A podcast is a crucial way for businesses to build a relationship with your listener, who can be your prospect, which gives you a longer attention span than digital advertising.
Think of speaking your voice on audio. And most would think of Clubhouse, a social audio app that allows conversation between people in a room and you can’t record the conversation. And when you are looking for ways to get a richer life experience than sharing/listening to your nuggets over audio (and you would come across podcasting as a buzzword if it is your first time).
If anyone is not familiar with what podcasting is, Wikipedia defines it as” radio on demand.” It is a prerecorded audio program published on the website and available for download on personal computers or mobile devices to listen when the listener wishes.
Image Credit: Linkedin Pulse (Shawn Corrigan): Will Clubhouse Replace Podcasting
There are major differences between podcasts and Clubhouse in this context. Podcasts are on-demand, whereas Clubhouse is live social audio. It’s an important difference: Podcasts can be scripted and highly produced, whereas Clubhouse is closer to a live radio show
Why Is Podcasting Important For Marketing
A podcast is a crucial way for businesses to build a relationship with your listener, who can be your prospect, which gives you a longer attention span than digital advertising.
Podcast awareness and listening trends continue to rise in the United States. The increasing trend in new podcast programming, adoption during the pandemic, and usage of “smart speakers” like Amazon Echo and Google Home devices.
Market Opportunity Around Podcast Advertising
From Statista reference, Podcast advertising spending is expected to increase steadily shortly, with 2021 figures estimated at 1.33 billion U.S. dollars, and these figures are forecast to surpass 2.7 billion dollars in 2025.
Podcast Advertising Spending In The United States From 2021 To 2025 (In Billion U.S. Dollars)
Image Source: Statista
In Asia Radio Today, the trend of podcasting is growing in the Asia Pacific from
were also popular in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, with the audience, prefer lifestyle and news podcasts genre content that is not found easily on Youtube or Google search.
My Personal Experience With Podcasting:
In my new journey as a podcaster under Tao Of Online Business, my recent podcasting experience is interviewing my business community, Dr Laura Jaget or Dr LJ on how she does podcasting and her nuggets to share around this topic. She was a retired chiropractor that has a 28-year of venture under the belt and creator of the How To Life brand (currently on the podcast and Youtube Channel), short tutorials on essential life skills to help take the fear out of “ADULTING.”
Image Credit: Howtolife.com (Mominars and Podcast Section)
What adulting means in general definition, it means to do grownup things and hold responsibilities such as a 9-5 job, a mortgage/rent, a car payment, or anything else that makes one think of grownups.
Dr Laura has created the episodes for her podcast starting from the last year 2020 and currently has more than 50 episodes at the point of writing and still doing it consistently.
Important Podcasting Nuggets:
In the process of doing a podcast, Dr LJ shared some of her nuggets on podcasting as below points.
1. Identify On Your Why On The Reason She Started Her Podcast
Understand why your podcast is relevant to the audience, and the story behind why you are doing it matters. In Dr LJ’s case, she shared her adulting experience from being a mother to 4 children, a business owner chiropractor for 28 years, and her sport. With her podcast, She utilizes her daily life experience to show how to do basic life tasks as simple as possible.
The intro message or the hook in marketing terms gives people a clear perspective on her channel about when someone lands on her Youtube Channel Podcast and how it matters to them.
Her introduction in her online channels is an excellent example of how a hook helps provide clarity.
“Do you feel confused and overwhelmed about how to survive and thrive in the adult world? Do you feel clueless when it comes to adulting? My name is Dr Laura Jaget and I help to take the fear out of ADULTING.”
2. Provide Relatable Experiences During Podcast Episode
During one of our conversations in the range of adulting entrepreneurship, we both agreed that the adult world didn’t care about degrees or accolades; rather, life skills matter. A lot of conversation has to be authentic. One of the success principles of memorable podcast episodes is to have life experience related to the audience challenge (hence the term: relatable experiences).
It is to know how to file her taxes, feed her family, reconcile her bank account, and what to do if my wallet is stolen in one of her Youtube channels. The wallet episode is relatable to me as someone who had lost my wallet days before and didn’t know what to do during the incident and what I should be aware of to ensure it didn’t happen to me again in the future.
Another relatable experience example was the answer given in Dr LJ sharing during the episode “How to Deal with the Stresses of Exams and Life when the host asked a question on how a civil engineer can deal better with exam and life-balance and how her sharing can be applied to the engineer profession.”:
Her reply gives the context of relatable experience for this episode as below:
“While I was starting my business and also a mother of 4 children, a variety of people wanted my attention. To manage all the stress and pressure. It’s essential to take care of myself first to have energy before taking care of others, similar to handling situations that require high-stress professions or aspects in other people’s lives”.
3. Knowing The Right Production Podcast and Tools
-Something related to creating content or scripting, recording, editing, and publishing podcasts would be general podcast activity flow. From Dr LJ’s perspective, she shared that there are episodes scheduled and planned within a month and I have incorporated a list of tools for beginners to kick start podcasting
Equipment-wise: A good microphone would be essential to consider and camera webcam works.
There are tools required to do podcasts for podcast production listed in the below points. One important note is that web conference software such as Zoom is not considered an intermediate or advanced level podcaster.
Recording and Mixing
-Audacity
-Anchor. FM
-Riverside.FM, Alitu, Kapwing
-Zoom (not recommended for intermediate and advanced level podcaster)
Copyright music to be inserted into intro and outro music
-Artlist.io
-Epidemicsound.com.
Podcasting Hosting
-Buzzsprout
-Bcastfm
-Lister (also have to convert text to audio)
Cover Artwork:
-Canva or Getstencil. Recommended minimum pixel size of 1400 x 1400 or max 3000 to 3000.
4. Ways to promote your podcast to your audience
a) Guest Podcasting: In Dr LJ’s case, her podcast audience would-be mothers or young millennials, or young professionals; she does her guest hosts on podcasts that have her target audience.
b) Inviting someone to be a guest on your podcast: Approaching people who have been in the news recently and inviting them to be your podcast guest is also another way to build subscribers for your podcast.
In this context, suitable podcast guests could be those that you can highlight a success story or award, someone that can community news a customer case study published or presented at a conference; that may be of interest to your audience.
c) SEO/Youtube: Typically, getting relevant keywords and backlinks would help people discover your podcast. In this case, there are platforms such as Google Podcast, Spotify would be a good platform for people to find your podcast.
5. Bonus Knowledge: Utilize business opportunities around podcasting:
Many people do podcasting as a form of lead generation. However, there are also opportunities for people to know and connect for a relationship, beneficial for small business owners, i.e., they can promote courses, approaching brands to sponsor some giveaways, or advertising slots during the podcast break section.
