When taking a walk, doing chores, driving, or whenever else, many of us enjoy podcasts. Over the years, podcasts have become extremely popular, with everyday people and celebrities alike, contributing to the billion-dollar podcast industry. The popularity of podcasts also poses a massive opportunity for businesses.
Even a moderately successful podcast can have thousands of dedicated followers and each one of those is a potential customer that businesses can tap into. This is why we see many business leaders make podcast appearances, especially during promotional runs for new products and services.
But it’s not all fun and games on the business-podcast front. On paper, it should be simple for a business leader to leverage podcasts to their benefit. In reality, it is much more complicated; finding the right podcast, reaching out and setting up an appearance, promoting the episode once it is out, and tracking the results.
All this can prove overwhelming for business owners who have other pressing responsibilities and this is where Podcast Virtuoso comes in. For years, the company has been at the forefront of digital marketing and specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of podcasts to build brand awareness, credibility, thought leadership, and much more.
Podcast Virtuoso was born out of the need to evolve content marketing beyond social media and owned & operated channels like blogs and webinars. Over the last ten years, we’ve seen it become more and more complicated for brands and entrepreneurs to gain consumer trust and build credibility. This is largely due to consumers becoming very wary of paid advertising, influencer marketing, and social media endorsements. My philosophy in marketing has always been rooted in building a systematized way to build an audience of people who are genuinely in your target market. Podcast Virtuoso was born to solve our clients’ problem of finding a consistent, effective, and accurate way to speak directly to their target audience.
Consumers, in general, are more receptive to learning about a brand, entrepreneur, or product when it is already coming from an established place of common ground. In listening to podcasts, there is an element of consumer choice and self-selection, where the individual is in the decision seat of whether or not they listen to the content. By putting that power in the hands of the consumer/audience, you end up with a much more engaged audience than you would from any other awareness marketing tactic. By allowing people in your target audience to hear from you directly, you set the stage for a personal connection that builds brand trust, loyalty, and credibility much faster than most other forms of advertising.
When we kick off at Podcast Virtuoso, we always tell our clients: you’re not going on a show to promote your product, you’re going on a show to promote yourself and build awareness about who you are as a person and what you stand for. It’s up to the audience, the consumer, to decide if they like you or not. If they like you, then they will pay attention and ultimately self-convert to being a purchaser of your product or whatever brand you’re trying to build a following behind.
Podcasts offer our business owners the opportunity to talk directly to their ideal consumers. Because we can customize so specifically which podcasts we feature our clients on, it is a matchmaking service between a client’s target audience and a podcast’s listenership. The concept is simple: if you were put in a room in front of 10,000 people who were in your self-described target market, how many of those people would fall in love with your service and with you as a person and decide to engage with your company? Be that buying your book, signing up for a course, downloading your app, following your socials, etc. If you have the skills to tell your story in a way that captivates your target audience, working with Podcast Virtuoso will set you up for success. Every day we are booking appearances that build brand awareness, establish credibility, and ultimately improve your brand’s share of voice in the broader marketplace.
Every time we onboard a new client at Podcast Virtuoso, it is a consultative process. We sit down and perform an in-depth strategy session and analysis of your current marketing efforts, client acquisition strategies, target audience, and overall product offering. We take all of this information and build out customized pitch materials and a customized profile of your ideal podcast host and your ideal podcast audience.
Making sure you’re on the right podcast is just the beginning. Working hand-in-hand with a dedicated client success representative, you will receive everything from conversation topics and recording pointers to ensure that you are prepared for every interview. Additionally, after each interview, our team produces a full suite of assets for you to use on social media. This includes audiograms, video files for TikTok and Instagram Reels, and custom graphics for you to post on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. At Podcast Virtuoso, we do all of this work using your brand style guide, so it integrates seamlessly into your broader social strategy. We add all of these post-podcast collateral assets to each one of our packages because it’s extremely important to us that all of our clients get the most mileage possible out of each appearance.
On top of this guidance, we also provide feedback on each recording to make sure that every time you record an episode, you are improving your skills of talking directly to your target audience and in turn improving the outcomes.
Of course, in the process of onboarding, we identify the core KPIs that are most important to each client and ultimately, if it is audience growth, sales, lead generation, or something different, all of our efforts are focused on driving forward that Key Performance Indicator. Your team at Podcast Virtuoso is your partner for the long term and are dedicated to making sure that you see the most value from your package.
The podcast industry has grown exponentially over the last several years with over a third of Americans actively listening to podcasts and globally adding tens of millions of new listeners every year. Projections show that we’re on pace to add over 100 million podcast listeners in the next two years, and I think we will continue to see that growth accelerate. Consumers are starting to realize that podcasts are a great way for them to do pre-purchase research not only on brands themselves and products themselves but also on the individual people who are behind the brands. Especially in today’s cultural climate where the people behind the brand are more important than ever, podcast appearances and consuming podcasts enable a very important analysis of parts of the business that before very much remained behind the scenes.
Since 2019, we here at Podcast Virtuoso have been building and implementing strategies that move with the markets and evolve with our clients.
