Steps to marketing your brand online part 2

Once you have developed a strong marketing personality, it is wise to use all the marketing outlets available to deliver your message in a memorable manner.

How We Learn, Comprehend, and Remember
There have been many misguided web development and marketing decisions based on the assumption that all people learn best through visual presentations. The truth is that multiple studies have confirmed that most people will learn best as the result of verbal presentations,
not visual. Several studies have indeed shown that auditory presentations are by far superior to visual presentations in most circumstances.

Evidence further suggests that our retention is best when information is presented in anecdotal narratives or as stories, rather than just as a flat presentation of facts and figures. The fact that oral storytelling helps to increase motivation, memory, and comprehension can be seen in the paper published by Bree Patrick Luck from the Psychology Department of Georgia Southern University entitled Information Relevance and Recognition Memory: First, Second, and Third Person, Narrative. When designing your marketing strategy for the web this
is a key point to remember.

Our natural inclination as humans is to relate to one another in a linear oral narrative. This is directly opposed to the non-linear hyperlinks that are embedded in many web sites we see these days. This style of relating is bound to be less effective at communicating our message persuasively to our potential customers.

To present your message with a memorable and very human voice you should carefully craft your web site with structure and a linear movement. Adding hyperlinks all over your page gives your audience the capacity to wander around aimlessly through your web site and never really hear or understand your message. It is like leaving the back gate open and wondering why the dog is no longer in the yard. You may be wondering why most of the web sites you currently visit are not constructed to really communicate with the audience, and the short answer is that many of the top visual design schools these days do an excellent job of teaching design but totally nothing in terms of teaching communications skills.

One of the top authorities on the spoken language in the country is David Pisoni who is a professor of psychology and cognitive science and the director of Indiana University's Speech Research Laboratory. They study many facets of how people both perceive and process
spoken language. Their research includes how people respond to sounds, word recognition, lexical access (how people use memory to understand the meanings of sounds), and spoken language and sentence comprehension.

Some of the key results of Pisoni’s research are vital to helping marketing professionals make better use of web sites to communicate with potential customers.

1. It is easier to process content from a familiar voice.
2. Memory and understanding are enhanced by an audience that stores information about voice characteristics including dialect, gender, pitch, speaking rate, eccentricities and emotional state. These characteristics give the audience an oral understanding of
personality and character.
3. The spoken voice is a much richer form of communication that visual methods, it is not abstract.

The Use of a Marketing Voice
The challenges of using audio to delver your web based marketing message have more to do with developing an understanding of psychology, medium, process, and environment than they do with using the technology available to implement it.

We have seen the use of oral presentations by some innovative small business owners that are early adaptors. While there attempts are in the right direction, in order to truly get the results they are looking for their best bet is to hire a trained voice over talent in order to present the information. A professional voice can really enhance the oral presentation.

Professional speakers, authors, and presenters have also been early to grasp the power of oral web presentations. While this may seem a natural blend of talent and technology, the truth is that presenting in front of a crowd with the help of visual aids is a whole different
ballgame than presenting over the web. The web-based audience will be less likely to forgive stumbles or errors over the course of a presentation than will a live audience who is face to face with a dynamic speaker. You will present a sloppy and unprofessional image if you use a flawed audio presentation on your web site.

The Familiar But Not Quite Recognizable Choice
Think about all those familiar voices you hear pitching you everything from toilet bowl cleaners to vacation planning on television commercials. Many well known actors are hired by marketing companies to add their voice to fifteen or thirty second commercials. While
we never see the famous face, they are relying on the subtle impact of voice recognition to sell us the product. While these actors are never identified, recent examples include Gene Hackman speaking for Lowe’s and Keifer Sutherland speaking for Ford.

A study authored jointly by Mark Forehand of the University of Washington Business School and Andrew Perkins of Rice University has shown that the presence of a celebrity voice can have an impact on the consumers impression of a brand, even when they have no idea
that it is a celebrity. The use of a celebrity voice is just one of many techniques used by savvy marketers to influence consumers without their conscious awareness, a technique referred to as implicit cognition.

While hiring a celebrity is out of range for most small businesses, you can hire a professional who is capable of imitating the cadence, style of delivery of a well liked celebrity in order to deliver your audio marketing message. This way you can have that signature voice as
your marketing persona without the expense and hassles involved with working with a real celebrity.

A skilled marketing professional can take advantage of implicit cognition by using a voice with some variation of voice characteristics to define the personality of the company. You can use this voice to get all the psychological benefits of a web based audio presentation.

The Rational Approach is Over-rated
A book written by Malcolm Gladwell called the “The Tipping Point” has pointed out that patients are more likely to sue a doctor who ignored them than one who is incompetent. Even if they make a mistake, doctors who are liked by patients are less likely to get sued.

You must always remember that your customers are much more than deals or numbers, they are people. Marketing attempts, including web sites, are bound to be disappointing as long as customers are not treated as human beings.

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Steps To Marketing Your Brand Online Part 2