With more than 600 million blogs vying for readership, the podcast scene remains relatively underutilized with just over four million podcast shows globally, leaving plenty of space for your company to build its brand with this rich, engaging medium. But where to start? A successful business podcast has these 7 things.
7 Things That Make Great Business Podcasts
#1 Focus
Who is your business podcast for and why? Lindsay Tjepkema, co-founder and CEO of Casted, recommends focusing on a particular audience for an industry topic that your company has expertise on and, even better, solutions for.
Listen to the entire conversation with Tjepkema about podcasting as a B2B marketing strategy on TechnologyAdvice’s very own B2BNation podcast.
Understand your audience and get to know them by researching what competing or related players in your industry are doing, attending and covering customer-facing events, and garnering feedback from sales team members. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
Also read: Are Personas Really the Best Way to Identify Your Buyers?
#2 Value
By honing in on the “who” and “why” of your business podcast, you’ll be able to figure out the value that your show gives to listeners. Your “why” will likely have something to do with educating the audience. Take it a step further by explaining how listeners can apply takeaways to their own business.
In the name of providing value, a business podcast should educate, entertain, or both.
#3 Consistency
Release schedule
Consistency is key, especially as your business podcast gains a following. Choose an episode release schedule–daily, weekly, monthly–and stick to it.
Time of day
Turns out the time of day matters as well. Business-genre podcast consumption is highest from 6 to 10am during the week (33% of all podcast usage) and on the weekends from 6am to 7pm (30%). Dropping episodes right before the busiest time frame ensures that fresh content is ready when your audience is. To maximize reach, schedule the drop for the Pacific time zone.
Episode length
Consistent run times help listeners integrate your business podcast into their daily lives more easily. Keep episodes between 20 and 45 minutes. 20-30 minutes is perfect for a walk or the morning commute; 45 minutes or longer will likely get paired with a lunch break or weekend house chores.
Opt for shorter episodes that leave room for improvement and experimentation when starting out. Data analytics tools will clue you into your audience’s desired run time.
Content batches
Piecemealing episode topics one at a time inhibits your ability to release content consistently, so schedule out topics several weeks in advance. Knowing which topics are on the horizon enables you to release a series of focused, relevant, on-brand episodes (also known as simply good content). Scheduling out content is also essential if your format frequently includes guests.
Consistency goes hand in hand with patience. It could take up to a few years for your business podcast to gain traction and generate a following. It is understandable that something might occasionally get in the way of dropping an episode according to schedule. Listeners appreciate announcements about upcoming deviations from the regular schedule.
The production and editing part is stressful enough, so always have content ideas on deck to keep the podcast running smoothly. Organization tools, such as Asana, Trello, or Google Workspace suite, help you set up a workflow and consistent production schedule.
#4 Visibility
Promoting your business podcast is crucial for gaining momentum. If you host guests on the show, take advantage of the chance to cross-promote each other for mutual benefit. As part of a well-rounded integrated marketing strategy, embed podcast content across several native channels, such as Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and, if possible, complement your podcast with in-person or virtual events to maximize opportunities for audience engagement.
Mash-ups between podcasts and YouTube is another strategy to try, as they do surprisingly well in terms of views. Cross-pollinate between your YouTube channel viewers/subscribers and your podcast listeners by posting podcast production videos to YouTube. Incorporating video into your podcast strategy has several advantages:
- gives listeners an additional way to engage with your brand
- brings awareness of your podcast to your YouTube followers
- further humanizes your brand when podcast listeners can put a face to a voice
- lends itself to content repurposing for clips on LinkedIn, TikTok, and other media
Get the most mileage out of your podcast content by cross-promoting and repurposing content. Strive whenever possible to direct traffic to the page where your podcast content lives in order to collect data on how users interact with your business podcast and encourage them to browse elsewhere on your site. In addition, set up RSS aggregators wherever your podcast appears, such as Google Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, or Apple podcasts, and pull all the insights together into a data tool like Tableau.
Also read: 16 Tableau Alternatives For Visualizing And Analyzing Data
#5 Measurables
Producing a business podcast will entail a lot of trial and error. To nail down what works and what doesn’t, define and monitor success metrics, including:
- Which episodes had the most listens, replays, likes, shares, and/or downloads
- Number of episodes listened to per week
- Number of episodes listened to per user
- Number of downloads per month
- Number of subscribers month over month
- Number of likes, shares, and reviews month over month
Chartable is a tool that examines listener demographics, measures cohort retention, and tracks listener churn rate.
Don’t approach your podcast as a money maker. Your listeners won’t necessarily convert directly into leads and sales. However, podcasts are crucial for building brand awareness and a community of followers, even if they’re passive. So focus on producing great content, and the listeners will follow.
#6 Accessibility
Accessibility is important for launching a successful business podcast and can be employed in a few different ways.
User experience
Particularly for longer episodes, break down the content into a clickable outline format so that listeners can skip directly to the segment they want to hear.
User ability
In an effort to make your content widely available to those with varying abilities, ensure that your recordings’ peak signal levels stay below +10 dB. Moreover, transcribe episodes and make the text available on the podcasts page on your company’s website. The transcription can be applied to YouTube as well to create closed captions. An enterprise podcast hosting service, such as Circle HD, automatically transcribes spoken language for transcripts and closed captioning.
No gated content
Guarding content behind a paywall or a contact form may work for more established brands; however, podcast content should generally be made widely available.
Also read: How to Develop a Customer-Centric Marketing Mentality
#7 Engagement
Encourage listeners to engage with your business podcast by putting a call to action at the end of each episode. The call to action includes asking listeners to like, share, subscribe, review, and more.
Also read: 7 Common Pitfalls Enterprises Make In Their Content Marketing Strategy
Why You Need a Business Podcast
The podcast medium has a host of benefits to your company as part of a long-term integrated marketing strategy:
- Build brand awareness
- connect with buyers and affiliates
- become a credible thought leader in your industry
- Convenient and easy for listeners to consume
- Opens collaboration opportunities
Start facilitating conversations that people in your industry care about to reap long-term rewards for your company.
Read next: Should You Use Podcasting for Internal Communications?
