The second coming of podcasts started long before lockdown arrived when we all really needed new entertainment and inspiration.
The growth in podcast audiences has come year-on-year in the immediate past and will continue in the immediate future as the number of listeners has grown, hitting over 15 million in 2020 and expected to hit nearly 20 million in 2024.
Podcasts are, in short, everywhere and there’s little sign of format fatigue (and people tend not to tire of a format, though they may tire of the content upon it). The question for companies is - should a podcast be part of their content marketing strategy?
Would a podcast help?
Companies deliver content marketing to establish a brand - to demonstrate their values, their expertise and their authority and to start to build a relationship with their consumers and stakeholders.
The nature of that content has most often been text and video - but podcasts have the advantage of convenience to consumers, who can listen as they do other things. All you need to do is give them something worth listening to - something which shows leadership in your field, builds authority and develops trust with your audience.
Those outcomes can often be driven by the sincerity of the delivery - the best podcasts are rarely the most polished. Something conversational and casual will connect just as well with an audience as anything produced by a major broadcaster.
Done badly, podcasts can simply be a vanity exercise, so the most important question is to try and understand if the format works for your company and its consumers, and whether your target market is likely to listen, what sort of content they’d be interested in - and whether you can deliver it.
What do you need to work out?
So if you fancy giving it a try, you need to think about some important matters:
- What are your goals for the podcast? New potential consumers? Brand authority? Brand awareness? Sales conversion?
- What content will help you hit those goals? Do you need to deliver insight, entertainment, inspiration or education?
- How long will your podcasts be? How long can you hold an audience’s attention. And how often? Remember that podcast is a collective noun so you need to plan a number of episodes or even keep going indefinitely. You’ll need a content plan that lasts.
- Have you the equipment, the editing skills, and the time to create it? And do you have a plan to deliver it (getting it on to the podcast platforms, getting the artwork, pulling together a marketing plan). Or do you need help?
What are you going to say?
Coming up with enough valuable content on a consistent basis is one of the most tricky things to sustain once you’ve made the move to start a podcast, so it’s worth putting a lot of time into this part.
There are a few options - you might opt for interviews, for more elaborate story-telling or reviewing the news in, and state of, your industry.
The key thing when deciding on that is how sustainable is it? If you want to do interviews, for example, can you find new guests each week, fortnight or month (this might impact your decisions around frequency).
For inspiration, you could do a lot worse than asking your existing customer base. Ask via email or social media what questions they need answering and use that to drive your content planning. Or look at your website data - especially the search terms which act as referrals to the site: those, by definition, are the questions your customers are asking, and this is your chance to answer.
How will you market it?
Never produce content without a plan to get people to see and hear it. Without a plan, it’s like writing a letter and never posting it. So, to get people to listen to your masterwork, think about the following:
- The branding and identity. You’ll need an eye-catching podcast name, which will inevitably lead to hours of agonising. And you’ll need striking artwork too, to make sure that, in a very crowded space, listeners can spot it on their platform of choice. Will you need intro music, a jingle or sound effects? Something to reassure listeners that they are where they think they are (in the same way that radio does, all the time).
- Get it on multiple platforms. It used to just be Apple, but now there are multiple places (notably Spotify) where users stream their podcasts. Also give it a home on your company website. If people get to know you from the podcast, they’ll want to see the connection on the website too.
- How will you gain listeners? Email campaign to existing customers? Social media? Pay-per-click advertising? Remind your listeners to review and rate the podcast too. That sort of engagement on the platforms drives the prominence.
How can you tell if it’s working?
Streaming figures (and downloads) are an important measure of success, but it’s not everything.
If your business goals are about brand awareness, can you measure this (and have you benchmarked it before?). If it’s sales, the same applies - and what sales messages or incentives are you putting into your content: reading out a discount code can tell you if listeners will take a prompt to move from podcast to website to make a purchase, for example.
But for some basic measures, try:
- How many people are streaming or subscribing?
- Have social media followers increased?
- Are more people subscribing to your newsletters?
- What are the reviews like?
- Have sales or website traffic increased?
Some of those are measures which may not have a direct podcast cause but may just be a part of the podcast adding to a generally heightened increase in awareness of your brand.
And that’s what you wanted - a new way of getting people aware of your company, its products and expertise which can, in the end, drive revenues.
If you fancy the idea of a podcast, but aren’t sure if you have the capacity or the idea, get in touch and let us plot alongside you.
