When we think about creating marketing content, most of us don’t think about neuroscience. But this academic discipline offers many insights into how to market a product or service. In fact, it’s such a popular marketing strategy that it’s acquired its own name—neuromarketing. It involves taking advantage of the wealth of information gleaned from measuring the brain’s electrical fluctuations to drive positive consumer engagement with marketing content.
Rest assured, there is no need to hire a neuroscientist for your brand. Luckily, you can tap into feedback, information and advice from existing neuromarketing research to help you put together a more focused, results-driven content marketing plan. In this blog post, we're going to explore five ways neuromarketing insights can improve your content marketing.
1. Use Emotions to Wake up the Brain
Our human brains kick into high gear when we’re stimulated by powerful, intense emotions. Content that triggers strong emotions—positive or negative—plays a key role in activating our brains. In turn, we're more likely to absorb and retain the content to which we're being exposed.
One of the best ways to trigger strong emotions is to pair visual and textual content with sound. As we point out in our eBook, The Secret Power of Sound: 22 Sonic Branding Insights for 2022, sound is quickly routed to parts of the brain that deal with very basic functions—"precortical areas" that are not part of the wiring for conscious thinking. These are places where emotions are generated. Emotions are evolutionary “fast responses”—things you don't have to think about. They’re rapid delivery systems in the brain.
Sound drives emotions. That’s why it hits you in the gut.
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As Seth Horowitz, author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, the human brain desperately seeks rhythms. It not only seeks rhythms but also patterns in pitch, too—that have a mathematical regularity and that capture the brain's attention. As a result, sound gets into your head and stays there.
Sound is also rich with patterns that carry information. And when the brain processes sound, it actually resonates with it, like a tuning fork that's been struck.
That’s the reason why sound has the ability to create indelible memories. And that’s why your brand needs a sonic brand (a/k/a audio logo) and a complete audio brand strategy.
Want to know what else? We humans respond to sound 10 to 100 times faster than we respond to sight. And since it’s stored in our echoic memory, not our iconic memory (which is where visuals are stored), sound makes its way into our long-term memory way faster than visuals or words do.
Really, sound is beautiful way to gain the unfair competitive advantage your brand needs.
"Sound drives emotions.
That’s why it hits you in the gut."
~ The ChromeOrange Media Sonic Branding Squad, The Secret Power of Sound: 22 Sonic Branding Insights for 2022
2. Appeal to the Brain’s Self-Serving Instincts
Our human brains have evolved to be self-serving—to react in ways that help us feel good about ourselves. Thus, content marketing pieces that stroke the consumer’s ego and make them feel validated and at peace with their own emotional, physical, and mental condition is more likely to be well-received. And again, sound can be a powerful vehicle for creating perceptions that lead to that inner peace.
3. Feed the Brain’s Desire for Familiarity
The reason why branding is such a powerful part of marketing is that our human brains desire consistency in the world around us. Indeed, when we recognize familiar patterns, our brains respond by producing the pleasure-inducing neurochemical dopamine. A 2019 study found that hearing music and sounds we like makes our human brains release more dopamine. And dopamine—a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functioning—plays a direct role in the reward experience that is induced by music.
But it’s got to be the right sound—one that creates an emotional connection to the brand and is part of the deliverance of memorable brand interaction. Kind of like a hit song that everyone loves. That’s why it’s so important to work with a sonic branding agency whose sonic brand developers have experience developing hit songs.
4. Keep it Simple
Anything that our brains perceive as difficult to process and interpret automatically becomes more complicated and time-consuming for consumers—like website copy that's too wordy or is written in words most people would need a dictionary to understand. Or content formatted in a fancy, ornate font that’s hard to read (including logos designed with such fonts) and complex graphics that are hard to interpret or are just plain too “busy.” Sound that is inappropriate for the brand will have the same effect on consumers.
The goal of sound branding is to "marry" all aspects of your brand messaging—visuals, messaging and sound.
5. Use Sound to Communicate What Words Alone Can't
Netflix is a great example of a brand that has used sound to communicate something that wouldn't have the same impact if delivered in words. A couple of years ago, they debuted a new sonic logo that literally is the sonic equivalent of "Ta-Dah!" It communicates the imitation of fanfare or taking a bow in a way that the words “ta dah” on a screen cannot.
For more information about sonic branding, audio brand strategy, and the application of sound and music in brand messaging, digital advertising, UX, visit our sonic branding page or email us at info@chromeorangemedia.com.
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