No time to read? Press play above and listen to the article!
Do you have a blog or are you a copywriter, journalist, columnist, editor or something related to online text publications? So, most likely, the engagement of your contents is one of your main concerns or ambitions – you want to positively impact the largest number of people within a target audience.
Currently, there are numerous strategies and tactics to increase the engagement of a content on the internet. This article will teach you a powerful and simple strategy. You will need to invest only about 10 minutes per text that you want the engagement to be improved.
This strategy increases your audience’s engagement with your content and has a better effect the more you apply it. In addition, virtually anyone can put it into practice. You don’t have to be an expert in digital marketing, content marketing or SEO.
We are talking about Text Narration, Audio Post or whatever you prefer to call it. Before showing the simple steps to apply this strategy, let’s address the logic behind the strength of this powerful concept that is gaining more and more relevance on the internet and in the daily lives of those who consume digital content.
Our research
Within the universe of people with smartphones or internet access, almost 90% read articles on the internet at least once a day. As we know, the amount of interesting content on the internet is huge. People are involved in increasingly fast-paced routines. This results in something alarming for any professional that works with content marketing:
Over 80% of respondents are unable to read everything they would like to on the internet.
Moreover, almost half of them do nothing about it. After all, saving a link to read later and never reading it counts as ‘nothing’.
On the other hand, listening to a text ends up being much more comfortable and practical and allows us to better use moments of our routine when it is impossible to read. As for example while commuting, walking, running, cooking, cleaning the house, walking the dog, washing clothes and many other activities in which we cannot read, but we can listen: consume content, be entertained and learn.
Reading vs. Listening
One is no better than the other. Each person has their preferences and each content has a different context. Some people may prefer to listen to a text. Others may prefer to read it.
There are also people who love to read, but prefer to listen to texts while commuting when they don’t have time to read what they would like to.
In more specific but also common cases, sometimes a person prefers to read texts on a certain topic. For example, economics. But when it comes to another subject, like sports, they prefer to listen.
It is indisputable that listening to texts is comfortable and practical. This can be done in countless situations where reading is impossible. If you read on your smartphone while driving, it is past time you stop it.
Increasing your content engagement
Since most people don’t even have time to read everything they would like to read on the internet, the power of audio post is clear. In addition to the obvious issue of increasing your content engagement, since a person who would not read your content can listen to it, we also have the matter of human connection.
Author and audience can connect even more. Or have you never been curious to hear the voice of a columnist you love, to feel the emotion in an author’s account or to capture the real intonation of an ironic phrase you read?
Certainly if you publish the text along with its audio version, more people in more situations will be able to consume your content.
It is important to emphasize that simply increasing engagement has a number of related benefits:
- More people consuming your content
- People who would leave the page because they have no time to read it, can now choose to stay on the page and listen to the audio
- This can increase the Average Time on Page – as seen in the Rock Content case study
- Longer Average Time on Page improves your SEO ranking – as seen in a SEMrush study
- Better SEO leads to more traffic to your blog
- More people consuming your content means more people moving onwards in your customer journey
- You can also use lead generation on audio posts
- More leads and more people on your sales funnel can lead to more sales
How to apply the audio post strategy in 10 minutes
Now let’s explore how simple and fast the process of giving voice to your texts is to increase the engagement and results generated with your content. Check it out!
Choose an audio platform
We recommend choosing an audio platform to store and distribute your content. The platform itself takes care of hosting your audio files and distributing them on your blog through a stable streaming or download service.
The VOOOZER platform, for example, is specifically developed for blogs and content marketing strategies. You can track valuable statistics on how much your audience is consuming your content and even generate leads with the player.
Another great thing about VOOOZER’s solution is that Instead of having to narrate your blog posts, you can hire monthly narrations that are delivered in up to 2 business days. Thus, your team remains focused on strategic issues and monitoring results – and not learning how to narrate nor being distracted from their main focus.
Publishing
If you are using VOOOZER’s platform, you don’t need to install anything on your blog or website and the narrations are published using an embed code: a single line of code that you copy and paste into the HTML of your blog post. This kind of embed code should be compatible with all main CMS softwares on the market, like WordPress, for example.
This very blog post you are on is an example: published in WordPress, the only thing we needed to do is paste the code in the HTML edition of the post.
Important precautions when publishing the narration of the text
Make sure to place the player at the top of your text. This way, your visitors will know about this option as soon as they load the page.
To ensure more engagement, point out the audio version before or after the player, that is, insert a call to action.
In it, present this comfortable option to your audience. This helps to prevent a person from mistaking the player for a banner or an advertisement or something else. Many blogs have inserted advertising between one paragraph and the other on their texts. A simple call to action helps in this regard.
Do you want to engage your audience even more and receive qualitative feedback? Ask them to comment on the experience of listening to your content.
Do you want to make the call to action even more contextualized? Use the keyword of your content in it. For example, “Press play and listen to our article about [keyword]”.
Keep track of your results
On the VOOOZER platform, for example, you can see how many Streams and Complete listenings (when the audio is played entirely) your audio content had.
By crossing this data with data from systems like Google Analytics, you can also find out what percentage of unique visits to a text resulted in a consumption of your audio content – this can be an indicator of how much the audio format is gaining relevance with your audience and how engaged your audience is.
10 minutes per text
The 10 minutes we refer to in the begging of this content covers:
- Order your narration
- Review the narration (it will be with you in 48 hours max)
- Publish the audio post in your blog
These are relatively simple and very objective tasks. Of course, depending on the size of the audio, it will take you less than 10 minutes or more. But it should be around this timeframe.
As the time invested per content is low, there is still time to invest in the most strategic issues: how to keep track of the results, optimize calls to action and work on the strategy as a whole.
Case studies
As we saw in the survey data, most people do not have time to read everything they would like to on the internet and this also affects large blogs and websites. Precisely for this reason that references in the content marketing area are already offering texts along with an audio version.
We have published audio posts case studies on our website. Here are some of our favorites:
- Rock Content – Average Time on Page increased by up to 43%
- RD Station – target audience experience enhanced and lead generation increased by 21%
- Siteware – blog lead generation increased by 27%
Putting it on your daily routine
In the same way that revising a text according to the best SEO practices has become a routine in the lives of so many copywriters, bloggers and editors, audio posts are increasingly conquering their space. One of the main reasons for this is its cost benefit: by simply adding an audio version to your blog post, you increase the distribution and consumption of a content that is already created.
Still, when comparing investment costs and mental effort in relation to other formats, audio posts are one of the most powerful, inexpensive and simple to execute options. Just compare it with the work and cost needed to produce a video, infographic or ebook.
If you are interested in boosting your content with Audio Marketing and enhancing your content marketing strategy, get in touch with our experts.
