While communicating through social platforms gets your message across, it may not build the genuine connection you want for your audience.

It can feel robotic, scripted, or even disingenuous. So what’s a good solution?

In this episode, we’ll be talking to Roger Nairn, Co-Founder, and CEO of JAR Audio.

Podcasting can engage listeners by delivering value in the form of genuine and relatable content.

You don’t have to be a professional radio host to start a podcast. Be genuine, relatable, and engage in meaningful conversations.

The Power of Podcasting for Building Your Brand.

What’s on tap?

• 
  
• The origin story of JAR Audio. How they start from a small agency to one of the world’s largest agencies?
  
• Podcasting; a new, powerful, and sometimes arguable underutilised channel.
  
• The rise of podcasting.
  
• Can anyone create a podcast?
  
• Identifying your personas.
  
• How a podcast fits in with a business’s content strategy.
  
• Create themes and engaging stories around your personas.
  
• Repurposing your podcast.
  
• How to measure the success of your podcast.
  

The origin story of JAR Audio

Roger Nairn has spent more than 20 years in the advertising world and has worked with some of the world’s biggest agencies.

With the idea to create advertising materials for clients to reach audiences and engage with them, he got into the podcast space.

What just started out as a hobby, gave Roger an opportunity to speak with incredible people including Seth Godin and Stefan Sagmeister.

Roger with the thought of business in mind started combining podcasts with his love of advertising marketing and met some amazing people who had their own specialities.

Soon enough, Roger and his partners Jen and Aaron started an agency that helped brands get into the podcast space and made them successful at it.

Since just being full-time 2 years ago, Jar Audio is one of the largest podcast production agencies in the world.

Podcasting; a new, powerful, and sometimes arguable underutilised channel.

A podcast is a sort of technology, an idea like an RSS feed, and is about 15 years old.

Over time, it has evolved; however, the actual crux of it is all about engaging stories and conversations, topics that are interesting to the listener.

A podcast is also an intimate medium as you develop a relationship with the host.

Podcasting has higher effectiveness because podcase listeners are more engaged as they are often listening, whilst doing other activities which increases their focus.

The Rise of Podcasting

Podcasts have influenced not just regular people but also corporations. With their rise in popularity, and often a need to monetize, some podcasts now employ ads and promote products or businesses.

Indeed, they often do so better or more effective than other media platforms.

First, podcast advertising chooses quality over quantity:  User experience means listeners’ trust in hosts or invisibly shifting from editorial work to commercials and back.

Second, podcast audiences are already engaged in the topic. One of many things that creates such engagement is the intimate environment of a host-audience podcast.

A third reason is the ability to target specific audiences. Because podcasts vary so widely, businesses can choose a show that is very related to the product they want to sell.

Can anyone create a podcast?

You are empowered to create your own station. But with the podcasting industry still evolving there are very few rules and regulations currently.

There is very little barrier to entry and fewer rules. All you have to ensure you have decent audio quality and not be boring!

If things go wrong, your audience understands as long as you’re respecting them and you can explain kind of what happened.

Be confident, creative and consistent! That’s one of the biggest parts of creating your own podcast.

Identifying your personas

The significant aspect of podcasting is building a community and understanding your community as a business is always important.

Try to be clear in identifying what the audience needs and how can you deliver that in the form of a podcast and how are you able to provide value to the listener on your own.

There are many different formats you can try such as there’s the panel opportunity where maybe there’s like 3 or 4 guests and you are the host, you are kind of trying to get different perspectives on an idea.

There are different types of styles such as narrative style, documentary style and so much more!

How a podcast fits in with a business’s content strategy?

Podcasts are inexpensive to create and scale well, a win-win for your content team.

With mobile consumption at an all-time high worldwide, mobile-friendly content experiences are becoming increasingly essential, and podcasts already lead the charge in that respect.

The sheer freedom listeners have to consume podcasts wherever and whenever they want is unrivalled by any other form of content available today.

People can multitask while listening to a podcast, which ultimately increases engagement.

Achieving brand affinity starts with an engaged audience.

When a listener is truly engaged and loyal to a podcast, they often become its biggest champions.

Create themes and engaging stories around your personas

Use different podcast directories on the search engines to find a specific topic.  to define your listener persona, you’ll need to answer these basic questions.

• 
  
• Who is the listener I’m looking to speak to?
  
• What motivates them to listen to your podcast?
  
• What are their barriers to listening to your podcast?
  
• What other types of content is my listener consuming?
  
• What’s a typical day for your persona?
  
• What are the possible contact points?
  
• How do they use communication channels?
  

Repurposing your podcast

• 
  
• Create audiograms for sharable social content
  
• Give your podcast a video element
  
• Convert your episode’s content into infographics
  
• Write your episodes as blog posts
  
• Run your podcast as a live stream
  
• Start a newsletter for your podcast
  
• Repurpose your episodes into transcripts
  

How to measure the success of your podcast?

There are many elements of a podcast that can provide substantial details about the audience, engagement levels and quality of the content

Here’s a list of eight methods you might use to measure the success of your podcast:

1. Number of listeners

2. Number of downloads per episode

3. Sponsors and advertisements

4. Audience and critic reviews

5. Website and social media traffic

6. Engagement with promotional materials

7. Networking and referrals

8. Recycled content

That’s a wrap!

We would like to thank Roger Nairn of JAR Audio to make this collaboration successful.

Roger has helped many clients find their voice through podcasting.

Roger is a podcasting expert with over 20 years of experience in the world of advertising.

What started as a small agency that specialized in helping brands get into the podcast space, JAR Audio is now one of the largest podcast production agencies in the world.