6 Ways Podcasting Can Grow your Business
Podcasting is a buzzword that has grown hugely in the last few years. Content marketing is another term that has taken the digital marketing world by storm. 20 years ago everyone wanted a website, 10 years ago everyone wanted a blog. Now, businesses and brands are learning of the power of audio.
If for some reason ‘Podcasts’ isn’t a buzzword you are familiar with yet, check out our blog “What is a podcast?” and come back here afterwards.
For those that know what it is, or have heard of podcasting. Here is how and why a podcast will help you grow your business, brand or product.
1.) It establishes an emotional connection with your audience building trust.
The format of a podcast gives your brand or business a voice. Not words on a page or stock images from a website. Having a voice attached to a brand adds trust, its natural human instinct.
Hearing your voice on a regular basis makes your audience feel like they actually know you, and allows you to establish an emotional connection with them. With this emotional connection they more likely to trust you, your business and your brand. Therefore they’ll be more likely to follow your brand and buy from you.
2.)You can repurpose episodes into other forms of content
You may be looking to increase your content marketing and a podcast can help do that. But not only as podcasts, you can repurpose your scripts and show notes as blogs, create snippet videos to promote on social media. And even gather all the best bits of the interviews you have done, or valuable information into an e-book. The possibilities of taking the content of a podcast and repurposing it are endless.
There are even currently two podcast shows in the US being remodelled into TV series, one of which starring Scrubs star Zach Braff.
3.) Increase traffic to your website, and rank higher with search engines
A podcast will increase traffic to your website in many ways: some will go their to listen directly, some will follow up show notes, and some will be interested in your products because they loved your podcast.
The other way traffic will increase is because you will regularly adding content to your site. This is key in Google’s and other search engines listing algorithms at the moment. You are more likely to list higher with regular and popular content. Podcasts will do this for you, or compliment other types like blogs or videos.
4.) Podcasting is a type of long-form content that people actually pay attention to
Attention spans reduce every single day. When we like the look of a headline and click it, but its a big wall of text we lose interest. We watch a video in our facebook feeds for less than half its length on average because we get bored or our attention is caught by someone else.
However, podcasting doesn’t have this issue to the extent of whitepapers, blogs or videos… The reason why?! Because you can listen whilst you do other things! Podcasts allow you to listen whilst at the gym, walking the dog, driving or commuting. And where else could a potential customer be listening to a podcast promoting DIY products, whilst doing DIY!
5.) Podcasting is great for networking and building referrals
An interview based podcast might invite guests on regularly in your topic or area of interest. Each one of these guests appearances is networking for you and referrals for your brand. Get an influencer on to your podcast, and they will likely share the episode (and therefore your brand) to hundreds of thousands of relevant people.
Added benefits are that podcasting can expand your public speaking skill, leading to invites to speak at networking gigs or bigger public speaking at conferences. The podcast will grow you as a leader in your field and referrals will play a big part of that.
6.) You can make money from it
Not everyone wants to monetise their podcast, but you may already be promoting your products or brand on the podcast and in that way it will make money. However you can add additional revenue streams to the podcast by taking on sponsorships, adverts or even affiliate links for other products where you get a cut of the sales.
So there you go, six reasons to get podcasting. If I was to say I have a product that can; make you a trusted company with your consumers, increase sales, increase website traffic, build you a bigger network AND you can create an additional revenue stream from it… You would probably bite my hand off! Well, that is podcasting… Try it!