The Advantages of Podcasts in Businesses

Are you looking for a way to grow your business or boost your reach to the audience? Podcasting is a new way to interact with your potential customers by providing them with a better medium of knowledge and information.

Businesses these days are inculcating new digital marketing techniques to reach out to a more significant number of the common public regarding different schemes and products. As the competition is high in the market among entrepreneurs, various digital marketing strategies have become the hour's need. The advent of "Podcasts," one such approach, has paved the way for many businessmen by adding boons to modern business.

Before proceeding to What advantages do podcasts hold in business? We need to have a background knowledge of what podcasts are? 

What is a Podcast?

Podcasts — a Mic

A podcast is a single or series of audio files that a user can download to his/her device for listening.

Consider the podcast as a new version for your blog or content to be shared in audio form to your device or in the form of MP3 through different music applications, like Spotify. With such a vast customer base growing day by day, podcasts provide more convenience to the customer.

Meanwhile, we use a podcast in business to let people know about the products, special announcements, company information, and general information that needs to be shared with potential customers.

Incorporating Podcasts into your business can help you grow your brand's marketing and ultimately more reach for your brand. The podcast can be referred to as the audio format of the information, or any data which can be uploaded, downloaded, and subscribed over the internet is called a podcast. One should understand a simple recorded audio file as a podcast. 

There are several formats in which podcasts can be created, such as an interview or conversational format, an advertisement format, storytelling format, and many more. People use podcasts to express their personal views socially. Their thoughts could disperse to a large crowd or deliver a global message through a uniform channel or earn more through advertising about their skills and products. 

Growth of Podcasts

Though the concept of podcasts is common abroad, it gained a high popularity in India during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, COVID-19. A few podcasting platforms include Spotify, Anchor.FM and Buzzsprout. These are the locations where a podcaster can upload their podcasts, and viewers can listen or view them and even subscribe to their favorite podcaster's channel. Podcasting, nowadays, has become a self-generating income source (a new form of business) along with uplifting the level of other existing businesses.

Podcasting helps your business with everything from increasing employee engagement to driving more traffic to your website to boosting sales figures. The success mantra of any business lies in how the producers interact with the consumers regarding the sales of their ideas, plans, and products that are efficiently handled with podcasts. Podcasts are broadly used nowadays in the corporate world as it has a secured channel, and the means of communication is also simple. 

Advantages of Podcasts in Business?

Podcasts can be considered a bridge between you and your customers, which will help customers know more about your brand and buy more products. You can choose a time to livestream your podcasts targeting your potential customers, or they can be shared with the audience in recorded form. Give your audience a chance to join the chat feed and the live discussion so that they show more interest in buying the products. Here we are enlisting a few main advantages of podcasts in business growth.

Exposure to a large number of customers

Podcasts have facilitated reaching out to more customers in less time. The more you are in contact with consumers, the greater are the chances of your sales. Podcasts allow reaching customers residing all across the globe. This is the boon of digital marketing in comparison to the traditional methods of marketing. It paves the way for your business to be acknowledged at a global level.

Cost–effective advertisements

Advertising through printed pamphlets or TV ads is less cost-effective and time-consuming than creating podcasts. It would be best to have a proper setup with a high-quality camera and a soundproof environment for shooting a TV ad. Hiring a brand ambassador to advertise the products adds more pennies to your expenditure. On the other hand, to create a podcast, you need to have a microphone and a smartphone. You can address people within minutes with no hectic tasks to be done. Thus, podcasts have become more reliable in business as it involves less human resources and saves capital.

Easy to create and upload

Building a podcast is no tedious job. You can record the audio and upload it to podcasting platforms within minutes. You don't need to prepare much before generating a podcast, as you can stay behind the camera. Podcasts are free to host, free to post, and in most cases, they are free to listen to. 

Allow multitasking and saves time

Podcasts do not only save the time of the creator but also of the listener or viewer. Though people have a tight schedule these days and are left with less time, they manage to spend time over phones and tablets. Well, getting acquainted with a podcast does not consume much time. Since the content in a podcast is generally fed in the form of short audio episodes so you can listen to it parallelly while doing other stuff such as cooking, traveling, or during your workouts, these are convenient to use as these episodes can be replayed anytime and anywhere according to your free time.

Highly Engaging

When words get a voice, they become more lively and attractive. Though the internet is stuffed with enormous written content, audio content helps users stick to information more conveniently. After reading a whole article, you might find significantly less content for your needs. But while listening to the same content, you can quickly identify things of your use. Almost 70% of the listeners take action on commercial messages in podcasts. Also, it becomes easy for a salesperson to convince consumers through podcasting rather than conventional write-ups.

Easy to Understand

People always prefer simple content above complex ones. Suppose you have to sell an insurance policy for which you have to describe all the terms and conditions to the buyers. Explaining things vocally is always better than penning it down. Therefore, a podcast provides ample potential to showcase your business's best bits. From the buyer's point of view, audio files can be easily understood and more informative. You can quickly assess the policy's quality and decide in less time whether you have to purchase it or not.

Efficient business tool

Podcasts have become a popular source of spreading business-related information in very little time. As Netflix flourished in the streaming industry, podcasting is creating its fanbase in digital marketing. According to a recent survey, more than a hundred thousands of podcasts are active on the internet, which indicates that in the coming future, advertisements through podcasts will gain more popularity as people are admiring the concept of listening over reading. 

Created employment

Many commercial brands hire voice-over artists to build podcasts to promote their business. This, in turn, creates more job opportunities thus, tackling unemployment and generating more revenue.

Uplifted business strategies

Now that podcasts have set foot in the marketing world, they have encouraged business strategies and ideas. Each upcoming podcast's episode demands more innovation and pleasure than the previous one to gain viewers' hearts. This poses significant challenges to the entrepreneurs in fighting against their competitors and thinking of bringing new creativity, thereby inching closer to the evolution in the business universe.

Conclusion

So we can conclude that podcasts play a vital role in today's business environment where everything is getting digital. As we have seen above, it involves less staffing or human resources and aids in increasing productivity, so we can say that it is a reliable and complete profit bench for start-ups.