The value of voice: why video and audio content is on the rise

The voice economy is emerging, and audio and video content gives businesses an easy way to tap into this new catalyst for super-fast growth.
May 30, 2019

The value of voice has never been greater. The 20th century workplace depended on text to communicate, but today's business world relies on audio and video to get a message across. The numbers don't lie: online video and podcasts are more popular than ever and continue to rise.f/p>

Consumers have been driving the trend toward the spoken word and businesses have been close behind them: the popularity of voice-led content has led to an emerging voice economy. Businesses of all sizes have realized that audio and video content are a great way to reach consumers. If content is king, audio and video content are emperor.

 

What does audio and video content mean?

Audio and video content for business comes in different forms. Here are a few examples:

 

How-to videos, product demos & tutorials

A way to explain how a product or service works while also engaging with customers. 65% of people are visual learners, so this is a great way to educate an audience.

Case studies

Video and audio case studies present customers talking about their experience with a company on film. It's one thing for a company to talk about how much customers love them, but hearing it directly from a happy customer's mouth adds credibility and builds trust.

Company culture

Internal recruiters love to sell culture when searching for candidates, and video is a great way to communicate this. By seeing footage of the office space and hearing from employees, culture comes alive.

Podcasts

Industry thought leaders, experts, journalists and more put their voice to the microphone to record compelling ideas and thoughts on a regular basis, following a recent trend for slow journalism.

 

Podcasts and audio content for business created by automated transcription

 

 

What makes audio and video content so popular?

It's obvious that audio and video content can lead to an increase in revenue for lots of different kinds of companies. But why is this kind of content more popular than a blog article or an ebook?

 

1. Hearing a voice creates an emotional connection with the listener

Possibly the biggest reason for the popularity of audio and video content is that it forms an emotional connection with the viewer. Every person's voice is unique, like a vocal fingerprint. There's an intimate connection that's made when people hear other people speak - this makes voice an incredibly powerful tool for content.

Brian Peters, digital marketing strategist at Buffer, says 'audio is one of the most 'personal and intimate' types of media available, allowing people to connect on a much deeper and more meaningful level.' And when voice is combined with visuals to make video content, the content producer can use a palette of emotions to create content that a lot of people want to view and engage with.

2. Visual content is easiest to consume

Of the five senses, sight sends the most amount of information to the brain - in fact, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. Video content is the fastest way to get into the brain of the viewer, which means people can consume content faster.

Video and audio content also require a lot less effort to consume. The easier it is to get content and information, the more popular it will be.

 

Converting voice to text makes it easier to produce video content

 

3. Audio content lets people multitask

Even though video is the fastest growing type of content, audio content is the second-most preferred kind of content today. Driven by a need to accomplish more with less - and at breakneck speeds - today's consumers love content that they can listen to while they're doing something else.

Podcasts have recently increased in popularity, probably because the perfect passenger for a daily commute: the listener doesn't have to watch anything or give their full attention. Consumers can also listen to them while doing household chores or at the gym. Audio-only content is perfect for passive consumption and gives businesses a way to reach audiences during times that would otherwise be blackout zones for content reach.

 

The value of voice to business

There are a lot of ways to tap into the voice economy with audio and video content. Here are just a few:

 

Audio and video content improve SEO

When a webpage has audio or video content, visitors spend more time on the page, called dwell time, which is a ranking factor for Google and other search engines. Not only that, but adding the text transcript to the webpage makes the video easier to search: Google can't search video, but it can crawl and index video text transripts in search results.

Building trust

Hearing people speak builds trust in customers. When there's a voice behind a company, viewers are more likely to trust a company, whether it's a case study, employee testimonial or thought-leadership podcast.

Increased conversions

Video content has a positive effect on a company's bottom line: 70% of businesses report that video performs better than other content for producing conversions.

 

With so much audio/video communication happening in today's workplace, businesses need tools that let them manage and search content so that they can realize its full potential. Trint is unlocking the emerging voice economy by realizing value from the spoken word. Find out more about how your business can use Trint Enterprise to produce better audio and video content, faster.

 

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Michael Nelson-Wolter, Marketing Manager

Michael worked for 8+ years as a manual transcriber in the US and UK before building an in-house transcription department for a mobile-to-web software company. He then moved to content marketing and now works in digital marketing. Michael loves to write about emerging technology, digital trends and the ways technology makes our lives easier.

 

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