Audio Branding for Business

Companies spend huge dollars on advertising and marketing campaigns across all forms of media; from the internet, radio, TV to the range of social media channels. All these mediums aim to ultimately promote a brand and drive potential customers to a business. However, if they’re not enhancing the customer experience with their brand, they’re wasting their time and money.

Branding vs. audio branding

At its most intrinsic level, “brand” refers to the perception of your company by the customer. It therefore becomes worthwhile to invest time and resources into developing a brand that will promote the core values of your company as well as the added value of your product whilst resonating positively with your potential customers. Audio branding refers to the development of a clear and unmistakable sound that represents your company’s values.

Developing your brand identity

When developing your brand primarily you need to consider who you are and what you are trying to achieve. Are you an informal service? Do you consider yourself to be operating at a corporate level or are you community service oriented? Are you trying to fill a certain niche or trying to maintain a head in a competitive market? Answering these questions are important as the answers should converge, allowing you to identify and create your company’s image.

Furthermore your brand should present a unified image across every medium. This means that the brand has to be consistently portrayed at every touchpoint of customer interaction.

Audio branding elements

Your company’s audio brand is made up of several elements, including: your audio logo, your brand’s voice, music branding, functional sounds and more. Be aware that many audio branding agencies will neglect seeing your business phone as an important audio branding outlet.

Phone audio branding

Just as your online presence has a defined marketing image, so too your telephone on hold system should align with that image. Like every other touchpoint with your company, your on hold music and messages shouldn’t be boring or unappealing. Rather, they need to be optimized to their full potential of bringing value to your company. This is achieved by having your already developed brand image synthesized into your on hold telephone system.   

The potential mishap is that many regard the telephone on hold system to be just a small part of a business, that doesn’t get much, if any attention. This attitude certainly does not warrant any significant outlay of effort or resources. However this pitfall neglects the importance of consistently engaging with customers at an optimum and positive level so that they will want to engage with you.

Business phones – where musical branding matters

A positive on hold music experience paired with a helpful and accurate voice messaging are known to have a direct effect on customer perceptions of your brand. Callers are likely to build affinity for your brand if they feel that they have achieved their objective through their call, that the messages were useful and the music was pleasant to listen to.

In contrast, if callers hear ubiquitous messages that are unhelpful, tired elevator type music or even worse a dead silence, they will be repelled. By subjecting callers to that type of customer experience, any type of branding effort that you may have spent developing elsewhere is going to be totally ineffective.    

Turning on hold time into a positive experience

When a customer has already called your company, you’re really duty bound to seize the opportunity. In marketing terms it is as if you’ve practically arrived at the other end of the rainbow, as you’ve already managed to capture their attention and now they are making the effort to reach out to you. Grab the opportunity to make the most of their on hold time by greeting callers with professional voice messages and music. Provide interesting content that is relevant to your business, but don’t go overboard by sounding like an infomercial.

By keeping messages short and informative and as much as possible helping callers address their needs efficiently, you will make their hold time a positive interaction, rather than a necessary evil. This is a powerful tool for building a great brand image, after all now your callers are engaged, they are listening and they are connecting with your brand. While you are now building brand loyalty and a pathway to success.