Now is a great time to be in marketing. The proliferation of digital media and the increasing sophistication of technology means that the true potential of experiential one-to-one marketing is edging ever closer.
Podcasts are the latest in a long line of digital developments that B2B marketers are sizing up.
A podcast is an audio file distributed over the Internet that can be listened to on MP3 players and PCs. What makes a podcast unique is that its content is created for an audience who wants to listen when they want, where they want and how they want.
The term may be familiar ñ Ricky Gervais famously holds the world record number of podcast downloads for ‘The Office’ and the BBC has been throwing money at creating podcasts of its audio content – but what is the true marketing potential of podcasts in B2B? How can podcasts best be used to support your organisation’s marketing activity?
New kids on the block
Podcasts are a new phenomenon. That’s not new as in ‘just starting big school and is scared of getting its head flushed down the toilet’; that’s new as in ‘just born and still attached to the umbilical cord’.
At the end of 2005, the ‘New Oxford American Dictionary’ declared ‘podcasting’ its word of the year. To give an idea of what that says about the impact of podcasting, it beat off high-profile contenders such as bird-flu and sudoku.
Guardian journalist Ben Hammersly first coined the term in 2004; and Apple ñ whose iPod has a huge hand in the nomenclature ñ only got wise to its potential midway through 2005, when it promoted a podcast facility as the main new feature of iTunes v4.9.
The listener searches via podcast directories (such as iTunes or Britcaster) for content that matches their pre-determined criteria. Once they have found something that fits the bill they ‘subscribe’ – usually for free – to that podcast. Each subsequent time the user plugs their MP3 player into their computer, the podcast directory automatically searches for new content from the pre-selected provider. If new content exists, it is automatically downloaded onto the MP3 player.
Essentially, the content provider has hit paydirt: a self-selecting audience has identified itself as being interested in a certain type of content, and is happy to have more of it delivered straight to their desktop on a regular basis.
The marketing potential should already be clear.
B2B meets podcasting
B2B’s current approach to podcasting is much like that of a group of teenage boys at a disco. They all want to ask a girl to dance but are too scared to make the first move. All it needs is for one of their classmates to get a snog and the dance floor will be heaving.
One of the more precocious movers is consultancy firm BearingPoint. It launched its first podcast in August 2005, beating IBM to market by one month.
Paul Dunay is the director of global field marketing at BearingPoint’s financial services unit. He instigated the use of podcasts and is unequivocal as to the medium’s potency.
Dunay comments: “Before we used podcasts, a standalone piece of thought-leadership – in the form of a white paper or something similar – would be downloaded by one out of 10 people who happened to stop by”. He continues: “But when that content is paired up with a podcast on the same topic, which is given away for free, three out of 10 people who stop by sign up to take the white paper. That’s a 200 per cent increase, which from a marketing perspective should have anyone doing handsprings.”
Slowly, slowly
Dunay and BearingPoint were clear that they were not using podcasts to sell. And this is something on which most marketers are in agreement.
Ian Ebden, creative executive at Moonfish, iterates the point: “Podcasting is about human development. It’s about cultivating an audience that connects with you and your brand. They actively want to relate to you. If you can get that right then you can convert it into money, rather than the idea that you can simply turn these people upside down and shake them for cash.”
There has been very little movement into podcasting among B2B companies. Richard Bush, MD at Base One, argues that this is because B2B marketers still fail to look at longer term advantages: “There is very little podcast activity within B2B because we’re still really bad at thinking beyond lead generation. We want to get that sale and therefore don’t tend to see the marketing of our brand in experiential terms. It’s all about closing the deal.”
What BearingPoint did was to focus on the bigger picture. Lead generation was always a consideration, but never the main objective. According to Dunay, the strategy had three key goals. “Business objective number one is that we want to promote our thought-leaders,” he says.
Podcasts provide an ideal platform for businesses to promote themselves and their key differentiators because the podcast is an experiential medium.
Compiling podcasts
As Bush points out, one of the plus points of podcasts come from their mobility: “People can download and experience it in their own time. It allows people to get a flavour of the brand. Compared to white papers, which are very flat, podcasts are a great experiential media.”
However, moving from white papers to podcasts wasn’t as easy as BearingPoint had imagined: “I had a lot of thought-leadership in the traditional format of white papers 10-12 pages in length,” says Dunay. “How could I create a condensed version of these that would work as a podcast?”
Dunay made the mistake repeated by many others since: to simply get someone to read the white paper into a microphone, call it a podcast and leave it at that.
ìI really, really, really wanted to like it. It was 25-27 minutes long and was brutally boring,î Dunay says.
Producing a podcast can say a lot about your brand. Adam Sefton, business strategist at agency Reading Room, claims that: “it gives a certain impression and creates a certain impact about a company. It makes people think ‘okay, these people know how to produce podcasts, they are on the cutting-edge of technology, they know what’s going on.'”
But if what you’ve produced is flat and boring you run the risk of doing more damage than if you’d left well enough alone.
BearingPoint’s second attempt was to prove more successful. “We tried something a little more professional, more condensed and that clocked in at something like five to seven minutes. We put in an audio logo both at the beginning and the end, and hired a professional announcer,” says Dunay.
Podcast strategy
BearingPoint’s second business objective in launching its podcasts was to create downloads or lead-flow from its thought-leadership.
“Our first podcast was on data security – a hot topic within financial services, something that people would love to know more about,” says Dunay. ìIt was short and sweet and both at the beginning and the end we directed listeners to the BearingPoint website in order to find out more information, white papers, thought-leadership and collateral around data security in financial services. This meant that the whole thing was very targeted, very narrow in scope and pointed people towards a specific space where they could extract useful information.”
This is the aspect of BearingPoint’s podcasting strategy that yielded a 200 per cent increase in download activity.
Such figures are impressive, but there is still a great deal of cynicism surrounding podcasting. One of the criticisms levelled at podcasting (and, to be fair, every other ‘new’ media) is that it is a novelty, only of interest either for a limited time, or to a limited audience of technophiles.
ìI don’t believe that the remit for podcasts extends only to IT people,” argues Bush. “It goes beyond that – podcasts will appeal to a certain kind of person who will exist in any kind of job. The technology could as easily be used by a senior decision maker within a big city financial institution as by someone in a cutting-edge design agency.”
In the palm of your hand
Additionally, far from being a novelty, Sefton argues that the way podcasts work is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in the communication of information: “The longer iPods are in the public domain, the more people realise what they are capable of ñ that includes the idea of subscribing to receive new content. All you have to do is plug it in and the new content is there, waiting for you. After you’ve done that once, it’s incredible. You don’t need to go anywhere, you just plug in your iPod and the software retrieves information for you.”
Sefton claims this is the way information is going. He says that the old model of ìa user going to 12 websites to seek out the information they wantî, is moving toward to a new world, where: “the user checks one local RSS newsfeed source, which collects new material from those 12 websites. It’s a fundamental switch and podcasting is definitely part of that.”
This paradigm shift is central to BearingPoint’s third business objective. The idea that the prospective client is discerning and selects with whom they communicate, means a business’ marketing resources can be utilised for much greater impact.
BearingPoint’s third objective is to create a community of people who are interested in whichever particular area of thought-leadership it wishes to promote.
ìThis is where podcast is a dream medium,î says Dunay. “We’ve promoted a thought-leader and created downloads, which in turn have created lead-flow. We contact the listeners asking what they thought of the white paper; we know they’re interested in that area so we ask if they want to talk further. Then we have a database of people we know are very interested in a specific subject, such as data security in financial services.”
The real beauty of podcasting is that your market wilfully reveals itself to you. The turkey has not only voted for Christmas, it’s bought you the cranberry sauce.
