Leverage podcasting for brand building
Leverage podcasting for brand building
1. Define an objective for adding podcasting into your content marketing mix.
There are many valuable reasons why brands are leveraging podcasts in their content strategies. For example, building deeper relationships with an audience, boosting brand sentiment, reaching new audiences, building brand partnerships, or positioning your brand as a thought leader and authority in your industry.
2. Look at your target audience, industry expertise, top-performing content, and unique branding to pick a specific niche for your podcast.
Consider the questions you repeatedly see your audience asking, across social media, email, forums, and reviews. Pay close attention to what topics and types of content receive the most traffic across your blog, email campaigns, and social media content. These areas will help you decipher what sort of topics are the most popular and in-demand from your current target audience, and you can consider aligning your podcast niche with a similar type of content.
3. Determine who will host and co-host your podcast, where you will record it, how long each episode will be, where and how frequently your episodes will air, and create a posting schedule to keep your podcast consistent.
Your podcast hosts should be highly engaging, entertaining to listen to, and able to match their conversations to align with your brand voice. Hosting for podcasts is typically done through a platform like Buzzsprout, PodBean, or Simplecast, where your podcast can then be picked up by popular directories like Spotify, iTunes, Google Play Music, and more. Many podcasts feature a weekly episode, but you can adjust the posting frequency to once or twice a month depending on what works best within your overall content marketing strategy.
4. Put together a budget for your podcast strategy, including costs for equipment, hosting, and renting a studio space if needed.
Considering your overall marketing budget, determine how much you can delegate to startup costs for your podcast. After the initial purchase of your equipment, your hosting can run between $20-$99 per month on average, and any rental cost for a studio will largely depend on the size and location.
5. Gather or purchase the equipment you will need, including a mixer, microphones and stands, headsets, and acoustic panels.
Equipment for an audio-only podcast can cost anywhere between $75-$750 at minimum, depending on the production quality you’re interested in. If you have decided to include video along with your podcast – for example, if you’ll publish the episodes on YouTube, you will also need camera and lighting equipment for your setup. Equipment costs will be higher if you also need a camera or cameras to record multiple angles and ring lights or softbox lighting for a video podcast.
6. Design a content strategy for your podcast episodes and plan out topics to discuss ahead of time.
Your episode topics can come directly from repurposed content that you want to expand and discuss further with a different medium, or you might consider drawing inspiration from FAQs asked by your audience.
7. Outline each podcast episode, with subtopics and points that you want to cover.
Depending on the length of your episodes, you may consider segmenting the episode to provide some structure. For example, if you’re hosting an hour-long podcast for each episode, you can break up that hour into 15-minute segments to make sure you cover various subtopics during each segment of the episode.
8. Market your podcast across your social media channels, email list, and website to tease upcoming episodes, featured guests, and encourage engagement on your posts about the podcast.
Leverage each marketing channel you already use in your marketing strategy to promote your new podcast. Sourcing guests for episodes can be an excellent opportunity for both of you to cross-promote on each other’s channels to expand the reach of both your audiences.
9. Analyze the performance metrics generated by your podcast to gauge the success of adding it to your content strategy.
Using your analytics platform, track and analyze metrics such as impressions, clicks, traffic, and conversions to help determine how your podcast is helping build your audience. Use this information to continue optimizing and improving your podcast strategy over time to achieve the best results.