Brand building can be a hard to understand endeavor, as many of the best practices don’t correlate 1:1 with the reality of the work results. That is: To build your brand, you often have a number of intangibles that can make brand building seem like a never ending hole of cash that has hard to measure metrics.
This article is about how podcasting can help your small business with brand building and how to show proper metrics and tracking, to ensure you don’t lose money doing it. Spending time and money on a brand building effort and then not being able to determine the value of the results is a lot like getting a pebble in between your foot and your sandal: It’s infuriating and painful.
This article seeks to showcase how you can brand build with podcasting as a small business.
Why Podcasts are helpful in brand building
Brand Building is about the recognition a person (potential client, or existing client) has with the services or products your small business offers.
Below are some ways utilizing a properly produced and distributed podcast can be helpful in brand building:
- Consistent brand mentions will make it easier for you to rank for your own brand name, and will help you establish a group of visitors to your different digital footprint endpoints that are aware of your brand
- SEO is an organic way to drive traffic from non-affiliated visitors (people who don’t already know of your brand); podcasting can have a dramatic positive impact on SEO (see an article about how podcasting can help SEO HERE)
- You’re going to be one of very few in your region or at least locally that is podcasting, and podcasting audiences are booming, with no sign of slowing down
- Most small businesses are worried about brand building through fleeting methods without longstanding value from a brand-name perspective – Podcasting has staying power and is very archivable (leading to timeless links on the internet)
- Existing clientele can benefit from podcasting by small businesses, so they are very likely to engage, and that steady stream of content will help with upsells, too
- You get to talk about what you want to talk about. If you are transparent about your titling and content in the podcast, that can help you build your brand in ways that are super important to you, and it will also allow listeners to interact with the body of content the way they want to interact with it, prioritizing what’s important to them, leading to better conversion potential
- Additional analytics, and data derived from podcast episodes, feedback in commentary and questions, and other information that comes from this new channel of marketing can help you refine your offering and produce more brand-building and focused marketing
- You get to segment value for a wide variety of listeners through selective marketing in your podcasts, allowing you to improve individual conversion based on groupings and marketing in different ways to different types of customers
Podcasting as a small business allows you to control a lot of your brand image to new potential clients
When you are podcasting as a small business you get to control the narrative. That is starkly in contrast with the way that social review sites, and other small business resources work, generally. While those resources are important assets in your overall branding strategy and should be used properly, you get to control more when you own 100% of the production and distribution of content. This type of ownership is easy to achieve when you podcast.
Of course, you shouldn’t be obnoxious with your commercial endeavors or in trying to convert or upsell listeners, but you will be given quite a bit of leeway to explore more conversion points. Podcast audiences want the information, and they want to be able to interact with it in their way – if you respect those considerations and produce good quality content, you get to market freely. And conversions will come.
Podcasting can have a positive impact on SEO
We wrote an article about this (linked above earlier in this article), and there are tangible positive effects that come with podcasting about your small business and the industry, services or other offerings you have.
Because that article is a much more in-depth exploration about that topic, we won’t cover it heavily here. But suffice it to say, the amount and consistency of podcast content and the ability to convert in a different medium on ideas and concepts means that you will be pushing up SERPs significantly. Podcasting as a Small Business can have a dramatic positive impact on the amount of new potential clients you can get in front of and on the percentage of conversion with existing clientele.
We also do SEO for Small Businesses.
You don’t have a lot of competition with your podcasting
It’s the early days of small business podcasting. And even if you are just now considering it, and there are competitors in your industry segment doing it – it’s easy to set yourself apart from the crowd, and produce compelling content. It’s MUCH easier to be a leader in long-format audio content than just about every other direct marketing format, including video.
There are low costs of entry to the space, and your knowledge of the industry, your business and how you can help customers will make you unique in the arena. Additionally, only big brands are moving rapidly to podcasting as a marketing channel in high volumes. It’s still not as well-established as a marketing channel for small businesses. It’s a medium that’s ready to be conquered for your specific industry position.
Not only that, but even if a HUGE company is podcasting in your space, there are plenty of audience members that won’t see the bigger brand as genuine, or as approachable as you, if you begin podcasting as a small business. So, you can compete well against much bigger budgets and with much larger competitors, while still minimizing total costs and total time to produce content.
In general, with the right guidance, you can see a few hours of podcast recording turn into the equivalent of multiple long-form content pieces in a written medium. If you have an employee, or you as an owner or manager are comfortable talking about your business, the industry and talking about relevant topics, you can produce a significant volume of content quickly. This can make you a leader in your space rapidly, and with minimal risk, with the right planning.
You can get trackable and tangible results with business podcasting; podcasting has longevity
When you produce a podcast, you can see some information about the value of that content quickly. You can use the audio tracks in your newsletter outreach; through social channels, on youtube (with or without significant editing – depending on what you want to accomplish) and you will begin to get feedback, too.
You can personalize conversion channels, like adding a podcast specific phone number or email inbox, or connecting the marketing to a specific page or form on your website, which will give you specific, tangible information about how people are interacting (more on this later in this article).
Most importantly, you’ll begin to start having people tell you about how they interacted with the podcast content, and how it helped them to understand what you do, what you sell and how they can be working with you. It occurs naturally as you begin to produce and distribute podcasting content as a small business.
Nothing is more tangible than seeing a conversion in real-time as it happens, and as a result of your newest marketing effort. You’ll be surprised how simple this will become for the conversions coming through podcasting.
More content, and more content for your different customer segments
Content is easy to produce as a podcaster. You do some basic planning, and with or without a script – you just start talking about that topic, and you give insights to how that topic plays out for you as a business. People love insights. People love to see behind the curtain. People like to get that humanization of the businesses they work with, or are considering working with. People want to be given something that helps them to get more value – podcasting as a small business can help you accomplish those tasks.
Having a moderator involved can also help you talk about topics that would otherwise be less approachable, or may help you make a higher volume of conversion.
When a moderator asks a question that talks about how money changes hands or about how a work-flow variable takes place, the customer can just listen, instead of feeling like they are being sold. Awkwardness is lessened, and you get more information out there on a public facing, but internally controlled interface.
The endless opportunities for content begin to manifest themselves, because you can start talking passionately about what you do, and then you can move down different tangents or talk about more in-depth concepts than ever before. It will help you to refine additional marketing avenues and talking points, as you have the wheels start turning as you talk about your business.
There is a lot of variability in topical focus, and you can prioritize things for your business, as well as catering to different customer groups
These different topics can help you map out entire strategies for new channels of acquisition, or improve existing outreach to clientele.
You’ll be finding yourself taking notes immediately after your first session (sometimes during the first podcast episode) about what you want to talk about next and how you can improve the total breadth of your topical consideration.
This is also a convenient and approachable way to talk about what you want to talk about without alienating your potential clients. You will also find ways to cater to their specific needs and improve the focus for different customer groups.
For instance: when you are talking about a broad topic on a podcast, based on the utilization of the people listening, or even before you have a large audience built, you can begin finding ways to further enhance your total contribution to those topics covered under that broad based topical umbrella.
If you’re a financial planner for instance, you might be podcasting about the weekly happenings in the market. But in one episode, you may mention how bond yields are being affected dramatically, and that can open up an important, and highly converting topic for you to improve customer interactions.
Podcasting as a small business is also a great way to proactively address customer service issues, like reminders for maintenance. Say you’re a car mechanic, talking about how customers can better interact with you to get more out of the experience when they need car repairs. You could devote an entire episode to why routine oil changes or transmission servicing is more important than it might seem on the surface level. You can talk about the nuances of how that maintenance can affect other parts or systems on the vehicle.
Using that same example, you can also add a promotional code to improve ‘off-season’ or slow times by getting clients to take advantage of a limited or time-sensitive offer. People love deals. They love directness, and if you market it properly you can do a lot to improve both traffic, and conversion, which leads to revenue building, with a podcast as a small business. That concept also translates into better datasets and more usable feedback from interactions and marketing utilization.
You’ll be privy to a whole new dataset that can help you improve business resource utilization and bring in more conversions in supporting channels
The above-mentioned data will begin to flow in – and not just as a report in digital format, but you will see more customers vocally reaching out to you to show you they see what you are doing, and they will express their opinions (good and bad, but mostly good) about this new marketing channel/methodology. Use this feedback to gather insights and improve your offerings, from the podcast to other products and services.
You will be able to see independently verifiable pieces of tracking data if you set it up properly:
- You can use specialized, shortened URL’s to track clicks
- New campaign-specific or podcast-focused endpoints, pages, phone numbers, etc. can be established to see real world benefits from the podcasting efforts
- You can distribute the finished product through a lot of other mediums to get multi-purpose use out of the content (e.g. youtube, social media profiles, newsletters, email outreach, or specialty landing pages, guest posts, etc.)
The conversions and outreach can be tailored infinitely when you being Podcasting as a Small Business
The point of all this information about branding considerations that can be enhanced by small business podcasting, is that it can work very well for a large majority of small businesses that are at least willing to commit to exploring the medium.
You get a ton of control – much more so than SEM and PPC/CPC or even CPA methods. That is because you control the production AND you control the distribution.If people aren’t interested, they don’t utilize the content – it’s a completely opt-in type of content medium for potential consumers. This means that you can find a lot of success, while minimizing risk of bad return either financially, or in effort.
The more you embrace the long-format, and deep dive ideology of podcasting as a small business, the more success you’re going to find, because you’ll continue to refine your presence, the reach of the content, and the offering for many different segments you weren’t previously marketing to. All this, while spending very little to get to the finished content piece – as podcasting is pretty direct, and the time it takes once you’re comfortable with it, is less than comparable mediums of outreach.
Let us know if you want to work with us to produce a small business podcast for your brand.
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