Podcast: Why is it so Popular and How Do You Create, Market, and Monetize Them? Part 4

As promised, we are back. So I hope everybody is enjoying our podcast so far, Video Cast, thank you to those who are following us on video. Big shout out to you there. So now we’re going to move into why podcasts are popular.

00:15 Why Podcasts are popular?

These are some of the more psychological and behavioral studies and information that has been able to come out of a lot of the investigation that’s occurred.

So, one of the main points and this is pretty logical and common sense is that you can increase your knowledge on almost any topic while going about your day. So you can continue driving, exercising, or plethora of other activities in your day to day life, all the while being educated in your ear as to a new language, a particular hobby that you might have, or general knowledge or trivia. Maybe you want to compete on Jeopardy some day. All right.

One of the other items is nearly three out of every four podcast consumers in the US say they enjoy tuning into a podcast to learn new things, and they do so on a monthly basis, which was the statistic that we shared a little bit earlier. But it’s important to go ahead and bring that up again. The majority of people who enjoy a podcast, they do it in a regular basis way. So they are constant podcast listeners.

So why is it popular? It’s popular because it’s something that’s easy for people to follow along and turn into a trend, a hobby, or a habit. Podcasts are not only a form of entertainment, they are also a source of news and inspiration for listeners. So like we talked about earlier, you could create a podcast that essentially is just a news show, a news podcast where you read important or interesting pieces of news or media that maybe you’ve come across. and you’ve curated on your own because you feel that these are relevant and important topics that you want to share with the world. So a podcast is a way that you can do that.

We know right now there’s a lot of controversial political topics and majority of the country is split. Some are in favor, some are against, some are pro one thing and some are anti another. So there’s always debatable points and topics going on in our day to day society that you can convert into a fantastic podcast by simply just following the news and bringing some of those news articles to people’s ears.

Podcast, the audio episode and this one in particular, it helps listeners to learn more about any topic that interests them. Let that be current events, news, education, movies, automobiles, fashion, or even technology or any other.

So audio episodes can help a person essentially have a sequence where they’re really becoming very well formed and intelligent wise as to movies or automobiles or anything that you might have any experience on. And just keep in mind the earlier suggestions. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert in that area. You can essentially just get a very good manual or wonderful book and maybe convert it into a podcast. Obviously, remember to keep in mind you have to review copyright and intellectual property and infringement possibilities.

So one of the clear benefits of a podcast is it does allow for multitasking. People can go about their day to day life while they continue to learn and listen to their podcast.

Now, this last slide, I’m going to have to skip over a little bit. People don’t need any dedicated time to listen to podcasts. So you can listen to a podcast essentially at any time that you are able to. Maybe some people, in particular, could listen to a podcast when they’re getting ready to go to sleep, or maybe they have difficulty sleeping. And a podcast might help them to find those Z’s you know, instead of counting sheep, they could just a nice podcast that gently loads them off into a well state of alpahaaram or sleep. So that’s one of the very important points.

Anyone can listen to podcasts at their convenience, and that’s the major reason that more businesses as well as individuals are creating podcasts to reach their target audience. People don’t need a dedicated time to listen to the podcast. Instead, they can listen to an audio episode while even cleaning, running or cooking, which means listeners can multitask.

04:45 Why Should A Business Create A Podcast?

So why should your business in particular create a podcast? So one of those main reasons is that 54% of podcast listeners are either somewhat or much more likely to consider buying from a brand, after hearing its advertisement on a podcast. That comes from Emarketer 2019, we will share the source and the citation with you a little bit further on down. Business podcasts are getting increasingly popular also because it has been proven that the words on the web page cannot engage an audience as well as a voice can. If your audience likes listening to stories, learn something new, catch up on current events. Then podcasts can meet these requirements.

A podcast brings the following advantages:

So you get faster engagement with your audience, you can showcase your particular expertise, you can increase trust or loyalty. It also obviously improves your brand awareness – if it’s a personal brand or if it’s a company brand that you’re speaking on behalf of. Improve also, more importantly, what we’re talking about with SEO, you can also improve your search engine rankings.

05:57 Things to keep in mind

So, very important items to keep in mind, if you are a business owner:

Real time engagement with your audience is another one of the beautiful benefits of this fantastic medium. Podcasts provide a wonderful opportunity to reach and connect with a busy audience looking for information for services that are related to your industry. Real time engagement allows listeners to stay updated and engaged. The internal teams, including marketing, sales and leadership teams, also can collaborate. It provides the option to communicate with your audience on a more personal scale.

Display your expertise. This is another one of the key important points. You can create educational podcasts which will help to share your expertise in that certain niche. Thus, more and more listeners will trust your brand, which leads to higher conversion rates. Highlighting experience demonstrates your brand as a trustworthy business.That goes back to what we were talking about earlier regarding Google and its EAT acronym where it’s always trying to find authority, sorry, Expert, Authoritative and Trustworthy content.

Another one of the important points why a business should be doing its own podcast, because you can reach a wider audience. People always look for easily accessible content. Podcasts that appear in search engine results make it even easier for customers to reach you. As a podcast includes conversation directly to the listener, either as an audio or through video, this content format serves as a friendly way to getting information rather than reading the whole page or a long ongoing email.

So there are moments inside of your search engine results. If your podcast is very informative, very educational and fun or entertaining to listen to, and a lot of people have shared it, it’s going to be a high possibility that Google is going to go ahead and actually put that podcast up in some of the featured snippet results that appear at the very top of the search engine results pages. Typically, the first page – almost always the first page. And what will happen is that you’re going to take up a lot more of the search engine result page – real estate, visual real estate – people will be seeing that podcast and it could lead them to click on it, especially if they’re a little, let’s say, standoffish in terms of reading a very large article and they just see a little play button there and a nice friendly face they click on that, they can sit back and just listen to somebody else explaining that topic and get through that information, digest that information a lot faster.

Another important reason why a business should engage in podcast is that it’s also one of the best ways of doing marketing at a low cost. Like we spoke about earlier about an organic SEO company and some of the activities and strategies that they engage in, primarily one of the major benefits of an organic SEO company has is that it’s going to engage in low cost activities or no cost activities that will promote your brand, will promote your content, will get you traffic, will increase a lot of the indicators in the analytics — the KPIs that Google takes into consideration that every business should take into consideration, to try to judge how well and how healthy your brand is online. Definitely these are part of the strategies that will get those KPIs signaling and lighting up like a Christmas tree for you and your business.

So, marketing at low cost, being this an easy to access digital format, podcasts eliminate many costs associated with other traditional advertising options including printing, posters and other forms of paper consumption. It’s easy to archive, podcasts are also easy to update.

So if you get a lot of engagement with the podcast, let’s say, for example this podcast video cast gets a lot of engagement, we might do a follow up where we receive some questions from the audience and we come back with another podcast.