How audiograms can help you attract clients

Added 26/10/23 - 3 min read

When you’re scrolling through social media, you’ll often come across brands sharing short audio snippets, accompanied by visuals such as soundwaves, photos or animated subtitles.

These are called audiograms, and are becoming an increasingly popular and effective marketing tool for brands.

Often, audiograms are snappy messages that simply explain a particular problem that a business can help with, or signpost followers to a new product or service.

Alternatively, they might be brief previews and trailers for a longer piece of audio content, such as a podcast.

So how can you adopt audiograms for your business and get the most out of these short clips?

Share graphics alongside your audiogram

An audio clip alone isn’t enough to grab people’s attention. It should be accompanied by an eye-catching image that reflects your company’s wider branding, so it’s immediately clear to people who has posted the audiogram.

Keep them short and simple

People don’t want to make a big time commitment as they’re scrolling through social media feeds, so it’s best to post brief clips to encourage people to listen.

Add captions

Captions ensure people can still consume your content even if they have the sound switched off on their device, and makes it accessible to people with hearing impairments.

Add a catchy headline

Viewers might have their autoplay option switched off, so make sure your clip is accompanied by an engaging headline, so it grabs their attention and encourages them to listen.

Optimise for different devices

With so many people checking their feeds on mobile devices such as smartphones, it’s important to make sure your audiograms are mobile-friendly, with any text and visuals able to be seen clearly on smaller screens.

Optimise for different platforms

Don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach, as different platforms have their own user base and ways of engaging with people. For example, a longer audiogram may be suitable on LinkedIn or YouTube, but not on Instagram, where a much shorter, punchier and attention-grabbing clip might be more effective.

Read more: What social media channel is best for your firm?

Test, test, test

Track the performance of your audiograms to measure their reach, engagement and conversion rates, so you can see what’s working best, and use this data to inform your approach in the future.

Add a Call to Action (CTA)

Encourage people who listen to your audiogram to take a clear and compelling course of action, such as visiting your website, subscribing to a newsletter or filling in a contact form.

Not only does this help to move people further along the sales funnel, it gives you a way to accurately measure the effectiveness of your audiograms as a marketing tool and how many conversions they’re helping to drive.

Encourage others to share

Once created, audiograms can go on websites on different social platforms and be shared with sales teams to push out on their personal channels too.

Tease and engage

If you’re posting an audiogram to encourage people to listen to a longer piece of content, such as a podcast, choose a segment that helps to preview it without giving away too much.

What free tools can I use to create audiograms?

There are several free options for creating audiograms that are really simple and straightforward to use.

Headliner

This free tool allows you to create audiograms quickly and easily on any device, including your mobile phone. Although paid packages are available, in many cases, the free option should be more than suitable for your needs.

Descript

This tool uses AI technology to make caption editing really easy, and there are loads of templates and visuals such as progress bars and waveforms that you can choose from to enhance your audio. However, there’s no mobile option for Descript.

Canva

Canva is another easy-to-use option that offers a mobile app as well as a desktop version. Although it does not create auto-generated captions, you can add text manually.