Leveraging Podcast as Marketing Tool
What if all we needed as humans was the company of other voices?
With the rise of technology such as voice search and voice activated assistant, audio-format blogging has been gaining momentum and found its spot among the hectic lifestyle of today’s digital society. Both individuals and brands have embraced audio as a way to connect more intimately with their audiences and to generate content around a particular subject.
There are an estimated 660,000 podcasts in production today and sharp-minded business owners and marketers have increasingly used podcasts to reach out to wider target audiences.
What is a Podcast anyway?
According to Wikipedia, a podcast is a set of digital audio files that are available on the internet for downloading.
A user can subscribe to the podcast to receive the digital files once they are uploaded online. The term was first introduced back in 2004, and it has since steadily garnered popularity.
Podcast as a Marketing Tool
The increased usage of mobile phones has led to the explosive growth of podcasting. As a static medium, once you record a podcast and publish it online, it will exist in the same form forever unless you rearrange or re-record it.
Podcasting has become widely popular as a marketing tool for various reasons.
Here are some of the benefits of leveraging podcast in your business portfolio.
- Increase your reach.
Podcast can help brands to reach a wide range of audiences. Listeners to podcasts usually subscribe to a series that they regularly listen to, so in a way, as long as your podcast series continues, your audience will likely keep on listening to your content.
Moreover, if you published your podcasts on popular platforms such as Spotify, chances are your audio content will be listened to by a bigger number of audiences. In addition, if your subscriber recommends your podcasts to other people, it can lead to an improved traffic generation for your brand too.
2. Convenient to make and easily accessible.
The best thing about podcasting is that people can listen to all the information they want on-the-go, meaning they can listen to your content while they are doing something else, such as driving, cooking, or exercising.
Besides, you don’t need to invest on a lot of equipment to create a podcast. A good quality microphone and headphones are among the important tools you’d need to make a podcast, other than good internet connection and editing software.
Learn what other skills that digital marketers should have here.
3. Build a better relationship with your audience.
Podcasts help building effective relationships with your audiences. Since it’s an audio-format content, listeners would often feel more comfortable and instantly feel the connection to the broadcasters and the brands they are representing.
Podcasts are also good to build trust between audience and the casters. This will encourage listeners to associate themselves with the brands faster, and therefore leading to more sales and improved conversions.
Find out about the importance of brand loyalty here.
4. Everlasting content.
One of the appeals of a podcast is that it does not have an expiration date. If you manage to craft a well-optimized podcast, there’s a big chance that your podcast will run for a long time.
This in turn will increase your chance of having more users subscribing, downloading your content and returning to your website to listen to the same content over and over again.
Applying podcast as your marketing tool
“…these humble chunks of audio have emerged as the most significant and exciting cultural innovation of the new century.” - New York Magazine -
With the internet being filled with an ample amount of written content, audio information that attempts to engage customers can be a welcoming break from the monotony. Podcasts can help you build your brand, reach new audiences, and eventually grow your business.
It also opens up a lot of opportunities for brands and marketers to push valuable and unique content. The freedom that a podcast offers its listeners is enough to include podcasts in your content marketing strategy.
If you’re not already engaging your target audience with podcasts, here are some points to consider before you started:
- Keep your podcasts direct, simple, and short.
- Advertise your podcasts on social media and other platforms.
- Use CTAs in your audio file and in the text description of your podcast.
- Invite experts of relevant industries to talk in your podcasts to establish brand authority.
- Establish the necessary KPI metrics to measure your podcast marketing performance (downloads per show and impressions are usually two of the most common metrics used).
So, are you ready to get started with your podcast marketing?
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