Marketing Dilemma: $30K into a Video or a Podcast?
For increasing reach and brand awareness, videos are fleeting, podcasts have punch.
COVID changed the world of marketing. Today, most companies are trying to assign a larger portion of their marketing budget to some kind of a digital marketing presence. The dilemma is how much to assign to which category.
Before you engage your personal preferences, you must keep in mind the ever-changing goals of your organization. For example, the board of directors may be demanding a drastic increase in sales for the next quarter; or they want to play the long game and invest in the ability for potential customers to recall and recognize your business.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say your board wants to focus on brand awareness and you have $30K set aside. You should know podcasting’s strength is to increase reach and prepare this crucial foundation to acquire customers. That is because podcasting is a long-term drip of information that can satisfy many concerns that current, or prospective, customers have.
Novice marketers ignore the power of a brand.
“Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
Eric Schmidt, former CEO Google
1. Podcasting is a wide-open field
There are four main arguments for taking the $30K and investing it into a podcast: podcasting is a wide-open field; podcasting reinforces your brand message effectively; podcasting can help deepen relationships; podcasting gives you many opportunities to engage with prospects because they are online at various times and different days.
Neil Patel estimates there are currently one billion blogs; millions of individual blogs are published every day. It is extremely hard to stand out in that ocean of text.
When it comes to video, the current estimate is thirty-eight million YouTube Channels. Successful YouTube videos are expensive and don’t hold up over time.
The good news: According to podcast guru Rob Walch from Libsyn, we really have only 322K active podcasts. This is defined as a podcast with a new episode released in the last 90 days and 10 or more episodes released in total.
It is always difficult to elbow your way into a crowded market. I am no math major, but it seems to me you have a better chance of success in a one out of 322K vs one out of 38 million.
Bet on podcasting to make headway into today’s digital marketing world.
2. Podcasting reinforces your branding message
Old college textbooks on marketing talk about the rule of seven. In other words, it will take seven impressions of your brand for a prospective customer to take action to buy your product or service. That may have been true in the early 2000’s, but with the exponential growth of digital advertising, we are bombarded by marketing messages all the time.
There are no official figures, but some people estimate we encounter between 6,000 and 10,000 ads every single day. We must place the old “rule of seven” into the history books.
According to Brian Dean, a typical video is released and most of the promotion should take place in the first twenty-four hours. This means that any exposure to a video will be over in a limited period.
You either hit the audience or do not. This is the functionally equivalent of placing all your marketing money on one horse. If you have an event, a product or book release, a video may be a great tactic. However, if you want to increase reach overall, then podcasting will provide a much longer-term impact.
For example, every January, in my podcast “Federal TechTalk” I do an annual “Top Ten List.” What amazed me is that for the year 2020, my most popular podcast was recorded in 2017. Lesson learned: business podcasts have a long functional life. If you provide information that is valuable to your audience, then people will come back for it.
3. Podcasting allows you to deepen company relationships
Customers: You can have a customer as a guest if you focus on a problem/solution approach. All listeners know a pitch from an interview in a matter of seconds. For example, an organization may have a problem with keeping a database updated because of multiple dependencies.
With a business-to-business podcast, one of your customers can tell the story of looking at product a, b, and c. There are strengths and weaknesses of each one, however, they found product C gave excellent value and allowed their database flexibility to integrate into other systems.
Analysts: Every business area has well-known analysts. For example, in the area of technology, companies like Forrester and Gartner have people who specialize in categories of technology. It is wise to keep your company on the radar of these opinion leaders. Why not ask an analyst to be a guest to talk about a current trend in the marketplace?
Partners: Every company has relationships with other companies. You may regularly combine with another organization on a large bid. You use their services on a regular basis. If they bring value to you, they will bring value to listeners of your podcast.
Prospects : Let’s say your company offers a high-ticket, long-term product. It may well be that a prospect is locked into a three-year contract, yet you need to maintain that relationship until the time where the contract is up for bid. A wonderful way to do that is to invite them as a guest on a podcast to talk about industry trends.
Current employees: Podcasting can help you get known in a large company.
For example, I had a person as a guest on my radio show/podcast. It just so happened that a member of the board of directors for that company happened to listen to the interview in her car. She was amazed at the knowledge of the guest. He became known to the company as a subject matter expert.
Potential employees: We have a tough job market today. There are an estimated 450,000 open positions in the field of cybersecurity alone. One way to separate your company from the others is to have a podcast. The candidate can listen to your company podcast to get an idea of what it is like to work with your team.
4. Podcasting provides consistent target outreach
A podcast will slowly drip information to an audience over a protracted period. $30K might get you a one-time five-minute video; the same investment will give you six months of podcasts.
Let’s say you want a wide range of people to know about your organization. All these targets are busy people trying to increase revenue for their company. It would be a one in a million chance to hit them with a timely video; however podcasts are released in a weekly manner and increase the chances of someone finding your message.
People in your target audience are starting to return to trade shows. If you release your video during this major event, you may not hit your target. However, they can subscribe to podcast and listen to your show in the plane on the way home.
Your target could be on a company retreat, board of directors meeting, or on an all-hands-on-deck marathon proposal writing deadline.
The drip, drip, drip of a regular podcast will make sure all your targets are hit over an extended period.
Conclusion
In a perfect world, the marketing team will have an unlimited budget for trade shows, videos, and podcasting. Unfortunately, this nirvana does not exist. You will have to sit back and determine what has the most bang for the buck when it comes to brand awareness and increasing reach.
You can’t evaluate the power of a podcast merely by downloads. Your brand gets reinforced, you deepen relationships with customers, prospects, and business partners.
Further, when structured properly, a podcast can attract search engines for journalists and potential customers over an extended period as well. Remember, each podcast yields an SEO keyword-rich 5,000-word transcript. After six months this is 24,000 words that are sitting on your server, all of which can be discovered with a Google search.
When it comes to brand awareness, you will get more value from a podcast.
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John Gilroy is the Managing Partner of The Oakmont Group. He works with companies to launch and promote podcasts.
johngilroy@theoakmontgroupllc.com
