Episode Summary
Podcasting allows you to share your areas of expertise with the world in an intimate and genuine way. And it’s certainly one of the best mediums for creating ongoing relationships with your audiences.
But one of the most incredible benefits of using podcasts for your business is that it helps you establish your company’s brand.
In this episode of the Recorded Content podcast, our host Justin Brown welcomes Elizabeth Hilfrank, the Content Marketing Manager at Drift. They talk about using podcasts to expand your brand, what it takes to launch a podcast, and how podcasting helps humanize your brand.
Guest Profile
Name: Elizabeth Hilfrank
What she does: She’s the Content Marketing Manager at Drift
Company: Drift
Noteworthy: Elizabeth has been a part of the Drift team for almost four years. She went from a video marketing intern to a content marketing manager.
Key Insights
- Your company is not only about your product; it’s about your people too. If you want to build a strong brand and humanize your company, you should consider adding podcasts to your content strategy. Elizabeth talks about how Drift uses podcasting to set itself apart from the competition. “I think one of the big things we learned there was people were getting to know David and Dave at the same time, both as personalities and as people. So we weren’t just a chatbot solution. We weren’t just the little thing you saw in the corner that people figured was a product; you actually got to know who was behind that and why we were doing what we’re doing. So we found a lot of success with seeking wisdom, which is why we double tapped into podcasting and now have four, going on five, shows running.”
- You have to understand your audience to make your podcast stand out from the crowd. You need to understand your audience to compete in today’s increasingly saturated podcast market. Elizabeth explains, “If we tried to fit all of this content into one podcast, it would just be overwhelming and it wouldn’t really be as targeted as podcasts need to be, especially now when there are so many podcasts playing in the space. You have to understand your audience and what problems you’re looking to solve for them or stories you’re looking to tell them. And by having separate shows, it allows us to get a lot more targeted into those. Each show is biweekly and they’re 30 minutes, so trying to squeeze all of that into one podcast would just be overwhelming.”
- What goes into creating a podcast? From finding guests and reaching out to them to editing audio materials and publishing on social media, a lot goes into creating a good podcast. Elizabeth agrees, “Don’t underestimate the time commitment to make your podcast successful. A lot of people think you can kind of hop on, hit Record, and that you’ll instantly have a thousand downloads. That’s just not the case. There’s a lot more prep work and post-recording work that goes into it, so make sure you have all your steps in place before you start hitting Record.”
- Time management: “Living in my Asana calendar is the main way I’m able to manage three shows.”
Episode Highlights
How to find great podcast guests
“I take a few different approaches. Again, because our hosts are the absolute experts, I’ll do a lot of research, but I always want to check with them. So for growth, I’ll make a spreadsheet of, say, ten people I find via LinkedIn or different product events, and I’ll lay out, ‘All right, this is the person, this is their title, and here’s why I think they’ll be interesting.’ Matt will then go through and give me the yes/no. If it’s a no, he’ll explain why so that I have better knowledge going into research again because I’m not a growth expert.”
Working with a podcast agency can save you time and energy
“We made the switch to an agency in the fall — maybe September or October — and it was solely for bandwidth reasons. My coworker Dan is still on the video team; we started together, and he used to edit all the podcasts, not for the audio-only files, the RSS feeds, but all the videos, social clips — it was all on him. And as I said, now we have four podcasts running, that took up a lot of his time. And other videos need to be made, like the ones that product marketing asks for, for their content marketing needs. And eventually, it was just that he didn’t have the time to do both things. So what would be the easiest thing to outsource? Since he had been doing it for two years, we had templates in place. So we were able to get an agency, send all of our templates to them, and say, ‘This is what we want, just put it in for us,’ and he could then focus on bigger projects.”
The podcast metrics you should be tracking
“We do look at downloads, even though we all know that’s a little bit ambiguous in the podcast world, but it gives you some acknowledgment of numbers. A big one that I am focused on is our engagement rates across the platforms because I think that’s a lot more telling in how engaged and active our listeners actually are — if they’re listening to 65% of a podcast versus the intro and then dropping off. That’s the biggest one that I have going right now. But then beyond that, are people clicking the links in our show notes? Are they taking the next steps? Are they visiting our website? That kind of thing.”
