Enterprise Podcasting: An overview.

Podcasts have seen exponential growth, doubling year over year. Since the word entered the English language in 2005 they have gone on to become the fastest growing medium in the world. 

Driven by this incredible growth in audio consumption, brands, organisations, governments and companies have caught up, sponsoring episodes in succesful podcasts, and we’ve reach a point where advertising in the medium is reaching maturity. The savvy players, however, are creating their own podcasts that reflect their values and foster trust with their target market. 

Yes, but isn’t there an app for that?

People quite rightly believe making a podcast is easy, you need as little as a phone and the internet and you can upload your work in no time. There are countless apps and platforms that offer the almost frictionless ability to create podcasts and launch them into the world. 

There is, of course, a pretty big catch though. Making a thing is not the same as having someone listen to it, and then, if you manage to achieve that, having that person actually enjoy it.

Joe Rogan and Marc Maron have taught us that we just need to roll the mic and have a chat with someone interesting and listeners will follow. This is not a very helpful lesson. The proposition of a succesful show with wide-ranging fascinating freestyle chats that enjoyed by millions is very appealing but this is extremely hard to achieve even for seasoned professional radio/tv personalities, for brands and businesses it is basically impossible.

Podcasting is easy and it has a very low bar to entry, and that’s of course one of the attractive things about it; it’s just not that easy.

There are a lot of elements that contribute to a successful podcast. Here are a few of the most important: 

• Presentation Skills 
• Structure
• Quality Content
• Production Values

These elements are less important the more desirable your content is to listen to. For example, if we could raise Shakespeare from the dead and have him speak on our podcast, these things would be irrelevant. We would suffer the lack of structure and audio quality to hear what he had to say for himself – for a little while at least. 

After that they become more important pretty quickly.

Story Electric can help you craft a podcast series or audio content that will drive your outcomes by ensuring your listener is kept front of mind. With years of experience working with a variety of organisations across a wide range of styles, we can work on each of these things to help you realise your vision. 

A podcast is not an ad, or

‘No one cares about your stupid brand’

It’s not about your brand, it’s about your listener. One of the most important and commonly overlooked questions in podcasting is why should anyone use up their valuable time to listen to you rather than something else? This is a huge issue even when it comes to creating a podcast on a subject with a large inbuilt audience such as gaming; with enterprise podcasting this question is everything. 

What are you offering your listener? What they are giving you is clear. 

Podcasting is a powerful medium full of possibilities of creating meaningful engagement with your audience, although this is going to come from you meeting your listener where they stand. What gap are your filling? How are you helping them? Why should they care?  

Story is everything

This really comes down to a through-line in everything we stand for here, but it is especially relevant when it comes to enterprise podcasting. It’s through stories that we understand the world. They are how we learn, how we relate to each other, and how we make sense of things. This has been true as far back as history extends. I would actually suggest that this is at the heart of the meteoric rise of podcasts. They allow us a way of feeling connected with others that is quite different to other forms of mainstream media. There are many examples in podcasts where they read out letters from listeners who say they feel like the host is like a friend they have never met. The relationship between podcast and listener is an intimate one.

When they are at their most impactful, podcasts can be intensely emotional, cathartic, funny and moving. Powerful stuff for something so easy to produce compared to film/tv.

All of this is down to storytelling; about our ability to connect to the words being spoken to us. Make no mistake there is an art to this and it pays to learn it.