Content marketing has long been a primary way for brands to increase their website traffic and customer bases. And one of the best in the game is CoSchedule.
This software as a service (SaaS) tool allows marketers to organize, execute, and analyze every promotional campaign to get more done. To introduce CoSchedule to potential users, they create educational content about industry best practices and their product.
In this episode, we discuss how CoSchedule uses podcasting within their broader content marketing activities.
What Makes A Good Podcast?
Framed as “what is the biggest mistake most content marketers make?” led Craig and Ben to discuss what makes a good podcast.
The answer: quality over quantity. Often times, creators are in a rush to produce as much content as possible. Thinking the more I put out there, the more chances people will have to interact with my podcast. But in reality, spending more time creating engaging content is the better strategy.
Creating a good podcast comes down to investing more resources in-depth and useful pieces that don’t just scratch the surface. Ben suggests asking yourself “is this the best resource available on this topic?” for every new piece of content. If your answer is no, it’ll likely fall flat because users will go elsewhere to solve their problem.
For every episode of their Actionable Marketing podcast, the CoSchedule team aims to provide real-world insights and actions marketers can apply to their own work. If the episode has no takeaway, it’s scrapped. Simple as that.
But remember, making a great podcast has a learning curve. It’ll take more time to research, produce, and polish episodes that go deeper but there’s a payoff. CoSchedule’s content sees passive visits and listens for months and even years after it’s published because they we were willing to invest the time upfront. That ongoing engagement is what it takes to bring a podcast from good to great.
Focusing on evergreen content is a great way to squeeze more engagement over time from a single episode. Timeless content stays fresher longer, driving more listens long after it’s first published.
How Podcast Content Complements Your Marketing Mix
Content marketing historically only included written mediums but audio content has recently entered the scene. Craig and Ben dug into how CoSchedule thinks about their podcast content and it differs from their other channels.
At a high level, CoSchedule creates content for marketers. Across written, spoken, and social content, the common theme is helping marketing professionals solve a problem. But their podcast content ideas have a slightly different spin than their other channels.
Content ideas for written and social platforms are typically focused on their SEO value or virality. The goal is to capitalize on keyword search volume or lead a trending social conversation to reach new customers. But podcasting allows CoSchedule to explore questions that can’t be positioned against these standard measures of success. Oftentimes, episodes solve problems listeners don’t know how to search for or answers questions they didn’t think to ask.
“Podcasts are a powerful way to connect with an audience for 20, 30, even 40 minutes,” Ben says. Compared the minutes it takes to engage with an article or social post, podcasts establish a stickier connection. There’s more opportunity to explore a topic in a conversational way with added personality. By not focusing on traditional marketing metrics, the Actionable Marketing Podcast helps produce brand loyalists and keep CoSchedule top of mind for potential customers.
Podcasts offer the opportunity to become part of someone’s routine. They may not visit your site each time a new article is published but they might habitually tune in to your new podcast content.
Podcast Driving Conversions
A common struggle for marketers leveraging podcasts as part of a content marketing strategy is attribution. Meaning, how can we assess if the podcast is driving customers to our business?
How do we track someone who tunes into an episode, visits the website, and ultimately purchases the product. Moving between platforms and the amount of time between each action adds to the challenge.
One way that Ben suggests to look at this is simply the “are we better off now than before the podcast?”. This is a binary, more simplistic way of looking at your organization’s objective. But it does provide a clear yes or no answer and can be applied to any business metric.
Given the complexity of the problem, we don’t have the perfect answer. So this is where we throw it back to you, the listeners. What are you doing to attribute podcast listenership to activities happening on your site, in your business, or with your brand? Tell us in the comments below!
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
- Subscribe to the Actionable Marketing Podcast
- Read more from CoSchedule’s blog here
- Subscribe to Audience
