Benefits and best practices for marketer podcasts

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m co-presenting with Ron Bloom (CEO of PodShow) at the upcoming iMedia Brand Summit that starts next weekend. I’ve been tagging various relevant articles, podcasts, etc. and have invited others to do the same. One of the items that I have tagged is a whitepaper from Podblaze. While I’ll be addressing podcasting more from the vantage point of podcasts as an ad medium, it’s also good to know how podcasts that you create yourself can be helpful for your business. Not unlike websites, many marketers will both have their own podcasts as well as advertise on podcasts (e.g., to drive listeners to your podcasts).

10 Benefits to Adding Podcasting to Your Marketing Mix. There are also additional benefits that may apply to your specific product, brand, service, or niche that may not be listed here.

1. An additional communication tool for your business.
2. Increased online visibility to your target market.
3. Increased internet visibility from the search engines.
4. Increased internet visibility & traffic from the RSS, Blog & podcasting directories. What You Don’t Know About Podcasting Could Hurt Your Business: How to Leverage & Benefit from this New Media Technology.
5. Communication medium is more powerful than text. This means increased potential results for your marketing message.
6. Improved level of perceived expertise from your target market.
7. Value added offerings to your target market that are only available in audio format.
8. Increased mind share from your target audience. People listen to podcasts while doing other tasks online. They can also take you messaging with them on their portable media player such as an iPod.
9. More frequent touch points and more frequent “top of mind” participation from your target audience.
10. Increased perception of your product, service, brand or value in customers minds.

Podcasting Best Practices: The following best practices should be applied to your podcast to achieve maximum effectiveness:

1. Know your audience/target market.
2. Be organized in the messaging that is to be delivered
3. Have notes & an outline to keep the show on topic
4. Edit show appropriately for both content, quality and length
5. Deliver valuable, informative, engaging and entertaining content to your listeners that they can’t get from any other media.
6. Ensure good quality audio by using proper recording hardware and software
7. Provide show notes for listeners to review content of the show before and while they listen to the podcast
8. Use proper tagging of Meta data so that you podcast can be found and organized easily by podcasting software and directories.
9. Ensure that the RSS feed for the podcast is valid and in compliance with the 2.0 standard. Additional functionality is required if you want the podcast to be apple iTunes friendly.
10. Submit your podcast to the popular directories so that your podcast can reach a greater audience.
11. Ping the major podcasting, RSS and Blog directories after each podcast to ensure that your podcasts are updated.
12. Have the proper web server technology that can handle delivering the content quickly and be able to handle the server bandwidth issues. Don’t underestimate the importance of this critical point.
13. Have an experienced podcasting consultant design, map, and oversee the entire process to ensure success the first time. This will ensure that you will achieve maximum market impact with this new media format. Your audience will not be forgiving of a poorly executed podcast strategy.