Corporate Podcasting: Why Make a Business Podcast for Your Tech Company?
Corporate Podcasting: Why Make a Business Podcast for Your Tech Company?
At Flywheel Associates, we’ve dealt with the hurdles of creating marketing content at scale. Whether you’re working in a startup or a Fortune 500 company, there’s a constant need for new content... and this demand can eat up a lot of time and resources. But we’ve recently fallen in love with a young and valuable marketing asset: a corporate podcast.
If you are considering leveraging corporate podcasting for your company, it is important to familiarize yourself with some of the foundational principles of the medium.
The first video of our new series looks at the ABCs and benefits of corporate podcasting.
Podcasting: a Growing Medium
Podcasting is becoming more popular among brands for communicating with both internal and external stakeholders. Recent studies show that more and more consumers are flocking to niche, personalized, authentic content — and audio-based media is one such avenue for its delivery, one that is easy for consumers to access and relatively cheap for businesses to produce.
This presents a promising opportunity for brands. More than 104 million people listen to podcasts monthly. Podcast consumers are also more educated, wealthy, and likely to spend money and adopt new technologies than the average consumers.
Podcast listeners present a $302 billion market for the auto industry alone, and studies show they are 54% more likely to consider brands they hear about on podcasts. Even small business owners are a distinct cohort of listeners, with 39% of SMB owners reporting listening to podcasts, 65% of whom listen weekly.
Podcast: A Definition
A podcast is an audio show that is composed of individual episodes focused on a particular topic or theme, distributed via RSS feed. If you are brand new to podcasting, you can listen to Strategic Momentum or one of Yann’s podcasts to get a better feel for the medium.
Podcasting and radio share a lot in common, but there is a critical difference — podcasting content is consumed on-demand, and since the release of the iPhone, most people have purchased a device that allows them to access podcasts for free wherever they are.
Listeners can access podcasts using any computer or mobile device through platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, or apps like Overcast, Pocket Cast, and Stitcher. On these platforms, users can stream episodes or download them, and they can choose to subscribe to or follow podcasts to receive new episodes automatically.
The Benefits of Leveraging Corporate Podcasting
A corporate podcast is an audio show that is specific to the needs of your organization.
These needs can be internal — think of the need to better connect with your employees, for example — or external — like driving business outcomes or creating a more authentic relationship with your customers.
Through your audio content, listeners have an opportunity to experience your brand and hear your story; they get to hear your voice and “see” a more personable side of your organization.
In today’s world, we want to know the people behind the brands we interact with — and a corporate podcast can give a target customer, or even your employees, a sense of who you really are and what you stand for.
But let’s be candid for a moment: as much as we all want to share our authentic stories, there’s truth to the old adage “content is king.” Creating content every week, or even every day, is challenging. This is where podcasts, as a medium, offer a huge benefit to businesses — what we call “Record Once, Syndicate Many.”
The idea is to make the most out of every single podcast episode you produce, to “squeeze” it and get as much “content juice” as possible out of it.
Here are a few examples:
Transcribe an episode and turn the transcript into a blog post or email newsletter.
Take some highlights from your episode and use a platform like Headliner or Wavve to turn them into audiograms, a type of short-form video content, to share on social media.
Represent some of the information included in an episode as a LinkedIn slider.
The podcast medium has one other huge advantage that makes it a perfect fit for today’s busy listeners: podcasting content can be consumed passively.
Most written, graphical, or video content demands the consumer’s attention. But your podcast listeners could theoretically consume content 24/7, and it isn’t uncommon to find people who pair podcast listening with regular activities such as exercising, cooking, or commuting.
Podcasts are the medium of the future. IAB predicts that podcasting will be a $1 billion industry by this year, already capturing 50% of the American public. There are myriad reasons for the phenomenal growth and popularity of the industry — telling signs of evolving consumer taste.
So if you do intend to capitalize on this upward trend and deliver value to people through audio-centric content — and maybe save a little bit of your time in the process — follow the guidelines we lay out in this video series to set yourself up for success.
Curious to see how your company could strategically leverage corporate podcasting? Get in touch!
About the Authors:
Connie Steele is the Co-Founder of Flywheel Associates, Business & Career Strategist, Executive Consultant, Host of the Strategic Momentum Podcast and Author of the new book Building the Business of You.
Yann Ilunga is a Podcasting and Lead Generation Consultant, and International Speaker. Dubbed ‘Podcasting Advocate’ by Forbes, he has produced over 400 podcast episodes since 2014. Connect with Yann on LinkedIn.