Is there a segment of your organisation’s target audience that you’re struggling to reach?
Lots of medium-sized organisations have a digital comms plan in place, which often involves photos, videos, and articles, distributed across their social media channels and via email.
But often, no matter how good the content and distribution are, there’s a still an audience segment that gets missed.
In that scenario, it’s a great opportunity to think creatively about how to plug the gap and try something different.
Audio (read: podcasting) is a great option.
Increasingly, businesses are turning to podcasting as a new, fresh content option because they offer a huge range of benefits, including:
Allowing for longer-form discussions which provide deep insights into your organisation’s expertise and thought leadership.
They’re easily consumed by the audience on their terms, for example during their commute, or at the gym.
They’re a versatile “hero” piece that result in a huge amount of derivative content, including long, medium, and short-form video, blog articles, graphics, photos, animations, and more.
“But everyone has a podcast these days!” I hear you say. “How will we compete for listeners?!”
It’s true that podcasts have become increasingly popular as a business communication tool since the start of COVID, when everyone worked out they could record an interview via Zoom and easily publish it on YouTube or Spotify.
But unless you’re Joe Rogan, the success or failure of your podcast doesn’t lie in logging millions of listens. Success should be measured against your campaign objectives, which you should set during the planning stage.
Your objective can be as simple as engaging 100 key members of your target audience that you’re failing to reach elsewhere. Otherwise, it might have nothing to do with listener numbers at all, and instead be aimed at boosting your organisation’s brand awareness through increased social media activity. Or perhaps your objective is as simple as getting facetime with the people you feature as guests, and listener stats are largely irrelevant.
The point is, you don’t need to take over the world, you just need to understand the communications problem you’re faced with, and solve it.
In the case of our client The Police Association Victoria (TPAV), they worked out there was a segment of their membership that they just weren’t hitting through their existing comms, and figured they’d give podcasting a go.
The outcome has been two series (so far) of podcast content specifically tailored to TPAV’s members, conveying the value the organisation offers, as well as exploring the experiences of members who’ve called on TPAV’s assistance.
Most importantly, both the trackable engagement stats and the member feedback show that we achieved our objective by reaching an audience that otherwise wasn’t engaging with TPAV’s content.
So when you find yourself with a communications problem to solve, thinking creatively while setting realistic strategic objectives can help lead to excellent outcomes.
And podcasting is definitely one of the options you should consider.