February 2007

It’s been more than a year since we introduced podcasting as another effective B2B integrated marcom tool. Many of you use podcasting regularly in your marcom mix. Thanks to the early adopters, we now have a good list of important do’s and don’ts for producing successful B2B podcasts.

Important Podcast Do’s and Don’ts

Learn what works and what doesn’t…

Podcast Do’s…

• Integrate podcasting into a promotional campaign
• Make it professional (use high quality digital audio)
• Use a conversational style, preferably more than one voice to make it more engaging—interview style works well
• Let visitors know the approximate length of your podcast
• Provide a transcript or complementary white paper
• Include a call to action
• Track results–common metrics include downloads, listens, duration listened, at what point the listener bailed, etc.

Podcast Don’ts…

• Rely on the “podcast and they will come” model— you need to promote your podcasts—promote in your newsletter or with banner ads on your own site or paid banners. Consider a pay-per-click program, upload to all the podcast sites such as Google, Yahoo, iTunes, podcast 411.
• Sell–podcasts should educate and inform (post roll ads are o.k., pre-roll ads will doom your podcast!)
• Use copyrighted music without permission
• Forget to include an audio logo—the intro and outro music that identifies your branded podcasts.

You probably have a few do’s or don’ts of your own. Share them with the Integrated Marcom Blog community.

More next time…
Joan Damico

J. Damico Marketing Communications
(845) 778-5095

PS Need help developing a podcast script? Or maybe you simply want to repurpose an existing white paper into a podcast. Call (845) 778-5095 or click here to tell me more about your podcast project.