Jeff Sloan, founder and CEO of StartupNation (www.startupnation.com), a website dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs with high value information as well as a dose of inspiration through story telling of how everyday entrepreneurs overcame challenges and achieved success with their businesses, advocates for all entrepreneurs and small businesses to have a podcast.
Why? Jeff Sloan explains that, while the podcast market for stand-alone podcast intended to be profit centers are over-saturated today, he isn’t focused on measuring success of podcasts in that sense. Instead, he believes that a podcast achieves several critical things important for business success today:
- Given that establishing relationships with your customers matters greatly in business today, hearing your voice and your views helps people relate to you and embrace who you are and what you believe in. As a result, they are more likely to want to do business with you.
- Similarly, consumers today look beyond price, selection, and even convenience to do business with companies with which they feel good about the business’s greater purpose. Like never before, purpose matters to consumers today and they are even making their choices of which business gets their purchases based on feeling good about the business’s greater purpose in the world today. Given that audio provides a platform that really allows you to authentically define and convey your business’s purpose and ethics, this will win the hearts of consumers beyond simply winning their minds.
- Lastly, a podcast helps you showcase your expertise as the business leader. One of the great advantages that small businesses have over big businesses is that expertise in whatever field your business is in matters, especially if you are in a niche business. A podcast is a great showcase for high level expertise that you can express and will help guide your customers to a personalized purchase decision that is best for them- even if they have to pay more to buy from you versus a big box retailer or online ecommerce platform.
To support Jeff Sloan’s advocacy for podcasting as a small business owner, a study conducted by Edison Research indicates that audio listening of all kinds is up nearly 10% this year over last year and is continuing to grow exponentially. For this study, Edison defined “spoken word” as audio content, encompassing news, sports, talk, personalities, and audio books. And while roughly 70% of audio consumption today is spent listening to music, now nearly 30% of audio listening is spent listening to spoken word-based audio content, up from 20% last year- an 80% increase. The biggest reason for these gains is the sharp upward trajectory of podcast listening, which hit an all-time listening high in 2021 with 57% of the US population having listened to at least one podcast this year.
Moreover, podcast listening is expanding in highly attractive markets to businesses today including amongst Gen Z (the demographic age 13 to 34) who have collectively increased their share of time spent with spoken word audio, driven mainly by podcast listening, by a stunning 116% increase from 2014 to 2020. The nation’s multicultural population is also a huge catalyst for the format’s sharp growth. For example, the Hispanic population is now allocating 27% of their total audio consumption time to spoken word representing a staggering 80% leap from 2014.
Getting started with a podcast is also easier than ever. Shay Berman, Founder and CEO of Digital Resource (www.yourdigitalresource.com) and StartupNation’s subject matter expert on digital marketing provides an overview of how to you can start your own podcast. The cost to start a podcast is relatively low today with many options for hardware readily available and with platforms to distribute your podcast are essentially at your fingertips.
Once you’ve started a podcast, Jeff Sloan recommends the following tips to optimize the value of having one for your business:
- Beyond hosting your platform on a platform where it can be found and accessed by the public, make sure you have access to your podcast on your company’s website and feature new subject matter on your homepage so anyone visiting your site doesn’t have to hunt to find it
- Include new release announcements of your podcast in your company’s outbound newsletter with a link directly back to your podcast page on your website
- Include brief (10 seconds or so) interstitial commercials in your podcast announcing specific promotions or offerings that your business is extending as “hot tips” your customers need to know. This provides an “advertorial” opportunity to showcase sales opportunities that are time sensitive in nature. It is recommended that you do these “commercials” as live reads rather than as a pre-recorded audio. When you do commercial announcements as a live read It will sound more organic and authentic and this takes advantage of the very essence of the power of podcasting.
- When doing your recording, remember to put emphasis on story-telling to build a relationship with your audience and make sure to showcase your expertise.
- Lastly, always include a text transcript alongside the audio so you can take full advantage of the power of SEO to help you and your company be discovered which inherently drives new potential customers to your website.
Jeff Sloan speaks to how, once you get in a rhythm of doing your podcast, it will become easy and even fun to do. The results such as attracting new customers, driving increased customer engagement, and incremental sales will be more than worth the effort.
