In a competitive environment where every business has a website, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page (and if you don’t, continue to check back to NaoMediaCon for tips), the margins for standing out are even thinner. Businesses must go the extra mile to command customer attention and build relationships. A podcast is a great, relatively untapped tool to use alongside other social media platforms. It’s never been cheaper or easier to to plan, record, and upload a podcast due to advances in technology. Here are four ways a podcast service can add to the brand personality of any business:
1. A Direct Line to Listeners:
Podcasts are an effective way to interact and build personal relationships with prospective customers. Through consistent updates (weekly or bi-weekly), customers develop a familiarity with the voices and personalities on a podcast. The audio medium is oft overlooked in this era of microcontent. From Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats to talk radio today, many have shaped the audio form to not only deliver a message but develop a strong rapport with their audience. Use the back and forth nature of conversation and dialogue to bring in potential customers and strengthen ongoing relationships. Encourage user participation by having a feedback or mailbag segment. Remember that a podcast is not only speaking to a listener, but speaking with and alongside a listener as well. Allow the listener to feel like they are a part of the show, which in turn relates to a larger business.
2. Expertise and Riffing:
Business and website writing are concise and to the point, careful with every word and detail. A host of a podcast can use intonations and exhibit passion and intelligence that doesn’t translate to the written word. The best podcasts are full of interesting, free flowing conversations while keeping a strong structure at the same time. The personality of the voices, the topics, the interviews, and the banter between hosts become part of the brand themselves. Use the spontaneity of conversation and diversity in show topic to reflect expertise that’s otherwise lost in a sea of text. It’s one thing to read something online – another thing to hear it from a human voice.
3. Use Guests to Gain Wisdom:
Interviews with industry leaders and peers make for especially poignant shows and provide an opportunity for a host to not only ask insightful questions but gain insight themselves. Create a narrative with a guest with a series of questions and invite the listener along for the journey. What are the underlying movements of the status quo? What factors will shape the future? The audience will not only try to answer these questions for themselves but ask follow up questions in their own mind. This allows the listener analyze and be influenced by a podcast long after its completion.
4. The Experience of a Mobile Podcast Listener:
The flexibility of podcasts (the ability to listen anywhere, to go back through the archives, to stop and restart a show at any minute) is its defining feature over traditional radio. Add that to the continued meteoric rise of the mobile market and there’s no limit to where podcasts can go. People listen at the gym, while running errands, or stuck in traffic. A traveler has a long plane ride and loads their device with listening material. A family takes a long drive over a holiday weekend and gets caught up on past episodes of their favorite show. The act of listening to podcasts becomes a part of their everyday routine. It’s said that music is a soundtrack for life, invoking feelings and images of various moments. A podcast is no different. Why not be a part of this conversation?
The best podcasts, like the best websites, interact with perspective customers. Whereas the website creates action through design, images, and link, a podcast can pack similar ideas in a short spurt. A podcast alone may not make a business millions of dollars. But if used along with other forms of social media and marketing, a podcast can be the tipping point in getting customers to act.
