Français
The growing popularity of podcasts over the last ten years has thrust them into the mainstream. What began as a niche that only a handful of people listened to now has a global audience of over 485 million people, an audience that has seen a 30% growth since 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Astute businesses have noticed this trend, and we see more marketing teams produce their own podcasts. This opens a new channel to engage and educate their target audience shaped around their consumption behaviors.
We will cover the key reasons your team should look at adding a podcast into your marketing strategy, and if you are interested but have no idea how to create one, you can download our comprehensive e-book here. It covers the A-Z of starting a podcast, from ideation & what equipment you need, to audio editing, promotion, and everything in between.
Podcasts provide a powerful medium to showcase your expertise to your target audience. They also add a personality and human element to your outreach, providing value in a more engaging and convenient format than more traditional digital marketing tactics.
Additionally, they make great content for your owned social media channels and provide an excellent opportunity to engage with other networks, businesses, and influencers who may have a similar audience to the one you are targeting. As long as you release your podcast frequently, they provide a consistent content source to promote and give you a structure to help build your following.
By interviewing and hosting guests, you can tap into their networks and ask them to promote the episode in which they feature to their channels. A powerful tactic for helping build your following organically.
Alongside your owned channels, podcasts are a great form of content for your paid campaigns. Depending on your objectives, you can gate the episode to drive leads or build campaigns around them to gain as many listeners as possible.
They make an excellent hook for these paid campaigns and give the people your ads are targeting a good reason to click through, as you are providing something of interest to them that will add value.
Just because you are turning to an audio format doesn't mean you need to make SEO sacrifices... far from it. By hosting each podcast on your website, you can have a transcript of each episode on the page. This will provide the opportunity to optimize these pages towards specific keywords and rank very highly for the topic. Tools such as Trint make the audio transcription process very simple.
Podcasts give people within your business a great opportunity to raise their profile in the industry. This is a great lever to generate more leads, along with the chance to build relationships with other people and influencers you would like to have as a guest on your podcast.
Hosting a podcast and showcasing your expertise will likely open more doors to appear on other podcasts or similar PR to further expand and capitalize on these opportunities.
Lastly, there is a phenomenon that developed throughout Covid-19, which podcasts may be the solution for - webinar fatigue. When remote working became the new normal, marketing teams worldwide doubled down on webinars to great effect. However, as the pandemic continued, this overuse has seen its impact drop.
Podcasting is a potential solution to engage with your audience in a similar format but built around how they consume their content. Empower your audience to listen at a time and setting that works for their daily routine but still get the same message through.
Podcasting is a powerful string in your marketing strategy quiver when delivered correctly. You will need to be clear with your objectives and what you want the podcast to achieve and have realistic expectations when initially launching.
If it is the right move for your business, but you have no idea where to begin creating one, we have you covered. We partnered with Hubspot to create the ultimate guide on starting a podcast. It includes everything from what equipment you need through to audio editing and promotion. You can download it through this link.
