In this last period, when in the SEO and marketing fields we refer to the “voice” the first thing that immediately comes to mind is the “vocal search” and how this will change the serp in the coming years.
But today we want to talk about podcasts , or rather the possibility for brands to do digital storytelling (and therefore brand awareness ) with the voice , a tool that seemed out of fashion and that instead is returning strongly to the fore.
The numbers say it, and as usual those coming from the USA, which is always a few years ahead of the latest trends in digital marketing that will then also affect Europe and in particular Italy: in the last 10 years, users of content audio have more than doubled and in the past year (2018) 48 million American users have listened to at least one podcast a week.
Interesting and constantly growing numbers, which are making many companies reflect on the benefits of this tool for their marketing.
But let’s first of all understand exactly what a podcast is and how it is made.
Podcast: what it is and how it is made
The podcast is a digital technology that allows you to listen to audio files normally distributed through RSS feeds and channels to which you can subscribe to automatically receive updates.
In the podcast, unlike what happens in the radio (which we could call its ancestor), the audio is digitized and transformed into a file located on a specific server, and to which you can connect to download and listen to it by typing in the browser a specific URL.
So the podcast is not “live” (live voice), but rather a “deferred” distributed recording (indeed, the more correct term is on-demand) through an audio file to which all interested users can connect (even simultaneously) to listen to it; the podcast therefore does not provide for the possibility of interacting with who is speaking, but we could always make available to listeners a system of comments to which they can then respond later.
In this sense, the podcast is a perfect tool for all those “niche” narrative programs that are based on a story that has “something to tell and to transmit”, and therefore perfect for brands that want to communicate their storytelling .
Podcast to raise brand awareness
In an increasingly fast and multi-tasking world, the podcast seems to be taking its revenge, with numbers constantly growing.
We can listen to the podcast even while we are intent on doing other things and the narrating voice, as shown by many psychological studies, seems to have an emotional impact and on the listener’s memory much stronger than a document to be read.
Ease of use, absence of distractions within the message, attention and emotion: all qualities that a well-made podcast possesses and that are very useful to make your storytelling more effective and “remembering”.
The voice hits our most archaic system of communication, when the “stories” were transmitted only orally and entrusted to the mnemonic capacity of the listeners; for this mechanism, and in a completely natural and spontaneous way, the mention of a brand within a podcast has a 16% more chance of being remembered and brand awareness can be engaging up to an incredible 89% more compared to a text message.
Hence, the voice is back in fashion, listened mainly by smartphones while one is busy with something else; becomes an intimate companion who then guides our choices and preferences with intense and captivating stories.