Enhancing your brand with sound
In the dynamic realm of marketing, the quest to capture and engage with a captive audience is a perpetual challenge. While visual elements do tend to steal the show, the contribution of music and sound effects is often overlooked. Music can evoke different emotions, create unforgettable memories, and forge deeper connections with the viewer/customer. For this reason, it’s important for creators to not ignore their soundtrack and sound effects.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the remarkable influence of music in marketing and discover how you can leverage it. Take your marketing efforts to new places by learning how to tap into this dynamic source of royalty free music.
Set the right tone
Music sets the stage for your brand. It’s a powerful tool to define the tone you’re looking for, letting your audience immediately understand what they’re in for. Do you use something loud and heavy hitting, or more subtle, or happier, or more whimsical? The right music quickly immerses your audience into the world of your business – whether physical product or personality – and you must use it to evoke the necessary excitement, inspire trust, or even create a sense of nostalgia. If you don’t select music that aligns with your brand, then something’s going to just feel off and your video might fail to resonate.
With Smartsound Cloud’s collection of music, it’s not hard to set that right tone. We’ve got a huge library full of uplifting melodies and epic sounds with a wide range of genres and styles to suit every brand’s personality and intention.
Create a memorable brand identity
In the same way that your logo is a visual representation of your brand, music can serve as an auditory symbol that helps to immediately identify your company. Think of how easy it is to recognize a Star Wars or Indiana Jones production just by ear, or the Microsoft Windows tone, or any other number of marketable sounds. Creating a distinct auditory identity for your brand increases brand recognition and really sticks in the minds of your target audience. By making your brand’s sound unique, you can make it stand out from the competition.
This isn’t just about an “audio logo” though, but also in the way you utilize music throughout your productions. Do you hold back for the b-rolls, is the intro in your face, to you try to keep up the energy even during dialogue. These are creative decisions you have to make and be consistent with. You’ll want to use the same style of editing your music from project to project to keep that brand cohesion.
With Smartsound Cloud, one trick is to use the “Variations” feature. Each track comes with a variety of different Variations, so that you can keep a very similar sound through one project or across several, while still having the track sound fresh.
Establish emotional connections
Emotions play a strong role in consumer decision-making, and it has an incredible ability to appeal to those baser emotions that move people forward. By carefully curating what music you use, you can make your project resonate more with your audience.
Sometimes it’s best to be as busy as a Danny Elfman track, never stopping and always running up and down the lines, but other times a bit of quiet and solace a la Philip Glass is called for. Read the situation, the emotion you want to draw out, and think of the best way to do this and what kind of music relays that the best. The worst thing is to have the music clash with the mood, and the best thing is to have it support or define the mood.
Amplify storytelling
Every creator has a story to tell, and as such, needs an appropriate soundtrack to promote your narrative. By adding in music that can actually promote your storytelling – and not just some random piece of repetitive garbage – you might be able to enhance that message. Use musical cues to heighten the story, almost like a Alfred Hitchcock or John Carpenter movie. I’m not saying your story is a horror, but in horror movies and thrillers the relationship between video and soundtrack is the clearest. Remember that scene in Psycho?
Notice how the soundtrack cuts off and there’s just silence while Janet Leigh gets in the shower. And then boom, as soon as the murder starts, the most iconic music in film history kicks in.
Or take this cue from Jaws, which also features some of the most recognizable music in cinematic storytelling:
Again notice the silence for “normal”, contrasted with the suspenseful music kicking in. Use dynamic contrasts like this in your own storytelling, whether on a YouTube video or podcast and see how it can promote your story.
Lucky for you, Smartsound Cloud has a huge array of different music styles. So whether you want to make like Hitchcock and his composer Bernard Herrmann, or go your own route, you’ve got plenty of selection.
Tailor music to your target audience
You should know your target audience, and if you don’t, then you’ve got some leg work to do on Google Analytics or some fancy AI do-the-analysis-for-you program. It’s definitely the most important thing in marketing. Different demographics, cultures, regions and so on can have very distinct musical preferences.
Make sure that the music you use fits that target audience. For this, you need to imagine and define that person you want to promote to, who is your ideal customer. And then build your brand image and sound to appeal to that person. Someone who’s young and hip might want a kind of lo-fi trip hop sound, someone who’s actively into sports or street life might want some drill, or if you’re promoting to an older demographic, then something that has acoustic guitar or jazz.
With Smartsound Cloud, you’ve got all those styles and more to make sure that your project caters perfectly to your audience. Our curated playlists and advanced search features help you find that perfect music to resonate with them. And because our advanced customization features can even make our tracks sound original to your project, you can use our stock music to connect with your audiences in ways you can’t with other stock music.
Integrate music in multi-channel campaigns
Don’t just use music on your main project. But use the music in all of your announcements for that project as well, across all your channels. With Smartsound Cloud, you can shorten or lengthen any track to fit every announcement, whether its done on a YouTube short, a Facebook Story or an Instagram Reel. You can also easily make variations of the track with the mixer function if it doesn’t quite fit the ad. And unlike with the music you can find already on Reels or Stories or Shorts, you can be sure that music from Smartsound Cloud is royalty free on every channel.
Wrap up
Sock music offers creators a cost-effective, time-efficient, and high-quality solution to enhance your products. With a huge selection of tracks, flexible customization, and royalty-free status, you can unleash your creativity like a fast-tracking Pirate Bay torrent. Embracing Smartsound Cloud’s stock music tools can let you to focus on your craft and deliver that exceptional content to your audiences.
