What does every small business need? An upper-hand or a way to stand out when marketing amidst the power of the Fortune 500 competitors. Sound in marketing is that secret sauce.
What if I were to tell you that sonic branding is just as important as choosing your logo, and brand colors and fonts? Or what about how in a recent IPSOS study, only 8% of marketers used sonic branding in their marketing but were 8.5X more likely to be high performers than those without?
What if I told you that approximately 83% of marketers rely exclusively on visual marketing?
Sound is this little known and highly misunderstood super power that takes your brand marketing from “meh” to “wow” in as little as half a second. That’s the power of sound. Fast, effective, memorable, and action inducing. All major players in effective brand marketing.
So why aren’t more brands investing in sound?
Sound strategy is the marketing secret sauce that any brand, both big and small has access to. Sure, Coke is a master at marketing but what about the little guy? Where’s that small business underdog story we all love to hear about in all of this?
Here’s 3 reasons that I believe sonic branding hasn’t caught on yet within the Stan’s Fans and Peter’s Pumpkins of small business.
Most people think that sonic branding means music and if they are not musical then they wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. Or they might think that it’s only for those with huge marketing budgets because all they’ve ever seen is the big bombastic Apple campaigns where their massive music licensing budget allows them access to any big band they could ever dream to license.
Sonic branding is sound. It’s not just about music.
Break it down further and sounds are vibrations. Vibrations are caused by movement. And everything and everyone moves. So in essence, sound is a part of us. We all should be able to understand movement and vibrations in one way or another.
They think sound in marketing is experimental and untested.
Based on the stats listed above, you already know that’s a myth. Sound marketing has been around far longer than the printed word. And as of 2016, 14% of the world was still illiterate. Television, radio, and moving pictures are all only around 100 years old. Sound is not new and it is not experimental.
Sound has been around since the beginning of whatever the beginning was.
Sound and the senses is what makes us human and a human connection is what modern media is calling for. An immersive customer experience. This is it folks. You can’t get more immersive than the senses.
They think sound in marketing is icing on the cake.
Most everyone now-a-days treats sound and music as the afterthought. Something to be dropped in after the strategy and production has been completed. But herein lies the danger.
Music and sound is part of the story. If you finish your campaign without the sound, then you’ve lost part of your story.
Without story, you lose contextual messaging. This, in turn, loses your significance and sincerity with potential audiences.
All we really want is to relate to others and have them relate back to us. We do this through an emotional connection. If we want our customers to relate to our brand, then our brand has to be able to emote. We have five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell.
To get the most immersive and emotional connection from our brand, we need to figure out how to incorporate as many of the senses as we can.
In digital marketing, touch taste and smell are not available to us (yet). But sound is.
So why not try and discover what our brand sounds like?
