The modern marketer has many different tools at his or her disposal to narrate a story that strikes the right strings in the customer’s mind and heart. Where the tools today range from blog posts to video blogs to ephemeral but powerful stories on Instagram and Snapchat, the need to always to remain educational is seen as major for brands today. Today we’ve seen organisations such as Netflix, GE and eBay all turning to use the podcast medium which claimed 67 million users in the US in 2017 – a fact reported by Edison Research. Podcasts have been around since 2007 and so certainly not new, but they are becoming an important part of the consumer’s digital diet in 2018 which has convinced many marketers to take it very seriously.
Why podcasting is effective
- Podcasts sit in the sweet spot between attention and capture while blogs are fighting harder than ever to get eyeballs. As a marketing officer, you obviously turn to more interactive mediums. Videos appear promising and again very popular but there is the requirement for dedicated attention, no matter how bite-sized the video may be. Audio content sits in the middle of this invisible tug-of-war and captures the listener’s attention, without distractions and creates a strong connect. It is neither as dry as the blogs nor an exercise of the attention span like with videos.
- Podcasts are easily consumable. Edison research in their 2017 report where they reviewed podcast consumption in America, quoted 42% of podcasts are listened whilst “on foot” and 29% of them “working out”. This shows how easy it can be to consume podcasts. A video or a blog can never be consumed in that manner which means that podcasts not only give you more consumers, but also more attention time from each consumer. This is why the average time spent by “weekly podcast listeners” is 5 hours 7 minutes which is extremely high. As a marketer, this proves that podcasts are great to have your prospects ‘snack on’ content which slowly and steadily builds your brand.
- Podcasts simplify your story is not talked about often, but a podcast helps you to churn your most important messages into audio. You wouldn’t be able to spin pie-charts and make icons twirl. It’s just your voice and your message. This simplicity helps bring out your core message that can probably get lost in the other, flashier mediums.
- Podcasts are simple to make if you have a decent microphone and free audio editing software. You could potentially make a great podcast. The entire focus then as a marketer lies on content which is where most of your energies should be focused on, without worrying about infrastructure and technologies.
- Podcasts can be self-downloading if a member of your audience subscribes to your podcasting feed on their app of choice. This means as soon as you release a new podcast it will automatically appear so you can leave the hassle of pushing your content to your consumers with email reminders or luring them with freebies. The iTunes app podcast subscribers are already over 1 billion and you can rest assured that the subscription mechanism actually works for podcasts.
- Podcasts sell 63% of people listening to a podcast have actually bought the product or service being sold. Numbers aside, podcasts are being used by lecturers, by big businesses, by design enthusiasts, by historians and by tech bloggers to convey their stories.
Podcasts capture attention, engage the listener, are cheap to make and they sell well. This is like a marketing officer’s dream come true. There is plenty of validation for the claimed arguments in terms of the businesses buying into this idea. The earnest marketer should truly mine this medium since with video mediums losing their credibility as a serious business medium and blogs going out of taste, podcasts might as well be the blogs of tomorrow.
