Benefits Of Creating A Podcast For Your Business

Benefits of Creating a Podcast for Your Business. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. In today’s post, I will be sharing a guest post from Michael Olatunji, co-founder of Outset Studio. Michael will explore the four most significant benefits of creating a podcast (audio or video) for your brand, passion, or hobby, plus some tips to help you get started. Once reserved for niche interests and gamers, podcasts have flourished globally. In the UK alone, over 21 million people regularly listen to podcasts. While podcasts are most popular with younger audiences, 22% of people over the age of 56 listen to podcasts. With podcasting’s huge popularity, you may wonder if starting a podcast would benefit a fledgling business, brand, or influencer.

Benefits Of Creating A Podcast For Your Business

Given the massive popularity of podcasting, you may be wondering whether starting a podcast could benefit your business. Since roughly half of all listeners tune in to learn and develop their understanding, podcasting can be a great way of demonstrating your industry knowledge and positioning yourself as a thought leader. Even a short series can attract hundreds of thousands of listeners.

Take the Mining Journal, for example. Despite the relatively niche and down-to-earth subject matter, Mining Journal worked with Outset Studios, a professional podcasting company, to reach over 200,000 listeners in just ten episodes. That kind of audience is often challenging to reach through more traditional content channels, like blogs and whitepapers.

The difficulty with podcasting is the learning curve it takes to get the content right. Not only does it have to be exciting and engaging, but there is also a lot of technology and production you need to get right. Additionally, while podcasts started as primarily audio content, most now combine audio and video content, increasing complexity.

With these challenges in mind, here are four key benefits of starting a podcast for your business and a few tips to help you get started.

Podcasts Are Popular

The main reason to consider starting a podcast for your business is that people like listening to it. They are also borderless since you can publish to Spotify or Apple Music, for example, and reach a global audience.

The challenge is how to cut through the noise. While it is hard to pin down a specific number, there are estimated to be between three and five million podcasts worldwide. Getting noticed by your target audience can, therefore, be tricky.

Commitment

One way of getting noticed is to demonstrate your commitment. By releasing between three and five episodes in one go, you will likely become featured in the ‘New and Interesting’ section on Spotify and Apple Music.

Podcast SEO

Another way of getting found is to use podcast SEO. Like regular SEO, you need to understand your target keywords and use them in a well-curated podcast description and episode synopses. It’s always a good idea to include podcast transcripts for great SEO and benefit those who are hard of hearing (or prefer written content). The transcript can also be converted into captions for video content.

Timestamps

Adding timestamps and other markups to your YouTube videos makes them more searchable. Again, knowing your audience and keywords is essential to ensuring that your podcasts speak to your audience’s questions using searchable words and phrases.

If you want to gain traction quickly, consider some advertising. Create short clips and trailers for your podcast and funnel money into advertising on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music. Ensure your ads are no longer than 15 seconds to grab interest and tease the content.

Finally, a great way of attracting a new audience is by featuring guests on your podcast.

Cross-Promotion With Guests

Bringing in guests is an excellent way of cross-promoting your podcast and piggybacking on your guest’s existing audience. Featuring guests enhances your perception as a thought leader while providing more variety within your content.

Hosting guests can, however, pose several challenges. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is getting your guests to show up. If you run some pre-show marketing and advertising to hype the episode, it is embarrassing when your guest cancels at the last minute.

One top tip is to immediately book their travel and accommodation once you have booked the guest, even if it’s just an Uber to the studio. Even though it may cost a little more, it locks them into a commitment, and they will be less likely to back out.

Sometimes, guests will still cancel. It’s unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. One way of dealing with a guest who can’t make it is to switch to a remote interview. While video calls may have connection difficulties or low quality, they are better than nothing. If you are working with an established studio, you might also have the opportunity to send the guest to their local studio to do the recording, meaning no loss in quality.

If all else fails, have a backup plan. And if you pin all of your content ideas on your guest showing up, you will be caught short occasionally. Always have backup content ideas and a host who can adapt.

If featuring a guest, always have an introduction meeting before recording. The meeting will help you get to know the guest and form a relationship between the guest and the host, translating into a warmer, friendlier relationship on the air.

Podcasts Are Interactive And Engaging

Of all forms of content, podcasts are one of the most interactive. You can podcast about anything, whether incredibly niche or relatively broad and generic, and people will be interested in listening and learning more.

Moreover, people will have opinions, meaning you can have fundamental interactions with your listeners. Interaction tends to happen in one of three ways: asynchronous interaction via comments, instant interaction via livestream commenting, or real-time interaction via call-ins.

Find ways to include interaction within your podcast, and you’ll create a lot of audience engagement. Comments can also be beneficial when developing new content ideas, or you could include a Q&A segment within your regular podcast.

Podcasts Are Multi-Format

One of the best business cases for podcasts is that the content can be easily chopped into various formats for different channels. A long-form podcast can be chunked into clips for social media and YouTube, segments for marketing and advertising, and even turned into blog posts.

Among all content types, podcasts are perhaps the most multi-purpose, making them one of the most cost-effective. A 30-minute episode could produce a hundred pieces of content through social clips, soundbites, and blogs.

However, getting content that can be chunked down into pleasing soundbites is more complicated than you might imagine. It’s all down to your pre-production; finding the ideal structure for the episode takes a lot of planning. You also need a good host who knows how to summarise things neatly, when to pause, and when to move things along.

If you are featuring a guest, let them know the questions in advance so they can prepare helpful and concise answers that are far richer in information. It’s always hard to think of everything at the moment. The host’s job is to make the questions seem natural and organic despite the preparation.

It can also be helpful to coach less experienced guests on minimising filler words like ‘err’ and ‘erm’ and when to take pauses. A guest who talks at length, with lots of filler words and very few pauses, makes for a complex editing process.

How Can You Chunk Up An Endless Stream Of Speech?

One idea can be to have an agreed signal, such as the host raising their hand slightly, so the guest knows when to bring their sentence to a natural end so the host can speak. This also helps minimise crosstalk—another nightmare for the editing room.

If you set up cameras to record video content simultaneously, it’s always best to set up a few different angles. Then, when it comes to editing, you can switch between angles to make the cuts appear seamless.

A final tip to help with editing is to have someone on camera make a note of the times when exciting things were said. This makes the editor’s job much more accessible and means you know how to market the episode before the final edit.

Podcasts can be a fantastic marketing tool for businesses. They do, however, take a lot of planning to get right. Many pieces must align between content, production, marketing, guests, hosting, and editing.

These tips should help you get started. However, having at least one person on your team with experience in producing podcasts is always helpful, as is using an agency that can get these things right the first time.

Production quality does matter; it keeps your audience engaged and ensures that the content can be used for many channels, giving you the best value for money.

I hope you enjoyed that.

Talk soon.

About The Author

Michael Olatunji is co-founder of Outset Studio, a full-service podcast and video production studio in London. Outset specialises in pod- and vlog-casts, live streams, and shopping. The team collaborates with the client to make high-quality content that attracts an audience and increases engagement. Recording can be done at their studios in London or on location. Whether a client wants studio space or would prefer someone to manage the entire production, Outset’s experienced teams have it covered.

Web: www.outsetstudio.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/outsetstudiogroup/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outsetstudio/ [@OutsetStudio]

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/outset-studio

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@outsetstudio [@OutsetStudio]

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/topics/6908/podcasts-in-the-uk/#topicOverview

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-podcasts