How to effectively use ASMR in your videos

All across the internet, you’ll find videos of people whispering gently and moving their hands randomly, together with gently repetitive visuals and sounds that you can somehow feel as well as hear. On social media, you might notice them tagged with #oddlysatisfying. It’s a phenomenon called ASMR, and if used correctly, it can be an effective marketing tool as well as just a pleasant experience and a way that helps people drift off to sleep. To help you understand ASMR better and deploy it in your content, here’s what it is, why you might want to use it, and some advice from Artlist creator Christopher on how to create it effectively.

 

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What is ASMR?

ASMR, as we discussed on this article, stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. It’s the tingling sensation or fuzzy feeling, usually centred on the back of your head and running down your spine, that you might enjoy as a response to particularly stimulating videos. It’s a pleasant feeling and can often lead to a period of relaxation or deep calm that helps some people to drift off to sleep. However, what triggers people, and how they respond, is different for everyone.

For some people, the stimulating response comes from sound, for example whispering, eating popcorn, or crunching autumnal leaves. Other people are triggered by watching repetitive, quotidian tasks: stirring hot drinks or spraying bottles. Role-playing scenarios that involve personal care, for example manicures or pedicures, spark the tingles in others. And some people don’t experience it at all.

What we know about ASMR is limited. ‘ASMR’ might sound very technical, but the term was coined in 2010 by Jennifer Allen. She started a Facebook group dedicated to it because she wanted to understand it better. The name caught on because it described a phenomenon that many other people were feeling, and had experienced for decades. Since then, most of what we know about ASMR is anecdotal. There are, however, two peer reviewed articles addressing ASMR: one from 2015 and another from 2018. These indicate that ASMR can have an immediate positive impact on people who experience it, for example a reduced heart rate, but that whether or not these benefits extend over the longterm is not yet known. 

In short: for the people who are responsive to ASMR stimuli, it’s a pleasurable experience. But not everyone experiences it; the triggers are not universal; and we don’t know why it happens. That doesn’t, however, mean you cannot integrate it into your product and marketing content.

Why you might want to use ASMR in your videos

There are some very good reasons to consider integrating ASMR content into your product videos or marketing materials. It starts with popularity.

Popular

If you look at Instagram, there are 16.3 million posts tagged #ASMR and 4 million with the hashtag #oddlysatisfying as of January 2024. Videos with the #oddlysatisfying hashtag on TikTok have around 140 billion views. It’s a concept that generates a lot of interest, thereby enabling you to connect and engage with a large market. 

Sensory approach

If you think about food and beverage marketing, it often exploits a sensory approach to its products: the sounds of chips or crisps crunching, chocolate snapping, and drinks fizzing. But you don’t have to restrict it to things you can eat. By thinking about your product in ASMR terms, it gives you the opportunity to focus on or highlight different aspects of it. Ideally, you want to draw attention to the product’s benefit by using a satisfying sound or a pleasing visual. That might be the sound of a running shoe squelching through mud for outdoor wear, or fingertips tapping on a keyboard for computer hardware, or even activities that you complete on a computer or items that you order online. ASMR can be about playing on those positive associations, rather than direct experiences, too.

Memorable

The pleasurable, physical response elicited by ASMR videos naturally makes them more memorable. Brand awareness is so much of marketing, which means if you can sear a product into a potential consumer’s memory by creating a pleasant sensory association with it, you’ve accomplished part of your mission. 

How to get your ASMR videos right

While ASMR videos aren’t especially tricky to create, they do require careful production. This is brilliantly explained by Artlist creator Christopher who’s an expert in ASMR content.

In his video, Christopher demonstrates how there’s a huge difference between increasing the sensitivity of a microphone to record what a product actually sounds like compared to crafting a bespoke sound that you want people to associate with a product. He uses his own headphones as an example.

Christopher’s headphones are top-of-the-range with excellent sound quality. But if you were to simply record the sound of your fingers running over the headphones, it wouldn’t do them justice. All you’d have is fingers on plastic that probably sounds cheap and nasty. Instead, you need to address two elements. First, how to engineer the sound of how the product feels. And second, in the case of a set of headphones, what it feels like to listen to sounds through them. 

This requires you to engineer the sound that you want your audience to feel. It will involve pulling together sound effects and tones and mixing them like a cocktail to create the perfect sensory experience for your viewers. And of course, this is somewhere where Artlist can support you. With tens of thousands of SFX at your fingertips, as well as stock footage for visually pleasing films, you can create the perfect ASMR video. Here are just a few examples:

Check out the full ASMR inspiration playlist on Artlist

Things to remember about ASMR videos

As well as thinking carefully about the nature of the ASMR that you want to include in your videos, and how to create it successfully, there are a few other pointers that you should consider.

First, not everyone experiences ASMR, so do not become too reliant on it as a technique. It needs to be used as part of a suite of content so that your efforts reach the full spectrum of your intended audience.

Second, people build up tolerance to ASMR triggers. If you intend on using ASMR videos as part of your long-term content strategy, then you need to constantly evolve and refresh your sounds and visuals to ensure that they remain effective. 

Finally, don’t use ASMR for the sake of it. Make sure that the sounds or visuals that you’re using are relevant to the product you’re featuring and the target market to which you’re promoting it. 

Wrapping up

When you create ASMR sounds with care and use them with creativity and thoughtfulness in your projects, you have a very effective marketing tool at your disposal. However, they do need to be created appropriately, and used in a way that is memorable for the right reasons. And, of course, there’s a huge library full of high-fidelity, royalty-free ASMR sound effects waiting for you on Artlist.