Blogs? They’re old news.
These days, branded podcasts are the clear winner when it comes to creating brand awareness — right up there on the list with video content.
The fact is, branded podcasts are great for providing your prospect and customers with valuable information, such as tips and tricks for your product or service, how-to videos, educational content and much more. They're also another way for you to establish yourself as an authority in your niche while building trust and positioning your brand as a resource.
The problem is, creating a branded podcast requires more than just sitting in front of a microphone and talking about what you know.
So if you’ve created a branded podcast and aren’t seeing the results you had hoped for, there are a few mistakes you might be making.
The first step to creating a successful branded podcast is deciding what you want to get out of it. In other words, what are your objectives? Do you want this podcast to act as another channel to convert undecided leads, or do you simply want to gain more exposure to grow your pipeline?
In fact, before you start producing your podcast, you should already have an idea of what your marketing strategy will look like, a season’s worth of high-quality content mapped out (if you’re not trying to cover immediate news), or even what thought leaders you might want to invite onto your podcast as guests so you can leverage their more established audiences.
Even if you’re going to keep things simple, it's important that you start with clear objectives to make sure your branded podcast is successful.
It may sound simple, but if you don't know who your audience is, then your content won’t attract the right prospects. Often, brands think they know who their audience is, but the reality is that they don’t have a deep enough understanding of the kind of content their audience is looking for.
With that in mind, remember that when you’re doing your audience research, your audience is more than just their gender, demographic, and job title. They’re also their beliefs, the solutions they’ve tried, and their desires.
Put another way, your audience is looking for answers to questions and problems they have, and if you know what those problems and questions are, you can work backwards from those to create content around the solutions speaking directly to the people who need to hear it most.
This is closely tied to having clear objectives before you begin producing your branded podcast, but not tracking the right metrics after you launch can hurt your performance, too.
Why?
Because tracking the right metrics tells you what your audience wants, and gives you the ability to focus more attention on what’s working and cut what’s not. For example, it’s obvious to track metrics like unique listeners and listening time — but which episodes pushed the most subscriptions? Which emails to your audience brought in the most traffic? What was the messaging? What does that say about what your audience wants to hear?
All of these details are important to track to continually optimize your podcast so you can continue to see growth.
Check out our free guide to planning, creating and executing a rich media content strategy here. If you have any questions, the experts at Tobe are happy to help.