Making Business Podcasting Part of your Marketing Efforts

Business podcasts are most often found through search, typically on the major search engines and also on the wide variety of podcast directories. To your website visitor or podcast subscriber, business podcasts are a tremendous convenience and source of useful information. To your sales and marketing team, however, your business podcasts are a key element of your marketing mix and source of lead generation and new opportunities for the sales pipeline.

An Optimized Business Podcast is an Effective Business Podcast

What does BOT International, a "Go-to-Market" leader, bring to the field of Business Podcasting? Simply put, sales results. A well optimized business podcast, to your target market, can improve the position of both your corporate podcast series and your website resulting in increased visitor traffic, more qualified leads, and increased sales. A Google first page visibility, via natural search returns or pay-per-click adwords, will typically increase your traffic and results six-fold. Optimization alone can be the difference between success or failure of your business podcast series to achieve its sales and marketing objective.

Results Only Limited By Your Imagination

Before you start saying, "I don't know anyone using podcasts for their business," visit About.com and check out some of the Top Business Podcasts to learn how IBM, Disney, BMW and many others are all using podcasts to enhance their brand. It's okay if you're new to business podcasting, but don't wait for your competitors to first start their own business podcasts and steal the attention and business of your target market. Podcasts provide a unique way to connect with your website visitors and podcast listeners turning them into customers and raving fans. Consider the following ten business podcasting applications:

1. Podcasts - provide a regular podcast, consistently formatted, to bring information and insights to your customers and prospects.
2. Prodcasts - provide product oriented podcasts in support of new product launches and marketing campaigns.
3. Customercasts - provide customer testimonials and business use cases for your key product and service offerings.
4. CEOcasts - provide CEO insights, leadership experience, and industry saavy in support of your business development goals and initiatives.
5. Conferencecasts - provide "best of the conference" highlights so that customers and prospects unable to attend can benefit from your conference investment.
6. Supportcasts - provide tips and techniques, how-to information, and frequently asked questions to your existing customer base.
7. Whitepapercasts - provide audio whitepapers that your website visitors and podcast subscribers can listen to at their convenience and leisure.
8. Cashcasts - provide your sales organization with inspiring, motivating and insightful interviews with your top sales professionals featuring sales awards and sales tips.
9. HRcasts - provide new employees with a comprehensive orientation to the company and to the business.
10. Betacasts - provide customers with feedback from product development and Beta participants on key new features and capabilities.

What's the Big Deal About Business Podcasting?

In a word, subscription. Audio files have been around for years, but there has not been an easy and effective means for business people to find items of interest and then to listen to them. Now there is:

• Subscription is easy - users can subscribe to RSS feeds to receive podcasts directly to their browser RSS Feeds Folder (IE 7.0) or to their Microsoft Outlook RSS Feed Folder (Office 2007) as well as subscribe via podcatchers and Apple iTunes.
• Automatic updates - once your listeners subscribe to your business podcast, they automatically receive your latest business podcast.
• Portable - listeners can download your business podcast to the handhelp device of their choice and then listen to you and hear about your offerings at their convenience and leisure - in the car, on a plane, in between meetings, over the lunch hour, etc.
• On Demand - whenever your listeners are ready, so is your business podcast. They can listen for a few minutes, replay an important section for a staff meeting, and email colleagues a link to your business podcast, etc.
• It's Fun - more and more business professionals are attending "The University of Wheels" and are enjoying making considerably more effective use out of what use to be idle, if not wasted, time.

Business Podcasting Benefits You Can Expect

Business podcasting offers many unique and compelling benefits. Here are just a few that you can expect:

• Time to Market - from concept to launch, your business podcast can be created very quickly allowing marketing and sales to respond to opportunities much faster than with the traditional elements of your marketing mix.
• Cost Effective - compared to other forms of marketing communications, business podcasts are the least expensive to develop, produce, and place.
• Quality - business podcasts identify your company as best-in-class and in-touch with the latest, most effective business innovations and techniques.
• Competitive Differentiation - business podcasts differentiate you from your competitors and demonstrate your commitment to best serve your customers.
• Leadership - business podcasts display and provide the leadership experiences of your company, your product offerings, and your executive team 24 x 7.