You have seen the recent trends in podcasting.
Everybody is in the game, from anime otakus to gaming nerds.
Podcasting has become far more active and the concept of speaking freely on the internet has started to trend.
Here’s how you can make use of this trend to gain recognition for your brand.
Building trust is key in podcasting.
Podcasting is not to be used or confused with any form of mass marketing campaigns.
In fact, the lesser you talk about your brand, the better.
Let’s find out how we can generate brand awareness without promotion.
Increasing brand awareness
Brand awareness is key for promoting your product.
When a customer knows a brand, they’re more likely to purchase the product.
If a potential buyer (a.k.a prospect), has some understanding over your brand, they’re more likely to share.
How listeners discover your podcast funnel (Source: Anchor.fm)
The value of your organization needs to be presented to your audience if you wish to make use of your podcast.
Popular podcasts, such as McAfee’s podcast Hackable, has brought in a vast range of a new audience through its valuable content.
The fact that people trusts the podcasts for its content, shows a growth potential from the beginning.
First, try focusing on what makes your podcast more digestible to your audience.
Brand Value and what it means to you
We cannot talk of brand awareness, without touching on brand value.
Brand value represents the reputation of your products.
But, it also can be affected by our outreach processes.
In fact, over advertising and campaigning has led to a significant decrease in brand reputation.
Procter & Gamble had grown its sales, although it had cut down its marketing expense, by trusting organic growth over mass advertising.
This all happened after the company decided to cut its marketing budget by 6%.
Now, what does this mean?
Should you stop spending on your Ad. Campaign in total?
Not at all, the reason for this significant growth is due to brand value development.
Your brand needs to have value in its consumers perspective.
Repetition in advertising is good, especially if you’re in a red ocean market.
But, your product or rather your brand, needs to speak in the consumers perspective for them to be involved.
Explore a new audience
Your existing audience is a great start for building your podcasts initial traction.
You need to work on identifying what interests your audience right now.
Target Audience Venn Diagram (Source: Alamy)
Typically you would look to collect your audience consumer interests using a survey, feedback form and etc.
But, a podcast can increase your data collection by a massive load.
How?
Well, a podcast can be considered a more personal, friendly and neutral approach for marketing.
Typically, a podcast audience is more active than any other.
Imagine it this way, a survey is like an exam and has critical questions.
But, a podcast, can be like a conversation between friends.
So, your podcast should look to enhance the communication of your brand between you and your audience.
The turtle wins the race, not the hare
Podcasting can be highly beneficial.
But, let me just break it you now, It’s really really slow.
Podcasts are tough to start with and the sooner you start doing it, the better.
Because, excluding the cost to start a podcast.
It does not grow unless you find the right medium of content to elaborate on.
Many podcast channels come and go.
The reason why some have stuck together and stayed, is because of the content value.
Your podcast, shouldn’t just be a means for the audience to hear from you.
But they should also be a part of your content.
A neat trick for increasing your podcast growth, is by including audience participation segments.
Dave Ramsey’s twitter thread on readiness of home purchase. (Source: Twitter)
Popular podcast host Dave Ramsey, runs a short thread on some questions based off of what his audience is interested in.
So, you too can follow a similar approach, or much better include a Q&A Session into your podcasts.
Or even, including a In-Call with The Audience segment, where you allow an audience member to call and speak live.
Overall, engagement is key and growing your consumer brand can take time.
But, podcasting is definitely worth the effort.
Bringing in the Star Power
A guest star can help to cross-pollinate your audience.
Bringing in a celebrity, or rather a prominent speaker within the domain of your expertise can be super effective.
To grow your podcast channel, you need some magic.
And, there’s no better way of gaining momentum, than including someone who’s already an expert in the industry.
Take for example, The following series Converge with Casey Newton.
Where a guest host talks of their areas of expertise and shares their knowledge on an episode.
It can be taken as a great example of how a podcast should host guests.
First, its right on point. They waste no time in coming up with the subject of the episode.
Second, they pick a relevant subject. The topic of each podcast is tailored to their audience and well-planned.
Third, the guest is an expert. The popularity of your host can of course bring in a new range of an audience. But, more important, is their expertise on the topic.
Relevancy is important.
Be sure to bring in someone that adds meaning to your show.
Podcasting through Videos
The power of expressions cannot be underestimated.
We need to show ourselves sometimes and create an emotional connection with our audience to grow their interests in the subject.
Lex Fridman Podcast. (Source: YouTube)
One of the best ways to do this is to upload a Video recording of your podcast online.
Preferably to YouTube.
A video uploaded on YouTube is bound to be recommended to those looking for its content.
The YouTube Recommendation Algorithm can be the one tool that you need the most.
If you develop the proper YouTube Thumbnail for your video, you can gain the first attraction of the viewer.
Start by find the right angles within your session room, to get an up-close and personal feeling.
Because, the more interested you seem about your podcast.
The more likely you’re to grab the attention of your viewers.
Your podcast should stay the furthest away from being a cliche piece.
You need to add some energy, get in on the culture of how its done around you.
And learn to experiment with your tools.
By identifying the trends taking place across podcasts and utilizing them in your series, you can attract new audiences to your series.
Trial-and-error
Experimentation is key for your brands value growth.
Your brand, cannot gain more attention from being simple.
Your method of hosting the show, from the beginning to the end, must be important to the audience.
Looking aside on brand growth for a while.
You need to identify the mind of the podcast consumer.
What would you suppose they might be interested in hearing throughout the segment.
Let’s take for example a podcast on teen girl beauty.
Would it really help to promote traditional beauty standards, or to support beauty acceptance.
There has been a significant growth in the promotion of natural beauty and personality plus confidence improvement lately.
This can be taken as a pivotal moment in the consumer sentiment of the beauty industry.
And that, is a sign of modern beauty changing tracks from setting standards to identify acceptance.
Now, the focus has been on improving mental health.
So, with this on account.
We can explore, implementing conversations between the podcast host(s) and the guest(s) about improving confidence in beauty.
So that our audience can find the answers for their questions.
A simple analysis and approach to your content development as this can be advantageous in the long run.
Become an authority of your subject
Constantly uploading content is great.
But, if you don’t dominate your field of expertise and talk about the actual things that people want to hear in your podcasts.
You’re going to miss out on becoming a subject authority.
Hackable Podcasts episodes (Source: Apple Podcasts)
Let’s take a look at the Hackable podcast again.
Hackable is a podcast hosted by McAfee which explores the cyber security industry.
This podcast series from McAfee has helped throughout to raise awareness on Cyber Security.
And, has also helped to grow the brands reputation in this area.
By mixing in Pop Culture and Myth Busters to bring about an adventurous series of hacking and privacy issue related segments, the series saw its rise.
Your content must become a go-to preference for someone looking to learn what you teach.
Bonus: Sponsoring other Podcasts
Typically, you might not have time to spend on creating a podcast.
Or you might find that the process of creating, editing and serving content is not for you.
Most brands look to sponsor existing podcasts that are popular amongst a like-minded audience.
BetterHelp Podcast (source: Raghu Markus Podcast)
This has been useful for BetterHelp, a mental help counseling service, which had spent $38.7 Million (USD) in the year 2020.
This increase in spending helped to promote mental health awareness on podcasts, especially in the Society & Culture genre.
And this incremental growth has obviously brought in a massive income source for BetterHelp.
With more people using the app and taking first preference for BetterHelp over the competition.
This approach to marketing is considered helping to grow the cause before your product.
By utilizing podcasts for increase awareness on Mental Health, BetterHelp learned to grow awareness of their business without aggressively promoting their products.