Are you looking for a new way to engage with your customers outside of the traditional written format? Then podcasting might be for you.
Podcasts aren’t new – they started back in 2004 (at least that’s when the term podcasting was coined by the BBC), and it’s grown to over five million podcasts globally and 464 million listeners.
But, with this ever-growing channel of communication, is it time to scrap the blogs and stick only to podcasts? Let’s find out…
In favour of sticking with blogs
Blogging has been around since the dawn of the internet. It’s still a tried and tested method to communicate with your audience. We love writing content for our News & Insight section as it means we can share top quality guidance and news around you.
You also have Google Algorithm behind you to share your content with an audience that may not know who you are. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means that you can maximise your reach through your choice of keywords, and answer questions directly.
Speaking of direct, blogs give you the ability to do that by answering questions quickly. Good quality blogs can take on average five to ten minutes to read, whereas listening to a podcast can take an hour, and the answer is usually scattered between anecdotes and ads. Blogs are far less time consuming and easier to discern the appropriate information.
Lastly, blogs allow you to work at a much faster pace when responding to current affairs. If something were to happen and you could comment on it, a blog could take you an hour to create and share, whereas a blog would require 30 minutes to an hour to create, and then you need to add editing time and uploading to that.
In favour of moving to podcasts
Are your customers on the go? Do they travel to work with limited internet connection? Then podcasts might work better for them. Podcasts work where blogs don’t, in that they can be downloaded and taken wherever someone goes.
They’re also much more accessible than blogs. If someone struggles to taken in information when its written, or are blind or have dyslexia, an audio recording such as a podcast will be a better way to engage with them.
Podcasts are also a great way of increasing brand loyalty. Often users landing on your website will not know who you are, get the information from you and then leave. With podcasts, they’ll need to search for you, subscribe to your content, and in doing so, you’ll become a more trusted and recognisable brand to them.
Is podcasting the new blog?
The long and the short of it – it’s not likely that podcasts are the new blog.
The key to knowing the answer to this is understanding your audience. If they are always on-the-go, or more likely to engage with audio rather than visual, then podcasts might be for you. If they have the time to sit and read via their desktop or mobile, then blogs would be better.
It’s easy to suggest that a healthy mix of the two might be the way forward. Blogs offer speed and searchability, whereas podcasts offer accessibility and brand loyalty. Blogs have also been around for much longer than podcasts, so search engines offer more advantages than podcasts (which could change as time goes on).
