Use Audio Content to Get Your Marketing Prospects to Really Listen

How does your business cut through all the noise with its marketing? You’re competing with endless email blasts, social media scrolling, and a dozen other competitors. What if you could bypass the screen and speak directly to your prospects during their commute, at the gym, or while they’re walking the dog?

That’s the opportunity that audio marketing offers you.

What is Audio Content Marketing, Anyway?

Audio content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing valuable, consistent audio content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.

We know, we know… the last thing the world needs is another podcast. That said, a podcast is just one example of audio content marketing. In addition to a podcast—or an episodic series of audio shows dedicated to building your authority on a subject—there are other forms your marketing can take:

• Audio blogs - Recording a reading of one of your published blogs and embedding it on the appropriate page.
• Audio newsletters - Similarly to the blogs, record a reading of your newsletter articles and share them with your email list.

However you use it, audio isn’t something your business should ignore.

Audio Marketing Can Help Advance Numerous Goals

Regardless of industry or specialty, and regardless of what you sell, you need to first and foremost earn your audience's trust. Audio content can help you share content that informs them, yes, but also does so in a way that highlights your personality and emphasizes your reliability.

Let’s review the various goals that audio content can help you pursue:

Cultivate Trust Within Your Audience
As we said, audio content helps emphasize your reliability, which, in turn, helps nurture trust. Let your audience hear just how seriously you take your business. The impressions this creates turn you into an advisor to those who work with you, rather than just another vendor.

Reach Your Audience In New Places
Email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, and all of the other activities we recommend here can be incredibly impactful at the right time and place. What about the other times, though, like when a target is driving or they’re on a run? Providing content in this different format allows you to get their attention when you otherwise couldn’t.

Generate Topics for Other Content
We’re also all about recycling marketing materials, particularly when they can be so challenging and time-consuming to create in the first place. Audio content you create can be revisited and repurposed into a variety of collateral, such as blog posts, guides, social media posts, and more. Why work harder when you can work smarter?

Stand Out from Your Competitors
Let me ask you this… how many of your direct competitors are currently using audio in their marketing activities? You can stand out simply by offering something different to your audience, making your name the one someone in need thinks of first.

How to Start Using Audio in Your Marketing

Let’s walk through the steps that you’ll need to follow in order to adopt audio content marketing practices.

Identify Who to Talk to, and How to Talk to Them
Given how saturated podcasts have become, it is critical that you find a niche. Take a moment and think about what your audience looks like, what they’ll care most about, and how to communicate with them most effectively. Once you’ve done so, aggressively maintain this focus so you can connect with those you are trying to reach more earnestly.

As you find your niche, being more specific will help you attract your exact audience.

Get What You Need
To create your auditory collateral, you’ll need the right tools. Mind you, we said the right tools… the right tools aren’t necessarily the most expensive ones. Get a microphone of reasonably decent quality, and you should be fine. You aren’t trying to capture high-fidelity audio; you’re trying to be heard. Keep it simple.

Similarly, you’ll need the software to edit your podcast, as well as a host (or distributor) to share it… but that’s only necessary if you wish to reach a really wide audience. Otherwise, put it on YouTube, SoundCloud, or a similar platform and embed it on your website.

Promote Your Efforts
It’s one thing for you to produce a podcast and make it available for people to listen to. Getting people to listen to it is quite another. Use all the marketing tools we so often recommend to direct attention to this one. Send an email to those who have opted in, letting them know a new episode is up, and share the link to it on your business’ social media.

You should also remember that a podcast isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so make sure you’re doing what we suggested before and use what you discuss in your audio content to inspire other forms of marketing collateral, like blogs and the rest. Reference your audio in these materials to send people to your website to listen, prompting them to learn more and keeping them in your marketing funnel.

For More Marketing Assistance, Look No Further

We’ve been helping businesses—especially managed service providers—strategize and execute their marketing for many years. If you’d like to learn more about what we could provide for you, reach out to us!