Podcasting as a Marketing Tool for Small Business

Duct Tape Marketing has a post on the usefulness of podcasting as a marketing tool for small business.

The hype surrounding Podcasting, especially among early adopters and those who tried to make a quick buck, eventually led to a backlash and a subsequent hype about 'the end of podcasting'. But as the writer notes: "the usefulness as a marketing tool for the small business is better than ever."

If you have a small business, he continues, think of Podcasting as:

● A great way to feature the stories of your best customer - interview your customers and post their stories for prospects to hear. It doesn’t matter if you have a large audience for your podcast, your customers will dig the attention and you’ll get content on the fly.

● A great way to open doors - when you contact an author, industry leader, or expert of any kind with the offer to interview and feature them on your podcast, you’ll be amazed at the quality of guest you can secure and then the quality of content and exposure that can bring. If you run a print shop in the middle of Des Moines Iowa you can offer your customers and prospects access to the leading design, print and color experts from around the world - would that be valuable?

● A great way to build and solidify your strategic network - By routinely interviewing the members of your network of partners that you would like your customers to meet you can build a stronger network and make referrals to that network more easily because of the focus you can bring with an interview and audio content featured on the partner section of your site.

● A great competitive advantage - Does your competitor have an interview with the current president of your trade association on their site?

● Two for one - hold live web conferences using either interviews or presentations, record and viola, podcast episode.

From the beginning, podcasting has been a very promising component in the marketing mix. Now that the hype (either way) has died down, actual practice is finally defining the terms.