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In today’s market, getting people to buy from your company is no longer the only end goal. And sure, it’s always nice to increase conversion rates and sales. But building your brand, investing in it, and harbouring a loyal community around it is where the real value is.
In other words, people don’t just want to buy from businesses anymore. They want to buy into them. Hence the importance of brand identities, brand stories, and brand transparency.
With this in mind, there are many ways in which businesses can increase their brand-building efforts. Social media, influencer marketing, and brand partnerships, to name a few. Another option is to develop a podcast content strategy. In other words, create a podcast.
Podcasting is a marketing strategy that many businesses use to enhance their brand. If executed well, they’re are an excellent way of:
In this article we’ll explore the benefits of having a podcast content strategy. We’ll also be looking at how online audio can drive brand growth and performance, what the future looks like for the industry, and how you can future-proof your podcast content.
Let’s dive straight in…
This is the most obvious place to start.
For any readers not already in the know, a branded podcast is a podcast created by a business in an attempt to predominantly establish relationships with ideal customers (or clients). They might be looking to boost sales, promote a new product, improve their content marketing, or simply grow their brand.
If done well, a successful podcast content strategy will enhance the brand’s industry authority in all of these areas.
Now we’ve established what a branded podcast actually is, let’s look at the 9 main reasons as to why your business needs one.
Connecting with audiences through audio or visual content pays dividends. Your voice is a powerful tool, and is capable of building up a more personal connection with your audience than written content is. It can build trust (which is essential in selling a product or service in the first place), and helps establish loyalty - particularly if you appear open and honest.
Having a podcast content strategy is an opportunity to remind audiences of your company name, what it stands for, and what you’re selling or promoting. Including your logo in your podcast artwork, for example, will act as a subtle nod to your brand. As will a short and snappy brand pitch in your episodes’ intros and outros.
Small touches aside. Podcasts give you the opportunity to tell listeners about your brand’s story. Creating transparency about the origins of your business, and the values you stand for can be really beneficial when it comes to building a dedicated clientele. If clients genuinely feel like they know who you are as a brand, they’ll be more willing to work with you.
A significant perk of podcasting is that episodes are incredibly easy for people to download and listen to, from wherever they are. Meaning they don’t have to be tied to a computer screen to engage. They can be out running errands, doing the school run, or simply on a walk. You get the jist. There’s next to no effort in listening to an episode of a podcast, and once downloaded, it can be replayed at any time. This increases listener retention. Plus, anyone who subscribes to your podcast will get the latest episodes automatically downloaded onto their devices.
The spoken word can make a refreshing change from reading content online. And a branded podcast can capitalise on this. It’s also a more interactive way of talking to your audience, enabling you to get to know them better and create a lasting dialogue with them.
Getting people to your brand’s website is the hardest part of the sales process. Thankfully, a good podcast content strategy will help you out with this. Because as your podcast builds, so will people’s confidence in it. And hopefully, so will your overall podcast SEO presence.
An in-depth explanation of podcast SEO is beyond the scope of this article. But if you’d like to learn more about it, check out the article below:
Podcast SEO: Tips to Optimise Your Episodes for Google Search
Perhaps one of the most obvious benefits to starting a branded podcast, but we’ll mention it anyway. Creating a podcast will hopefully lead to improved sales figures, and conversions. If you can get your audience to trust you, you’re more likely to make a sale. And getting behind the microphone, putting a face to the name, and interacting with clients in a genuine way is key for building up that trust.
Once your podcast starts to gain some traction and popularity, there’s the potential to monetise it. If you can deliver engaging content on a regular basis to a loyal audience, you increase your chances of monetising episodes. This might be through sponsorships, cross-promotion, merchandise sales, premium content subscriptions, listener donations, or affiliate marketing. Whatever it is, creating an additional stream of revenue is never a bad thing.
Digital consumption of audio has grown rapidly over the past few years. And it’s now more popular than ever. Podcasting has been one of the main factors driving this evolution, and the growing audience figures haven’t gone unnoticed by marketers and advertisers. It’s clear that more and more brands are catching onto the fact that audio offers a uniquely intimate atmosphere where people can connect with brands. To overlook this when it comes to your own brand, means to miss out.
Audio content currently offers better cut-through than other media. There are 600 million blogs, 51 million YouTube channels, but only 4 million podcasts.
But this situation won’t last forever, as the competition is already heating up. Molly Beck (founder of Messy.fm), claimed in an interview with Quartz magazine that if you want to start a podcast, you have three years to do so. After that, it will become extremely difficult to carve out a niche in the market. She said:
“Every brand will have a podcast soon, and many of the biggest ones will be updated daily. Nobody is going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you it’s time to launch a podcast. That comes from your desire to share your brand story with the world. So, don’t wait. If you start your podcast three years from now, it’ll be way too late.”
Now we’ve discussed how having a podcast content strategy can help your brand, let’s take a quick look at the industry’s future predictions. So, where is it heading? And why should you stay ahead of the curve? Having a good idea of this will help you decide if creating a podcast aligns with your future business objectives and brand goals.
Below are 5 future podcasting trends worth highlighting. It’s important to note that these are only speculative. The podcasting landscape is constantly evolving, meaning different trends may emerge in the future.
Private podcasts are starting to become more and more popular amongst businesses. Having said that, they remain a fairly niche format, mainly because private podcasting as a concept is still fairly new. And there aren’t many companies or enterprises out there who truly understand what it is, why they should consider factoring it into their content strategies, and how to actually create one.
Private podcasts are produced for a limited audience. In other words, they’re not made for the general public. They’re private, meaning the creator gets to choose who has access to episodes on an invite-only basis.
So, if you’re a business with a large number of employees, how are you currently delivering your internal company comms? Stale PDFs? Laborious email chains? Chances are it’s probably one or the other. A private podcast is much more personal. They’re also more secure, and a great way of keeping business information safe. Not only that, but it’s a creative way of opening up communication between senior management teams and employees. It doesn’t have to be for this sole purpose, either. Because private podcasting is also an effective way of delivering company-wide (or team) updates, boosting company culture and employee engagement, sharing business information, making announcements, onboarding workers, or training.
When you think of standard podcast content, you probably think of 30-60 minute episodes. Right? Well, thanks to the popularity of short form content on platforms like TikTok, there’s a potential for much shorter podcasts to start coming into production.
How long these short podcasts might be is up for debate, however. They’ll need to be long enough to impart value on the listener in an easily-digestible way, but they’ll need to be snappy enough to appeal to time-constrained audiences. With that in mind, we’re inclined to hedge our bets on bite-sized, 5-15 minute episodes. A happy medium, you could say.
With more and more advancements in technology being made, like AI, podcasting platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts may feel the pressure to keep up. Like short form content, we don’t know what this will exactly look like. That being said, it might involve live podcasting with real-time audience participation, polls, AR / VR integration, Q&A sessions, or something else entirely.
The statistics say that video podcasts (a podcast with a visual asset) are on the rise. And YouTube is actually one of the main listening platforms for podcast content.
But what does that mean for the traditional audio-only podcast industry? Well, it just means it’s evolving. So instead of listeners streaming on-the-go as they usually would, they can sit down and watch it. Video podcasts give audiences a face to connect with, and they can play a huge part in enhancing certain bits of content, like guest interviews. They’re also easy to repurpose, easily shareable, and SEO friendly.
As more and more video podcasts start to enter the space, it’s perhaps time for brands to grow with it and stay ahead of the trend.
As podcast hosts finally start to recognise the importance of understanding their listeners, they’re becoming much more equipped to make data-driven decisions. By this we mean producing targeted content, making their output reader-friendly, keyword research, enhanced marketing efforts, repurposing the right content, and so on. As this continues, we’ll likely see a boost in listener engagement and all-round better audience experiences.
It’s not enough for brands to just create a podcast strategy. They should prioritise future-proofing it, too. Doing so will help them stay relevant, adapt to changing listener preferences, leverage new technologies, optimise content distribution, explore monetisation opportunities, gain a competitive advantage, and achieve long-term success in the evolving podcasting landscape. Below is a list of 10 tips for creating future-proof content.
There’s no denying that producing a podcast takes a lot of work. And that’s why it’s always smart to invest in your show and do it well.
If you’re a bigger brand with a production budget to work with, you might decide to partner up with a production agency. An agency will handle everything from the initial concepting stage, right down to promotion and distribution. That’s exactly what we offer here at Cue Podcasts. You can check out our showreel below:
If you’d like to get in touch with us to talk about the project you have in mind, click here.
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