Building Brand Awareness, Trust, And Loyalty Through Audio Content

Articles that entertain, educate, and problem-solve and can add tremendous value to your customer’s journey. Regardless of industry, they’re an effective way of building brand awareness, trust, and loyalty. However effectiveness is relative isn’t it?

Noting the ‘TL;DR’ effect – ‘too long; didn’t read’ – where 55% of audiences read a blog post for 15 seconds or less, and the average visitor only reads 25% of an article, it’s clear that the effectiveness of articles have diminished.

There’s a growing preference for video content, which makes sense considering the reduced audience attention span. However many businesses have limited capability or budget to develop engaging video content.

Luckily, there’s a growing interest for audio content. In fact, a research conducted by Edison Research and Triton Digital revealed that time spent listening to any kind of online audio is at a record high in 2019 at an average of 16 hours and 43 minutes per week.

Podcast listeners in Australia alone has seen an increase of 52% of listeners aged between 18 to 54, and 93% of listeners complete ‘all’ or ‘most’ of the episodes they listen to. As marketers, these statistics serves as a strong indication that audio content should form part of our content marketing strategies.

Audio fosters strong relationships between the listener and your brand

That’s because audio is an intimate content format. Through repeated sessions of tuning in to audio content, a relationship begins to form between the listener and the presenter – and by extension, your brand. This relationship is important because it signals trust and loyalty to your brand which opens up opportunities for advertising.

Podcasting in particular was shown to be an effective medium for advertising with 63% of listeners having taken some form of action based on advertising or sponsorships. In Australia, brands such as BPAY and Dare Iced Coffee have partnered with comedic duo Hamish and Andy to successfully drive brand consideration and product awareness.

Through these and many other partnerships, it was also revealed that 56% of Hamish and Andy podcast listeners recall the brand as the show sponsor and 43% of those who recalled the sponsorship took some form of action with the brand.

Furthermore, 23% felt more positive towards the brand as a result of the partnership and 53% of Hamish and Andy podcast listeners are more likely to consider brands, products, and services that they recommend.

Technology has paved the way for innovation

The advancement of smart speakers and voice assistants has paved the way for marketers to experiment with interactive audio content. In fact, research shows a staggering amount of benefits for including interactive content as part your content strategy:

• 88% of marketers said that interactive content is effective in differentiating their brand from their competitors (SnapApp)
• 81% of marketers agree that interactive content is much more effective at grabbing people’s attention than static content (Content Marketing Institute and Ion Interactive)
• 66% of marketers have reported greater audience engagement after using interactive content (SnapApp)
• Interactive content generates two times more conversions than passive content (Demand Metric)

The statistics clearly show a shift in preference towards interactive content and indeed, brands have begun to jump on the bandwagon with pet care brand, Purina, recording their own audio content called Ask Purina. Ask Purina allows dog owners and enthusiasts to interact with the Skill through Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, to access a library of educational content relating to dog breeds.

User comments praise Ask Purina on the amount of quality information provided and its integration with Amazon Echo Show devices. This helps establish Purina as a trustworthy brand especially for new dog owners who have yet to establish brand loyalty to another brand of dog food.