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Tag: content creation

How Can a Podcast Help My Business?

There are several ways a podcast can help your brand or business. 

Share Your Knowledge and Expertise

The first way a podcast can help your business is by giving you an outlet where you can share your knowledge and expertise, shedding a light on your business while giving insight into your industry. You have direct knowledge and expertise that only you can share about the industry and, more specifically, your business. You are an expert in what you do, and this is an opportunity to share that expertise with people who are already interested.

Plus, if you’re one of the first podcasts in your industry, you also have the first-mover advantage over others that may join the podcast space for your industry down the road. Regardless, you have your unique perspective and an opportunity to differentiate yourself from other podcasts and businesses in the industry.

Sharing this expertise on an audio platform helps you build community around the show and your brand that you may not reach on a visual social media platform. Many people listen to podcasts while occupied with other tasks, passively consuming content while walking the dog, exercising, driving, or while working in a way no other digital media can be consumed.

Creating Connections

A podcast can also help your brand or business by creating connections to others in your industry. If you choose to interview guests on your show, you have the opportunity to reach out to and share viewpoints with your colleagues, vendors, and customers to offer a 360-degree discussion of your area of expertise. You also have an opportunity to add value for them, as well as the audience, while you discuss your industry and business. Without guests, you can share customer stories, solutions with vendors, funny anecdotes, and other content that showcase your expertise. 

You also reach people already interested in your industry and business with your show, acting as a reminder of who you are and what you do. It’s like nurturing a community of “warm leads” for your business.

Get Insight Into Your Community

When you engage and involve the listeners in the show itself, you also help your business, gaining insight into your community of customers and potential customers.

Can you imagine being able to ask an engaged community what they want to know about your business or industry? This is like having a FREE focus group to tell you how you can better serve them. You can also test new ideas with them, to find out if your latest idea is a good one. When you listen, you’re able to gain insight into how they want you to serve them.

Is there a better insight into the minds of customers than an engaged community of customers themselves?

Create Pillar Content

Finally, for a brand or business that’s creating content around themselves, a podcast gives you a tremendous amount of long-form content that you can use as a pillar for a lot of other content you create. You can re-package and re-purpose the same content across a variety of channels without having to create something completely original for each platform.

Using a podcast as “pillar content” is a great way to have a variety of content created for many platforms and uses.

Create Pillar Content for Your Business with a Podcast

By having a podcast serve as long-form pillar content for your brand, you achieve two big things.

What Your Pillar Content Does

  1. You create a library of searchable content that stands out when people look for you and in your industry. If they are not a part of your community already, they will be looking for an expert to answer questions in your industry. You are that expert.
  2. When creating content around your brand, a podcast serves as a terrific way to re-use and re-purpose content for other use, by slicing, dicing, and re-packaging the podcast content and using it elsewhere without having to create more content. 

Re-Purpose Content

A 20 minute podcast episode turns into several other pieces of content aside from the audio you publish. It can serve as 3-4 blog posts on your website by transcribing (or using your pre-written notes). Think about how much time you save by editing your spoken word to become a blog post, rather than writing, re-writing, editing, and publishing new, original, written content into a blog post. 

Also, utilize your laptop or smartphone camera to record video yourself recording your podcast episode to upload to YouTube to capture those who are interested in the visual as well as the audio of your podcast content. It also offers a way to passively consume the audio on their computer while they utilize other tabs in their browser or applications as they work. It’s an easy way to share video content with minimal editing, only requiring a cut here and there and uploading to YouTube. You then create a channel on the second largest search engine in the world for your business. Having that search engine working for you is pretty handy when you consider that Google also owns YouTube and will be able to index your video for relevant Google searches. 

Social Media Use

Take short video clips from your podcast, whether your recorded video or “audiograms” to share to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote your show, share video content highly-valued by those platforms, and share smaller bites of your expertise with your community. That content will also drive your existing community toward your podcast, and you’ll be able to deepen your already existing connection with those that carry over . 

In addition to the audio and video that you re-purpose in smaller pieces, you can also create memes for those same platforms with quotes, as well as offer text excerpts from the body of your podcast to your community across platforms. This creates a TON of content from a single podcast episode without minimal extra effort. 

This is how we are able to create so much around Beyond Your Side Hustle, creating articles, videos, quotes, and micro-blogs from the larger pillar content created for the podcast. We also record video YouTube publication to answer each question answered thus far on the Q&A episodes.

There is a lot of potential content created from a single episode of Hustleburg, and it’s replicable for your podcast. 

I’m Stuck About Where to Start Creating Content for My Business

This was a response to a question in Episode 4 of Hustleburg, an episode devoted to answering your questions.

You should start creating content in two ways. The first place to find guidance will be from listening to your customers. Listen for what it is that they need. By listening for their needs first, you begin to understand how your business can meet those needs. This offers you a starting point for much of your content creation. You need to help them solve a problem.

When you examine the underlying issues of your customers, you’ll understand how to better craft your content to help them

As you listen, keep in mind that what they will likely not explicitly give you directions about what they need you to solve. Too often, we, both the customer and the business, focus on the obvious, external problem. That external problem is only a symptom of the underlying internal issue that drives their desire for change.

For example, when you have a plumbing issue, it’s not so much that you need to have your toilet unclogged or sewer line snaked, while that is certainly the obvious and important issue to address. What you are really feeling is the internal problem of how you would feel about being unable to use your toilet, having to rid your waste in some other way. In 2020 America, we live in a society where anything other than indoor plumbing is pretty weird. You would probably feel very odd if you evacuated your wastes in an outhouse, had a Porta-Potty on the side of your house, or used your yard. All of these show that you are unable to operate by the norms of this society. THAT is the internal problem you’re actually solving with a plumber.

Add Value to Their Lives

While you listen, you also need to add value with anything you share online and your other marketing materials. You should share about the things you’ve observed how you can help them to help solve their issues in your areas of expertise. It’s not just a non-stop advertisement about what you do. You should be adding value to their life.

Connections Win

Sometimes, you’ll have areas of interest overlap with your customers, and it won’t be in your field. That’s not just okay. It’s preferred. You should always be presenting yourself as an expert in what it is that you do, but sometimes it’s those related areas or personal interests in another aspect of your life that you share that will forge a connection.

To give you an example, I’m more likely to do business with someone who is a Braves fan or is a fellow alum of the University of Georgia than someone who isn’t. When all other things are equal, that is something that will help me make the decision, because I have that connection or shared experience with someone. That’s only something I learn through interacting around that interest. That’s not to say that I exclude someone due to those factors, but I’ve found time and again that I am definitely more apt to do.

When they are able to connect with you over shared experience or interests, that’s going to be a win for your business. Use this knowledge to expand beyond a single focus for your content.

Five Topics for Your Content

  1. The main thrust of your business
  2. A related aspect to #1
  3. Another related aspect to #1
  4. Something that makes you a real person that interests you.
  5. A second topic of interest that shows you’re real.

When you deploy these varied topics in your content, it shows your community that not only are you an expert in your field, you’re a real person. If you go back to my earlier plumbing example, people aren’t always looking for a plumber. They will, however, remember that person they connected with over a shared fandom or who grew up near them is one when the time comes. They aren’t looking to hire a plumber. They are looking to hire someone they connect with who understands their internal struggle when the toilet won’t flush.