Podcast Strategy: Engage Your Audience. Build Trust. Be Relevant.
You’ve probably heard of podcasting, but do you know why it’s important? This powerful communication tool is being adopted faster than any other broadcast media in history. Having a good podcast strategy can ensure you’re keeping current and leveraging the most effective media tools to build deeper relationships with your target audience.
Engage Your Audience
Having greater reach and more direct touch points with your audience is something every communication strategy aims to achieve. Podcasts provide a direct communications link to an global audience with next to no incremental cost. Taking a small amount of time to develop a podcast strategy can result in a new communications channel that engages a world-wide audience.
A podcast strategy can also leverage all the social tools on the Internet to encourage interaction and engage your audience on a deeper level. Users can do more than tune-in to a podcast. They can follow links, give feedback, pause or rewind, share content, or engage in many other ways. With a good podcast strategy, you can monitor your user engagement and respond to it quickly.
Build Trust
You already know that trust is essential for effective communications. Like Radio and TV, podcasts are publicly broadcasted rich media and carry more credibility than press releases, lectures, emails, or most other common communication tools. Podcasts put the persuasive power associated with a global broadcast at your disposal.
A podcast is delivered to users whenever they’re ready and choose to play it. A person who receives information through a podcast is more empowered than a person who receives the same information in a presentation, flier, or by other traditional means. Podcasts give your audience more control over their experience, which helps build greater trust between you and your users.
Be Relevant
Web 2.0 is a reality. If you’re not familiar with terms like “social media”, “blog”, or “podcast”, you’re quickly losing touch with the standard tools people are using to communicate. With hundreds of thousands of podcasters, and over 18 million regular podcast users in the USA, podcasting is becoming an important part of the Web 2.0 world.
Podcasting also presents relevant content to your audience. People who listen to or watch podcasts do so because they want to. With a solid podcast strategy, you can deliver messages that are in-line with your goals, and draw in an audience that already sees a benefit in what you are saying.
If you think podcasting is only relevant for teenagers and Silicon Valley tech start-ups, think again. Libraries, hospitals, local retailers, fortune 500 companies, universities, professors, police departments, fitness trainers, authors, or just about any organization with a need to communicate in the modern world can use podcasting, and in a great many cases already are. Podcast strategies can be powerful, competitive, and a lot easier to implement than you might have ever imagined.
Feel free to send me an email if you have questions about how you could implement a podcast strategy. My email is rian [at] dailysplice.com.
Tags: Podcast Guide, podcast strategy, podcasting
