Why Starting a Podcast May Be a Good Idea for Your Business
Many businesses struggle to find a deeply invested audience that will become brand ambassadors and repeat customers. These are the high-margin clients, i.e. the “golden leads”…
Attracting targeted, high-margin clients like these are why many businesses start blogs in the first place and why content marketing is so powerful. And in many ways, text-based content marketing is a niche marketer’s dream.
However, what many businesses find out very quickly about content marketing is it takes time, effort, patience, and practice to generate the type of high-margin business we need to run our business effectively.
That is unless you start a podcast.
Podcasting is the godfather of long-form content marketing
Long-form content marketing is a methodology for attracting the specific target audience that drives our business.
The idea behind long-form content marketing is the longer we can keep prospective leads’ attention focused on our content, the better chance we have of actually capturing them as a lead and the more qualified they will be.
Many experts would tell you to create content in short bursts. We hear this rhetoric attached to blog posts and videos all the time.
“Never create a video longer than three minutes…”
”Don’t exceed 750 words with your blog posts…”
The thought process here is consumers on the Internet have such short attention spans they will not stay focused on our content for more than a minute or two.
Long-form content marketing, specifically podcasting, flush that idea down the toilet.
Create better content in a format your audience enjoys and they will stay longer.
Enter the podcast.
The podcast audience, by their nature, is deeply invested in the content they consume. I call podcasting the godfather of long-form content marketing for two reasons:
- Podcasting has been around for a long time yet very few people are aware of the power it yields
- Podcasting takes your audience outside the Internet world most of us create content in, operating by a different set of rules.
Yes, our podcast audience can listen to episodes online, but that is NOT how podcast listeners consume content. The podcast follows consumers outside the world of the Internet into their everyday lives and allows them to consume our content on their schedule when they’re away from a computer screen.
This is an incredibly powerful concept.
With a blog post or video content, our audience has to be in front of a computer screen or iPad, or smartphone. When someone is consuming a text-based post or watching a video they cannot multitask.
Think about that for a second, if you create a video the reason it has to be three minutes or less and you have to break up the content into an intro bumper and outro bumper and add bloopers is to keep your audience from multitasking. As soon as your audience begins to multitask, your message is no longer being delivered.
This isn’t the case with a podcast. Your audience can be running on a treadmill, driving home from work, or working on paperwork at their desk. With a podcast, all your audience needs is a set of speakers.
Your podcast goes where your audience is instead of your audience has to come to you…
Starting a Podcast
Like any digital project, launching a podcast starts with an idea. Looking at your most successful content is a good place to start. There is a chance you can repurpose your text content into a podcast by:
- Inviting guests who are experts on the topic and interviewing them (This is how Super U Podcast was born)
- Turning your existing videos into audio format and re-using them as a podcast (Make sure your audio files make sense)
Another idea is to publish audio comments on current events and trends. There’s a lot going on in any niche, and simply talking about that is the easiest content that exists.
Yet another idea is to feature your most active customers and interview them. This is also a great way to collect more customer reviews and engage your most loyal customers.
Make sure to come up with a catchy podcast name. Namify provides quite a few ideas to steal: You can even find some visual identity inspiration by using the tool:
Creating a separate entity for your podcast is a great idea because it will be easier to brand. There are quite a few themes that make podcast marketing easier.
Conclusion
There is a barrier to entry with podcasting. It’s not as simple to get a podcast going as buying a domain name and one-click installing WordPress. That being said, there are plenty of “How to start a podcast” tutorials from very reputable sources that make the process of starting a podcast very easy.
These are people who consume content on iTunes, Stitcher, Zune, and Blackberry and if you want to capture them as a potential audience, you have to start a podcast.
Image by Daniel Friesenecker from Pixabay
