The written word always has its place in content marketing. However, adding audio and visual content can elevate your ad to even better heights. Nowadays, live video marketing is one of the forerunners in the content marketing scene while audio content is being increasingly consumed across demographics in new and innovative ways.

According to Statista forecasts that audio and spend could grow from 28.4 billion to 31.7 billion U.S. dollars between 2010 and 2020. As we enter 2018, here are some tips to add audio marketing content to your content strategy.

Podcasting

Podcasts aren’t new, but their popularity is growing steadily thanks primarily to their convenience factor. Plus, there are still so many niches and industries without relevant podcasts. According to Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP of Marketing and Host of The Growth Show, HubSpot, “Marketing is about being where your prospective customers are, good marketing is about being there and adding something of value.” Furthermore, Anderson commented that her organization understood that more and more of their users were consuming audio content.

Webinars

Webinars are powerful customer and prospect engagement mediums that deserve to be experimented with. You can think of a webinar as an online presentation or show which can be used to demonstrate products or services, host a Q&A or even have a roundtable discussion. With webinars, the user is able to learn how to get more out of the tool, and, in return, businesses get more active users. There is no point in selling anything during the session, as there is no conversion in a traditional sense. Rather, the idea is to bring value to the spectator and to solve his or her problem. Therefore, you can bring reputable experts to your webinars, to take one step towards brand loyalty. Likewise, while webinars are primarily visual mediums, audio-only webinars do exist, and audio content can easily be extracted and reused elsewhere.

Anchor App

The anchor is a growing iOS and Android app that is steadily attracting podcasters and radio station hosts. With it, you can record and manage a station with ethereal audio content that expires after twenty-four hours. You can also archive content before it expires, which turns it into a podcast with episodes that are always available to your audience. Anchor content — or “Waves” — can also be accessed via smart home assistants, or via in-vehicle interfaces. Anchor also provides a service that enables you to set up a podcast on popular podcasting platforms like iTunes and Google Play using your archived Anchor content. Lifehacker has taken advantage of this service, launching their Anchor-native podcast.

Alexa Skills

As the popularity of Amazon’s line of Echo products increases, the nifty Alexa Skill needs less and less of an introduction. In essence, they’re apps that function through audio commands made to your Amazon Echo device. Therefore, you can leverage Alexa skills to create a list of signals that can help users to reach out to your business, when in need. All they have to do is say their name and your company name to their Alexa-powered device and you can get notified via Slack. It’s also worth noting that while Alexa Skills are currently the most popular smart home assistant apps, Google Home and Apple Homepod equivalents will also be big players in 2018 and beyond.

Audiograms

Audiograms make audio content easier to share across social media and give some vibrancy to your content that would otherwise give listeners nothing to look at as they listen. WNYC, the radio and podcast station enjoys the use of audiograms, releasing their own audiogram generator which is free and accessible via Github. The station published a Medium post shortly after making their tool public, stating that their Twitter research shows that the average engagement level for an audiogram is “8x higher than a non-audiogram tweet.” On Facebook, they are seeing some audiograms outperform photos and links by 58 percent and 83 percent respectively.

Voice Search

According to Comscore, 50 percent of all web searches will be voice searches by 2020, and that’s again thanks in part to smart home assistants as well as smart virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana. Voice search optimization has thus emerged as a way for brands to ensure that, when consumers ask Siri about a question, it’s their web page that pops up with the best answer. The renowned SEO company Yoast has laid out some foundations for a voice search optimization, explaining that content writers should take into account the “Five W’s” when writing content intended for voice searches: The five Ws encompass the five primary ways humans ask questions when it comes to searching with their voice; who, what, when, where, why and how.

(All photographs are courtesy of the original owners unless otherwise indicated)