The first step in gaining a client is brand awareness. But how can you create brand awareness in a digital world crowded with competing websites? That’s where podcast marketing comes in. Digital marketing podcasts are the newest way to create a loyal customer base for your brand.
The Basics of Podcast Marketing
Simply put, a podcast is an audio recording of someone talking. However, this description doesn’t do the infinite variety of podcasts justice, because there is so much possibility in the art of audio recording. A podcast can be one person speaking briefly on a topic for five minutes, or a two-hour interview with two hosts, a musical interlude, and a quiz game. There are podcasts on nearly every topic conceivable.
Podcasting is the action of making and distributing a podcast. A podcast can be made relatively easily from an audio file – all it takes is saving the file as an MP3 and uploading it to one of many podcast hosting platforms, where listeners can access and download it.
Over the pandemic, podcast listeners increased while many other industries suffered. As a result, podcast marketing became a popular and effective marketing tool. Why the increase in podcast listeners? In addition to their multitask-friendly format, a podcast is far more personally engaging to a listener because you can hear a person’s voice rather than read text on a page.
Key Considerations for Starting a Podcast
If you’re thinking about starting a podcast to market your business, start by evaluating the following points.
Define Your Audience
As with any type of content, you need to know your target audience. Who is this podcast for? How can you best connect with this audience? By keeping these questions in mind, you can tailor your podcast to meet your audience’s specific needs.
Establish Goals for Your Podcast
The next logical step after deciding on your audience is deciding on your podcast’s goals. What do you want the podcast to accomplish? Do you want to educate your audience, or spur them to take action? Defining your goals will help you decide on your podcasting format.
Choose a Broad Topic to Discuss
You know your audience, and you know your podcast goals. Now, what do you want to tell them? This is a key step in making sure you attract your audience: what makes you different from any other podcast? Is there a new topic or opinion you can cover? What can you bring to the table that no one else can?
Learn About Audio Production
Now that you have an audience and a goal in mind, it’s important to acquaint yourself with how podcasting works. Familiarize yourself with the audio recording tools available to you – a laptop or phone microphone is the simplest option. However, you can also invest in a USB microphone or a professional recording microphone.
Make sure your recording application can record or convert to the desired format (usually MP3). The final step in podcast recording is to upload your audio file to a hosting site – there are quite a few hosting services, so be sure to look around for the one that best suits your audience and your needs.
Use SEO for Podcast Marketing Success
SEO is a critical tool in your podcasting journey in two key ways.
First, in order to get people listening to your podcast, you need to cater to podcast-specific SEO. People searching podcast sites type in their interest keywords and browse the results, so you need to make sure your podcast shows up at the top. Having strong SEO in specific keywords can help those searches, as well as gather positive reviews.
Second, your podcast can lead interested audience members to your main website. Two strategies to accomplish this are:
1. Putting website links in the podcast summary
2. Setting up podcast episodes as blog-style pages on your website
Benefits of Podcast Marketing
Podcasts are great for building your client and brand relationships. Listening to a podcast enters the listener into a personal conversation with the podcast host, and allows them to connect directly with the brand. Once you have a loyal listener, then you have a client who is invested in your overall brand.
One of the major benefits of marketing with a podcast is that they’re relatively easy to make. Without having to worry about any visuals beyond your podcast’s title page, you can focus on having strong written and recorded content, which will be faster and easier to produce than a video.
Another of the major benefits a podcast has is that it’s easy for your audience to access it with an internet connection. You don’t have to worry about your poster catching their eye at just the right time, or customers fast-forwarding through a TV spot. Your audience can choose to listen to your podcast at any time that works best for them, since the episodes are stored online.
In addition, the multitasking appeal means that your client is more likely to listen to your podcast than search for your video recording since they can listen to a podcast while driving or doing another task.
Podcasting Setbacks
On the flip side, if your target audience doesn’t have internet access, reaching them will be a challenge. Podcasts can be large files and difficult to download without a speedy internet connection.
In addition, accessibility is an important factor to consider. An audio-only podcast won’t be accessible to a hearing-impaired audience, so consider making written transcripts available as well.
Digital Marketing Podcast Strategies
Once you have a podcast, you want to build your following and increase your brand awareness, but how do you do that? Strategic digital marketing.
One way to expand your audience is to connect with other podcasts. Reach out to podcasts with an audience that overlaps yours and offer to collaborate. By having guests on your podcast, or appearing as a guest on another podcast, you’ll get the chance to gain new audience members and demonstrate your knowledge.
Promote your podcast digitally! Using virtual tools like website pages, social media posts, and email lists will let your audience know that your podcast is available. In addition, you can reuse your podcast content across different platforms. Turning a past podcast into the subject of a blog post, creating an infographic of the covered content, or taking clips for social media posts will help generate interest from audiences of those digital formats.
Once you have a podcast, it’s important to remember that you can keep past content working for you. Just like in website marketing, it’s good to have pages (or podcast episodes) linking back to each other. If, in podcast episode 34 you mention a topic that you covered in episode 12, include the episode number and a brief summary to allow interested listeners to find that episode.
Next Step: Record
Creating a podcast can be the difference between brand oblivion and brand awareness. Once you have your audience, goal, and topic in mind, you can easily record and upload your podcast episodes to the internet for client access. Through your podcast, your audience will get to know your brand, and you’ll be able to make your content work for you in various digital marketing strategies.
For more help with marketing your podcast, reach out to Content Cucumber today! We have a variety of marketing services, and we’d love to take a listen!