Over the last few years, the digital audience has evolved significantly to what we can probably call the “hyperconnected audience”. Your audience is 24/7 connected to the internet, consuming content across various formats across a variety of devices. It has led to massive growth in smartphone penetration in the last few years. Let’s take a recent report by Deloitte titled “Global mobile consumer trends” as an example. It predicts that more than 80% of the population across the world now owns a smartphone. And more than 50% of the population has access to high-speed 4G data.
This massive growth has led to an evolution of the digital audience in what we often call “the new-age audience”, characterized by:
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1) Multi-Device: Most of them own multiple devices, with at least 1 of them getting carried around by them 24/7.
2) Multi-Format: They are consuming content in various formats across these multiple devices.
3) Multi-Tasking: Content consumption is now a part of daily life. They are consuming content dedicatedly while also doing other things like working, driving, cooking, etc.
4) Multi-Location: People consume content across many locations. At home, in the car, in the subway, in school, in colleges, offices, cafes, etc.
The Emergence of Audio as a Content Medium
Audio has strongly emerged as a content consumption medium led by the growth and popularity of spoken audio formats like podcasts and audio articles (like the ones we help create at Listen2It)
Spoken audio has been the main growth driver for this increase in the preference for audio content.
6 Advantages of Audio Content Marketing
1) Audio Helps Break the Clutter in Content Marketing
It is becoming more and more challenging to stand out and drive audience growth in the crowded text and video content landscape. According to the Content Trends Report by BuzzSumo, the number of page views on WordPress posts has been declining since March 2017, even though the content base continues to grow year on year. Social sharing of content has also reduced by 50% since March 2015. The share of social traffic from Facebook, which had gone higher than search in 2015, is now roughly half of it.
Source: BuzzSumo Content Trends Report
In this crowded content environment, audio content is still less competitive as a content format. This coupled with the fact that the consumption rate of audio content continues to grow strongly, audio can be a clutter-breaking content format for you to reach out to and engage your audience.
2) The Audio Audience Is Highly Engaged
Audio is the most natural of the mediums from us. As humans, audio remains the most common mode of communication. We are used to listening even before we are born.
In groundbreaking research, Entercom and the market research firm Alter Agents studied how “Immersive” we are when consuming audio vs other content formats. The results were precise: Immersion (which predicts sales) was the highest for audio across all studied formats.
Source: Radio World
According to data released by Midroll, podcast listeners are making it through 90% of a podcast episode on average. It’s coupled with the average podcast length being close to 30 minutes, as brands get access to a hyper-engaged audience for a very long time.
3) Audio Content Leads to Higher Leads and Sales
Audio listening is an exclusive experience. Listeners highly engage for an extended time. And this results in an excellent affinity for them to react to brand messaging and advertising. According to a study done by Westwood One, more and more advertisers are now getting onto the audio advertising bandwagon. 37% of modern marketers are likely to do podcast advertising in a survey, up from just 10% in 2015.
Separate research by Edison Research on “Super Listeners” 2020 discovers that 49% of listeners agree that podcast advertising is the best way to reach out to the 54% of them are likely to purchase a product after listening to an advertisement on podcasts. 48% pay more attention to advertising on podcasts than on any other medium.
No wonder, podcast advertising is expected to double to $1.8 billion by 2024.
4) Audio Content Drives Accessibility
Well designed audio content inherently increases the accessibility of your content marketing initiatives.
Various studies have shown the results of improving accessibility to the business. Not only does it help drive traffic from differently-abled users but it has a strong link to driving between user experience and improving indexing by search engineers.
5) Audio Opens up Newer Channels
Audio platforms have recently seen a very strong growth spurt led by increased audio consumption over the internet. Between the two largest podcast platforms on the Internet – Apple and Spotify podcasts, they command more than 50 million monthly listeners, with the number continuing to grow yearly. Other platforms like Anchor.fm, Google podcasts also have a large listener base.
Audio content allows you to access and reach out to the consumers on these platforms. They are generally more engaged and highly targetable users.
6) Audio Content Is No Longer Hard to Create
One of the big challenges in audio was creating the content. However, over the years the audio content creation technology has dramatically increased. Creating a podcast is now as simple as editing text with the launch of new tools like Descript.
Tools like Listen2It (yes, us!) allow you to automate the entire audio content creation process itself with zero effort. You can just create text content as you would normally do, and we will auto-publish an audio version, post it to your selected podcast networks and drive new audience and growth for your business.
