Are you curious about starting a podcast for your business? If so, you might be wondering how you will stand out among today’s 1.96 million active podcasts.
Differentiating yourself in the massive sea of podcasts comes down to one thing–properly planning a strategy for your podcast. A good podcast strategy means providing the right content at the right time for the right people.
Knowing your strategy will help your podcast grow, scale, and succeed– and provide a starting point and the peace of mind that you have a plan when challenges occur.
The most important thing for a business podcast’s strategy is narrowing the focus of the content and audience and then validating your ideas. We’ll walk you through four crucial questions small businesses should ask themselves when building their podcast strategy:
What is the focus of your podcast?
Who is your target audience?
How will you validate that your podcast will resonate?
How do you make your podcast episodes interesting?
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What Is the Focus of Your Podcast?
What will be the focus of your business podcast?
Answering the first two questions in the four crucial questions should take up the bulk of your planning time, and the answers will become the guideposts for your strategy from now on:
What is the focus of your podcast?
Who is your target audience?
The focus of your podcast should describe the story you want to tell in each episode and the value it will provide for your audience. This focus refers to your podcast’s central topic or theme and defines your why for creating a podcast. It can also serve as a source of motivation for your listeners to return time and time again and for you to keep creating episodes despite challenges.
Keep in mind why people listen to podcasts.
How to define your podcast’s focus
A great way to figure out your podcast’s focus is to decide if you’re primarily trying to educate, inspire, or entertain your listeners. Podcasting is a great way to build authority by providing your audience with content that will help them see you as an expert in your field. It’s also a great way to keep your audience engaged with your brand by providing them with a source of entertainment.
If you want to focus on being seen as an expert, decide on the segment of your business you want to talk about and what knowledge you have that you want to share.
The importance of keeping your podcast’s focus narrow
The more narrow you go with the podcast’s focus, the stronger your connection with your target audience. You don’t need to—or shouldn’t—compete against the entire nation when it comes to podcast themes. Most business podcasts are hyper-localized and address a niche market.
For example, our Shorts-N-Suits podcast is geared towards other small business owners in the city of Gilbert, AZ, and looks at balancing family life with entrepreneurship. If you try to appeal to everyone with every topic, you will be less effective at attracting an audience, which is true for all marketing—not just podcast marketing.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Keep narrowing down your podcast’s focus by targeting a specific audience.
The next step to creating your podcast strategy is to decide who you’re trying to reach, what they already know, and how your podcast will provide them with information that they want to know. Fortunately, since you likely already have an audience identified for your business, you already have a starting point when it comes to defining the audience for your business podcast.
For example, we’re a local, family-owned, B2B and B2C small business located in East Valley, Arizona. Our Guiding Growth podcast targets East Valley business owners who are starting out or already established. We want to talk to an audience that cares about maintaining the human side of running a business and focusing on what really matters to them. This audience wants to learn about what drives entrepreneurs and gets to the heart of who they are, such as parental influence, school, mentors, and peers.
Meanwhile, our Shorts-N-Suits podcast speaks to small business owners in Gilbert, AZ, who want to learn more about the logistical side of being an entrepreneur and how to build a business. This audience wants to learn the insights that the hosts, fellow entrepreneurs, wished they knew when they started.
How to define your audience
You can use sticky notes on a whiteboard to help narrow down your focus. We recommend coming up with 1-3 sentences about a) your niche demographic and b) what your audience wants to learn or what they care about. Start by trading ideas with colleagues or somebody you trust to help identify your focus. This can help you brainstorm your way to defining your key audience.
How to use personas to reach your audience
One trick is to create a “persona” for your podcast. Sketching out precisely who your target audience is will also help you in defining content for your podcast.
That persona is somebody you should refer to every time you’re planning an episode, such as: “Would Ben, our listener persona, like this? What would he take away? Is this focused on what he is interested in? If not, how could we present this in a way that he would like?”
The importance of knowing your target audience
Knowing your target audience allows you to focus on being relatable to them effectively. While we all desire to have a broadly popular podcast, this will take some time to build unless you already have a large audience interested in consuming podcasts from your business. Being relatable to a specific audience increases your podcast’s probability of success. The next step is to validate that your podcast theme would intrigue your chosen audience.
How Will You Validate That Your Podcast Will Resonate?
Show Intro
Creating a podcast teaser can validate that your podcast idea has legs. This is an example of a show intro for our Guiding Growth podcast show.
Before you release your podcast into the world, you want to think about how to test the validity of your podcast theme and chosen audience.
Conduct research into your niche
You can validate your podcast by searching for other podcasts with similar topics and preview them. Take notes on how they approach overlapping topics with your podcast ideas to see if they align or not. You want to look for opportunities to do it better or differently from podcasts in similar fields.
Put together a podcast teaser
Want to know what people will think of your podcast? You can also validate your podcast by putting together a 1-4 minute teaser for the show, sending that out to people in your network, and promoting it on social media to ask them for their first impression and whether they would continue to listen. This way, you can share what the podcast is about and see if your niche audience is interested in it.
How Do You Make Your Podcast Episodes Interesting?
How do people find podcasts that interest them? Research your audience’s go-to’s so you know how to promote your podcast.
Episodes that don’t interest listeners can sink a podcast. Creating an exciting podcast for your listeners means thinking about your podcast’s framework, coming up with relevant and unique episode topics and titles, and enough content to fill up a typical podcast episode and schedule.
How to structure your podcast’s framework
First, you want to think about the structure of your podcast. Most podcasts use either an interview-based or knowledge-based structure.
If the podcast uses interviews like our Guiding Growth podcast, you can devise a general flow of how each episode will go. For example, our podcast episodes always involve a monologue and some dialogue at the beginning. We ease our guests into interviews with a lightning round of lighthearted questions (e.g., what is your favorite color?), and the framework is consistent for each episode.
Meanwhile, knowledge-based shows like Shorts-N-Suits focus on expertise. Each quarter, you can ideate topics on a whiteboard that your audience would want to hear about, drawing from the challenges you have had or are having. Then, as each recording session comes near, see which ones stick from the brainstorm and create an organizational outline.
Validate your episode topics through search to see if you need to pivot.
How to come up with unique and relevant ideas for episodes and titles
The next step is to generate ideas for episodes and titles.
Your episode titles being search-friendly is especially important if your podcast doesn't use interviews. To help you validate the relevance of your episode ideas, conduct some research in the places that listeners are finding podcasts. According to Statista’s 2020 study, the top platforms for podcast listeners are Spotify and Apple Podcasts, which hold a cumulative 45% of the market share. Listeners also find podcasts via charts, word-of-mouth recommendations, other podcasts, and social media platforms.
You want to meet your listeners where they are. Search for the episode topics that you’re interested in discussing on your podcast in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, social media, forums, and other podcasts within your field. This research will help you check if your episode ideas are relevant to your audience and how you can distinguish your episodes from other podcasts.
If your podcast is interview-based, keep the focus on episode content and your guest’s credentials in the title and summary. Don’t worry too much about whether the guest’s popularity will impact your business podcast. If your podcast targets a local audience, you want to consider local popularity. Just because your guest isn’t Shark Tank-level famous doesn’t mean that people don’t want to listen to what they have to say. With less well-known guests, you want to get the word out about why people should listen to your guest and episode through marketing.
How to check if you have enough content for your podcast
No matter what the framework of your podcast is, you want to consider if the episode topics you brainstormed will be enough for an episode and your podcast schedule. 39% of podcasts publish an episode on their hosting platform every 8-14 days. Some podcasts even publish up to every 3 to 7 days. The average podcast length is 25-30 minutes but can significantly vary depending on the genre, so this will be another area that would need research on your end.
All in all, a validated focus, audience, and episode topic will help make your podcast attractive to the right people.
Want Help Planning Your Business Podcast Marketing Strategy?
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Come check out Modern Moments podcast studio equipment and learn more about our services.
Modern Moments is a podcast studio space that caters to small businesses interested in starting podcasts. We provide everything from equipment and pre-production ideation to post-production editing and landing page setup. We don’t just talk the talk—we run three small business podcasts ourselves: Shorts-N-Suits, Rocket Media blogcast, and Guiding Growth, and are well versed in the popular podcasting platforms.