Cutting Through the Noise: Leveraging Podcasts to Promote Your Organization
Podcasts are a great way to keep a finger on the pulse of your industry. Topics range from product development to the evolution of office culture. For organizations, creating a podcast can provide an avenue to connect with service providers and business partners, while highlighting your organization’s capabilities.
In today’s information-overload age, consumers are inundated with all types of media. Up to 5,000 ads a day reach the average person through endless mediums. Advertisements like commercials, banner ads in emails, and more creative methods such as park benches and buses, inundate our lives. As such, consumers have grown adept at tuning out most of this visual noise. This visual desensitization led advertisers to ask, “How do we cut through all the noise and reach our target customers?”.
Recently, blogs emerged as the forerunner for standing out because they accomplish what most advertisements cannot. Blogs primarily provide consumers with access to useful data, with only a minor amount of marketing directed toward them. Such an approach establishes a better relationship with the consumer by allowing them to seek out information on their own.
As more companies adopt this blog approach their effectiveness diminishes. Enter an even more powerful and novel tool: podcasts. Podcasts have experienced tremendous growth as of late with a monthly listener base reaching 73 million in May of this year. And these listeners are more than casual; the average podcast listener consumes seven different episodes a week (up from five in 2017).
The average podcast listener consumes seven different episodes a week.
Recently, even large corporations like GE and eBay have started podcasting. eBay created their own podcast titled Open for Business, which focuses on what you should know when starting a business. Rather than push its own marketing agenda, Open for Business helps entrepreneurs by featuring successful startup stories about overcoming challenges. The listener base benefits from an increase in knowledge about their passion, while eBay gains a loyal following, even if they’re not directly channeled to the site. Ultimately, Open for Business proved successful by achieving 200% of the download goal in its first season.
It isn’t necessary to be a multinational corporation to take advantage of podcast popularity. The American Camp Association created the CampWire podcast to, “…cultivate conversation about what camp is and how great it is.” Although many brands have joined the podcast space, an opportunity gap still exists. 41% of marketers have discussed podcasting but only 15% actively pursue it.
And creating your own podcast may prove easier than you think. Here’s a quick list of how to get started:
Identify your Audience – your audience may differ slightly from your normal consumer-base, so spend some time to determine who you want to reach.
Generate Ideas – Once you begin making episodes, you should hold a fairly large repository of episode ideas for quick execution. Think about your audience’s pain points as topics for discussion.
Be Consistent – Consistency is key with podcast listeners, so make sure to regularly release episodes at the same time every week or two.
Be Subtle – Podcasts are not simply alternate forms of advertising. They exist to inform consumers about a product or service, so try to avoid heavy brand presence throughout the episode. One or two ads per episode should suffice.
Get your Equipment – Podcasts require relatively minimal investment. Find a quiet room to record, a computer to capture audio, recording software, and you’re good to go. Audacity offers a free, open-source audio recording and editing service for those looking to get started.
If your organization is looking to expand its marketing efforts, then creating a podcast should be on the table. Even being aware of the appeal and reach of podcasts is a good start. As, the C-suite gets younger, mixed media is on the rise and right now, podcasts are leading the way to the future!
