In this digital age, content marketing is a great way through which brands can tell their stories to the world. Podcasts and their transcripts are effective marketing tools for small businesses. Being a content format that is easy to consume, podcasts are one of the best vehicles for content marketing. This format does not require an individual’s undivided attention as in the case of videos or text-based content. Though an interesting podcast can open new possibilities to market your products or services, having a transcript of that podcast in your site would expand its reach.
How Small Businesses Benefit from Podcasts
While small businesses venture into content marketing, they need to focus on their budget and better efficiency. So, they require a content marketing strategy that is easy to implement and appealing to consumers as well. Podcasts are quite easy to implement. Just get your recorder, start podcasting and embed the podcast into your site. The popularity of podcasts has been rising in the past years. As per the 2014 Infinite Dial report from Edison Research and Triton Digital, around 15% Americans listened to audio podcasts in 2014 compared to 11% in 2009. This makes this content format the right choice for small businesses to distribute information. Here are the reasons why it is a good marketing medium.
- Facilitate More Intimacy with the Audience – Podcasts allow you to talk directly to your audience in your own voice. In this way, you can connect with them on a more personal level and be more intimate with them so that your ideas get shared easily.
- Share Ideas in Different Ways – This medium is not only for one-way communication with the audience as you think, but enables you to share your ideas in different ways. You can invite an industry expert as a guest in your show, review products or services and even interview consumers.
- Distribute through Multiple Channels – Though it is more common to broadcast podcasts on a website or blog, these can be actually distributed through multiple channels such as iTunes, Stitcher and SoundCloud in order to extend their reach across global audience. It is also possible to share them through social channels.
What’s the Role of Podcast Transcription?
- Make Your Podcasts Searchable – The challenge with audio content is that it is not marketable or searchable via search engines since they cannot index audio files. On the other hand, search engines can index the transcript of the audio content. So, if someone recalls a part of what you mentioned in your podcast and want to get the full version, they can type certain parts on the search engine and retrieve the entire audio content, which makes your content easily searchable.
- SEO Advantage – Content that is easily searchable and consumable can give you better SERP ranking, increase time on your pages, reduce bounce rates, increase traffic and ultimately increase the number of subscribers and revenue.
- For More Professionalism – Some consumers like to have text while listening to the audio as they feel it will reinforce the content. Hearing impaired consumers may not be able to capture audio. If you are providing the audio transcript, your consumers will feel you are quite serious about your work to make it available in whatever format consumers want.
To put it in a nutshell, podcast is an ideal content marketing choice for small businesses if it is accompanied by its transcript.
