Podcasts take a lot of time and effort. You need to plan topics, source guests, prescreen guests, host episodes valuable to your audience, polish up audio, create graphics, and finally add a new page to your website featuring the episode. A single episode can take 5-10 hours of work across multiple team members.
YouTube videos are even more time-consuming. Getting video, audio, graphics, presentations, and subtitles to all sync up is a lot of work. (Then optimizing YouTube videos to show up in YouTube search or the Recommended column is another, completely separate effort.)
Yet, despite all that effort, even when content is incredibly well-produced, it often goes nowhere. Most providers with content on YouTube have less than 100 views per video, even for content that’s been online for 4 years or more.
Podcasts are often even worse with many providers averaging only a handful of listens per episode, which is why there are so many defunct podcasts sitting on provider websites.
All that time, money, and effort, but no one listening or watching. What gives?
This is one of the most common mistakes we see across the board with providers, and it includes written content as well as audio and video. The problem is that providers allocate money and labor to production, but don’t allocate any budget to promotion.
If you’re not promoting your content, how will people ever find it? Most people are not doing online searches for “yet another healthcare podcast.” And there are already many very solid healthcare podcasts on most topics, so those are what will show up in a Google search if people do.
The question then becomes, how did the popular podcasts become popular? We can tell you it certainly wasn’t because they posted them to their website and then hoped people would stumble across them. They became known because, in addition to producing great content, they paid to get their content in front of people.
Over time, this built a following. As they built a following, people started sharing episodes with friends, family, and colleagues, posting to their personal social media accounts, including them in their blog of “the top 10 podcasts I’m listening to right now.”
Most providers produce the content and maybe add it to a free social media post on their business pages. But these go almost nowhere. Check your company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok content. If you’re lucky, you’ll have more than 10 engagements per post. Most have less and, honestly, half of those engaging are staff or the CEO/owner.
Social media platforms are pay-to-play. They make money by selling ads. They are not designed to promote free content. Across platforms, the average business page post is seen by around 3% of followers of the page/channel. That’s right, posts rarely get seen by new people. They are mostly seen by people already following your profile, which, again, tends to be a lot of staff.
The point is that posting your latest article, podcast, or video is going to be seen by very few people unless you pay to promote it.
Every major piece of content that you invested so much time and money in creating needs a promotional strategy behind it. If the content is good and people like it, then they’ll come back for more, tell their friends, subscribe to your channel, and add you to listicles or favorites. That’s how a provider can grow an audience.
Of course, all of this is very basic. Ideally, there is a larger strategy behind both production and promotion:
- What’s the goal of the content?
- How much marketing budget should be allocated to content production versus promotion?
- What channels should the content be marketed on?
- Is there a unifying theme to the content? (there should be)
- Will different pieces of content go out to different audiences?
- How will your content stand out from the literally millions of other videos, podcasts, and other pieces of content online already?
All questions providers need to think about, which we’ll answer another day.
Looking for an example of an excellent podcast on how to build successful healthcare organizations? Check out ours: https://www.circlesocialinc.com/recovery-executive-podcast/
Need help with a content and marketing strategy that has purpose and focus, one that actually impacts your organization’s bottom line? Then get in touch with us at engage@circlesocialinc.com or call 1-800-396-9927