In the previous post about the criteria for a successful business podcast, we approached it from the listener’s perspective. Today, let’s look at the company’s side of things.
The Criteria for a Success Corporate Podcast: From the Company’s Perspective
For a podcast to be deemed useful by the company that is either producing or funding its own podcast, one of two things must take place:
- It must either make them money
or - Motivate listeners to take action on their behalf
Simple enough, don’t you think? (You might be surprised how many podcast experts are unable to articulate that simple fact.) Yet the reason most business podcasts fail to fulfill either of those two criteria goes back to what I wrote about in the previous post. That is, before your listener will separate himself from his money or do something you ask them to do, you have to establish your credibility in such a way as to influence that listener to want to follow your call-to-action, whatever it is.
How?
First, by proving you are familiar with the problems your listener is going through. You’re going to have a hard time getting me to buy your widget if you spend your whole time pitch, Pitch, PITCHING me without showing any indication that you know (or care, for that matter) about what motivates me. It might be because I’m trying to relieve some pain OR it might be because I’m trying to achieve/strive for something better, but regardless of what it is, if you can’t explain it, I’m not buying it.
Second, after you’ve shown me you “get” me, DON’T SELL ME. As I’ve said, telling is not selling, teaching is. Spend less time repeating the products name and more time telling me how the product works. If you do a good job in creating curiosity, I’ll pick up the phone and ask for more details.
And speaking about picking up the phone, did you remember to include a call to action at the end of the episode? For the first podcast I ever produced (Great Relaxation Music Podcast), all we did was play some music, teach people about who the artist was, and then we gently invited people to hear more free music at the website.
That gentle call to action improved sales by 23%.
For many of my customers, we’ll include the interviewee’s phone number or email address to make it easy for somebody to take action. And if we have a promotion/special going on, we’ll tease the listener by mentioning the promo in the website and RSS feed text.
These are just a few ideas. What about you? What are you doing today that makes your podcast listeners pick up the phone and call you?
Leave a Reply