Archive for Audio Marketing Tips
7 Things To Look For In An On-Hold Marketing Company
Posted by: | CommentsNobody wants to be put on hold when they call a business, especially in today’s world of too many tasks, and too little time to get them all done. Being put on hold is a certain way to irritate even the most patient caller. The worst offenders put their callers on hold with dead space, leaving the caller to wonder if they’ve been disconnected. While you have your caller’s attention and ear, you should be using that time to your advantage and to his. You want to think like a caller, and do what you can to not only give him your message, but make it worth his while to be on hold.
"Did I Get Disconnected?"
While you have a caller on the line waiting for your attention, you have an opportunity to not only make an impression on him about your company, but also promote your company’s products, services, and special promotions. With a creative on-hold message, you can educate, sell, entertain, or all three at the same time, resulting in lower frustration for your callers and better returns for your business.
Don’t be afraid of the technology or the unknown. The range of options and prices may surprise you. There are many equipment options available today for on-hold marketing and phone systems, including virtual on hold systems. The equipment prices at the low end allow even a home-based business to enjoy the benefits of on-hold marketing. With the technology available, every business, no matter the size or location, can use their on-hold time to their advantage.
So, what should you look for in a reputable, professional on-hold company?
1) An experienced on-hold messaging service provider should have a list of equipment options available for you to choose from and a knowledge about the benefits and drawbacks of each. Prices should be clear and up-front, with no hidden costs.
2) They should be able to either install the on-hold equipment for you, guide you through it, or arrange for it to be professionally installed.
3) You should have your choice of either male or female professional voice talent, with demos available of each.
4) The music a reputable on-hold marketing studio uses should be royalty-free, or the company should offer licensing as part of the price.
5) A professional on-hold message company will offer a choice of music styles. If you get lucky, you’ll find an on-hold company run by gifted musicians (like New England Multimedia) who custom-write original material for every on-hold message.
6) Scriptwriting should be part of the package. If you want to write your own on-hold message script to save money, be sure to read it out loud yourself and see how long your message is with breaks, or you may get caught in a frustrating cycle of emails back and forth with the company as they instruct you to cut, and then cut some more.
7) A professional on-hold marketing company should offer to contact you a couple of weeks before an update is due, to give you time to get your marketing materials together.
Did you know?: New England Multimedia started out exclusively as an on-hold marketing company called “Soundtrax Unlimited,” with little more than a 4-track recorder, keyboard, guitar, bass, and microphone. Scott literally picked up the Yellow Pages and began cold-calling every business in the book to offer our telephone on-hold message services; at one point, he was the voice of nearly every Auto Body Shop in Rhode Island! Back in those days, he’d hook up a standard CD player to a business’s phone system to get them up and running. Script-writing, voiceovers, and all-original music with quarterly updates kept them coming back, and that’s how we paid the bills while Scott built New England Multimedia into a multimedia business offering website development, on-hold marketing, video production and more.
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Michelle handles all Social Media for New England Multimedia. You can contact her by email, on our Facebook, or on our Twitter.
The Cost of Poor Audio Quality
Posted by: | Commentsby Scott Quillin, for New England Multimedia
"Make it STOP!"
The quality of audio in an advertisement, whether radio or video, has a definite effect on the public’s perception of the quality of the product or service you provide. While “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” poor quality audio is apparent to everyone listening. Many businesses don’t realize the negative effect low-quality sound has on their brand.
It’s easy to hear the difference in audio quality between a professionally-produced product and one produced with sub-par technology. When it comes to the transmission, reception, or reproduction of sound, audio sometimes ends up at the bottom of the technical food chain. This has never been more apparent in the flood of online web videos, podcasts, music sites and marketing material uploaded to the Internet each day.
Truth is, in some applications, there are applications where you can record using “cheap” video but use professionally-produced sound quality, and still result in a professional experience.
Not convinced?
Paranormal Activity, an independent horror film written and directed by Oren Peli, had a nationwide release on October 16, 2009. Peli chose to shoot the picture with a hand-held home video camera to focus on believability and authenticity.
According to an article in Entertainment Weekly, the film was shot with a Sony FX1 camcorder and edited on a Dell PC using Sony Vegas.
The audio was recorded and processed professionally to give it that “cinematic” quality – even with intentional low-quality video production.
This is just one example of the importance of high-quality audio production to deliver a professional quality product.
Scott is the CEO and Founder of New England Multimedia. You can contact him by email, on our Facebook, or on our Twitter.
How A Pest Control Company Got My Attention
Posted by: | CommentsYesterday I was deliberately plodding through a stack of business cards, checking out their associated websites and looking for signs of Social Media integration, when I happened upon a website that grabbed my attention. It at once amused me, interested me, and got me to stay on their site for much longer than I had the time to, even though I had absolutely no interest in their services. And now that company’s name and brand is in my head, in my memory, waiting for a future moment when I will need their services (and hopefully I won’t).
What was it that kept me on New England Pest Control’s website for a good ten minutes?
They made me laugh. First, they have a unique and fun landing page that seized my attention, and secondly, they’ve incorporated fun, quirky audio sound effects into their menu.
The sound I heard when the Big Blue Bug dropped into the page made me smile, and then I looked around the page for social media information.
Having Too Much Fun To Leave
Nothing there. But the menu items were quirky, with a retro style, and the next thing I knew, my mouse headed for one of them. As my cursor approached the cartoon image of a woman standing on a chair screaming, she — well, she screamed!
Now I started hovering over each link to see what sounds they had associated with them, and then I started playing games with myself, hovering over the links in different succession. Maybe I’m easily amused. But what I did next is what they hoped for:
I clicked a link.
In this case, I clicked “About Us.” Then they had me, and the wooing began. Their “About Us” was interesting enough to keep me on the site even longer, poking around until I realized I had spent too much time already and went back to work.
New England Pest Control’s web designer used Flash on their website to get the audio effects that entertained me.
Scott explains, “New England Pest Control’s website uses Flash to create a more interactive multimedia experience than just text and images can produce. Flash allows you to animate graphics and embed audio (including sounds, music, voiceover, etc.), and gives your overall brand a unique approach to design. It’s like a standard website on steroids.”
To increase conversions (visitors who become customers), there are several ways to implement audio on your website besides what New England Pest Control has done. We’ll cover those in later blogs.
By the way — I only remember one other website from the whole stack of business cards I went through.
Good job, New England Pest Control. You made me look!
Note: Because I want your comment to stand, please read our simple comment policy before replying! Thank-you!
Michelle handles all Social Media for New England Multimedia. You can contact her by email, on our Facebook, or on our Twitter.
