The Marketing Unleashed Podcast – Why should a business should start a podcast?
Joel: Hello everyone and welcome to a nother episode of the Marketing Unleashed Podcast. I’m here with Nathan. Nathan, how you doing man?
Nathan: Doing great today. Thanks Joel.
Joel: Yeah, so we’re going to be talking a bout why businesses should be podcasting. Now obviously it’s kind of ironic because you’re listening to a podcast about podcasting. So we are going to just kind of go over some of the basics of what the advantages of podcasting would be for your business and we can kind of chat about how to get started a little bit. Or if you need help, obviously we can help you get this started because we’re doing it right now. So Nathan, I’d say first off, one of the basic reasons to start a podcast is to generate traffic for your business.
Nathan: Yeah, that’s right. And people like to listen to podcasts. I listen to podcasts, they’re easy to consume, you can’t read a web page while you’re driving your car or at least you shouldn’t. And if you have to, everybody’s got to commute for the most part, unless you work at home all the time, which sometimes I do. So it’s nice to have something like a podcast that you can listen to on a regular basis while you’re driving in your car. It allows you to learn about subject matter that you’re interested in. It allows you to deliver that content with, sort of in a hands free way. Like I was saying, you can’t get look at a webpage while you’re driving your car. So it’s a nice way to deliver content when people otherwise would just be listening to the radio or something else.
And it really helps continue to kind of extend how you’re able to reach people. Written content and graphical content is just one way to reach people. And I think having that audio and or video content can really help continue to reach people where otherwise you might not be able to reach them or that time might be wasted. One sort of side note, a lot of sales guys that we’ve worked with, other clients, podcasts work great for delivering sales content. So if you’ve got a new product and the sales guy needs to learn about the product, they’re going to be driving around going from client to client. You had just put together a podcast and put it all in there and let them listen to it and learn as they’re driving from client to client and then later reinforce that with your written material and your webpages and it’s a great way to help keep your sales staff up on new products and things that are going on in your industry.
Joel: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like you said, it takes a lot longer to read, a blog post or maybe a new sales training manual and you can’t do it on the fly. You can’t do it on the go. With a podcast you can pretty much listen to, while you’re cooking dinner, driving, sitting at the office. I listen to a lot of podcasts while I’m working out at the gym. I don’t know, there’s just something about hearing people talk that makes that time go a little bit faster for me than music. Maybe I’m just weird in that way, but…
Nathan: Yeah, you feel like you’re getting something else out of it too. You’re not just spending your time sort of mindlessly listening to the radio or whatever. You’re actually getting some knowledge out of it.
Joel: Right. Yeah. And as far as the content creator is concerned, I mean, how much time do you… I mean, you really have to think about it, how much time do you spend writing and crafting that perfect blog post when you can just set up a microphone set up and, and just talk for 15, 20 minutes and you get pretty much the exact same amount of words and content that you would, if you were to write, I don’t know, a thousand or 2000 word article, you think.
Nathan: Right. Yeah. And it depends on how long your podcast is, but yeah.
Joel: Yeah. So I mean our podcast, they last… Well each, whenever we talk about a topic, it’s 20, 15, 20, 30 minutes. And I’d say it’s probably what, a couple thousand words I’ve never actually counted.
Nathan: Yeah, I know. We do the transcript of the calls and that’s sort of a benefit to doing this because you get the additional written content that you can add to your website. When we plug in these podcasts on our website, we include a transcript and then that way you kind of get that text as well as the spoken podcasts. And I’ve never really counted the words, but they tend to be much longer, I know, than the blog posts we’ve made.
Joel: Oh yeah, yeah. Well for SEO purposes, you want at least 300 words and I mean, we’re blowing that out of the water.
Nathan: Absolutely.
Joel: Yeah. So I think speaking is a lot easier to, as far as content creation, than sitting down and writing. People tend to find that writer’s block and everything. But I think if you just put a microphone in front of somebody’s face, they can speak a lot easier.
Nathan: Right.
Joel: Now… And just to give you a few stats here, so 39% of small and medium sized business owners do listen to podcasts at least once per week. So that people are listening. I mean I think it’s like a third of the total us population, which is between upper 300 lower 400 million, like a third of them listened to podcasts. So that’s a huge number. I mean that’s a lot more than probably have, I don’t know, maybe even cable, I don’t know. I don’t know what those numbers look like, but that’s a lot of people.
Nathan: Yeah, I mean, I would say, just from my experience, especially the younger you get the more apt that those people are going to be listening to podcasts. Because they kind of grew up with it, and that was something that they, some media that they consumed on a regular basis. And so people are just used to it. I also think it sort of helps develop, I don’t know if this is a side note here, but it helps to develop a personality for a business. And a lot of times in marketing we find that our clients have trouble sort of developing a, for lack of a better word, a business personality. Or a sort of a general feeling about the business that people can relate to.
And whenever you’re building a podcast, you can relate to those people because when they listen to our podcast, they start to learn, they know who we are even before they might come in the door and talk to us. So if a new client came in and they met Joel, they would already, oh yeah, I know you, I’ve talked listened to you talk about the different topics on your podcast. If they came in and met me, they would, oh, you’re the IT guy that I always hear answering the IT questions on the podcast. So it let’s people get to know your business and people who work there maybe even before they are a client.
Joel: Right. Yeah. I like to call it a personalization at scale. You can have a conversation with somebody, or it’s almost like having a conversation with someone, but you’re having a conversation with potentially many people. It, just to let , if you don’t have an audience already, don’t let that stop you because podcasts are actually a great way to build that audience. Giving people something that’s easy to consume. Putting it on their phone or on their computer every week or day or month, however many times you actually produce a show. It’s a great way to build that rapport with them and definitely build your authority in whatever industry you are targeting and just kind of connect with them on a different level.
Nathan: Yeah, absolutely. I’m all for the, expanding your horizons and being able to reach clients in new and different ways. One of the things about starting a podcast is yeah, you’re starting from scratch, but it gives you an opportunity to sort of build an audio knowledge base out there. It’s, you can get clients interested, existing clients interested, they learn about topics that maybe they didn’t know you were an expert in that field. And it gives you another opportunity to get in front of your clients. So I think it’s a great, a great way to do that.
Joel: Right. And something else to keep in mind, whenever you have your own show, whenever you have your own podcast and you do start to build that audience, you can also start to cross promote with other similar, companies in the same industry or with influencers that would really it help you in your industry and bring them on as guests. That’s how a lot of companies, kind of grow with their podcast. It’s not always about, I have my audience and I can only talk to my audience. They’ll a lot of times bring in a guest that has their own audience and then that guests will promote the episode and then all of a sudden your audience grows because they’ll say, “Oh, I like this content. I like the host, I like the people involved. I’m going to subscribe to this podcast. Now that I’ve heard the podcast guests.” Does that make any sense?
Nathan: Yeah. And another thing that I like about it is, you learn insights about the industry, whatever the topic is from your podcast, and then you can go back and reuse that content. So don’t think of a podcast as kind of like a one and done. You’ve done the podcast now you walk away, it exists out there. Just like a webpage would exist out there, people can come back to it and reference it if it’s got good information. We’ve done other projects where we’ve taken audio recordings, video recordings, and chop those up into a audio or video knowledge base so people can do a search and whenever they get the answer back, it’s not in the form of a written answer, it’s the form of someone actually answering the question or here’s a podcast on that topic that we discussed.
And then someone can go back to that content and read it or listen to it. So you can use podcasts multiple ways. It’s not just one time kind of record and release, not like the nightly news where you kind of get the news one time and then the next day it’s a new news broadcast. This can be used, the content can be used over and over and over again. But I think it’s definitely a good tool. I really like the mobile aspect to it.
The traffic on websites is mobile and getting more and more mobile with all of these voice assisted tools like Siri and Alexa and those kinds of things. It’s only going to get more and more voice oriented. And I think there’s some really interesting tech on the horizon where podcasts will be directly referenced through things like Siri or Alexa and there’s some really interesting technology that’s coming out and by doing a podcast now you’re kind of building up your content. So when those new technologies sort of come out, you’re going to a nice base of content to work with when you go to try and use some of those technologies.
Joel: Right. Yeah. And another thing that if you do build a larger audience, you can even monetize the podcast itself.
Nathan: Oh yeah.
Joel: So if you’re an expert in your industry and your using your podcast to gain customers, but all of a sudden you find yourself with tens of thousands of subscribers every episode, you can now turn that audience into a moneymaking opportunity. Kind of as a side hustle for your business.
Nathan: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I wouldn’t count… if someone’s starting off fresh and they haven’t done anything, I wouldn’t count on 10,000 subscribers in the first month. But it’s something that you’re building towards. And it’s the same thing that people have done in the past with YouTube channels and things like that. Or, you’ve got to start just building the content. And ultimately, what I always say with web and other marketing techniques is content is King. And so you need to just start building the content and then eventually, you’re going to build an audience. And then that audience, you can then monetize. Our podcast hasn’t been around for that long and we’ve already had people interested in advertising on our podcast.
Joel: Right yeah. Yep. Through guest posting and being a guest on the show. Also, it doesn’t take an incredible amount of time to produce a podcast. I mean, it does. You do have to invest some time, but it’s not like you’re going to be spending, half your day or three fourths of your days producing a podcast. It can be fairly simple, and relatively inexpensive. If you want to invest in the equipment yourself, you can go on Amazon or go to Best Buy and buy a microphone that can actually plug directly into your computer. There are very cheap or free software out there that will allow you to record. And you don’t even have to edit the podcast yourself. Now we do all the editing internally and all the mixing and everything, but there are services like ours and there are other ways that you can outsource whatever you may need. And that goes along with podcast production introductions. Pretty much anything that you can think of, you can find somebody to help you out with it or you can just call us. So…
Nathan: Right.
Joel: Shameless plug.
Nathan: [inaudible 00:00:14:37].
Joel: Right.
Nathan: We might even invite you on our podcast to get you started.
Joel: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Yeah, we’d love to have anybody, come on board and be a guest and talk about what they do and we could talk about how we can help them. And I think the biggest thing is that podcasting, it just fits into people’s lives now. I mean it’s kind of like, I mean, it’s becoming the new television in a way. People I think are using podcasts as more of a entertainment and information source. I mean, there are quite a few new shows where I don’t watch it on TV because I’m not sitting in front of the TV all day, but I usually do have my phone with me or I’m sitting in front of my desk at the computer in front of my computer at the desk. And I can easily listen to the the audio version of the show.
Nathan: Right. Well, whenever you’re working, a lot of times people listen to music or other things while they’re working. You can do the same thing with a podcast, listen to it while you’re working it’s not as sort of in your face as having to watch video or pick up content by reading it or what have you. You can do other things while you’re listening to the podcast and, pick up information that is useful to you. So you’re not sort of wasting that space where, you’re at work eight hours a day and you’re doing your job and there’s plenty of time for you to listen to other podcasts. If you listened to music, you can listen to a podcast.
So and it depends on the subject matter. Sometimes if you’re going to get technical, people have to pay more attention. And in those cases maybe it doesn’t work as well when you’re doing other things. But for general kind of podcasts, informational podcasts, they’re sort of a mix between entertainment and educational and those are pretty easy to listen to while you’re doing other things. And it’s just, it’s kind of an added benefit. People are looking for ways to do more with their time and that’s a great way to do more.
Joel: Right. Yep. So, all right. You got anything else? On podcasting.
Nathan: I would say that some of the things that we’ve noticed, podcasting since we’ve been doing our podcast, our website traffic is up. We’re getting interest and people are contacting us, interested in our podcast. We’ve talked to other clients about starting their own podcast and we’d be glad to help anybody get theirs going. It’s really not as hard as you would think. You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment really to get a podcast off the ground. You just need some good subject matter and someone who’s not afraid to talk into a microphone and you can get a podcast going pretty quickly.
Joel: Right. Absolutely. And I will also add that even if you’re not, even if your podcast idea is not business related and it may be more entertainment or personal related, I mean we could still help you out you don’t, you don’t have to be local to Saint Louis. We could do this, we can either travel to you or, or we can do it over, online through Skype or whatever it may be, Go To Meeting. We have many different ways to record.
Nathan: Right? Yeah. You don’t have to be in the same room with the people that you’re interviewing. I mean, right now we’re not in the same room and we’re doing this podcast. You don’t have to be there with your clients. If you want to interview clients or talk to other people in your field. You don’t have to travel to do that. As long as you can get a phone conference going or a Skype call or something like that, then you can make the podcast work.
Joel: Yep. All right. All right. Well how about we wrap this up?
Nathan: Yeah, no, I think ultimately the takeaway for me is podcasts are a great way to learn and a great way to consume information. It allows you to do other things while you’re listening to the podcast. It’s a great way to interact with other companies and kind of learn about people who work there. Most of the time the only interactions you have are sort of the sales on their website or maybe through some call center if you’ve got a customer service issue. So it really helps kind of personalize a company for you.
Joel: Yeah, definitely. And again, if you need help, feel free to visit our website at a yellowdogllc.com and you can give us a call or shoot us an email and we’ll get your podcast up and running pretty quickly. All right, Nathan. Well, Hey, thanks. And we’ll be right back with Can’t Let it Go.