Is Your Business Ready for Podcasting?

By Philip Nicosia

Everyone seems to be making and listening to podcasts nowadays. At the beginning, podcasting seemed to be associated with the so called computer geeks. These days however, it is not uncommon to see podcasts from businesses and corporations trying to widen their horizons and get a hold of a larger market. As podcasts inherently surpasses the limits of traditional broadcasting and advertising, they present a feasible alternative to businesses as a means of making their presence felt all over the world.

Could podcasts possibly be what your business needs? In order to help you answer that question, it may be helpful to first understand what a podcast can do for your business. The most obvious thing would be promotion. A podcast can serve to promote your business just like advertisements do. This application in itself covers a wide range of possibilities. You can do virtually anything on a podcast to promote your business. Diverting from the usual advertisements, you can use most any content and format to promote your business. One such example would be to offer in-depth information to your customers. They need not be overtly self-promoting but the whole effect would be to make the consumers aware of your business. If you are an educational institution for example, you may give weekly tips to students or to parents. For medical-related business, podcasts may focus on different health issues. In this way, you not only promote your business but you also provide a service to your customers. What better way to advertise your services?

An internal application of podcasting is for training. Podcasts are fast becoming a viable alternative for companies to provide training and information to their employees. Business executives often have a huge amount of work to be done at such a short period of time. With podcasts, they have a more portable way of perusing information. All you need to provide is an MP3 player (a laptop would work just as well) and anyone in your company can have access to training materials and other documents anywhere, anytime.

Of course, as with most any other commercial endeavour, using podcasts for your business will cost you some money. You need people to create podcasts on a regular basis. These people would have to know some of the technical aspects of recording and podcasting. Then you need your talents – people who would actually be recorded for the podcasts. You will have to analyze the cost benefit relationship before deciding to start a podcast for your business.

There are some ways to offset the cost of creating a podcast. If you are making podcasts for your customers, you may opt to charge a small fee for each download. You can also choose to provide a subscription service wherein the listener will receive the podcasts in their emails regularly for a fee. Of course, this might be not be the best option as people prefer not having to pay for podcasts.

Whatever you decide to do, the bottom line is to create podcasts that will serve their purpose. Be it for consumer awareness, added customer service, or employee training, your podcasts should have relevant content packaged in an appropriate manner. Even if you shell out money for this project, the returns may be more than what you expect!

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