Advertising Audio & Sonic Branding

Did you know that it only takes 0.146 seconds for a human to hear and interpret a sound?!? (Business News Daily) When we think of advertising, the first thing that comes to mind is visual, but the sounds in an ad can make or break it. Certain sounds can connect with your audience on an emotional level. Something further, sonic branding is a sound that is associated with your brand. Think of the Netflix sound when it launches. All of you reading this can hear it in your mind right now huh? We can too. Another way to use sound is in a retail environment and is probably the most common. Let’s dive into each a little deeper.

In Store Audio

1.     What type of emotion do you want to inspire? Calm, excited, secure? This will create the emotional state of your customers while they’re shopping in your store.

2.     Do you want them to stay a while or get in and get out? Most stores want people to stay unless they’re fast food or high turnover shops. If you want consumers to stay slower music is best. They stay longer. They spend more money. If in and out is what you want then fast paced music with upbeat tempo.

3.     Are you selecting music that your target audience would listen to? You want to ensure that your audience likes what they are hearing. Dive a little into your target audience. What is their demographic? When were they born? This will give you an idea of what kind of music to play.

Sonic Branding

1.     Keep the sound simple. Just a few tones that last a few seconds. It should be a musical mnemonic pattern that is easy to remember and listen too.

2.     Make your audience feel something. Create a sound that conveys the right emotional response. Think of sounds that you often hear such as the sound when you upload something on LinkedIn. It’s oddly satisfying. There’s a reason for this.

3.     Don’t plagiarize. Stand out and be unique with your tonal voice. Not only is this copyright infringement, it’s lazy.

Sounds in Advertisements

1.     Again, know the brand audience. What is the product for? Is it fitness or a massage? This will greatly effect the sounds you want to use in your ads.

2.     Consider the platform. Looping sounds do better on social media since it tends to disrupt the user less. This will also determine which music can go on your ads. You need to have proper clearance for copyright purposes.

3.     Create with mobile in mind. Most people will watch digital ads on their phones. So, unless your ad is running on Hulu as a commercial, you want to pick tracks that don’t have a lot of heavy bass.

4.     Sound effects might be needed. Sometimes an added sound effect might be needed to emphasize a key point in your ad. Don’t forget to use these to bring attention to the points of visual interest.

5.     Get the mix right. Most ads have voice over. It’s important that the music and/or sound effects don’t overpower this. Obviously, this will be done by an editing professional but should always be checked before going live.

Sound can be a very powerful tool in advertising that is quite often overlooked. It can be used to enhance certain aspects of your ads or as a tactic to keep customers in your store longer. Our favorite though, is sonic branding and how it can be just as memorable as a visual logo if not more. Sounds tend to get stuck in our heads because it takes less attention to recognize them while visuals require us to focus our vision from whatever we may already be doing to something else. Also, if you get it right people will remember your sonic branding for years to come!

Programmatic SEO

We all know that high SEO is important for your brand but what is programmatic SEO? Even if you’ve never heard of it, it is quite common practice in the digital space. Instead of spilling a definition at you, let’s look at an example of programmatic SEO and work our way backwards. Imagine you do a web search on best restaurants in (city) and when the results come back with a TripAdvisor page in at least the top 3. The reason for this is that they have a page for almost everything travel related anywhere in the world. They have to create thousands of landing pages in order to increase their SEO ranking. This is programmatic SEO in a nutshell. It is building a database of thousands of pages that are connected to a template in order to rank higher in Google’s search query. They all use similar, long-structure keywords. Brands can use this to write the content and publish for them instead of having to it all manually. So, how do you implement programmatic SEO? Here is a quick tips list to get you started.

1.     Choose your head terms: this is the overall broad categories. Advertising, advertising agency, content agency would be an example of some we would use. These will have a large search volume.

2.     Figure out what the modifier keywords are: Primary: found content agency, user-generated content agency. Secondary: advertising: user-generated content, found content, sourced content.

3.     Put them all together: it’s not uncommon to have 100K keywords.

4.     Do competitive analysis: what keywords and long for modifiers are your competition showing up on with Google search?

5.     Build the landing pages: they will all be a similar template but slightly unique. It’s important for the algorithm so it sees it as a unique value for visitors on each page.

Every brand can benefit from programmatic SEO, because every brand should have an online presence, no matter the size of the company. We live in a digital world, so improving your brand’s SEO will allow it to reach more people, make your site more attractive and the ROI on programmatic SEO is very high. It can also require much less time to achieve results.

De-Influencing

It seems that the forecast for trending influencer marketing uptick in 2023 may be fiction more than fact. We’ve reported that it may be trending upaward this upcoming year through our research, but with economic uncertainty on the rise, that may not be true at all. Everyone in the U.S. has been more cautious with their spending habits and has increased their scrutiny over “influencer authenticity.” This became a recent reality when a popular creator was accused of wearing fake eyelashes to promote L’Oréal mascara. Our favorite part of this scandal is that it has been coined “Mascaragate.” We love a good pun… When influencers are paid for their reviews by certain brands, it raises questions over the authenticity of their reviews and promotions. Rightfully so! We find it hard trust anyone who was paid by a company to give me a review on a product or service. Would they tell me if the product sucked? Probably not. Influencer marketing worked in the past because their reviews were true to their opinions without any influence from particular companies. Therefore, something that created trust at the birth of the influencer was their negative reviews on any given products/services. This is actually the concept of de-influencer. De-influencer is defined as the act of telling followers what not to buy. This could be a way to bring trust back into the brand to audience gap but there are still issues here. Even if an influencer says use this and not that, are they being paid by the brand who they’re telling people to use? Gen Z’s trust in influencer marketing has been waning quite a bit since the end of 2022. There is a heightened need for authenticity.

While we don’t have all the answers, but we do think that investing in micro-influencers and regular people is where this road will lead. Found content is going to be that pot of gold at the end of the metaphorical rainbow. Investing in real people to connect authentically with people is where it’s at. It makes sense. Brands collaborating with micro-influencers whose audiences’ see as more trustworthy is another solution to this connection problem. It’s time to start fixing the trust issues with good content and transparency!