How podcasts can be your brand's Trojan horse
How podcasts can be your brand's Trojan horse
Part 2 of Content Brand, a series on how startups are using content to build brands
In his book Founder Brand, marketing guru Dave Gerhardt dedicates an entire chapter to podcasting. It is from one of his interviews that I got the Trojan Horse analogy I use here.
What do I mean?
We’ll come to that, but I’ll let Dave lead us off on why podcasts are a great marketing tool.
“Pick a product. Pick an industry. There is more competition and noise than ever before. Many businesses do essentially the same thing as their competitors. The marketing is similar, the features are similar, the pricing is similar. With that said, how do you make your company stand out from the competition? The best way is to create a personal relationship with potential customers and improve their lives in some way.
The best way to communicate the brand? Podcasting! In podcasting, you are creating content and creating a community because the medium is your voice.”
But it’s not just about how podcasting can create that relationship. It can, yes, but the main reason podcasting is amazing is how versatile it is.
Here’s Dave again.
It’s not just the actual episode, it’s all the ways an individual episode can be used in this process. Your episode can become a blog post. You can extract quotes or clips, and they become social media posts. It becomes a Twitter thread, LinkedIn posts, and audio or video clips. A podcast can be used in almost unlimited ways. Snippets can be used as tweets. One podcast episode can give you social media posts for most of the week.
This is why it’s a Trojan Horse. It can secretly get into your city and unleash a wave of content.
And this wave of content is incredibly important for an early stage startup. Because the only way people will pay attention to your startup is if they keep seeing it again and again, until they are forced to pay attention.
But producing a podcast (like any early stage content) is not as easy as it sounds. There needs to be leadership buy-in, and a lot of clarity about the brand and target audience.
Having all of these may not be enough, though. Go pick any good technology company you know of. You will be able to find them venturing into podcasting at some point. And at least 70% of these podcasts will be defunct. One of my own favourites was Wistia’s Brandwagon. Another was Lattice’s Uniquely Led. If you keep looking, you’ll find more and more such examples of great podcasts that didn’t keep going. And in content, consistency and continuation are the only things that matter.
How can you avoid this ride to obsolescence? I’ve thought about this a lot as we are beginning our own podcast at Atomicwork. I think the answer is simplicity. The simpler you keep the process and the execution, the longer you’ll be able to go with podcasting and accompanying content. And the longer you’ll keep producing, the more chances of it becoming a breakout success.
So start, and keep at it.
With the first episode of the Atomicwork podcast going to editing yesterday, I’ll be doing exactly the same.
I’ll be documenting the journey here too, so subscribe and follow along.
Part 1 of the Content Brand series was on why video is your startup's most effective branding channel. Read.
I’m opening up the Job Board again in the new year. If you want open marketing roles at your company to be featured on the CMO Journal, please send the links to the JDs to me on LinkedIn. I’ll feature them on the next edition.