Businesses define themselves in a number of ways. Their logo, specific colors, and spokespeople or persons that represent their brand all play a significant role in how they interact with their audiences. One of the most often overlooked parts of a brand is their audio. Consumers are bombarded with visual messages, so using the radio to improve the company’s audio branding could be the perfect way to cut through the noise and get your audiences to remember you.

What is audio branding?

Audio branding is a marketing element where brands utilize signature sounds or music to express their brand identity. There are a few different types of audio branding, like the sound you hear when connecting to Skype, or the 20th Century Fox music you hear before a movie starts. When companies create sounds or musical signatures to help define their brand, it becomes easily recognizable. According to the Harvard Business Review, “The right sounds can positively differentiate a brand by creating customer preference, improving recall and building trust.”

What does that mean? Gary Vaynerchuk sums it up nice and simple. “Over the next decade or two, what your brand sounds like is actually going to be an unbelievable crucial variable of success in a world that will be driven primarily by two things: voice and brand.”

Using Radio to Improve your Audio Brand

Here are a few things to consider:

• Radio is one of the most widely-listened-to mediums. In fact, radio has a weekly reach of over 90% among adults. By using this tactic, you will quickly improve your audio branding.
  

• People listen to radio for extended periods of time. According to new data on music consumption released by Nielsen, Americans spend more than 4.5 hours per day (32.1 hours per week) listening to music. Branded sounds linger in a consumer’s mind for a long time, especially when hearing them several times a day. When audio branding using radio, companies can get their brand to listeners’ brains faster and more effectively because they already spend several hours a day with radio.
  

• There is a wide range of demographics listening to radio. With such a large range of radio listeners varying in age, gender and interests, companies can easily match their station of choice to an audience for a cohesive radio audio branding initiative. According to Inside Radio, radio’s continuing supremacy in the audio universe is due in part to its ubiquity and ease of use. “All the other ways you can use audio do not appear to be coming at the expense of radio. There are just as many people listening to the radio now as in past years. It’s an addictive thing,” says Miller.

If your company does not utilize radio for audio branding, then you could be missing out on a huge percent of the population who might need what you are offering. Radio has been around for ages and is still one of the most popular mediums for getting information.

Paying attention to your radio audio branding will be increasingly important to help form a deeper relationship with audiences, a relationship that moves beyond visuals. Even when someone can’t “see” the brand, having a strong audio brand presence will have the same, or stronger effect. Understanding how you can utilize this to move the brand forward will help increase brand identity and market share, now and in the future.

For more information on how to improve your audio branding, contact the team at Zimmer Marketing today.