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Regardless of which industries or markets a company conducts its business in, no business will survive if it lacks a way to distribute its brand messaging to consumers. As such, the foundation of any successful marketing strategy lies in the business’s ability to reach a broader number of consumers, engage with them, and ultimately convert them into customers. 

Consider Proctor & Gamble’s “soap opera” strategy, for example: in the 1930s, P&G began sponsoring daytime radio dramas as a way to market their products to housewives because research at the time concluded that women wanted a source of entertainment while they performed housework. This gave way to the birth of “soap operas” which still exist today, albeit predominantly on television rather than radio.

While we’re a long way from the days of this kind of housewife targeted advertising, creating and fostering an audience is just as vital for a business’s survival today as it was a century ago. The primary difference is that today, we are fortunate enough to have a broader spectrum of tools and platforms with which to do so. In recent years especially, one of the most powerful tools businesses have used to build and boost their marketing platforms is podcasting.

Why Podcasting?

One study reported that, in 2018, roughly 44% of Americans over the age of 12 have listened to a podcast. This statistic increased even further to 50% in 2019, granting a total estimate of roughly 60 million Americans who listen to podcasts each week. An additional study also reported that nearly half of all Americans who listen to podcasts each week possess annual household incomes of $75,000 or more. 

For businesses, this means that there are a lot of potential podcast listeners with disposable income to spend on brands, goods, and services advertised through podcasting. This provides businesses with a platform to build an audience and foster positive values of trust, reliability, and credibility for their brand for the businesses that aren’t afraid to jump into the admittedly-saturated market of podcasts. Though easier said than done, the best way to get started on a podcast for your brand or business is two-fold:

  1. Identify and refine your niche market: of that target market, find what approximate percentage of that market is likely to consume your podcast content.
  2. Start planning for the content you want to produce and then generate it!

Content Is King

Remember that any brand is only as valuable as the worth that consumers place on it. This holds true for brand content, as well. Whether or not your brand is already established with your target audience or market, the sooner you begin producing high-quality content, the more likely your audience is to consume your content and share it with other potential customers, creating the beginning point of a content distribution cycle that assists in building your brand’s reputation and credibility.

So, how does this cycle begin? A few tips to generate high-quality content for your brand or business’s podcast include:

  • Make it informative/educational: everyone loves a good story – your customers and listeners are no different. The more content you produce that highlights your brand’s story, the more likely you are to reach consumers who resonate with your story which builds trust and credibility in your business early on.
  • Establish yourself as a subject matter expert: the more information you are able to produce for listeners that provide value to some facet of their life, the more likely they are to view your brand or business’s podcast as a reliable source of educational information on the subject matter, further adding to your credibility.
  • Invite guest speakers for in-depth interviews and conversations: once you have established a sense of trust and credibility amongst your podcast’s listener audience, invite other subject matter experts within your brand or business’s sector to offer their own subjective experiences on your podcast. This can help keep your audience engaged by providing them with outside points of view, and engaging the guest in deeper conversations and talking points can even lead to you helping the guest solve their real-world problems on-air, in real-time, further boosting your brand’s credibility and trust from listeners, and even inadvertently create a “brand ambassador” in your guest.

Best Places To Start

So long as your business has been founded and has produced any content (be it written, verbal, visual, or otherwise), this content can be transmuted into topics for audio content to cover in your podcast. Any old blog posts, infographics, or even books can be rehashed into a topic to cover in a 20-45 minute podcast episode, and will potentially even be consumed by a larger audience than the content itself originally intended for.

The best part? The more high-quality content you produce for your podcast, the more chances you have of achieving higher SEO rankings in consumer searches for your brand and its content via online search engines. Getting started is the difficult part; once you have a plan to get your podcast started, the benefits you can reap are virtually endless.

Ginni Saraswati is the owner and founder of the Ginni Media, a one-stop-shop podcasting production house providing multiple podcast services in one company. Ginni Media has worked with clients including Allure, Architectural Digest, and Siemens. You can follow The Ginni Show on Twitter.

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