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Today we’re talking about modalities and how a little bit of knowledge on this subject can really help you as you’re mapping out all of your marketing.
By now, you will know that communicating with your clients consistently and regularly makes a massive difference to brand awareness and how people come across you in the first instance.
Many of you are doing content marketing and using different marketing media. However, I want to talk about why using multiple strategies might work for you.
Let me explain a little bit about how we learn as human beings. Has anyone ever said to you, “I know you’ve just explained it to me in precise detail; however, I need to see a diagram to understand how this works”?
Or maybe you’re the sort of person who likes to mess around with things and find out how things work? Or perhaps you’re that individual that likes to listen to things, maybe you never watch any of our videos, but you listen to our podcasts.
This is all because of how we process information as human beings. Generally, there are three groups.
Communication Style Preferences
The first one is visual. Let me point out that none of us has entirely one preference. We all have a bit of everything.
However, we will all have a particular preference that is higher than the others. I’m in a group that is known as visual preference. It’s relatively high, with 65% of the general population being visually preferenced.
The next group is those that are auditory preferenced. They like to hear things; they are probably the ones that have always got earphones in listening to podcasts. They like music and want to talk a lot. That particular part of the population, around about 30%, are auditory preferenced.
The final group, and for my sins, I have this as part of my preferences. That is the group known as kinesthetics. People who are kinesthetically preferenced are very touchy-feely. They need to get a sense of things; they need to feel things to be able to process information.
If you go online, you’ll see these groups often referred to as VAK learning styles. That’s why you will find that when your children are in school, teachers write on blackboards, talk to them, and get them to write in books. All this helps our learning process, and it’s the way that we, as human beings, assimilate information.
Now that you know that, it’s a good idea to think about, “If I know now that people like visual stimulation; if some people like to hear, and if others like to feel engaged, how can I use this in my marketing?”.
The fabulous thing is there are so many ways that you can use this in your marketing. Because let’s be honest about it, as business owners, we want to touch and engage with as many people as possible where we know that our service could make a massive difference for them.
If we just have a blog post on our website, yes, that will gain us some traction. However, what about the other things that maybe we’re missing out on? If we don’t record a video, don’t jump on a podcast, or don’t do all of those other things we could do?
Let me give you some ideas on where you might want to start when it comes to interacting with people and what some people might consider being ideal marketing pieces for visual communicators, audio communicators, kinesthetic communicators.
Blogs
When you write a blog post, think about the topics that you’re writing. You’re probably wondering, “Well, how does this work for visual people?”. People like to read the words that are on the page, and as they read, they are often creating visual images in their mind.
With the way search engines are working, you would never want not to have blog posts that communicate value for your audience.
From a search engine optimisation perspective, if you’ve got certain words and phrases in your particular blog post, then there’s a sporting chance that you will appear on Google. I’ve been working with a couple of clients recently who are appearing higher and higher up in search engine results due to them increasing their content.
Something here to think about is that the formatting of your blog posts can freak out visual people. If you’ve got a blog post, and the content is bunched up together, it switches visual people off. It’s more of a challenge to read.
Most people are reading things online, so make sure you break up your content and space out the article.
Make your sentences shorter; make your paragraphs smaller — use subheads, and where you can, use an image to represent what you are communicating. You’ll notice at Superfast that we use a variety of images. We’ll have a main banner image that will be quite conceptualised around the topic.
From a visual perspective, the second thing to consider is, love them or hate them, using memes. Using images in your posts will draw the eye and will attract attention.
It might be that you are writing something on LinkedIn; if you add an image, that will help people, especially if they are visual because they’ll get a sense of what you’re trying to communicate.
The other most logical thing here, of course, is to create videos.
Videos
It’s a topic that’s raging at the moment in one of our groups about different microphones and which cameras to use.
Video is a great way to communicate. The beauty of video and why it’s so popular is because it touches all of our learning styles. It’s visual, so people are looking at something, and at the same time, they are hearing. And when you’re talking, smiling, and sharing something relevant for your audience, this is where we hit that kinesthetic button for many people.
The other thing you can do with kinesthetic people is to have quizzes and surveys. Because it’s more hands–on, they have to go onto the keyboard and type something, and that’s how these people start to engage.
If you’re not doing video, think about it now.
The final thing I want to talk about is audio.
Podcasts
Our podcast has been going now for at least six years. We were doing it before it was popular. It’s made a massive difference because I would say 95% of our clients have heard this podcast or listened to several episodes before they start working with us.
Podcasting is much easier than people realise. I’m recording this, believe it or not, on a free piece of software called Audacity.
I recommend podcasting to many of our clients; not all of them take it up because there is a little bit more technology involved. By the way, if anyone’s interested in podcasting, we can help you with that. Just get in contact with us, and we can help you get started.
What I love about podcasting is that it’s becoming increasingly popular, particularly since the first lockdown. You tend to find that more senior–level individuals from different organisations will tune into podcasts and listen to them.
If you want to get your brand across, it’s a great way to do that from an auditory perspective. Remember that we’re talking here about hitting multiple modalities with multimedia; sometimes, you’ll hear it referred to as rich media.
Always remember that if you’ve recorded a video, you can take the audio portion of the video – there are all sorts of software online that you can use – and have it transcribed.
Imagine with the video; a, you’ve got the video; b, you can strip out the audio, and you could even drop that audio into a podcast and have it transcribed.
By recording one video, you’ve got so many different leverage points from that one piece of content. The beauty of this is that you can provide content in a multimedia format that hits multiple modalities for your audience.
Next Steps?
There’s no excuse for thinking you can’t provide what all the different parts of your audience want. If you want to get started with this or trained up, this is what we do in our Superfast Circle programme – click here for more details.
Multiple modalities will help you interact and get on the radar of more of your clients.
If you’re ready to propel your recruitment business to the next level this year – we can help. Book a free no-obligation call with our marketing experts today; click here to book a call at a time that suits you.
This is Denise saying bye for now.
