Pod­casts are rapid­ly becom­ing one of the most influ­en­tial media of the 21st cen­tu­ry. For what­ev­er rea­son, they have been adopt­ed and endorsed by Mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z all around the world as a mean­ing­ful, easy, edu­ca­tion­al, enter­tain­ing for­mat that isn’t hard to pro­duce and often has unex­pect­ed results. All over Amer­i­ca, pod­casts are pop­ping up on all sorts of top­ics, some of the most pop­u­lar being true crime and lifestyle pod­casts that are flocked to by mil­lions of lis­ten­ers. It’s an excit­ing state of affairs, since pod­casts have enor­mous poten­tial to do a lot of good in a very con­ve­nient way, and they are immense­ly inno­v­a­tive in a lot of their packaging.

How­ev­er, pod­casts aren’t only use­ful for indi­vid­u­als look­ing for a bit of enter­tain­ment or pod­cast pro­duc­ers them­selves, there are all sorts of oth­er rea­sons why they should be embraced. One of those areas is for busi­ness, which may come as a bit of a sur­prise to some peo­ple. Busi­ness­es in the con­tem­po­rary era have to be more and more inno­v­a­tive in the ways in which they go about com­plet­ing their marketing.

Users expect high­er qual­i­ty mar­ket­ing, dis­trib­uted in cre­ative and user-friend­ly ways, which has dri­ven mar­ket­ing teams to look into all sorts of avenues, from social media influ­encers to inter­ac­tive bill­boards. Pod­casts fall under this cat­e­go­ry as a dis­tinct­ly inno­v­a­tive field for mar­ket­ing and a lot can be achieved with­out too com­pli­cat­ed an approach.

With that said, let’s get into some of the many rea­sons that you should real­ly be con­sid­er­ing incor­po­rat­ing pod­cast­ing into your mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy this com­ing year.

1. They Give You A Wonderful Opportunity For Collaboration

When you take the plunge and choose to devel­op your own pod­cast for your com­pa­ny, your first step is to imag­ine what the show will like­ly com­prise of. This can be a bit of a daunt­ing process as you start to real­ize that you’ve got to fill a whole show with inter­est­ing talk. One of your first ports of call in that par­tic­u­lar storm is the ‘invite a guest’ port.

Gen­er­al­ly, guests on pod­casts are there to ele­vate both the inter­est lev­el of an episode and the gen­er­al qual­i­ty and appeal of the show. You can get guests on to a pod­cast in a con­ver­sa­tion­al and easy-going cir­cum­stance with a lot more ease than you would if you were reach­ing out through email for exam­ple. This boosts your oppor­tu­ni­ty for form­ing a gen­uine rela­tion­ship with a guest who could be influ­en­tial for your company.

They Give You A Wonderful Opportunity For Collaboration

2. It’s Very User-Friendly

“Of all of the forms of enter­tain­ment out there, pod­casts have to be the most con­ve­nient. In just a few clicks you’re lis­ten­ing to some fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion like a fly on the wall, which can be lis­tened to at any time, and can eas­i­ly be incor­po­rat­ed into an oth­er­wise packed sched­ule”, says John New­combe, pod­cast expert at UKWritings.

Pod­casts are per­fect for any­one with a lot of time pres­sure on them­selves, par­tic­u­lar­ly moth­ers, stu­dents, busi­ness peo­ple and the like. For a lot of busi­ness­es, we’re per­fect­ly describ­ing a tar­get audi­ence. Since a pod­cast can be absorbed whilst exer­cis­ing or dri­ving or any oth­er time you can have some­thing on, this makes it a real­ly user-friend­ly oppor­tu­ni­ty for con­nect­ing with your user base.

3. It Lends Your Brand Authority

Though it’s a com­plete fal­la­cy that mere­ly by hav­ing a pod­cast that means you have real exper­tise, there’s still an immense­ly pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal sway to be felt by announc­ing your­self as a leader in an indus­try through a pod­cast. If you are in the car indus­try and the num­ber one car pod­cast is pro­duced by your com­pa­ny, it reflects pos­i­tive­ly on the com­pa­ny itself and inspires your cus­tomer base to view you as the lead author­i­ty in your par­tic­u­lar field. It’s a chance to show what you know and to talk with real knowl­edge and insight about your own world, direct­ly into the ears of would-be cus­tomers. That’s a real­ly valu­able mar­ket­ing tool for any company.

4. Podcasts Are With Users At All Times

Increas­ing­ly, mar­ket­ing in the mod­ern age is about con­nect­ing with cus­tomers or would-be cus­tomers 24/7, 365 days a year. It’s ask­ing a mas­sive amount to actu­al­ly stick to this, but the instru­ments are in place for you to be giv­ing dai­ly reminders of your exis­tence to cus­tomers and show­ing them the path towards a sale is always open and available.

It doesn’t mat­ter where a user is, they could be in an air­plane soar­ing above the ocean or sit­ting in the bath, they can always have a pod­cast with them. It’s stream­able, down­load­able media which makes it an ever-present prospect for lis­ten­ers that nev­er need to leave their side. With a good upload sched­ule, you can be mar­ket­ing all week long every week direct­ly into the ears of poten­tial clients.

5. Diversifying Your Media

Though pod­casts are immense­ly pop­u­lar and become more and more pop­u­lar with each pass­ing year, they still aren’t an accept­ed norm as a mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Yes, it is a norm to have adverts in the midst of a pod­cast, but to actu­al­ly begin a pod­cast is not yet a stan­dard mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, which gives you a tem­po­rary edge.

If you go now, you’ll still be amongst the first to diver­si­fy your media in this fas­ci­nat­ing way, offer­ing peo­ple an alter­na­tive side to your com­pa­ny and a top­i­cal method for cre­at­ing mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. “Even the dis­tri­b­u­tion of a pod­cast can be a diver­si­fied process, with great poten­tial for branch­ing out.

A sin­gle episode of a pod­cast can be turned into a blog post for writ­ten con­tent, can be put into a newslet­ter or can be filmed and uploaded to a com­pa­ny YouTube or Vimeo chan­nel”, sug­gests Paul Emery, tech writer at Acad­e­m­ized. It’s a medi­um that is rich with poten­tial for how you use it, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you get start­ed with it right away.

6. Cultivate A Connection With Your Audience

One of the real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing things about the direc­tion in which tech­nol­o­gy and mar­ket­ing have gone is that so many of the stuffy norms of busi­ness-client rela­tions have been done away with. Social media mar­ket­ing, for exam­ple, allows cus­tomers to chat direct­ly and inti­mate­ly with com­pa­ny rep­re­sen­ta­tives who like­wise are able to demon­strate their inter­est in the cus­tomer and fos­ter a relationship.

Pod­casts are a tool for achiev­ing a sim­i­lar thing. Though the premise for the pod­cast and the fund­ing for it are obvi­ous­ly nec­es­sar­i­ly con­nect­ed to your busi­ness, in oth­er regards you have a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to kick back a bit and to talk infor­mal­ly to your audi­ence. Hav­ing a seg­ment where you respond to lis­ten­ers’ mes­sages can even be a good way to work­shop com­pa­ny ideas in an easy-going, approach­able envi­ron­ment. It’s a chance to gen­uine­ly bond with poten­tial customers.

Cultivate A Connection With Your Audience

7. Remaining Relevant

This is a lurk­ing con­cern for most mod­ern mar­ket­ing teams, fight­ing against an incred­i­bly fast-mov­ing play­ing field with an audi­ence with tiny atten­tion spans. Being top­i­cal, stay­ing ‘top-of-mind’, can be a real strug­gle for a lot of com­pa­nies, par­tic­u­lar­ly since com­pa­nies are bat­tling their own rep­u­ta­tion for cor­po­rate stuffi­ness when they attempt to attract the atten­tion of mod­ern, inter­net-con­di­tioned users. As far as mar­ket­ing strate­gies go, you’ve found a real win­ner in pod­cast­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you’re try­ing to stay on people’s minds all the time.

This is for a few rea­sons. The first is that it’s very easy to pro­duce pod­casts. Two peo­ple sit­ting in a room and a third lis­ten­ing in anoth­er room with a few mics is all it takes to pro­duce some­thing high-qual­i­ty work. So you can pro­duce shows fre­quent­ly and there­fore dis­trib­ute shows frequently.

Sec­ond­ly, pod­cast con­tent can be about any­thing which means that you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk in your pod­cast about cur­rent trend­ing top­ics, giv­ing your two cents on what­ev­er the issue of the day is, anoth­er way in which you keep up with your audience.

8. Grow and Keep Growing

Your pod­cast audi­ence will dif­fer some­what from your Insta­gram audi­ence who will dif­fer from your email mar­ket­ing audi­ence. This is to say that as you build your pod­cast and you get lis­ten­ers, you’re sim­ply increas­ing your sphere of influ­ence and boost­ing your audience’s engage­ment with your com­pa­ny, all at the same time. The big­ger your sphere and the more active­ly engaged they are, the eas­i­er it is for your com­pa­ny as a whole to grow.

And growth leads to more growth, in all areas. Soon, with a large enough pod­cast fol­low­ing your pod­cast is inspir­ing bet­ter socials sta­tis­tics which in turn results in more sales for your com­pa­ny. Over­all, from a growth per­spec­tive, a pod­cast audi­ence is a very good thing.

Conclusion

Hope­ful­ly, this list makes it pret­ty evi­dent just how immense­ly pow­er­ful a pod­cast can be for busi­ness mar­ket­ing. It’s not an obvi­ous choice, which is in some ways its strength as it can help ele­vate your company’s mar­ket­ing approach in cur­rent and unex­pect­ed ways.

SOURCE: MAILMUNCH