Welcome to podcast Maps. My name is Graham brown. I'm going to share with you five insights from the world of audio, very different insights from tech, business and society. This week, we're going to look at what Instagram is doing in audio and what that means to Facebook, Tik Tok and Spotify. Then we're going to look at podcast rankings and data analytics. I'll offer some insight into three rankings apps that are available on the market right now being Chartable, Rephonic and Podstatus. Then we're going to look at an app that I've started using recently, which isn't actually a podcast app, but it is audio journalism. It's called Curio. I'm a big fan, I'm now a subscriber of the app and I think you should check it out at least to see what's possible in audio. We will then finish up with two disruptive trends. The first one is Neil Patel, the SEO guru, moving from guest posting which he has been using as the cornerstone of his SEO content marketing and thought leadership strategy for so long and now doubling down on podcast guests. Lastly, we'll look at the podcast $150 billion opportunity. Everybody talks about podcasts in terms of advertising. But i feel that there's a large untapped and overseen opportunity in podcasts. All this and a lot more coming up in this week's episodes or podcast maps. Enjoy the show.

How do you get started with your corporate podcast? Well, you have a choice to do it in-house or to do it with a specialist. In-house maybe easiest to get started in the short term if you have the ready skills. But the lack of industry wide perspective on what works as well as the risk and cost and employee times and focus may make it a better choice for you to hire an industry specialist, a podcast agency, like our team at Pikkal & Co, who have the industry experience and can take care of all the heavy lifting. So are you ready to get started? Well, there are three questions to help you answer that question. One, do you have an idea of the business benefit and the why of the podcast for your team and your organization? Two. Who is the host going to be? You may not have a definitive answer, but at least a shortlist. If you don't even have a shortlist, it may be worth spending some time talking to people inside the organization to find out who would make a suitable host, and also who would be interested in doing it. And lastly, do you have the bandwidth to do this long term? Everything important in business exists in the long term, beyond the next quarter. I'm talking about thought leadership, brand building, relationships and it's no different from podcasts, which includes all of the above. So, if you feel confident of your answers to these three questions, your next step should be identifying the stakeholders for your potential podcast. Project favoring, an optimal working team rather than the perfect one. You may not have all your ducks lined up for this particular project, but you at least have a starting point and that's where we come in and help you take this project to the next step. I'll be happy to give you advice on your podcast project, whether it's an idea or an established podcast. One way to do that is to go to our website at Podcasting For Brands. Or you can simply email me at gb@pikkal.com.

With over a thousand podcast episodes produced, you develop a good ear for what makes a good host and importantly, what doesn't. I'll talk about those choices in a minute. But at this stage, the most important decision is to decide who the host is. We have a series of criteria in the podcast agency to identify hosts internally and help corporate leaders and comms leaders decide who the best hosts could be. Here are a couple of those questions and factors to consider in host choice one. Are they a podcast listener themselves? Do they already consume podcast? Being an existing listener is a key factor in determining long-term project success. If I was to look at one of the most important factors in determining whether a podcast is going to get beyond episode six is whether or not the existing host is already actively listening to podcasts. They have to be a believer. An existing podcast listener is more likely to be motivated for this podcast. They'll have an ear for what sounds good and what doesn't, and they're more likely to come up with ideas for the continuing podcast. An existing podcast listener is more likely to be vested in this podcast success. Of the five factors that we help podcast clients use to determine good host podcast fit. The last factor is authenticity. Will this podcast host open up, will they appear human and communicate in an authentic way?

Sometime ago, I was giving a presentation to a group of startup founders, and I was talking about narratives and storytelling. After the presentation, one of the startup founders approached me. He looked a little bit confused and he said, "I don't want to tell a story. I want to tell the truth." To which I replied, "If you don't tell a story I won't know what your truth is." In a world where people increasingly want to know our truth, who want to see through organizations and understand the thoughts and the conversations of the people inside them, knowing how to create engaging narratives is becoming more important than ever. The most engaging narratives are not found in PowerPoint and bullet points. So, what is a narrative? A narrative is a story. It's a series of connected events. That's why all stories whether it's in Netflix or in a book are told in chapters in episodes. Think about a book. Why did you pick that book up in the bookstore? Well, you look at the cover. You turn it over and look at the back, the blurb as they call it in the industry. That blurb is super important. It defines the reason why you're going to pick that book up and read it. So in the bookstore, you open the book and you start reading a few pages. This process is no different from how people consume podcasts today. They find a podcast on Apple podcast or Spotify. They listen to it and then if you're lucky they subscribe. Now, if you go back to the Gutenberg Printing Press. The book publishing industry is over 500 years old. However podcasting is young and new, and that means they haven't quite learned by trial and error. What works and what doesn't yet. Although in the last couple of years, podcasting models have evolved fast. The most successful podcast today have learnt the best of what works from the world of Netflix, book publishing and music and right at the top of that list of things that work in the world of publishing is narrative. Remember that last book that you picked up and read or that Netflix documentary you watched, how did it present the content? Was it dry fact and bullet points or was it a journey? Now content can come in both forms but I bet the journey is the one that's going to keep you coming back and turning the pages. Think about how Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin reads compared to let's say your average white paper and even in the beginning of this section, I gave you a small human story. Remember the startup founder that came to me after the presentation. It was an anecdote, an apocryphal tale. But we've been doing this as a species for thousands of years. To convey meaning to lead audiences and to create positive change. If you want to grow your audience today as a podcast, you must have a good content narrative. In the context of a book or watching a Netflix episode, it's the reason why I'm going to stick around and consume the next episode. Podcast designed without a good narrative may succeed in getting an audience to one specific episode, but fail to convert that audience into subscribers over repeat listeners. And the reason is, is that episode one has nothing to do with episode two and episode three. There's only so much of your time, per audience's attention that you can take for granted these days. You can build a compelling narrative for a corporate brand. McKinsey's Future of Asia podcasts, for example, has a strong through story. The core theme is the future of Asia, as it says on the podcast itself. Within that the macro trends of the Asian century from the rise of Asians middle classes to the evolution of its dynamic startup ecosystems. A good narrative should also lead a category. In marketing terms, this is simply called a category narrative. Sometimes it's called a strategic narrative. Think of how red bull, for example, rather than playing in this soda category decided to define the category of energy drinks. Think of how salesforce.com. defined and ultimately led its category with its no software narrative. I'm pleased to be working with UTI, an India investment bank, which wants to define its category narrative. The podcast we're creating with UTI is the story of India and a key objective for UTI is to redefine that story, to tell it in a positive way to show clients and partners about the outsize returns potential in India. This isn't a story of Bollywood and Curry, but a story of entrepreneurship of the world's largest youth population embracing the future and a digital first, digitally enabled, talent pool. Great storytellers know how to tell stories. It's a skill. It can be learned and it's one of the things that we work with our clients on. One of the things we've learned as an agency over the years is a good ear for understanding how to take an idea and turn it into an engaging story. That doesn't mean fabrication of fact, but it means delivering content fact and information in a meaningful and engaging way. Think of, for example, the effectiveness of creating change with a story like flattening the curve. That's a story. It's not once upon a time, but like all stories, it involves change. Think of the different results that we would have achieved in public health care policy if flattening the curve was presented as a PowerPoint presentation.

So, what do you talk about on your brand podcast? The answer to this question lies in your audience. That's why, if you haven't defined the Audience Avatar for your podcast yet, it's going to be hard for you to create content that strikes a chord with the listener. The good news is that you probably have a lot of content already in the house. That may be white papers and reports, but it also may be found in the conversations that your people have on a day-to-day basis. That's why, there are four different sources for content for your podcast, the host, your internal body of work your guests and your audience. Good podcasts include at least three of these four in their programming. And the choice of three is really dependent on the podcast design. When you've chosen the right design for your podcast, content choices fall into place. That's why one of the most important sessions that we hold with podcast clients is what we call the Content Mapping session. That takes the design that we've worked on together in stage one and manifest that as a content calendar in stage two. Content should always be based around the needs of the audience. Often one of the starting points for a podcast idea is this is what I want to talk about. Our goal as a podcast agency is to bring that starting point to the next level which is what does the audience want to hear about and that really is about what's her issue, what's her frustration, what problem are we solving for her and why will she listen. These are key questions that we must help answer in the pre launch stage of a business podcast. Once you have the design, you can then think about the Audience Avatar. And once you have the Audience Avatar, then you can go to work on the content choices. For example, I want my podcast to get me meetings and leads. I'm a startup and I see myself as a leader within this space. Once you choose the news and analysis podcast. The next stage is the definition of the Audience Avatar and then defining the content. So my Audience Avatar are comms leaders, corporate leaders out there, people who are frustrated with the pandemic and being unable to get their key talking points out to the market in ways like they used to. They are frustrated and overwhelmed by content choices everywhere. Do I choose video, do I choose TikTok or do I choose audio? They look at me because I've created a map for them to navigate this increasingly complex industry and make more informed choices. So with this podcast design combined with an Audience Avatar, my challenge now is to put together the content plan. And this comes back to the four content sources for your podcast. Now it varies by podcast design. But as a general role here are some of the ideas for podcast content. For the host, focus on personal journeys and connection with the subject. I recorded my first podcast in 2006, I set up a podcast agency 2018. Let's look at existing body of work form the key talking points for the brand. In my case, I have white papers and guides. You can go to pikkal.com/guides and download all of them free. And then this guide, this audio book you're listening to now, I created it for you. It's your questions that you've been asking me over all these years. That's why audience are crucial part of your content. As a host, you must speak to their pain, their frustrations. You must know who they are and also the language that they use to talk about these important issues. For me, for this guide, you are a comms leader, a corporate leader or somebody that services all of the above. I didn't write this guide for podcasters. Although you may be a podcaster and the corporate leader already. So the questions that I've answered in this guide, aren't podcaster questions. No, there are plenty of podcaster guides out there about how to use microphones, etc. Instead this guide is for you. And it's the questions that you have about corporate podcast, about creating a podcast for your brand and the goal is to help you make informed decisions about those questions and it's the same with your podcast. A key part of making your content and your conversation relevant to your listener is not only defining those conversations that matter to the listener but also defining what doesn't matter. When I work with the clients in defining the audience avatar and the design and the content map, one of the questions that we ask is not only who is this for, but who is this not for?

The Audience Avatar is one of the most important assets that you'll create for your podcast. It's a single sheet that contains everything we need to know about the listener and when I say everything, I mean, everything. For me, this audio book, the Audience Avatar is Nicole. I gave her a name. She's 42 years old. She's a corporate leader. She's a communications leader for her brand. Give your Audience Avatar a name, humanize them. How old are they? What positions do they have in their organization? What are their frustrations? What are their paying points? What are their fears? What has changed for them in the last 18 to 24 months? Why are they going to listen to you? What kind of language did they use? Now what qualifies you to be in a position of leadership to influence Nicole? I'm regularly reminded that most people start podcasts without even firstly, an idea of who the listener is and therefore, why their content is important to them. Which means no matter how hard you hustle with the guests and getting great guests for your podcast, if you haven't designed the Audience Avatar then it's all academic. When you record the podcast, when you do the intros, the outros, the calls to action, this thing is the callbacks and the bumpers. You should be speaking directly to Nicole. You're not speaking to you guys or the listeners or anybody out there. You see, Nicole doesn't want to be anybody or everybody. She wants to be somebody and down right a good Audience Avatar should not only be that one pager for your podcast in the production. But it should also be the go-to sheet for your social and communications teams for understanding how to communicate to your audience when that episode goes live. The more you can involve all different aspects of communications and marketing across the organization, the more you can make your efforts omni-channel, the more likely you are to turn a listener into a fan. As a podcast owner, your goal should be to turn listeners into subscribers and subscribers into fans. Fans comment, fans share, fans promote your podcast. Your fans are your best marketing department when it comes to podcasts and the best podcast are partnerships between hosts and fans. One of the most important aspects of any corporate podcast is how you speak to the audience and how you involve the audience in your community. A podcast should never be, this is what we want to talk about. It should always be, what does the listener want to hear about? What is the listeners frustration of? Why are they listening to me? And you'll only ever really know that by speaking to Nicole. That's why when we take on a new podcast project, the two upfront development assets that we want to work with any client on are firstly, the Audience Avatar i.e. understanding who the audience is, understanding their personality, understanding their language and understanding what their problem is and secondly, the podcast design itself. Meaning, how will that podcast speak to the audience and how will it involve them in the process. Involving the audience in the process doesn't necessarily mean phone ins in the old school radio vernacular, but it does mean speaking to them directly. And many corporate podcasts today ignore the audience or say the audience or you guys or the listeners as opposed to simply saying 'you'. There are many ways you can involve the audience in your podcast and turn them from listeners into fans and this is where any good podcast agency should be able to help you. Whether it's helping you with callbacks that reference both back catalog audio and what's coming up next or designing with a clear call to action. That encourages the listener to get involved in the podcast itself. That could mean, for example, email feedback, filling out a form, downloading a lead magnet or simply subscribing to the podcast on their favorite podcast platform. Your biggest asset in your podcast is the audience. And that means having a really good understanding of who Nicole is and why you're doing this podcast for her. Because, you know, what's going to happen. You'll get to six podcasts and the novelty of doing the podcast itself will wear off and internally people will start asking questions as why are we doing this? However, if you get feedback, if you involve your audience in the process then you have the foundations for long-term communications success.

In this section, I'm going to talk about podcast design. Solid, well-researched designs are like the foundations of your podcast. You can't build a house on quicksand. It's the same as starting a podcast without researching who your audience is and what the right design is to achieve your business objectives. That's why anecdotally, a large percentage of the podcasts that do fail, fail because they aren't set up right from day one. No matter how successfully you build their house, if the foundations aren't sound, at some point it's going to collapse. So, how do you create sound foundations for your podcast? We use four designs for business podcasts, which you can find out more about in the guide that accompanies this audio. If you don't have a copy of this guide you can download it from the Pikkal & Co website, which you can find atwww.podcastingforbrands.com. The four podcast designs for business are effectively each objectives for that business. They are one campaign awareness, two brand or authority, three business development and four news and analysis. Think of these designs, like blueprints for the house. It's a lot easier to build a house that has an established, tried and tested design than build one from scratch. That design contains many factors inherent to the success of the podcast long-term. Just as any blueprint would give you indication about how deep to build the foundations, a podcast design should also give you indications about the length of a podcast, who should be the host, who should be the guest, what the call to action on the podcast should be, how often you should publish a podcast and what the content narrative of said podcast should be. If you want to build an apartment block to house 100 people, you don't start building a house. And if you want to build a holiday home by the sea, you don't start building an office block. But that is what happens when many people start podcasts, especially for brands and do it without an informed design. So, how do you choose a podcast design? This process is like working with an architect. Here is my idea. Please make that possible. How do you choose an architect? Well, I imagine if you're choosing an architect to build a house for you, you choose somebody that has experience. Have they done this before? Or are you bankrolling their education? Just in the same way that, because you love eating food, doesn't make you a good choice for a restaurant manager. The fact that somebody likes podcasts or has a podcast himself doesn't necessarily make them a great choice to turn your podcast idea into a business success. And are they a specialist? A landscape gardener may know the basics of design and be able to use tools and equipment but can they actually architect and build a house. The danger here is that you respect their designs and trust them to create beautiful landscapes. However, put to the test on bricks and mortar, it might be a risk too far. Those landscape designers, maybe PR agencies, digital agencies, creative agencies. They may have ideas about design, but once again, you're bankrolling their education. In choosing a partner to design and execute and grow your podcast successfully, you should look at a couple of factors. Does this partner actually have a podcast themselves? Secondly, what kind of results have they delivered for their podcast clients in the past? Show me the metrics. Good podcast partner, ideally a specialist podcast agency is defined by the quality of the questions that they ask you in the introductory stage. Your architect's first question should be what's the objective? Why are we building this? And in the context of podcast, it's the same. One of the first questions we want to find out is how does the brand see itself? Is it leader? Or is it an enabler in its industry? Is it an enterprise or is it a startup? Because each has its own different voice. An enterprise that sees itself as a leader, for example, is well-suited to a brand or authority podcast. This is the design we use for the McKinsey's Future of Asia podcast. Future of Asia won McKinsey nine communication awards last year, including one award for the podcast episode, with the United Nations Director of Inclusivity and Diversity. That podcast episode was about parity in the pandemic and it won a Platinum MarCom's award. But if I said to you that was all planned in the design from day one, I'd be lying. Because day one was 2019, not 30 episodes later, as it is now. We learn those designs from producing thousands of podcasts and not all of them were successful. That's what architects do. They learn from their own mistakes. They put in years of practice. They study the patterns of success so clients don't have to. And if there's one thing that we have learned in all of this time it's this - the best podcasts have their success baked into their design and this all starts with the right choice of metrics. Peter Drucker, the management guru famously wrote that 'What's measured gets done'. So the goal, the metrics that you choose for your podcast will ultimately define how it sounds and how it evolves. Take the business development design for a podcast, for example and you'll see that it's fundamentally different to the brand authority podcast. And this can be different even within the organization. We manage the Future of Asia podcast for McKinsey and we also manage The Venture for that bespoke venture building arm Leap by McKinsey. The objectives are very different. So let's take a minute to go back to the podcast design planning quadrant that we have in the guide. The brand authority podcast design employed by McKinsey's Future of Asia is well suited to an enterprise and as a leadership communications podcast. Rather than being a leader Leap by McKinsey are an enabler and they are an internal team within the brand. These mean fundamentally different designs for each organization and with that different conversation, topics and different metrics employed to measure podcast success. In the brand or authority podcast, one of the key metrics we use with clients is chart category leadership. How does this podcast rank amongst its peers in that category? I'm pleased to say we helped McKinsey guide their Future of Asia podcast to the number one spot in the management category in Singapore, in December last year and the Future of Asia has consistently ranked in the top 10 alongside Harvard Business Review and Ted ever since. These metrics also apply to our news and analysis podcasts. Beyond markets by the investment bank Julius Baer recently entered Hong Kong investment category a number one. That was for an episode specifically produced in Mandarin by us for Julius Baer and you can see why having an eye on the metrics as opposed to simply counting the audience is vital. When it comes to business objectives. In this case for Julius Baer, it was an effective way to open up new markets. . Think about the comparative market entry costs. I have a producing a podcast in the local language versus be sending your team out there and setting up an office. For our business development podcast however, the metrics are different. One of the engagement metrics we employ with clients. For business development design podcast is the reach out. Within this metric, there are a number of different instances of when people reach out to the podcast host or the team. One such metric is the meeting and it's important for a business development podcast to help drive business development meetings with that team. Once again, what's measured gets done. When the objective of the podcast is to drive high level quality meeting with aligned prospects and partners then the content, the call to action and the ongoing narrative of the podcast will evolve and change to meet that objective. When we started our podcast agency here in Singapore in 2018, servicing global clients, there really wasn't a playbook for podcasting for enterprise brands. We had to learn it through our own mistakes so you don't have to. Then we found a good design saves time. Getting the design right day one provides the foundations you need to build a long-term successful podcast.

Who exactly listens to podcasts today? Let's have a look first at age and influence. According to a marketing chart survey of LinkedIn members, most podcast listeners were 18 to 34 years old and at the VP or C level within their organization. Meaning, podcast listeners are young, influential and possibly more vocal than older non podcast listeners. Now let's have a look at how podcasts listeners actually consume podcasts. From the Edison Research Infinite Dial Report, 44% of podcast listeners said that they listened to most of the episode. In a later Statista survey, 34% of podcast listeners consumed up to 30 minutes of content, compared to 7% of up to 15 minutes. Meaning, unlike other forms of media podcast listeners are all in. One of the most commonly asked questions by podcast clients at our agency is how long should my podcast episodes be? And for many years, the answer lay in whoever had the loudest voice in the office, giving his opinion about how long a podcast episode should be, often that guy doesn't even listen to podcasts. And his answer is something like five minutes. But we put that answer to the test. We crunched 900,000 business podcast episodes to find out what the average episode length was and this is what we found. The average business podcast episode length is 34 minutes. However, there is a key caveat in understanding this data. There is a significant difference between the length of a long serving podcast and a newcomer. Let me explain. So long serving podcast i.e. podcasts that have tenure at least 5 years and these are podcasts, which are consistently turning out content for 5 years and successful average 43 minutes. Whereas new podcasts i.e. podcasts that have been produced or released in the last year, average 27 minutes. What does that mean? It means long-term successful podcasts publish longer episodes. But it's important to also consider the category. As our data shows the length of the podcast varies by the category in which the podcast is in and this is a key part of the planning process with any new episode and any new series is helping a client understand what the normal expectation of the audience is for your podcast category Lastly, let's talk about the qualitative nature of your podcast audience. What makes a good audience number for a business podcast? I've worked on a range of different audience numbers from let's say 300 listeners, an episode to 30,000. This goes back to comparing B2B and B2C podcasts in the last episode. As a business podcast, you can produce a successful podcast with 300 listeners. If within that 300 listener base, you have an audience of people who are high value and useful to your brand. That's why in the development stage of any new podcasts, the two criteria we need to establish to make a podcast successful is one the key business objectives of the podcast and two, what we call the Audience Avatar. 300 aligned listeners who care about what you have to talk about is far more valued than 30,000 unaligned listeners who just think your subject is interesting. A strong well-defined and well-researched Audience Avatar for any podcast series makes the return on investment and time for all those involved in the podcast a lot higher. Think of your podcast, like landing a plane. It all happens in the alignment and the approach. It's what I will illustrate in the podcast design section which will help you design a podcast, a format that works specifically for your business, for your audience and for your objectives.

Podcasting for brands is for corporate leaders and communication heads. You may have a podcast in your company already and be thinking about how do we grow our audience or you may be thinking of starting a podcast for your brand. It may be specific to your region or a team. All the above options, a good reasons to listen to this guide because I've worked on all of these business cases. And I want to share with you today, my experience about what works and what doesn't. And hopefully if I've been successful at downloading my experience in this guide, it will do a few things for you. Firstly, help answer questions that you have. Secondly, give you some ideas about what podcasting could be for your brand. And thirdly, give you more questions to think about. And if that's the case, then this is what I want you to do. You can contact me either on my website, which iswww.pikkal.com or you can contact me Graham Brown directly on email - gb@pikkal.com. And let me tell you, there is no such thing as a stupid question when it comes to podcasting. Podcasting is a very new format. And it's evolving fast. It's only natural that people are still trying to figure it out. So feel free to reach out. In the meantime, enjoy Podcasting for Brands.

What is podcasting for brands all about? I've produced over 1000 podcasts and worked with brands like McKinsey, IBM and AirAsia in my time. And I found that the problem roughly breaks into three areas for brands. One is concept, two is conversation and three is community. Let me break these down for you. One concept. A business podcast is fundamentally different from a consumer podcast. Now that's a challenge because most of what we understand and experience in podcasting today is popularized through consumer podcasts names, such as Serial; that true crime podcasts that brought millions to the format from Serial to Real Dictators to My Favorite Murder. Rich audio, narrative formats, deep in storytelling and research have really pushed the envelope in terms of what's possible in podcasting today. And while these consumer podcasts raise the bar of expectation for everybody, they are not business podcasts. They certainly give us ideas about how we can increase engagement with audiences and produce more engaging narratives for business podcast. But their objectives are different. Whereas the goal of a consumer podcast is ultimately to create advertising real estate. For business, the concept is different. So what is the concept of a business podcast? Ultimately a business podcast has to move the needle on the business objectives. Those business objectives can be one of four potential outcomes with a podcast. Firstly, campaign awareness. Secondly, brand authority. Thirdly, news and analysis and lastly business development. I'll share how that works in this guide. These all boil down to ultimately Thought Leadership because Thought Leadership means attention and attention leads to trust and trust converts into business outcomes. So, how do you convert all those amazing conversations and that talent within your organization into content that people care about? This is the second area for podcasting, for brands, which is conversation. In podcasting for brands, conversation challenges often manifest in a number of different questions. Those questions can be, for example, who hosts our branded podcast? Secondly, people may be wondering who they should get as guests. Thirdly, do we use the podcast to sell our products and services or do we talk about other things? And most commonly asked, what should we call our branded podcast? The last challenge for brands when it comes to starting and building successful podcast is community. Because without a community, every podcast is simply a vanity project. As our client podcasts grow, one of the areas we focus more time on is audience building. Once you're through the proof of concept, stage two is all about engaging your community and growing your audience. And to do this, we found that you need a number of factors, which I'll talk about in this guide. Firstly, you need good data. Understanding of what's worked in the past, but also understanding of what's working on store with platforms like Spotify and Apple. These platforms have hundreds of millions of listeners. And if you understand how they work and design your podcast with them in mind, you can tap into large jet streams of organic audience. That's why one of the things I'll stress in podcasting for brands is working smarter as opposed to working harder and this is no different when it comes to building an audience. As they say in the old world, if you want to find the gold, mine where the gold is and the gold is on Spotify and Apple. The last factor to consider in podcast audience growth is how do you relate to the community? How is your podcast taking them on a journey? Quite often when a brand comes to me with a podcast idea, it starts with a conversation about, this is what we want to talk about. My challenge is to take that starting step and help the client realize that ultimately it's about what the audience wants to hear. A key step in the planning process of any good podcast is identifying the ideal customer profile, what we call at the agency, the Audience Avatar, and it's worth spending time scoping out the Audience Avatar in the planning process of your business podcast. Because if you can't see the target, how can you hit it? I'll explain how to develop an Audience Avatar in this guide. And the last factor in community is the content narrative. Which is really about why will your community and your audience come back? The goal in building a podcast today for businesses isn't necessarily getting the biggest celebrity guests. It's not even about getting guests at all. Whilst guests are important, you have to remember and what we'll discuss in this guide is that the audience always comes for the guest, but stays for the host. So the host has to be a pivotal part in driving the narrative and creating a compelling reason for why, that listener will come back for a future episode. .

So just how big is the podcast market today? If you want to understand the podcast market today, we have to understand it through the lens of people. There is no more authentic medium. There is no better way to build authority and what better way for you, your brand and your brand leaders to grow an audience of people that care about the conversations that matter to them? There are 2 million podcasts in the world today. That's the number of websites there were back in 1998. The latest statistics show that we now have 1.7. Billion websites. Purely from back of envelope estimates, there are 1 million podcast hosts in the world and those podcasts hosts have spoken to 50 million people. Let's think about podcasting from the perspective of the people who listen to podcasts. If you look at the data there are 1 billion people listening to podcasts every week. The COVID 19 pandemic has done a lot to put podcasts on the agenda both for us as listeners, but also as a valid option now for businesses. Consider that a lot of what we used to do in the world of traditional corporate communications from press releases analyst lunches to breakfast briefings to business events are no longer effective options. According to the latest Edelman PR trust report, people want CEOs to speak out. What are their views on diversity? What are their views on climate change? In many ways, these very personal conversations define our experience of brands today. The question has always been for corporate leaders and communications heads. How do you do that? Both in an authentic manner and a scale. Because the most valuable assets in any organization, i.e the people, the leaders don't scale by their very nature. We all know the power of an informal coffee meeting. That's where deals are done. However, you can't scale that kind of intimacy and by contrast the press release or the social media tweet don't offer the bandwidth, the engagement or the level of scale that we need as brands to reach the people that matter most. That's why podcasts offered the rare combination of both authenticity and scale. I encourage my clients to think of their podcast as like a coffee conversation at scale. So back to those 2 million podcast, should your brand also have a podcast? Consider your branded podcast as a communication interface for the leaders of your organization. Much in the same way that the websites in the early days provided a more effective communication interface for consumers and the brand. It was far more efficient to go to the website, order a product, find the store opening hours or send an email than phoning up the switchboard or reading news articles to find out more about the company or going to the store to find out it was shut. Your branded podcast too, provides a better way for your partners, your network and your clients to understand more about the people behind the brand. What do they care about? What are their views on different subjects and what is their journey within the organization? These conversations, both humanize and define brands today. Because people follow people, not brands.

Welcome back to podcast maps. This episode is all about growing podcast audiences. You might be a podcast host. You might be a podcast agency. One thing you're probably experiencing today that shares all of the above is the difficulty in growing an audience. There's reasons for that. You can listen to my previous episodes of podcast maps to see how technically the algorithms have changed or Spotify on apple. Covered in this episode of Podcast Maps: Audience numbers quality or quantity?, Guest sharing strategies, Dungeons and Dragons podcasts, Taylor Swift, The Thought Leadership Magic Quadrant and what happens to Tik Tok stars after they become famous.

Connection -> Speak to the listener "you” works greatConversation -> Talk to them, not the guestCommunity -> Get out there and talk to themContent SEO -> Attract aligned listenersCallback -> Create a narrative that keeps people coming backCadence -> Once a month is no longer enoughConsistency -> ...builds quality

The first sense we ever experienced was the sound of another human's heartbeat. Audio is the root of all connection. And this is the same of brand communication as it is for human beings. Video may be exciting and shiny, but you're competing with an army of teenagers who work harder, longer and get more viewers than brands ever will. But what your average 15 year old kid can't do is bring a wealth of experience, connection and conversation to the table. That's why when it comes to thought leadership and business development, audio wins hands down.

Vox Populi Vox Dei - the voice of the people is the voice of God. We can learn a lot from radio. Radio can teach us what Audio 2.0 needs to do next. The first ever "Radio Phone in” took place in London 100 years. The industry first by BBC Radio was so popular that the Post Office (who then controlled the airwaves) had to step in and shut it down. My point is that Radio has been doing Community for 100 years. Specifically building community. In this episode I discuss what radio does so well - being part of and including the listener. I also share example of podcasts that do this very well - e.g. Cold War Conversations and Dungeons and Daddies. To understand Audio 2.0, think of the industry as Music in the pre-digital era. You needed Property (the songs) and you needed Air Play to promote the songs. Pre-Spotify and iTunes these entities would be: Property - the Music catalogue Air Play - Radio Today, we can see a similar model emerge. Property - Podcasts Air Play - Clubhouse, Linkedin Live, Telegram Groups, Whatsapp Groups, Facebook Groups, Discord, Twitter Spaces etc Now, what's important for us to understand here is that creating a Podcast and pushing out a few social media "audiogram” highlights or Tweets ain't gonna cut it anymore. To succeed, you need to build Community with Air Play. You need to create Social Space… If we want to realise Audio 2.0's full potential, every audio content owner must also create a COMMUNITY around her property. The rules of the game are evolving. See my Linkedin post this week on the comparison of podcasts 2016 vs 2021.

I was surprised to learn that Cassette Tapes are enjoying a renaissance, due in part to the reality of our disconnected lives. Tapes have always been core to connection and sharing. (In 1989 tapes sold 83 million units a year in the UK). https://scroll.in/article/990384/audio-cassettes-are-a-bit-rubbish-so-why-did-their-sales-doubled-during-the-pandemic Remember the word COMMUNITY comes from the Latin COMMUNICAT which means "to share”. What we were doing with cassette tapes 30 or 40 years ago, we are now doing on Clubhouse and Podcasts. Too often technologists try to force people to adopt new behaviors, an approach that fails. If there's something we need to learn from the rise and fall and rise of Cassette tapes it's this - OLD behaviors NEW technologies. Those behaviors are primarily rooted in SHARING. Both the sharing of audio and the shared experience created by audio.

Orson Welles rose to notoriety with his broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. Legend has it, his realistic broadcast complete with news alert, brought offices and drivers to a standstill, shocked that Mars was indeed invading America. The broadcast aired during a perfect storm of factors: on the one hand a backdrop of foreboding with the rise of Hitler in Europe and on the other the emergence of the modern industrial consumer who turned to mass media for information and connection. Fast forward to 2021 and the latest data from the Infinite Dial report in Australia shows us how weekly podcast listening grew 53% over a period of 12 months (the last report being polled pre-Covid lockdown). https://www.adnews.com.au/news/digital-audio-continues-to-climb-with-podcast-listening-up-37 Michael Stelzner, the CEO of Social Media Examiner, explains why audio is filling a void left by the disconnection we feel from this unprecedented era in history, "the pandemic has made so many of us yearn for real, live conversations and Clubhouse brings a unique dynamic by adding social elements to it.” - source Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhackl/2021/02/05/community-is-at-the-heart-of-social-audio-with-clubhouse

Tokyo and Shanghai combined have 73 million people. That's more people in 2 cities than the population of California and Texas combined. So many people, so little space. Many of these 73 million people came from outside the city, uprooted from their local communities. It's no coincidence that they have the largest and most profitable Starbucks stores in the world. Not because Starbucks sells coffee, but they sell what people need during times of massive disruption - spaces to connect. In this article from Unified Communications, the author writes that, "Everyone's talking about Audio Spaces right now”. Clubhouse, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Reddit, Discord and Podcasts are all forms of Social Space reimagined for the world of audio. To the question of who will win long term, this is perhaps best answered not by me, but by the ones who have driven communication technology for the last 20 years - teenagers.

This year Elon Musk and Clubhouse burst onto the scene. The Google Trends data on Clubhouse speaks volumes about the hype. After Clubhouse comes Linkedin, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. Then there's Discord, of course, the audio first dark horse app hit chugs away in the background with 120 million users. (a more detailed trend comparison of Clubhouse vs Discord) And Podcasts. 1 Billion Weekly Listeners. All of this is not going without Mainstream attention. Washington Post this week wrote an article headlined: Video is so 2020. Now Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are going all in on audio. Why? Audio 2.0 is on the rise in 2021 because of 2021, not as a coincidence. 2021 has been one of the most disconnected eras of our modern history and with that we have collectively sought out ways to connect. If we consider disconnection as the pain point of the modern consumer, we as audio professionals need to deliver. This means a) acknowledging that the core power of audio is connection and b) building connection into our audio content. If there's one thing we've learned that makes us happy from its absence in the last 18 months - it's Community. More than anything, we crave the contact of other people. That's why Audio is enjoying a resurgence. It's audio's ability to connect and create community that we are attracted to. In Season 3 of Podcast Maps I discuss the backstory to the rise of Audio 2.0 and share examples of how technologies and audio content creators and engaging communities. I hope this helps you see audio for what it really can be - not as another content channel but as a powerful medium for us to create authentic connection in a very disconnected era.

In this episode of Season 2 Podcast Maps we'll look at the analytics tools you can use to find your podcast ranking. We built our own Podcast Analytics tool called Podminer which ranks 90,000 podcasts in the business category. Critical to your podcast ranking are several Podcast SEO meta factors including your choice of category (see How to Choose Podcast Category), Podcast Cadence (see how often should I publish my podcast episodes? and audio length (see How long should a podcast episode be?). If you have questions, queries and feedback about Podcast SEO add Graham Brown on Linkedin