Podcasts are the future of marketing.
In this article, I will explain why companies use podcasts, how successful they can be, plus my own personal experience with running a podcast.
Why Companies Use Podcasts
Podcasts are highly-engaging forms of content.
Other marketing techniques such as blog posts find it tough to keep an audience around long enough to explore a topic in detail.
While there are a few tactics to keep your audience on a website, such as leveraging multimedia techniques ( images, infographics, video) podcasts are far more effective at capturing the attention of your ideal audience.
In addition, the human interaction podcasts create gives a sense of familiarity and personalized content that other marketing techniques cannot offer.
When you run a podcast, you can discuss topics in great detail, providing your personal view on a topic, and connecting with both your interlocutors and your ideal audience in a very direct way.
Lastly, when a potential customer listens to a podcast, they have already made the decision to stick around and listen to what you have to say, whereas, with a blog post, customers often scroll down to find an answer to their question and move on.
Some Stats on Why Podcasts Are a Great Idea
To see why people love podcasts, you don’t have to look any further than the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It has grown exponentially over the last year and pulls in millions of views on every episode.
Here are some facts and figures from SocialBlade:
- At the time of writing, Joe Rogan’s podcasts get around 57 million views per month;
- At the time of writing, Joe Rogan’s podcasts have gained more than 240,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel.
These two statistics alone show that there is a huge demand for interesting and engaging podcasts.
Also consider the following Podcast Insights statistics:
- 80% of listeners come back every week to listen to the next podcast;
- 45% of listeners listen to most of the podcast;
- 35% of listeners listen to the entire podcast.
By now you should have an idea of how podcasts can bring new life to your marketing campaigns.
Here are three other benefits for starting a podcast in 2019 as part of your B2B marketing campaign.
Benefits Of Starting A Podcast
Underutilized Medium
Data-driven marketing strategies have seen a boom in consumer-focused content to read, watch and share with customers, with the majority being white papers, blog and newsletters sent to their email inboxes.
Now, even though there are lots of podcasts to listen to, it is still a very underappreciated channel to attract new customers.
As you dive deeper into niche industries, you will find fewer and fewer podcasts to listen to – it’s not totally crazy to think you may be the first business to release a podcast on your specific topic!
Easy To Access
Websites, apps and media players are making it easier to access podcasts than ever.
They are usually hosted on the publisher’s website but with companies such as Apple and Spotify catering to the podcast medium, more and more people have the option to listen to the latest show.
For example, we use Simplecast for hosting our podcast and then Simplecast syndicates each episode to 10 other podcast platforms. No effort from our side at all – publish in one place, reach 10 different audiences.
Podcasts are also great when targeting mobile users. For example, submitting your podcast to the iTunes store gives you access to an audience of more than 90+ million users all over the world.
And with social media, podcasts can be shared with friends and colleagues to increase the reach and potentially referrals – one of the strongest forms of marketing around!
My own experience with running a podcast
First a little background about me and my company.
I run a consulting agency called Digital Authority Partners. We’re a software consulting firm working primarily with healthcare companies on digital transformation initiatives. This includes digitization projects, automating manual workflows, building telemedicine apps, custom dashboards for hospitals and more.
In line with our core business, in early 2018, we launched a digital magazine called Healthcare Weekly. Healthcare Weekly is dedicated to highlighting how emerging technologies are redefining the healthcare space. We’ve grown to over 100,000 monthly readers over the last year alone.
The magazine serves as an ‘ice breaker’ for us, as an agency, to get more business. After all, CEOs at healthcare companies are significantly more likely to agree to being interviewed for a healthtech magazine than to respond to cold outreach emails from my sales team.
Two months ago, I decided to start a podcast where I interview CEOs from healthcare companies that have launched a digital-enabled solution. My latest episode was with Joseph Truscelli, CEO @ HelloAlvin on the future of telemedicine.
Starting a podcast was one of the best decisions we could have come up with as a team.
Because we had a large number of readers online, we were easily able to drive traffic to each episode. Each episode gets anywhere between 10,000 and 18,000 downloads during the first 30 days after an episode was published.
But most importantly, the podcast really led to a surge in business for our agency as well.
Here are main benefits I see right now, as a business, for doing a podcast.
1) Low cost/ low maintenance. Our model is very simple. We record the podcast via join.me then a sound engineer cleans the audio file and ads the intro-outro. This is followed by a writer who summarizes the podcast and publishes a new episode on the Healthcare Weekly website and on various podcast platforms, directly from SimpleCast.
2) Get to the top of food chain. Since we only interview CEOs for the podcast, we always talk to decision-makers. Most of them have no interest, necessarily, in our core business, but a few of them ask about our other services. So far, we’ve been able to convert 7% of podcast guests into customers. And the beauty of this approach is that we never have to sell. Those who have a need, ask about it.
3) They come to you. After a couple of months, we’re now receiving 5-6 pitches directly from PR firms each week. This gives us access to amazing companies. The podcast is more or less on auto-pilot – aka, it doesn’t require me or my staff to try to get any new guests. Last week alone, I recorded three episodes.
4) Introductions to other CEOs. When a podcast episode goes live, we send an email with instructions on how our guests can promote the episode. And we also ask them to refer us to other CEOs they know who could be a good fit for a future episode. About 35% of our guests send intro emails to other CEOs.
5) Free SEO. After we publish an article, we often recommend our guests to write a blog post on their own blog and link back to the original source (the Healthcare Weekly article announcing the release of a new episode). This has led backlinks from authority platforms with no additional effort.
Conclusion
Podcasts are the future of marketing. They are excellent at engaging with customers and have proven to be effective at keeping them satisfied. There are plenty of benefits to implementing podcasts as part of your marketing strategy in 2019 and beyond.
I strongly suggest you invest in running a podcast in 2019. You won’t regret it!
Codrin Arsene is the CEO @ Digital Authority Partners and Healthcare Weekly Magazine.