What does it take to make a business podcast successful? You already know that a podcast is a powerful digital marketing tool that allows you to reach out to potential clients where they never leave – their mobile devices. As such, with podcasting, your business can greatly benefit from increased traffic generation, brand awareness, and conversions using a simple but effective platform.
However, making it work in your favor can be a challenge and it’s easy to just quit and abandon the rest of the episodes that you may still have in mind. Before you reach that point though, try to step back a bit and see what you could do right with your business podcast to help you with your goals this time. What you want is to build a more personalized relationship with your audience, get more downloads, attract more listeners, and keep a sustainable pool of subscribers.
Fanatics Media CMO, Mark Fidelman talks to the Founder of Sweet Fish Media, James Carbary to find out the formula to success behind podcasting for his company and their growing number of clients. While each organization is unique and has varied target audiences, there are basic principles to follow to make it work for your own company.
Pre-interview Essentials
James espouses that “A huge element of making your show successful from a content perspective is really around the pre-interview that you do with each of your guests”. Their target buyers are chief marketing officers or VPs of marketing but what they do is ask their guests what they want to share in the podcast ahead of time. Once they have chosen the topic they want to focus on, James would dig deeper on the subtopics that guests aim to have their audiences walk away with after they listen to the podcast. With the outline all set, he would then go through them and review them with the guests just to make sure they will be able to talk about it spontaneously when they go live with the recording.
When guests know what they are going to say beforehand, it gives them the confidence during the recording and makes their statements clear and concise. As for the podcast host, the outline also serves as a guide as to the right direction where he or she should be leading the interview as well as to keep it back on track when the conversation becomes too exciting or engaging.
Eliminating Fluff
Fluff is not for everybody and if you think that your kind of target market would rather have it straight to the point, then do away with fluff. It is good to start with a bit of personal stuff at the beginning of a podcast interview and talk about family with your guests. But if your audience is composed mainly of business people raring to hear purely business matters, then give them what they want right away. In this way, they hear the kind of content they seek instantly and keep coming back for more.
