How to Get Hold of Music for Your Business?

Find out how music affects your customers, how it builds your business brand, and where to get the music to sell.

Many people know theories from popular psychology: music motivates you to move faster, eat more or less, and buy impulsively things that were previously postponed. It is believed that this is why music is included. In fact, background sound covers a lot more nuanced than replicated methods of exposure. This is what researchers and background music experts say.

Let’s dwell on the theory of audio marketing in order to choose an effective way to solve business problems.

Employee productivity

The staff will not accept any music, and this is not about taste preferences, but about objective reasons.

Consider the case when the specialists of a fashionable auto center studied the musical preferences of the target group, interviewed the core of the audience, and decided that the most effective sound is the lounge. This music relaxes, under it, you want to contemplate, consider the little things, and feel how everything around reminds you of comfort, a fulfilled life, and success.

However, the playlist was changed: the employees of the auto center fell asleep and did not rush to go out to the customers. Minus – the playlist was homogeneous. After all, the lounge is calm music, which means that visitors and employees did not feel cheerful and joyful.

Such a playlist should be diluted with dynamic tracks. This will help the staff stay in high spirits and serve customers faster.

If specialists are busy with monotonous work, which is constantly repeated, they need help with music – positive and dynamic. The well-coordinated work of employees is also a criterion for evaluating audio marketing because the company’s profit depends on their work.

What to enable and for what tasks to help employees:

• classical music: mathematics, attention to detail;
• pop music: data entry, deadlines, spell check;
• electronic music, ambient: solution of equations, accuracy.

Impact on sales

When it comes to playing music in stores and restaurants, common sense dictates to play the music that the patrons listen to. However, research shows that this approach is often ineffective in increasing sales.

If the goal is to increase sales, the music should match the store’s brand or a specific product. For example, wine sales grow when classical instrumental music is played in the store. But in order to increase sales of only French wines, it is wiser to dilute the playlist with French music.

Consumer behavior

If you are researching the effectiveness of audio marketing, you probably know.

If people are annoyed by music, they leave without shopping or buy goods faster in order to get out as soon as possible. You don’t have to go through hard metal at the family store, just turn up the volume. When the task is to speed up the movement of shoppers during rush hour, then this is an effective tool. But loud music isn’t for every business. It is appropriate in bars, but the store will face another problem – negative associations with the brand.

A universal way is to control behavior with a musical tempo. The effectiveness of the method was proved by the English professor Ronald Milliman. He studied whether the behavior was related to the speed of the music. It turned out that under slow tracks, buyers crossed the control distance in 128 seconds, and under fast tracks – in 109 seconds.

Interestingly, in supermarkets and restaurants, shoppers spend more money if slow music is playing. In Russia, the influence of background music is rarely researched, so let’s remember a Scottish restaurant as an example: shoppers spent 19% more because they spent longer in the restaurant. These facts are confirmed by a study by scientists from the University of Strathclyde.

Another sense of time

When music is playing, time moves faster – this is how people evaluate it. If you ask consumers to name the minutes spent shopping with music, they are more likely to biasedly reduce the amount of time.

While listening to tracks, the human brain builds positive associations, we dream, make plans, remember pleasant moments, and even try to solve a problem that we have long wanted to close. This property of the brain and psyche helps a business when it comes to reducing the stress associated with long waiting. Most importantly, customers don’t mind waiting if the music they like is playing.

Therefore, it is effective to use the background sound where queues often gather or you have to wait until the papers are prepared or a specialist is free – a doctor, tutor, trainer, stylist, or manicure master.

How to Source Hold Music

The average consumer is estimated to spend 43 days of their life waiting, from conference calls to customer support lines, writes West Corporation. More than 80 percent of people put it off every time they contact the company, writes Cision PR Newswire. And silence is painful: if the caller is listening to dead air, they are much more likely to hang up.

Expectation – customer retention is not ideal, but often inevitable. So instead of keeping your clients a secret, you’ll want to tweak the recording to make the most of the latency.

Along with giving the caller something to listen to, hold on to music, and exchange messages, you can:

• Increase customer retention on calls;
• Create sales opportunities by promoting value-added services and offers;
• Make a good first impression and show the unique character of your business;
• Free up agents’ time by providing key information such as opening hours in the minutes.

Where to find holding music

You know you need something to hold callers when they are waiting on the phone line, but how can you hold with music? You need to pick up background music. There are many online sources today that make it easy to view, license, and download audio files. Read this article.

Licensing

When sourcing holds music, you also need to be aware of copyright laws. Purchasing a music CD or an mp3 song file for standard listening doesn’t give you the right to use it as music on hold. ASCAP is one of the regulators of these types of licenses, and more information can be found on their website here.

Brand communication

To emphasize unanimity with customers, companies add music to the playlist that emphasizes that the brand and customers are in a common information and social field. For this, regional characteristics and favorite “home” performers, fashionable music among young people, or buyers of expensive mobile phones are taken into account.

For example, Renault’s brand book records that the automotive giant uses music to create a sense of unity with customers. To make the sales department and customers feel close to each other, the background sound in stores reflects local musical trends. Therefore, the song list in Renault includes the latest hits in the local language of the country where the store is located.

Music can be used to emphasize the prestige of the establishment. Listeners do not always follow musical innovations, even in their favorite genres. If an expensive establishment constantly opens up the new good sound for customers, and songs can be found through Shazam or social networks and bragged to friends, the image of the establishment as a supplier of new and exclusive is strengthened.

Expert advice

The main criterion for successful audio marketing is considered to be profitable growth. But for objectivity, it is necessary to foresee in advance by what parameters the effectiveness of background music will be assessed. Perhaps your preferences differ with the choice of specialists. In this case, keep in mind that professionals choose music to solve business problems, and not to please an individual person.

For the audio marketer to understand you, pass them the evaluation criteria, a portrait of the consumer and tell them about the specifics of the business.

The music editor thinks in schemes, is guided by professional intuition, knowledge, and experience. This means that the more the customer talks about the brand, the more accurately it is understood. Sometimes specialists know in advance that a client will come back and ask to change the music even though he insisted on it. Therefore, talk to the editor and ask him to justify the choice. It is possible that professional advice will help you understand how to solve a specific business problem, and not just click on “play”.

Music creates a brand

No matter what you do, background music enhances brand identity, increases sales, and improves team performance. Check out the research on background music.

Through sound, customers understand what character your brand is and what to expect from it. In addition, music creates a competitive advantage and an emotional connection with consumers.

• 46% of managers and business owners agreed that music helps customers understand what a brand is and “who they are” as a business (DJS Research);
• 93% of bars and pubs believe playing the right music creates a comfortable atmosphere for customers (MusicWorks);
• 67% of people call a store fashionable if it plays good music (Vision Critical);
• 80% of clients want to listen to music in beauty salons (Vision Critical);
• 96% of gym-goers prefer to listen to original tracks rather than covers (YouGov plc);
• 88% of employees who work in stores with background music want to listen to recognizable artists (MusicWorks);
• one in five companies – and one in four retailers – say they lost business if the music was turned off (Vision Critical);
• 63% of small vulnerable customers believe that the music reproduces their long stay in the store (Vision Critical);
• sales in bars and pubs increase 44% from the average when music is playing (CGA);
• 41% of managers or business owners agreed that in-store music influences their buying decisions (DJS Research);
• one in 10 business managers and owners say they will go out of business if they have to turn off their music all the time (DJS Research);
• 90% of hairdressers agree that the right music is good for their business (Vision Critical);
• 65% of businesses say music in the workplace makes employees more productive (Vision Critical);
• 91% of managers and business owners “agree” or “strongly agree” that music makes customers and employees happier (DJS Research);
• 81% of hairdressers believe music makes employees happy (Vision Critical);
• 61% of small retailers believe staff is more productive when music is playing (Vision Critical).