Podcasting is the New Direct Marketing

By Andrew Ballenthin

Consider Why Podcasting Is The New Form of Target Marketing

Talk Directly To Your Prospect – with the massive amount of advertising noise consumers and businesses contend with the challenge is to stand out from the rest. Traditionally this means spending thousands on well crafted messages to catch people’s attention and many thousands more on print (which is declining in public favor due to environmental considerations). With Podcasting consumers are choosing to tune in to your message. From an advertising standpoint you couldn’t ask for a more targeted way to gain your prospect’s attention.

Lengthen Your Captive Audience’s Attention To Your Message – radio and TV, due to cost and nature of presentation usually communicate their message in up to 30 seconds. With Podcasting, download statistics indicate most people will listen for 1-3 minutes. Print has a matter of seconds to capture attention to gain readership and then pull the prospect into more detail to take action. Podcasting due to it’s highly personal nature generally compels much greater interest in its content and holds the audience throughout the broadcast.

Build True One-on-One Relationships – compared to traditional advertising, which has it’s highly valid place, Podcasting brings a face, voice, and life to the target customer. If a Podcast is crafted even reasonably well, it gives a company true one-on-one face time with new and existing clients with only the initial small outlay of time to create and publish the Podcast. Consumers become familiar with the brand through that person and a higher level of trust can be established.

Create Anticipation For Future Communication – you only have to look at the explosion of YouTube to see the anticipation for more communication from the same author. Average people are generating thousands of views on sequential Podcasts and videos. Messages that are more creative can reach hundreds of thousands of people within days and have a viral impact that traditional media only dreams about.

Measurability – depending on the platform for hosting your Podcasts there ways to measure the consumer behavior in relation to the message. Similar to HTML email where links can be clicked and measured for follow-through to the main offer, Podcasts can be studied statistically to see how many people watched during what times. Unlike TV or Radio that has a passive audience receiving the message, Podcasts have an active audience that have chosen to engage your message and listen with captive attention. Measuring conversion rates is comparatively easy to other mass media.

Immediate Call To Action – statistics case analysis are still building, however, many anecdotal cases show a rise in sales, contact from prospects, people sought out for speaking engagements and increased mass media exposure due to Podcast communication. The rationale for these successes is that for the 1-3 minutes you engage your prospect you have the opportunity to create a compelling message that is not competing with any other advertiser.

What’s Next?

If you look outside of the box, Podcasting gives marketers and sales people the dream media they have always prayed for – that is, to talk directly to an engaged audience with nil competition, for the least amount of cost possible. Our prediction is that the businesses that engage in this form of marketing as a core strategy will have the potential to outstrip competition due to their ability to gain trusted one-on-one relationships. If you consider yourself a visionary and leader in your industry, in sales, in your marketing, this is a media evolution not to be missed.

This article has been inspired by Leesa Barnes, a pioneer in this field and after a few years of challenge (as all pioneers go through) has become one of the most noteworthy speakers on the circuit for lecturing about Podcasting. Check for information on her current [http://www.leesabarneslive.com/andrew]upcoming lectures

Article by Andrew Ballenthin, President of Sol Solutions. When you need to stand apart from your competition talk to Sol Solutions for your marketing, strategic planning, and operations streamlining needs. http://www.communitymarketing.typepad.com Passionate About Connecting Pieces. For more information contact [mailto:andrew@solsolutions.ca]andrew@solsolutions.ca.

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Using Podcast Submissions to Enhance Your Podcast Marketing Strategy

Podcast marketing is a crucial part of your overall podcast strategy. Once you’ve developed the idea, bought the equipment, downloaded the software and created your podcast the next question is “how do I find an audience”. Start with how the audience finds you as your premise and make sure you’re where they’re already looking.

There are a variety of ways you can promote your podcast. You could create a podcast blog, specifically the home of your podcast. Doing a custom WordPress podcast blog is a good solution for this one.

You can attach your podcast RSS feed and link to everything you send out – invoices, emails, etc. You can promote your podcast to internet radio stations and see if they’d be interested in running your podcast for free….or you can pay for time on a variety of systems.

You can set up your feeds to run through FeedBurner and manage your subscribers for both your podcasts and your email together. You can invite prominent people on as guests and beg for them to send out an email!

Regardless of how big or small your podcast marketing strategy is, you have to start somewhere.

The most cost effective podcast marketing begins with Podcast Directory Submissions.

Just like everything else these days there is a directory for podcasts. In fact there are hundreds of them. Podcast directories range from the big guys like iTunes to niche oriented directories and MySpace playlists.

Each directory has different requirements for getting listed, like show descriptions, keywords, etc. Some are free and some you pay a small or large advertising fee for regular or “featured” status.

Start with the free directories and work your way to the paid directories/paying for eyeballs advertising once you see how well the free ones are doing in terms of increasing your audience size, RSS subscribers and search engine optimization rankings.

You can submit to the directories manually if you have the time, or there are paid podcast submission services as well.

Christopher Conlan is CEO of Kaboodle Ventures and a 18 year marketing veteran. Read more about podcast marketing at http://www.podcast-marketing.com visit Kaboodle Ventures at http://www.habooble.com and get all the latest internet marketing at http://www.web30technology.com .

Innovative Ways to Market

Marketing is a three-syllable word that seems so simple, yet encompasses so much. Marketing is a multi-faceted approach to promoting a product or service. Both traditional and unconventional marketing methods have a place in the small business world. Marketing helps small businesses focus on building their brand and identity. There are few limitations to marketing options, and the opportunities listed here are just a few that will generally result in a decent ROI (Return On Investment) for most small businesses. That said, do not be afraid to be creative -- no one knows or understands a small business like its owner, so think outside of the box and don't be afraid to experiment. Innovative Ways to Market

Marketing 2.0: Using Social Media to Talk to and Energize the Groundswell

Andrew and Alex covered Forrester Research’s Marketing Forum 2008. During the forum, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented material from their new book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Charlene and Josh quickly overviewed their POST framework for using social networks and shared a number of bite-sized case studies of how brands like Procter & Gamble, Ernst & Young, and Loblaws effectively use social media to talk with and energize their customers. They also used Dell to illustrate the importance of tackling social media one application at a time, with high level executive support, and getting it right before moving on to the next initiative. In addition to covering the presentation at the conference, Andrew also interviewed Charlene later in the day. Harnessing Social Technologies to Energize Sales Charlene Li, Analyst, Forrester Research Josh Bernoff, Analyst, Forrester Research POST Framework The biggest problem with the use of social networks is that companies are trying things without a strategy. You need to have a process, start with the desired customer relationships, not the technologies, then decide what technologies to use the enable those relationships. We call our methodology the “POST” process:

• People - What are your customers’ social activities?
• Objectives - What do you want to accomplish?
• Strategy - Plan for how relationships with customers will change?
• Technology - Which technologies will help you achieve those objectives?

Within POST we break Objectives into five pieces:

• Research - listening to your customers;
• Marketing - talking to your customers;
• Sales - energizing your customers to advocate;
• Support - responding to your customers’ needs;
• Developing - embracing your customers.

Today’s Focus: Talking and Energizing (Marketing and Sales) Talking. Talking is about two-way conversations, not just shouting, which is analogous to traditional one-way advertising. It’s critical to accompany these conversations with the use of metrics to track activity to sales. Blendtec is a great example. They sell commercial grade blenders, and their decision to make videos began when the marketing executive saw the CEO trying to blend 2×4s to test out the blenders and decided he should record it. So they spent a few thousand dollars buying stuff to blend and then creating videos. The videos have become a YouTube hit with over 7 million views and 20+% sales growth. (See also Digital Podcast’s Are Ads as Content the Future of Advertising?) Another example is Johnson & Johnson. J&J created a blog, opened it up for comments but incorporated a very strict comment screening policy to avoid liability, and made those guidelines explicit to consumers to avoid any will. They are a good example of how you can try things even within a strict regulatory oversight environment. Ernst & Young is doing a great job of interacting with people on Facebook for recruiting. E&Y needs to recruit 3,500 college students each year, so within Facebook, they include information about recruiting and a wall for posting. In one post a student asked E&Y why they are not recruiting on their campus, and Dan Black, the head of North American campus recruitment, answered personally with suggestions for how to get in touch with E&Y. This kind of dialog has a viral effect on campuses. Procter & Gamble had a problem trying to connect with teenage girls regarding tampons, which is not something that’s openly discussed. P&G created beinggirl.com, which includes discussions and Q&A about life as a teenage girl and Tampax and Always branding but no direct marketing. They are achieving a 4X return relative to traditional advertising, using their own internal metrics, and have rolled out the approach globally. Energizing. Energizing is about finding and motivating enthusiastic customers to talk about your customers. Example efforts include brand ambassador programs, communities, and embeddable widgets. Ratings and reviews are one of the most interesting ways for interacting with customers, especially for customers who wouldn’t otherwise be engaged. Loblaws, a supermarket chain, encourages shoppers to rate products online and share the ratings in the store aisles and advertisements. If customers complain about a product they’ll fix it, like when the added more eggplant to the eggplant mousaka that customers told them were under-eggplanted. Fiskars, a scissors and craft supplies maker, created the Fisk-A-Teers website, an ambassador program. These are deeply passionate customers, but when surveyed, were very neutral about the Fiskars brand (when asked what food Fiskars would be, customers said Saltines). They made the Fisk-A-Teers site somewhat of a hot commodity by restricting membership to invitation-only after the site was seeded. They have 4,000 Fisk-A-Teers, and the number of positive mentions on the internet went up many-fold after the site launched. Fisk-A-Teers go to stores to give demonstrations, and when they do triple sales in the store on those days. Brides.com energizes its fans through the use of widgets. They understand that brides and their friends are the ones who care about weddings, and created a countdown clock widget that brides can put on their own MySpace page. How should companies get started? It’s very easy for marketers to look at these social media efforts and get intimidated. Do not start by trying to move social applications into everything you do in your company. Pick one place, one application, make that’s successful and only then move on. Put metrics in place to make sure the success is measurable and can be replicated. Dell jumped into social networking when Dells started catching on fire, literally. They had Lionel Menchaca be the lead spokesperson he had the technical background, product review PR experience, and was well connected throughout the company. Unfortunately, Lionel’s first efforts were too stiff and too company-focused. The blog was getting criticized, but despite these setbacks Michael Dell threw his support behind Lionel. It’s critical to have this kind of high-up support for social applications as these efforts always some ruffle feathers along the way. Lionel put up a post titled ‘Flaming Notebook’ directly addressing the issue, including a link to pictures. He described in detail what Dell was doing about it and their investigations. Dell got wide praise for its directness and as a result were well ahead solving the problem and getting replacements before other laptop makers. Dell didn’t stop there. The next thing they tried was IdeaStorm, a social application for generating ideas from customers. The first suggestion was a PC running Linux. They asked customers what form of Linux, what type of support, and conceived and shipped the product in 2 months vs. 9 months for the typical Dell product. Next came DellShares, a Dell investor-focused blog. In many ways, this was really a means for distributing to individual investors answers they were already providing to the institutional investor community. They engaged with Legal first to identify and agree to necessary safeguards, ensuring that DellShares made it through to release versus being roadblocked. In this case, the Legal department devised a disclaimer that needs to be agreed to and clicked through before gaining access to the site. In summary, to succeed with the use of social marketing: (1) Focus on relationships, not the technologies. (2) Find and nurture your revolutionaries. (3) Start small with individual applications, but think big. Q&A Discussion How do you engineer the creation of viral video? It’s really hard to create something that goes viral, and it’s even harder to create one that communicates the message you want for the brand. For example, Delta put up a safety video featuring “Deltalina”, a take-off on Angelina. They at least thought about this enough to show consumers that they “get-it”, and there’s a lot more they could do to engage fans around the video. Forrester is going to do a video in support of the book about how to use data. It won’t be BlendTec-scale success, but we expect some pass-around How critical are these techniques to driving business and marketing peripheral or the meat? It depends on how big your company is. BeingGirl.com is not what made Tampax and Always successful, but it’s a nice addition to a marketing plan. On the other hand, BlendTec had no consumer market before the videos, now they do. ConstantContact doubled their business with customer involvement. It goes back to marketing mix – never put all your eggs in one basket. You never know what will work with your audience. How do you feel secure about what you’re creating? You don’t start with coming up with a brilliant idea, you start with who are your customers and what do they want. The BlendTech guys started by spending $50 with no real risk involved. Make it safe to fail, and encourage your team to try a lot of different things. How do you tackle efforts to create very rich customer experiences with a very small number of people? If you look at the classical value of lifetime value, look at purchase amount, frequency, and viral value. Count the number of people they are actually touching and the value that drives. It’s not nearly as expensive as TV too. You have to start small to prove out the concept and see what works before trying to move it to the next level; once they get going these things scale very well. More resources are available at www.forrester.com/Groundswell Technorati Tags: Forrester 2008 Marketing Forum, Forrester Research, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, Social Marketing