How to Make a Successful Branded Podcast: 3 pillars for success

The branded podcast has become a powerful tool for brands looking to connect with their target audience, generate value and position themselves in the market. However, creating a successful branded podcast is no easy task. In this article, we share with you the fundamental pillars that will help you achieve your goals.

Do you want your company to get it right? Here are a few basic pillars to achieve it or if you prefer you can write to us and talk to us on how to create your podcast or improve your current podcast.

First pillar: even if it is associated with a brand, the branded podcast is not an excuse to talk nicely about oneself. It's not about finding ways to "flatter" yourself in different ways in each episode. 

This may sound obvious, but every time we have our first meetings with clients we discover that it is a reality: we listen to their first podcast ideas and we realize that most of them had ideas that go down that wrong path of self-praise. 

It is very common for those first answers to be something like this:

"We want a podcast that explains in each episode our product and the features that make it unique", "We have an event in three months and we want to tell people in a podcast why it's going to be amazing"... In general, they have in mind what we could call "a long commercial".

I could go on and on giving examples of some not-so-good first ideas, but the question is: Why aren't they good? We understand that if the cost of producing a podcast is going to be covered by the company, it should bring a return in some way. However, these ideas tend to seek results in the short term, and this, in itself, goes against the nature of podcasts because their success is not seen with two or three episodes on the air... Podcasts "simmer" and give a great return, but in the medium and long term. 

Neither are good ideas because the podcast should spark a conversation... And there, the key word is "spark". It should be like a spark that ignites something bigger, but when the ideas are focused on the company with a short-term goal, like buying tickets to an event, chances are that spark won't ignite anything else. 

If your answer to any of the above questions was "No," there are things to rethink. That doesn't mean the show can't air, but it does mean that there are adjustments to be made to the concept of the podcast. 

I don't want to close this section without first clarifying further what I mean by some examples, where we seem to be falling into the mistakes I just described. However, these bets have such subtle, but powerful, changes that make all the difference and ensure that these have been three of our most successful podcasts. 

Do you want to talk about yourselves? 

Truora's Universe: A Startup Story is a documentary podcast about the company, with a big difference: we are not showing the "perfect" story of a startup. In fact, when I asked Daniel Bilbao, cofounder of TruoraWhen I asked him what we were looking for with the podcast, his answer summed it all up: "We wanted to show in a transparent way how it feels to create a startup, seen from the inside, with the good, the bad and the ugly.

And so, with that very real objective, the podcast has become one of the main sources of talent attraction in tech. If you have tried to attract this type of talent, you will understand how complicated it is to do so. The podcast also catapulted Truora's brand from its core. 

Do you want to show yourselves as experts? 

The best case I can share is Sales machinea podcast in which Dan Macias, a sales expert and partner of Sandler Colombiasits down with Santiago Cortés, our commercial director at Naranja Media, and in each episode they talk about some aspect of the commercial process giving a LOT of valuable content in a super entertaining format. 

What is the difference? This is not a "freemium" product: that is, the content is not given half-heartedly, with an announcement at the end of "you want to know the complete tool, buy our course". On the contrary, many listeners have never taken a Sandler course, but have seen their business process improve by leaps and bounds by consuming this content. 

Best of all is in the return: Sandler Colombia has made the podcast the source of 43% of his leads and, at the same time, the show has achieved a loyal audience, month after month, of more than 19,000 listeners. 

Do you want to improve your brand positioning? 

Another success story happened to us with Industrias Gasco: a company whose main product at the time was the sale of liquefied gas, those gas cylinders that you see in areas where there is no natural gas. I want you, for a moment, to imagine what podcast could be done for this company if your goal is for this to contribute to your brand positioning... Ideas? 

Well, actually, Industrias Gasco offers energy solutions and that gave birth to What Watt, a podcast in which we talk about energy transition and focus on very innovative solutions that are being developed in Latin America. Each episode has been with a different startup, and, in fact, the team at Gasco is so committed to preserving the essence of the show and his goal of fostering conversations around it that we went more than 20 episodes without talking about his liquefied gas product.

The podcast has been a key pillar in positioning the brand and showing that Gasco's essence is focused on energy solutions. This has also allowed Gasco to join interesting ventures that have allowed it to strengthen its portfolio. 

Often the best way to position myself is not to repeat over and over again a slogan or an institutional vision. On the contrary, the solution may lie in the conversations that my brand fosters and the issues I want to give voice to. 

Now, let's go back to the fundamental pillars that support a sponsored podcast.

Do you want your company to get it right? Here are a few basic pillars to achieve it or if you prefer you can write to us and talk to us on how to create your podcast or improve your current podcast.

Second key pillar for a successful branded podcast: distributing the content well is as important as getting the content right. 

A podcast is a new channel and it's not going to be like Netflix's La casa de papel: people are not going to be anxiously in front of the screen waiting for your company to release a podcast. In fact, they may never hear about it. 

Therefore, at this point, it is key to understand several things: 

1. The podcast needs the company's current channels to continually - and the key word is "continually" - push the podcast and iterate as many times as possible until we find the best channel for promotion. That's one of the key aspects where we help our clients the most: identifying what channels they have and, therefore, how they could promote the podcast in each of them, what messages we can try, what formats we try, types of players, messages for their internal teams... In short, we review all the time where we can promote the podcast and what's the best way to do it. I have to say, this is also one of the aspects in which most brands usually fail: they release a podcast and many times they don't even announce it to their team or it stays in an announcement of a post on Instagram and that's it. 

2. If there is an advertising budget available to promote the podcast, experimentation is key here. We have seen that many companies allocate advertising, but they do not know how or where to advertise, or in what formats it would be ideal to do so. Our advice: experiment a lot because even the advertising agencies that handle advertising do not usually understand how to advertise a podcast or the considerations of the channels in which it could be advertised. We spend hours a day optimizing and adjusting our campaigns so that the campaign always brings new listeners, and bringing listeners is very different from bringing clicks. 

3. Distributing the podcast is also about creating channels for listeners to talk and interact with us. A loyal listener base with whom there is constant communication can multiply the effect of the podcast. In addition, they are the ones who most help us understand how to make the content better. Better content, more voice-to-voice, more audience. This allows us to have a virtuous circle. 

Finally, ask yourself: what is something that only my brand could do to promote the podcast? Hint... It's not your social media, it should be something more "unique". 

To close, third key pillar: the effort and dedication of resources behind a branded podcast must have a value capture system. 

I would like to propose something to you: for a moment, let's leave aside the natural eagerness that companies may have in that everything they do in marketing is to sell more in the short term, and think about the challenges that your company has beyond that... Think about the ideal scenarios in which those challenges are overcome, now, think about how a branded podcast could contribute to overcome those challenges. 

I can't leave a formula for capturing value from a podcast because it doesn't exist, because it's not generic. In fact, it's such a case-by-case thing that my biggest invitation is in three things: 

1. If you are looking for short-term sales results, don't do a branded podcast. I assure you that you will have better results investing those resources in advertising. For example, you could look for podcasts that already have the audience you are interested in and advertise there. 

2. Go back to the three examples of successful podcasts I gave you in this article, and look at how the return and value capture is in different aspects. Ask yourselves the question: what challenges do you have and what do those ideal scenarios look like in which the challenges are overcome? Talent attraction, positioning, possibility of making new alliances, "hotter" leads? Here you will find out why value capture becomes a really broad universe. 

3. Put metrics in place that work more like a thermometer and not a fixed goal. The podcasts that best capture value are the ones that have measured their month-to-month growth, the ones that are willing to iterate the content to make it better, the ones that are betting on being alive in the long run, the ones that track their improvements continuously and don't just stick to meeting a closed number and that's it. 

Making branded podcasts involves many things that, as you can see in this article, are not only focused on understanding the technical aspects, such as which software to edit with or which microphones to record with. In reality, it is something much deeper and more complex. I hope this article has shed some light on it. If your brand wants to do it, or improve what you already have, you can contact us here. 

Do you want your company to do well? you can write to us and talk to us on how to create your podcast or improve your current podcast.