Creating Brand Awareness with Podcast Interviews
Share your story and make personal connections with your audience.
By Brandy Whalen and Ryan Estes
- Kitcaster
- July 13, 2021
- 7:41 pm
Podcasts are hot
Most everyone you know has a podcast that they love and, “you’ve gotta check out.” In fact, the number of podcast listeners has increased 40% over the last five years. So, it stands to reason that podcasts present a fantastic opportunity when it comes to brand awareness.
Podcasts do more than inform and entertain. Podcasts are an opportunity for us to reach out to our ideal audience, precisely when they are looking for resources and answers. Company founders and consumers alike turn to podcasts for inspiration, but they also turn to them searching for solutions to specific pain points. This is a marketing opportunity to build brand awareness for your business.
A Tale of Two Audiences
When trying to broaden their reach through podcast bookings, we encourage our clients to consider two types of audiences: those with broad audience interest and niche audiences. However, before you sit in front of a microphone to talk about your company, it’s important to know how to tell your story. Everyone loves a good origin story, and founders and companies are no exception. Your story connects the listener to you and your business on a personal level through shared vulnerability. Over time you’ll refine your story, making it more compelling and building your brand awareness by connecting more to audiences.
“If someone heard your story and it resonated with them, then they went to your website to learn more about you and they discover there are twenty-five other podcasts you’ve done; well, you’ve just made a fan. And what do fans do? They share.”
Podcasts With Broad Audience Interest
A podcast with broad audience interest presents an opportunity to build, refine, and share your personal narrative. Yes, listeners of these podcasts look for specifics in addressing pain points, but here is where we believe you’ll find the chance to share pain points that are a bit more personal to you and hopefully to them. First, share the pain points you experienced along your personal journey in starting your business and then seamlessly weave in business pain points that you’ve witnessed through your career and decided to address.
As you’ve done podcast after podcast and refined your origin story, you’ll reap the benefits of all your hard work. A show like Guy Raz’s How I Built This, Mixergy, or The Tim Ferriss Show will bring considerable SEO juice to your website, but it’s not only about the big shows. Along the way, you’ve converted and built relationships with new listeners from many different shows. As a result, your brand awareness has been expanding with each and every interview.
Be sure that your website is ready to receive this traffic and that it guides the curious audience members towards your social media, Make sure your retargeting and remarketing pixels are firing so you can keep telling them your story, and don’t focus only on fruit from the top of the tree. What we mean by this is to say that your goal should be to reach the low-hanging fruit of keeping the audience interested until finally, they’re ready to convert.
Now, here’s the best part. When you’ve been sharing your story and making personal connections with your audience, they feel they’ve “discovered” you. If someone heard your story and it resonated with them, then they went to your website to learn more about you, and they discover there are twenty-five other podcasts you’ve done; well, you’ve just made a fan. And what do fans do? They share. They share what they like with anyone who they think could be interested as well. Now your brand awareness is growing through audience referrals.
Podcasts With Niche Audiences
Once you’ve spent time with broad audiences, discovered how telling your story on podcasts can help your company, and are ready to convert specific targets, then it’s time to look at shows with niche audiences. Here, things are a little more straightforward. Some think “niche” means “small,” but it doesn’t mean that the audience is small. Instead, a niche audience is that the podcasts they enjoy are intentionally more technical and delve deeper into their addressing topics.
These audiences present a unique opportunity to connect more personally because the audience is closer to converting. By the time they’ve arrived at a particular podcast, they already know the market intimately, have defined their pain points, and are looking for the solution. The great opportunity here is that we seek to find podcasts for our clients that address the specific market that is searching for the pain points your company addresses, leaving you to captivate the audience and draw them to your brand.
A Few Misconceptions About Creating Brand Awareness with Podcast Interviews
To wrap things up, we encourage our clients not to swing for the fences. You’re not closing the deal here or trying to hit a home run; you’re looking for base hits that add up. You don’t want to pitch the product directly; you want to draw the listener in, spark their curiosity, and make them search for the pitch. So when you go in for your 17th podcast interview, be sure to have the same enthusiasm as the previous sixteen. First, you’re looking for followers and subscribers, then you want to retarget, contact through email, and through this increased brand awareness, you’ll see purchases.
