What Businesses Should Know About Podcasts
May 24, 2018 By Ashley Orndorff, aka Marketing Geek
Podcasts can be a great channel for your customers and potential customers to engage with your business. They can also be used as a tool to grow brand awareness and improve visibility. Whether you’re already creating them or just getting started, here’s what businesses should know about podcasts:
1. It’s competitive out there.
One of the biggest things businesses should know about podcasts is that there are a ton of them. Podcasts have become more and more popular in recent years. In 2013, iTunes boasted over 250,000 unique active shows. As of April 2018, that number jumped to over 525,000 active shows. It seems there are new shows popping up every day, which means the podcast landscape is competitive. In order to break through, you will need to go in with a plan for your own time management and for content marketing.
Successful podcasts tend to release episodes on a schedule and keep to it. They also talk about topics their target audience finds interesting, compelling, and valuable. It’s also important to keep in mind that your efforts with podcasting, much like blogging, are cumulative. Unless you are already a huge brand with a ton of dedicated followers who are excited about the prospect of a podcast, you likely are not going to magically have a ton of subscribers right off the bat – you will have to earn them.
2. Quality matters.
The quality of your podcast also matters. You can certainly be more informal in your tone and have improvised banter if it fits your audience, but your audio and recordings need to be high-quality. It takes a lot for listeners to subscribe, and for subscribers to stick around, in the face of bad audio. If you’re serious about starting a podcast for your business, invest in the right equipment to ensure you’re producing a quality product.
3. Your podcasts can help grow your website traffic.
In addition to increasing brand awareness and driving people back to your website, you can also integrate your podcasts into your content strategy for your site to increase traffic. The more relevant, high-quality content you can add to your site, the better. This provides more relevant content for search engines to crawl in order to further understand the context of your site. It expands the number of queries for which your website can be viewed as relevant and gives you opportunities to show up for them that you may not have had otherwise. Additionally, it gives people on your website a chance to engage with your business in another way.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to feature each podcast episode on its own page of your website, like a blog post, and add a transcription. People visiting the site can click to listen to the podcast or skim through the transcription to read about it. The transcription adds copy to the page so that anyone with hearing impairments can access the content. In addition, it adds enough content to the page so that you are not adding potentially damaging thin content to your site. You can also repurpose podcast content by writing blog posts about related topics and then linking to the podcast page.
Over time, these efforts can increase visibility in the search engines, improve your site’s overall authority, and grow traffic to your website. As long as your site is built to engage users and convert them, it should also increase leads for your business.
4. More Americans listen to podcasts than watch Sunday Night Football.
Barring notable games and huge events like the Super Bowl, more people in the U.S. listen to podcasts than watch NFL Sunday Night Football. Approximately 20 million people watch Sunday Night Football while over 48 million listen to podcasts weekly, consuming 7 different shows a week on average. This is certainly a much smaller number when compared to the total US population, but it is still an impressive number nonetheless. This also indicates that if there is interest in your content topic, it’s also likely there is an engaged subscriber base available for a podcast about it.
These are just a few things businesses should know about podcasts. If it’s right for your business and you can commit the resources to it, a podcast can help your business connect with customers and grow. As you break onto the podcast scene and start to gain subscribers, you can bet they will be checking out your website. Contact us for a meeting of the MINDs to make sure your website is up to date and built to convert customers!
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