Why Launch a Microcast?

As used in this context, a Microcast is a type of podcast with two characteristics that distinguish it from your average podcast: First, it is short in duration — usually between 1 to 3 minutes long (only 14% of podcasts are less than 10 minutes long); and second, it is published more frequently than the average podcast (currently only 7% of podcasts are published daily).

Here are five reasons why a Marketer should publish a microcast.

It’s what listeners want

An important metric to keep in mind is this: 74% of podcast listeners tune in to learn new things, while others listen regularly for entertainment, to keep up to date, to relax, and for inspiration. In other words, three quarters of listener listen mainly not for entertainment but for education. They want to learn. They are willing to listen for 30 minutes, a whole hour, three hours, and put up with the fluff and the commercials, just so that they can pick the occasional new piece of information or two. Imagine if they could dependably do this with a microcast in a minute or two?

It’s easy to create

Unlike podcasts that require time, preparation, aligning schedules, long recording sessions, and post production, a microcast is relatively much easier to create and produce. The key to a successful microcast is planning and aligning the content of the microcast with the content of your other digital channels (Twitter, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc.). One easy way to do this is to talk about what you have on the other channels. I am not talking about speaking verbatim tweets and posts, but rather about providing color commentary that only a human person can give. But always make sure that you are providing that nugget of information that the listener is after. Moreover, such linking between the voice of a living human being and your social media activities has the added virtue of driving traffic to your other channels, thus creating a nice synergy between the warm state of the brand — the one that a human being represents with their voice — and its cold state as it exists in social media.

It keeps your brand top of mind

By virtue of being published much more frequently — ideally on a daily basis — than the average podcast, your brand will occupy the privileged position of top of the listener’s mind much more than say a brand that publishes their podcast weekly. If your microcast is providing the listener with information they find useful or interesting, then your brand will hold an even more special place in that listener’s heart. Your brand will become part of the listener’s daily routine, and a Marketer cannot ask for more than making their brand part of someone’s daily life, can they?

It’s a way to engage the whole ecosystem

It should come as no surprise that people like to be asked the question: “Tell me what you think?” So why not ask your customers, your prospects, your employees and executives, your partners, your suppliers for what they think? Not only do that all have interesting things to say, but they have things to say from different perspectives. If nothing else, your listener will gain a greater appreciation for who you are as a business and what you do as a company when they are given a sense of just how many people are engaged in making the company deliver its products and services.

It’s good for your SEO

Two minutes of spoken audio is about 200 words of transcribed text. Multiply that by 5 and you have 1,000 words a week available for you to post as a blog post, with some edits here and there as you see fit. And that’s a blog post chock full of content that is directly relevant to what you and your business do and that other people helped you create. And if you cite the contributors who pitched in (as you should), those are people who will spread for you the word about your blog post, your blog, and your business because it is in their own intertest to spread the news. Interesting, original content, along with motivated ambassadors can only be a good thing for your SEO, your website, and your business.

So, in an age when the sonic channel is on the steep ascendant, here’s an easy but powerful way to introduce audio into your mix in a way that not only fits well with your other digital activities, but in fact amplifies them and consolidates their effect.