Business of Marketing and Branding Marketing and branding ideas for business marketing

Nice case study on b2b marketing – audio presentations

MarketingSherpa posted a good little case study on the use of powerpoint style presentations with audio which caught my attention. A bit low-tech, was my first reaction. What about webinars? Isn't this a bit old fashioned? Really doesn't matter of course. The only thing that matters is whether it works.

In this case study the audience was the scientific community who are very knowledge oriented so whitepapers and brochures were tools of choice.

The marketing team decided to test a new format -- an audio + PowerPoint-style presentation they called 'On Demand Training.'

The idea was fairly simple. They'd put together a set of slides, perhaps 10 or so, and post these on the site along with an audio feed to talk viewers through the presentation. The tech required less bandwidth for a typical webinar (which some prospects in China and Eastern Europe may still have problems with.) Prospects could click to listen and view any particular slide or sit back and hear the entire presentation in order.

They tested the results and...

Turns out 30% of prospects in the scientific community prefer audio-enhanced PowerPoint-style decks to white papers, brochures, Web pages and webinars.

The article goes into some more detail on the "how to" which you can read here , but I've been thinking about why they would work so well. Here are a few thoughts:

1. Education - a presentation is a really traditional way of educating and for most a much more engaging interaction than reading a paper
   
2. Control -rather than a webinar or podcast, the presentation allows you to skip around the pages. This is the age of customer control, so that's right on the money.
3. Human - a person, a human voice. We are people after all, and we still prefer dealing with other people over web pages.

Do you have any experience with this?