How to Use a Podcast to Grow Your Brand Fast
Short answer
A podcast grows your brand because people listen away from a screen, relaxed and paying attention, and because the guests you interview lend you authority and become relationships. It also takes me far less time than other content: about half an hour for a 25-minute episode, against 8 to 10 hours for a good blog post.
Key takeaways
- People listen when they're away from a screen. They're driving, at the gym or falling asleep, learning while they do something else.
- It's a relaxed, personal way to be heard. Most people listen alone on headphones or in the car, and they're more receptive than in front of a screen.
- Guests make you an authority by association. Half an hour with a respected guest on a topic they care about leaves you with a connection you can come back to.
- It takes less time than writing or video. A good blog post takes me 8 to 10 hours and a short video 2 to 3, but a 25-minute episode takes about as long as recording it.
- Look at how much people listen, not just downloads. Listening figures show which parts of an episode people play or skip, so you can see what's working.
See it in practice: read how a Sydney strata lawyer used a podcast to become the obvious choice in her field. How independent professionals use a podcast to win better clients
Work out your own numbers: a 5-minute worksheet on what one client is worth to you, and what getting known would cost. What is one client worth to you?
Related Episodes:
- 038. Rand Fishkin – How To Create Great SEO-Friendly Content Plus Key Trends In Search
- 039. Podcasting for Entrepreneurs with John Lee Dumas
- 073. Darren Rowse — Problogger Founder — Shares His Secrets Around Prolific Content
- 120. Tim Reid On How To Use Podcasting To Take Your Business To The Next Level
Key Points and Insights
- 1:00 – Intro
- 2:04 – Why podcasting has re-emerged as a content medium
- 4:39 – Apple’s announcements at WWDC 17
- 5:18 – How podcasting can help develop relationships with high profile guests and build market authority
- 6:14 – Apple’s Car Play and it’s role in the podcasting revolution
- 6:40 – Podcasting requires a minimum amount of effort as compared to the other content mediums i.e. written and video content
- 7:38 – New form of podcasting announced at WWDC
- 8:22 – Trailers and the role they will play in podcasting
- 9:23 – Changes in the podcast interface on iOS
- 9:55 – Podcast Analytics – the game changer
Advantages of Podcasts
- Does not require you to have a screen to consume the content.
- Allows users to self-educate while doing something else.
- Makes for a more laid back experience.
- Is often an intimate experience – given the fact that people tend to listen on headphones.
- Podcasts are largely consumed using mobiles and this is going to lead to massive growth in podcasting since mobile consumption is growing extremely fast.
Transcript
Machine transcript, lightly edited for reading. The intro, the offers from 2017 and the sign-off are left out.
Today I want to talk to you about some key changes that Apple has recently announced at the Worldwide Development Conference in 2017 and how these changes are going to affect podcasting and what that means for you. But before I go into those changes, I just want to put things into a bit of context. So, podcasting as a platform was launched several years ago and has kind of been nascent over that period. Over the last couple of years there's been a real resurgence in the field of podcasting and we've seen people like Tim Ferriss and Neil Patel and various other influencers embrace podcasting and use it as a platform to grow their brand and increase their market authority.
We've also seen other game-changing shows like Gimlet and Serial and Apple appears to have noticed this. So, they're really starting to get behind the platform and the analytics around podcasting is finally starting to evolve beyond the Stone Age. So, we'll cover that in a few moments, but I want to just examine in a bit more detail as to why there is this groundswell in podcasting and why I personally am very bullish about it. Now, I won't go into all the benefits and reasons that podcasting has started to really come into its own, but if you want to check out episode 64, I cover these reasons in a lot more detail.
I also recommend you check out episode 73 with Darren Rowse, the founder of ProBlogger where he shares his secrets around podcasting. Episode 120 with Tim Reid on how he used podcasting to generate massive authority and attract high value clients and episode 39 with John Lee Dumas where he too used podcasting to generate a very successful business and was actually featured on Time Magazine. John Lee Dumas is the founder of Entrepreneur on Fire. So, there's quite a few useful related episodes for you to listen to, but for now I'd like to zero in on just a few of those reasons why I think podcasting is really starting to come into its own.
Well, firstly, podcasting doesn't require you to have a screen to consume the content and people are starting to consume content when they're more relaxed in their off-screen time. So, they're listening to content while they're falling asleep, while they're at the gym, while they're driving and it allows them to self-educate while they're still doing something else and that is a big thing in today's time poor environment. The screen is generally associated with being a bit of a battleground, you know, people associated with overwhelm whereas listening to a podcast is a much more laid-back experience.
It's a bit more informal and people tend to be a bit more receptive. It's also quite an intimate experience in that people tend to listen to podcast episodes either on their headphones or when they're driving in the car on their own because it's quite unusual for a person to listen with a partner or somebody else to the same podcast. It's quite rare for people to have the same interest in a particular topic to that extent, at least not as far as I'm aware anyway.
When I interviewed Rand Fishkin in episode 38, he talked about how mobile consumption is actually growing independently of desktop and podcasts are largely consumed on mobiles. So, the general level of interactivity with mobiles and as a direct consequence of that, people's interactivity with podcasts is starting to increase. In the WWDC conference, Apple announced that the number of episodes on iTunes went from 8 billion to 10 billion in 2016 and 2017 is shaping up to be an even bigger year.
They're looking at about 20% growth. There are now more than 400,000 podcasts available on iTunes and there are 1,000 new shows submitted each and every week. Podcasts are now available in 155 countries and it's one of the easiest ways to reach a global audience for audio content. We're starting to see large companies doing it including CNN, Disney, BuzzFeed, Bloomberg, BBC, Wall Street Journal and plenty more. Another benefit of podcasting is it's relatively easy to get high profile guests onto podcasts because as a channel, it hasn't been used and abused as much as other channels.
So, there is still a certain sense of novelty associated with being on a podcast. Although that gap is starting to close, it is still not too late to really use podcasting as an opportunity to position yourself as an authority by implication, by having other authorities as guests on your show and also to develop very strong relationships with influencers because if you think about it, when you have an influencer as a guest on your podcast, you're spending half an hour to an hour speaking with them about something that is quite important to them and if you are able to add value and embellish what they're saying and develop an interesting conversation, you invariably leave that conversation with a connection which you can later revisit.
Another big thing that's driving podcasting is Apple's CarPlay. I think Apple is doing a lot in the automotive space and CarPlay is just one of those things. CarPlay is increasingly ubiquitous these days. Cars are rolling off production lines with CarPlay installed on them. This means that podcast consumption is going to become easier because friction to access to those podcast episodes is going to be reduced. Now, apart from all these reasons I've just mentioned, one of the biggest benefits to me as a content creator is that podcasting requires a minimum amount of effort as compared to the other two forms of content being written and video content.
I'm a trained writer and it takes between eight and ten hours to write a good quality blog post. To create a good quality video takes significantly longer than it does to create a podcast episode. It takes me about maybe two or three hours to create a decent 20 to 30 minute video at minimum. But to create a 25 minute podcast episode takes no more than half an hour. It's literally the time it takes me to record it.
I follow a certain structure which I share with my clients as part of my podcast launch service and I usually outsource the editing at very reasonable rates. Okay. So let's talk about some of the key changes that Apple has announced, which are going to be rolled out in iOS 11, which is due for release around September, I believe September, October, 2017. So generally Apple is starting to view podcasts in one of two main ways. Either you'll be able to create podcasts as episodic content, where each episode stands on its own, much like this podcast currently is.
And that will be the default type, but they're going to introduce a new form of podcasting, which is going to be serialized. And so you can have season one, season two, season three, and so on, which really lends itself to a narrative storytelling type of podcast. They're also going to introduce trailers. So that's the second big change. And what comes to my mind is very much the Netflix model, you know, the Netflix equivalent of audio. They're going to have bonuses as part of that new structure as well.
So you can provide bonuses to your listeners. And that would be an opportunity for you to add a bit more value. And I'm guessing you could include things like outtakes and bloopers and those sorts of things, which would really be a nice touch. It would give your audience an opportunity to get to know you even more intimately and sort of in an informal setting. So what this means for you as a podcaster or a content creator in the podcasting space is that you need to focus on creating episodic content that entertains, informs, and inspires, or serialized content that entertains, informs, and inspires.
I think the serialized content would really lend itself to the storytelling narrative kind of podcast where one episode feeds into the next, into the next, very much like a soap opera sequence. Now the third main change is going to be around the interface. So they've simplified the app considerably with four tabs across the bottom. The first tab will be the Listen Now tab. The second one will be your library. The third tab will be the Browse tab, very much like on the Apple Music app at the moment.
And the fourth tab will be a Search tab. In terms of design and interface, this is the biggest update for the podcast app since they initially launched it on iOS. I think that was in iOS 8 I believe. Now the next change, and in my opinion by far the most important one, is what they're going to do with podcast analytics. Finally we're going to have more than just download statistics. We're going to be able to see how much of your podcast episodes have been played and when.
You'll be able to compare the performance of your podcast episodes over time, and you'll also be able to see which parts are more interesting to listeners than others. You'll be able to see what they're skipping across and what they're actually listening to. Now the data will be provided on an aggregated basis to protect privacy and user identities, but I am particularly excited about these new analytics because it's going to give us a lot more feedback as content creators and enable us to understand what's working and what's not, what people are actually listening to and not.
At the moment all we can see is what gets downloaded and what doesn't. We have no idea at the moment when someone downloads an episode whether they're even listening to it, but with these new analytics we're going to be able to see what people are listening to, what they're not listening to, and which parts they're listening to and not listening to. So to me this is a massive breakthrough. It's a real changing of the guard. It's Apple's declaration that podcasting has come of age and I believe that it is going to give us podcast and content creators an excellent opportunity to create much more relevant, much more actionable and transformative content for our audiences.
So what does this mean for you? What this means is if you don't already have a podcast, I strongly recommend you launch one to build your authority and grow your brand. If you do have a podcast then be sure to familiarise yourself with these new tools that are going to be released in iOS 11 and understand how you can use these tools to create a much better listener experience, to deliver that much more value and to provide information that is relevant and actionable to your audience.
To find out more, go to developer.apple.com/wwdc17/512. I will post that on the show notes. So if you head over to productiveinsights.com/131, you will see a link in the show notes and that will take you to developer.apple.com/wwdc17/512 which is where you can watch on video the 20 odd minute talk from Apple which goes through these key changes. So the key action steps here are head over to that link, watch the video, get an understanding of what is coming in terms of podcast analytics and have a think about how you can use this information to create better content as a podcaster and also reflect on the fact that podcasting is about to become a real force in the content marketing space and will be a critical part of your branding and your content strategy.
I hope you found this useful and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
