Podcasting Marketing Strategy

A Complete Guide to Creating, Publishing and Monetizing a Successful Podcast

Daniel Rowles, Ciaran Rogers

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780749486242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Take advantage of the skyrocketing popularity of podcasts and learn how your business can use the unique opportunity to stand out and drive loyal engagement with target audiences, using this complete guide to podcast marketing - written by the hosts of the global top ten iTunes podcast, The Digital Marketing Podcast. Podcasting is a hugely persuasive, yet under-utilized channel accessed by an affluent and influential demographic. In a crowded and noisy digital environment, it gives organizations, brand builders and marketers the unique opportunity to stand out and drive engagement with target audiences, with accurate and measurable levels of allegiance that can only be dreamed of on other digital channels.This book is the complete guide to the podcast environment. It describes the importance of podcasting for businesses and explains why, uniquely, it has the highest level of consumer commitment than any other social media. Written by award-winning author Daniel Rowles, and his co-host of the global top ten iTunes podcast, The Digital Marketing Podcast, this book: -Explains how podcasting can drive business results
-Advises on how to record, edit, and advertise your content
-Provides a unique digital marketing toolkit
-Is supported by case studies from influential organizations around the globeQuite simply, Podcasting Marketing Strategy is the definitive authority to making and publishing podcasts that deliver quantifiable results.

Part One

Podcasting in perspective

01

Stand out from the social media noise

Why you should be podcasting

In the early days of digital marketing, we would build websites and use online advertising to shout ‘Buy our stuff!’ at people. We then got a little wiser and started using content marketing, and embraced the idea of using content to engage with our audience even when they didn’t want to buy stuff. The problem, however, is that everybody has embraced content marketing, so there is an awful lot of content. This level of ‘noise’ continues to grow and, for example, there are around 74.4 million blog posts published each month (Wordpress, 2018), which equates to around 2.5 million blog posts being published every day. There are also around 576,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every day (Business Insider, 2018). That’s over 65 years’ worth of content being uploaded every day! The bottom line is that if you want somebody to consume your content, it’s getting increasingly hard.

So surely podcasts are just more content and more noise? Potentially, but actually they are very different to all other forms of online content in the way in which they are consumed. The majority of people listen to podcasts not when sitting in front of their computer (although many do), but rather via their smartphone when they are on the move (Nielsen, 2018). Also, as a longer-form type of content, we engage with them for longer than we do a blog post or a short video. They also generally form part of a series, so we listen again and again. This different pattern of consumption has a huge impact on how effective podcasts can be.

In this book, we will show you how you can plan, create and distribute highly engaging and successful podcasts. We’ll also show you how these podcasts can drive your objectives and how you can measure and demonstrate your success. Ultimately, you’ll learn how podcasts can make you or your brand stand out above the online noise.

One of my favourite ways to demonstrate just how noisy social media has become, and the level of content being produced, is to use a fantastic website called Internet Live Stats. It shows how many social media posts and how much content have been published so far today, based on the time zone you are in, and you can see it grow in real time. You’ll find it at www.internetlivestats.com

As well as podcasts being consumed differently, they can also connect to people at an emotional level and build more trust than other digital channels. People trust podcasts as a source of information more than both blogs and video (Nielsen, 2018) Why? Basically, because you are listening to a human voice/voices and it therefore feels more intimate than reading a blog.

The growth of podcasts

We’ll look at podcast adoption in detail in the next chapter, but at a top level, the number of us listening to a podcast weekly has grown by 58 per cent over the past two years (Todd, 2018). What’s interesting, though, is that podcasts are still an unknown to many people, with only around 30 per cent (Richter, 2018) having listened to a podcast in the last month. This leaves huge room for growth.

The barrier to entry

So, if podcast adoption is growing so rapidly and podcasts get great engagement and different media time, why is everyone still writing blog posts? There are a whole host of reasons, but one of the most important ones is that it appears harder on first inspection to record a podcast than to write a blog post. We actually don’t think this is true at all.

We all have what we need to create a blog post easily to hand in most cases. If we have a word processor or text editor of some description, we can write pretty much anywhere. Podcasting, however, requires some equipment that not everyone has, such as microphones and an audio recorder (although you’ll see that just a smartphone can often be enough) plus a decent audio environment for recording in (not too noisy, too much echo, etc). Once these two factors are taken care of (and we’ll talk about them a lot more in this book) we actually think that recording audio is actually easier than writing, particularly if your podcast involves dialogue between two or more participants. We’ve spent our entire lives learning to talk and discuss, so this comes more naturally to many people than the apparently more structured process of writing.

We’ve already said that only about a third of us regularly listen to podcasts, and this level of adoption is often cited as a reason not to use them. However, bear in mind that these adoption figures are higher than for many social channels like Twitter and LinkedIn (Smith and Anderson, 2018). And podcasts are growing more quickly, whereas the use of channels like Facebook is declining in many markets (Smith and Anderson, 2018; Sterling, 2018).

Podcast passion

In our minds, though, the most important thing about podcasts is the level of engagement and advocacy they can drive. If people care enough to listen to what you have to say every week for 30 minutes, they are quite likely to have a fairly strong opinion about you and what you say. I (Daniel) think that a quote I heard from a fellow podcaster and former colleague of mine, Kelvin Newman, who runs the world’s largest SEO conference BrightonSEO, sums it up brilliantly:

People who like podcasts, really really like podcasts.

We’ll hear more from Kelvin later, but he’s really onto something here. The average podcast listener listens to around seven shows per week and 80 per cent are listening to all or most of the entire show (Winn, 2018).

In my experience as a podcaster, the level of advocacy, that is people who are willing to share your content and say nice things about you, is at an incredibly higher level than with other forms of content and social channels.

Content or channel

We would normally refer to things like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram as digital ‘channels’, which contain different forms of content such as audio, video text and images. So, are podcasts content or a channel? Well, podcasts are a specific format of audio that is distributed as a series in a specific way (via iTunes or Spotify, for example). We think therefore it’s fair to consider podcasts as a channel in their own right, but many people would disagree and argue that they’re just a specific audio format. Essentially it doesn’t really matter, but we just need to be clear that when we compare different digital ‘channels’, it’s not always a completely like-for-like comparison, so we need to be considered in our approach.

The podcast opportunity

Hopefully what you can see from this first brief introductory channel is that podcasting offers a fantastic opportunity to cut through the level of noise that exists online, build an audience, drive engagement and essentially drive your desired outcome. What we haven’t even touched on yet, though, is the limitless creative opportunities that podcasting actually offers. Whether you’re doing a live interview-style podcast recorded directly onto your smartphone, or a high-production, multiple-section podcast with extensive post-production, the only limit is your imagination. This book will help nurture and inspire your ideas, and then help you turn those ideas into a success.

PODCAST INSIGHTS Podcast inspiration

Bethan Jinkinson, Executive Editor, BBC Ideas

I first got hooked on podcasts when someone recommended Serial series one to me. It blew my mind – it was a fascinating true-life tale, cleverly told and hugely addictive. After that, my podcast journey took me in all sorts of directions. From comedian Romesh Ranganathan’s Hip-hop Saved My Life to the sublime This American Life (listen to the episode called Abdi and the Golden Ticket – it’s life-changing). My most recent addiction has been to Radio 4’s Th...