A few years ago podcasts were the shiny new digital deliverable on the block for business to business marketers. But with the explosion of social media - twitter feeds, Facebook and, in particular, YouTube, the podcast lost some of its simple but sturdy allure for B2B use.
Why bother making an audio only feed when you can quickly film your message and post it to YouTube within minutes?
Well, one reason is purely economic. The Customer Advocacy teams at Metia have seen huge growth in the use of video to tell the customer story over the last couple of years. Video production costs have fallen over time, and with the advent of the aforementioned YouTube and other content sharing platforms, the attraction is pretty clear.
But, every video has an audio feed, and to take this feed and edit it into an interesting audio podcast is pretty straight forward, and best of all – cheap to do. So for a fraction of the cost of the initial video, you now have two different deliverables to tell your customer story, which leads me to the second point.
More important than the purely economic argument is the fact that podcasts really do work. Recent research in the UK by RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research), published in December last year, found that 8.1 million adults have downloaded a podcast and 44% of users say they listen to them at least once a week.
Your customers consume media in different ways, and whilst a video is great, an easy to download podcast can be consumed whenever and wherever.
Podcasts also offer the opportunity to be a little more informal and lend themselves very well to discussion pieces. Plus, it can be easier to organise and often make potential subjects more at ease than the prospect of going on camera – which can occasionally send a shudder through even the most confident CIO.
Used as part of an integrated set of marketing assets that tell a customer’s story positively and succinctly from different perspectives, podcasts still have a really important role to play…
Hear the latest Metia podcast here
Source: http://www.rajar.co.uk/docs/news/MIDAS7_news_release.pdf