when smartphones and online streaming toppled TV and print media to take over as the new kings of marketing. The emergence of new digital platforms and channels created a void of visual content that brands soon filled.

Now, there is a new player in town. Amazon’s Alexa and Echo, along with Google’s Assistant, are forcing audio marketing in new directions with unknown customer experiences yet to be mapped out. The current technology is taking branding possibilities to new heights with constant development and almost daily launch of brand-new voice- and sound-driven apps.

Modern multisensory marketing is growing rapidly with audio at the forefront, and it is giving the visual-oriented world new challenges to face. Audio is becoming an integral part of our lives while liberating us from our previous involvement with screens. As a result, creating a viable audio strategy will be the key to future customer interaction.