Learn four ways podcasts can help solve common pain points of content creation and expand your reach.
By Tina Dietz, CEO Twin Flames Studios
When you’re trying to grow your business, you’ve got a huge amount of information you’d like to share with your audience. But taking everything you and your company are passionate about and distilling it into digestible content often feels like trying to capture a genie in a bottle. Despite your best efforts and highest motivation, it’s all too easy to wind up with content that’s inconsistent, doesn’t connect with your audience, or burns out your marketing team.
Not to mention that in the growing media landscape, it’s harder than ever to capture an audience’s attention. Their eyeballs are constantly pulled between social media, streaming services, hundreds of cable television channels, and millions of websites. But what if instead of eyeballs, you focused on ears?
According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2021 Report released in March, about 80 million Americans (28% of the U.S. 12+ population) listen to podcasts weekly. 116 million people listen to podcasts monthly, a growth of 61.5% since 2018.
As a podcast producer and vocal leadership expert, I’ve seen firsthand how sharp companies increasingly turn to podcasts to solve their content conundrums. Let me take you through some of the most common pain points of content creation, and how you too can use podcasting to overcome them.
- Single-use content
Tell me if any of these scenarios sound familiar:
- You write a blog post that gets a lot of traction, but a week later no one remembers it
- Your team designs a graphic for your website, but only uses it there
- You create a social media post that works perfectly on one platform, but falls flat on three others
This is probably the biggest problem content creators and marketing teams run into. No matter how good these pieces of content are, they’re only ever going to be useful once—you can’t just repost them on a different platform. This leads to a never-ending cycle of constantly having to create immense amounts of new content, either for up-to-date engagement, multiple different platforms, or both.
Luckily, podcasts don’t have this limitation. You can take the content from a podcast and reuse it on a number of different platforms, simply by changing its form to adapt to different mediums. And each time you record a new podcast, all those platforms get up-to-date content.
The following six examples are ways you can repurpose podcasts:
- Website embeds
- Easily embed podcasts into your website so that the latest episode is always available to play with just a click on the front page. Visitors can listen while they navigate through your site or even continue as they switch to another tab.
- Quote cards
- Take the most memorable insights from your podcast hosts or guests and post them on social media as a one-look visual that your audience can quickly absorb while they scroll through their feed.
- Video clips
- Many podcast recording methods include video, so you can easily get another secondary piece of content from your podcast. Upload a full, optimized video to your YouTube channel or short, impactful clips to Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
- Audiograms
- An audiogram is a short media clip that layers an audio soundtrack over a background image and texts or subtitles, sometimes with other effects showing up as well. Think of it like a cross between a PowerPoint slide and an Instagram reel or YouTube short.
- You can easily grab audio clips from your podcast and layer them over branded images and transcribed texts to create multiple audiograms from the same podcast. Then post them to social media, link to them in your email marketing campaigns, or feature them on your website to attract new listeners.
- Transcripts
- Some people still prefer the written word. Publishing transcripts of your podcast allows audience members to quickly scan for key phrases and ideas and jump to the point in the conversation that most interests them.
- Google scans your webpages for keywords, and it’s easy for the algorithms to recognize them from a transcript. This helps your website’s search-engine optimization (SEO), leading to higher search rankings on Google.
- Articles
- Repurposing podcast content into blogs or articles are another way to create timely and thought-provoking content for the community or profession you serve. This could be on your own website as blogs or case studies as well as used for contributing blogs or trade publications.
The Paychex Business Series, a thought leadership-branded podcast from the global HR and payroll services business Paychex, is a great example of this multi-platform approach.
On the podcast’s main webpage, you’ll see weekly episodes with links to video of each episode on YouTube and audio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. The Paychex Business Series page also includes a few sentences summarizing each conversation, the timestamps of the topics covered, and a link to a PDF of the transcript for easy downloading and forwarding.
The podcast is promoted on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. One recent tweet from Paychex includes a link to the latest podcast, a short description of its focus on workplace mental health, and a 19-second video with stills of the podcast guest and one of her most impactful quotes from the conversation. The variety of content creates awareness of their message and promotes the podcast to multiple social media audiences.
Another example is Randy Crabtree, the host of The Unique CPA and his team at Tri-Merit Tax Solutions. They are now in their 3rd season of podcasting and went from building an audience from scratch to being in the top 5% of all podcasts, according to podcast data aggregator.
But, the real magic was how the podcast helped Randy Crabtree, the host, reach his goals. As a partner in the company, Randy is excellent in creating relationships and helping companies, but he didn’t consider himself a thought leader or influencer. Hosting the podcast allowed Randy to use his strengths as a relationship builder and generate content that he and his team were then able to turn into articles. They have become regular contributors to industry publications like Accounting Today due to their podcasting content, as they regularly turn their transcripts into thought provoking and timely articles for the accounting profession.
Because of his podcast, Randy also received a coveted mention in the Top 100 in public accounting because of his “excellent podcast.”
As you can see, each podcast can be turned into many pieces of content. Multi-channel marketing is an important process to maintain brand consistency and company growth.
Three other pain points of content creation podcasts can overcome are:
- Inconsistent content
Let’s face it: it’s difficult to keep most marketing content consistent across platforms. In written blog posts, you have to follow grammar and style rules and keep the tone the same across multiple writers. Visual media must also remain consistent with brand color schemes and formatting. It’s easy to miss small (or even not-so-small) inconsistencies, especially when producing large amounts of content over time.
Podcasting solves this problem by holding all the consistency in its conversational format. As long as the length and topic(s) of your podcast stay the same theme, everything else can be flexible. The host and guests have room for a free-flowing conversation, without having to worry about going through a ton of edits or making everything look and sound perfect. Audiences already expect that every conversation is going to be a little different, so there’s no requirement to formalize a podcast besides a consistent introduction. After that, the space is all yours to share organic-sounding content that resonates with your listeners.
- Trouble connecting with audience
We often struggle with the fact that the more overt our content is as an advertisement, the less likely potential customers are to want to come back to it. Gene Marks, host of the Paychex Business Series, is the first to admit that “nobody wants to have commercials or products jammed down their throats.”
Podcasting allows you to place your brand in the context of topics your audience already cares about. Tomorrow Comes Today, the branded podcast of UK wealth management giant St. James’s Place, features conversations with economists, journalists, and more on everything from success psychology to the role of investors in combating climate change. Content strategist Lauren Smith told podcasting company Podbean that the podcast has solidified St. James’s Place as a thought leader in the wealth management space.
Podcasts are edifying and enjoyable for both content creators and listeners. That’s the reason 80% of podcast listeners stick around for all or most of an episode. Podcasts offer a peek into a real conversation with real people, and provide real solutions to your content difficulties. You, too, can connect with potential customers more organically through podcasting.
- Content producer burnout
If you or your company’s content producers report feeling burnt out today, they’re not alone. A recent study by content agency Vibely found that 90% feel the same way. Too many content producers are asked to spend too much time on mediums that don’t maximize engagement.
Mark Bussel, National Director of Learning and Development for the memorabilia ring company Jostens, used to spend much of his time creating an all-for-one newsletter. He recently turned to podcasts and told Podbean he was shocked at how easy they were to create and publish.
“We’ll take maybe 15 minutes to create an episode by putting a bumper on the front and back and adding a little bit of music,” Bussel said. “I am by no means a technical expert, but I’ve learned in a really short period that we can make it look pretty doggone good.”
As you can see, the magic of podcasts is that they are enjoyable for both marketers and target audiences alike.
For more information about how podcasts can work for your business, click here.
