These 3 principles will dramatically increase your podcast listenership.
It’s ironic, but when creating a branded podcast that offers value to your customers or clients – the first thing you need to do is STOP thinking of them as customers or clients, and START thinking of them as podcast audience members.
Here’s why:
At the most basic level, customers are people with money in their pockets who you’re trying to engage. Clients are the people we serve.
Podcast audiences may include people in these categories – but they also represent something more significant.
Podcast audiences are sounding-boards, receptors, and disseminators of ideas.
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They’re educated, politically-informed, discerning, and up for intelligent discussion.
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Listeners can handle more creative treatment of ideas.
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They are “long-form” listeners.
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They like to infer and learn.
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Their opinions carry weight, and you can’t coax them with special offers – you have to earn each of them.
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They’re influencers, in the best, most authentic sense of the word.
Remember, your podcast is talking to 3-dimensional people who have collectively agreed to give it the time of day. They don’t have to. There are lots of other podcasts they could be enjoying. They could be watching Netflix. They may not care about your brand much, or at all…yet.
It’s critical that you, as a brand or organization, keep this fact firmly in mind as you go forward, creating your podcast.
So given all this, how can you “talk so podcast audiences will listen?” It’s an art form, not a science, but there are some established principles of the audio storytelling trade you can lean on.
Keep these 3 principles in mind when making your brand’s podcast.
1. Never forget. It’s all about delivering value value value.
You need to continually ask what value your podcast if offering to the listener:
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Why should they give you their valuable “share-of-ear”?
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How does the value of the podcast differ from the value of your other brand channels?
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How does it overlap?
For instance, customers may come to your website to buy cutting-edge tech. But if they can already do that on your website, then that is not the job of your podcast. The role of the podcast might be, instead, to celebrate the concept of innovation through stories of great tech pioneers.
It’s relevant to reason this out.
The other “value variable” to consider is production value:
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How smoothly does your podcast sound?
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How well is it recorded?
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How clear and present is the writing?
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How tight is the editing?
If you aren’t pushing each of these aspects as far as you can, you are not meeting the full potential of your podcast.
In a previous post, JAR Audio wrote about how to remotely make a podcast during a pandemic.
