3 Tips To Perfect Alignment Between Your Podcast And Your Business’ Brand

Over the last three episodes, I've convinced you of the importance of making sure your podcast accurately represents your business’s brand. Today, I’m sharing three tips to make sure you’re getting to that crucial alignment.

There’s no doubt that you put a significant amount of effort to make sure your business’,  your organization’s, your nonprofit’s brand is on-point in all public-facing assets produced by your firm.

And it saddens me that all too many of your peers don't do the same thing with their business-focused podcast.

How bad would it be for your company if your business development lead went with a crappy PowerPoint presentation? With the logo of your business all pixelated because it was “upsized” from a thumbnail image and then expanded as the cover image? With crappy and inconsistent font usage (lots of Comic Sans)? Maybe with weird color schemes nowhere near your carefully chosen palette? Or filled with pictures of people with bodies stretched out of proportion? Or with ill-conceived transitions between slides?

You'd fire that business development person and hire someone else who cared about the quality of their pitch deck and respect for the established brand.

The same holds true for the people who are managing client relationships. What would happen if they showed up to a board meeting for a Fortune 500 client wearing ratty jeans and a poor-taste t-shirt?

You'd have issues with that, wouldn’t you?

Well that's might very well be happening with your podcast. Every single day, your podcast is representing your brand. To your customers. To your clients. To your prospects. Maybe to your competitors. Certainly to the public at large. Your podcast is causing those people to make assumptions about your brand.

Are those assumptions the ones you want?

Here are three tips that will help you make sure that you're giving your podcast’s listeners the best chance of making the right assumptions about your brand.

You have to become a listener of your podcast (and others).

You wouldn’t let a brand new biz dev person pitch to a prospect or client without screening their deck and presentation skills, would you? And you’d likely accompany your biz dev people on key pitches from time to time so you could observe them in action, right?

Just like you’d monitor the real-world interactions between your account management people and your customers. Or just like you’d try your best to see with your own eyes how anybody else in your company is representing your company to the real world.

It’s incredibly easy to monitor your podcast. And not just occasionally. Always.

You are already observing how your people represent your brand in the real world, either by walking around the office, attending a few biz dev meetings, or even sitting in on client update sessions. Because you own the business, and you have a responsibility to make sure the people on your payroll are accurately representing the brand you've worked so hard to build.

So please, listen to your podcast. I am amazed at the number of business owners I have met just in the last six months -- in big companies and small -- who’ve have authorized someone in their organization to make a podcast for the company… yet the business owner has never listened to the final product.

And for the few that do listen to their company's show, that’s the only podcast they’ve ever listened to. Equally bad, because they may think “well, it’s a podcast, and podcasts are supposed to be lower quality than content produced for the radio, an audiobook, television, or any other form of media, right?” Wrong. Very, very wrong. So, please... Listen?

Give your team time to make great content.

It's not a 30-minute long process to put out a 30-minute long podcast episode. That should not surprise you. It might only take you 15 minutes to read the latest white paper your company put out. But you do recognize it took longer -- much longer -- than 15 minutes for your employees to assemble that paper, right?

That 30-minute sales deck your biz dev person just pitched to your biggest prospect took her days or weeks to assemble. Not minutes.

Quality products take -- and deserve -- time and attention.

As the business owner -- the person that's controlling the purse-strings -- you to allow your people to invest their time (and your money) into making a high-quality product that accurately represents your brand. Give them time to do that.

Partner for the future.

It's very possible that the people inside of your business cannot do this alone. It might be necessary to partner with someone because the podcasting space is moving crazy fast.

It's very difficult to keep up with all the changes unless your full-time job is making podcasts. Just like it's difficult to keep up with what's happening in digital media, web development, video distribution, or all of the things that are necessary but not central to your business.

You need someone outside of your organization. An expert whose job is to keep track of what's happening today and look forward at the changes podcasting is going to go through and suggest/shepherd changes to your podcasting effort to keep your brand on-point. To make sure that your brand’s message is accurately conveyed in the best way possible in this medium today and tomorrow. To make sure you’re making the right kind of content that accurately represents your brand and the content your customers/prospects/listeners want to hear.

Of course, I’d be happy to chat with you to see if my firm is a good fit in that role. Get in touch with me by sending an email to evo@podcastlaunch.pro. You can go to PodcastLaunch.pro to see a list of the services my firm currently offers our clients all over the world.

Hope you've enjoyed this little mini-series on how your podcast impacts your brand. I shall be back not tomorrow, but on Monday, with yet another Podcast Pontifications. Cheers!