This is a guest post by voiceover artist Richard Heathcote. While working together on a couple of projects, I asked him to outline the business case for audio content online. Here’s his answer.

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.

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:

• welcome messages, (always opt-in – there’s nothing worse than things blaring at you without your control!) 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.

Quality wise, these would be the kind of things that you would expect to hear on any radio station.

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.

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.

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.