Where Is The Sound In Your Website?
Well, I’m sure that title may have brought at least a few folks who cringe at the thought (rightfully so in most cases!) of including audio on your website (the kind that plays automatically whether you like it or not).
But actually, it’s a sentence from a book that seems to perpetually be on my desk at my day job: Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.
I was reminded of an intriguing section from that book while reading an article today on the Church Marketing Sucks website called Making Sense Without Sense. In that article, Brad Abarre writes about being on a treadmill at a gym and watching television without the benefit of the wireless headphones that the gym provides — in other words, only seeing the video but not hearing the audio.
Without audio, TV becomes in someways a web site on auto pilot. An array of moving images and graphics that come together to tell a story. I kept watching to see if I could put the story together without the sound. It didn’t always work, but when it did, I am sure the gods of advertainment rejoiced somewhere.
The principle I want to talk about in this article doesn’t relate entirely to what Brad is trying to say, but I did want to mention the way my thoughts progressed because the Church Marketing Sucks website is worth adding to your regular reading list. I don’t always agree with what they have to say, but their writing is certainly thought-provoking.
At any rate, Brad’s article did remind me of this passage from the Call To Action book:
To understand persuasion you must have a rudimentary understanding of the physiology of the human brain. At the front of the brain, right behind your forehead, is the prefrontal cortex, which is the center for planning, emotion, and judgement. Its job is to give the signal to the motor assocation cortex, located adjacent to it, to coordinate behaviors, and then initiate voluntary movement (take action). Until your marketing message has reached the prefrontal cortex, all you have done is take up space and make noise.
The shortcut into the human brain is the ear. The auditory cortex is right next door. Raw sound enters the auditory cortex, and spoken words, melodies, rhythm, laughter, and jingles are stored in the auditory association area. That’s why you can remember hundreds of songs you never intended to learn ("You deserve a break today ...").
To test the power of sound and auditory reception for yourself, try this. First watch your TV with the sound off, then listen to your TV with the picture off. You can prove to yourself in just seconds, that when it comes to conveying information, affecting emotions, and causing action, sound beats pictures hands down. Where is the sound in your website? It’s in the words, which we understand by “hearing” them in our minds.
The Eisenbergs go on to write:
So what does this mean for marketing your website? It means you will be most successful when you use words that cross from the ear almost directly to the prefrontal cortex, the decision part of the brain. The killer app in web marketing is not sight, it is sound, whether heard directly (audio) or mentally (ad copy). It is not the design of your website that sells. It is the content — the words.
Are there exceptions? Of course! But don’t bet your budget or your business on them. Choose your words carefully. Every word you use on your website is a drop of the magic potion.
To me, this says that church and ministry websites should pay at least as much attention to the content (the words on the page) as they do to the graphical design of the website. In the end, it is the content that will persuade. And that’s really what we’re trying to do with a church or ministry website — persuade site visitors to do something, whether that be desiring to meet a believer in our congregation (my preferred outcome), attending and participating in a service, contacting us, etc.
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
