When it comes down to marketing, business owners who want to establish an online presence must make several difficult decisions. One of these decisions is whether to start a blog or a podcast to supplement their content. Follow the basic steps as shown in pic for an effective digital marketing.
Podcasts and blogs are both highly effective marketing tools that you can use nowadays. The company blogs are well-established inbound marketing channels, whereas business podcasts are newcomers, creating excitement in the industry.
Both help establish customer relationships, validate expertise, increase brand loyalty, capture search traffic, and generate leads. However, both tools have some advantages and disadvantages. Here are some pros and cons of both that can help you decide which one is better based on your needs:
Benefits of Podcasts
Help in Connecting with People
Your podcast or hosts gives your brand a human voice. These podcasts put a knowledgeable representative from your company in conversation with the industry experts to discuss current issues and offer advice, usually with a sense of humor. You can ask questions from the audience about what you like to cover in the next or upcoming podcasts.
Convenient and Easy to Consume
Podcasts are far more convenient and accessible to consume than reading a newspaper or watching the news. You can subscribe to a podcast feed to get the new podcasts automatically downloaded to your computer as soon as they are available. That is why you can listen to them at any place, any time, without any problems.
A Time-Efficient Form of Communication
You can listen to the podcasts you like while doing your work at home, in your workplace, or during your morning commute. Some types of meetings can be replaced with podcasts which saves time and increases productivity.
Podcasting is an On-Demand Technology
The podcast listeners can choose what they want to listen to and when. On the one hand, this means you’re competing for their attention and ears. On the other hand, if they subscribe to your podcasts, there is a higher chance that they will receive and digest the information you are providing daily.
A Great Way to Reach a Younger Audience
Nowadays, most people like to listen to podcasts, so it is a great idea to start your podcast as you have a higher chance of reaching a young audience. According to Statistics, people who listened to a podcast at least once increased by 20 million between 2018 and 2019. The number of weekly listeners started to increase by 14 million at that time.
Podcasts Cut Down Cost
As podcasts can be delivered digitally, they reduce many costs linked with traditional forms of communication like postage, printing, and paper. They can also help you in saving money on meeting expenses and email storage. They are simple to archive, and quick and easy to update.
A Great Way of Delivering A Social Media Strategy
Podcasts are a great way of building your brand. The subscribers of your podcasts are the soul of your community, and they will be your best prospects for strengthening the relationship over time through cross-sell and loyal strategies.
Disadvantages of Podcasts
Podcasting Tech Can Be Challenging
It is not that easy to be comfortable with podcasting, especially when starting as a beginner. Learning how to use the technology and making a podcast requires a lot of time and effort. And businesses with small marketing teams and budgets may be skeptical about it.
Podcasts and Its Creative Requirements
Even after you feel comfortable with podcasting as a beginner, it still requires a lot of time. You have to think of different topics, writing the podcast, reach out to guests, and record before shifting to post-production and marketing. Moreover, you have to be consistent enough so that your loyal fan base doesn’t decrease.
Podcasts Don’t Work For All the Businesses
Podcasts certainly work for some businesses by helping them build their brand and reaching out to consumers. However, not every business is meant to engage with its target audience via podcasts.
For example, distributing podcasts is unlikely to influence a company that sells products to senior adults. The business target audience is less likely to use the internet or to be familiar with podcasts.
Connecting with People
The podcasts must immediately grab people’s attention and interest and keep it there. That is easier said than done, depending on the topic of your podcasts. Text is an excellent source of content because people can read each part to find what they want and what interests them. However, this is more difficult to achieve with video. It is much easier to fail in podcasting if you look frightened and don’t have a clear and compelling voice.
Copyright Issues
You can add music and video to your podcast, but you will find yourself in legal trouble if you add copyrighted audio. If you want to add copyrighted music or video to your podcast, you must first get permission from the song’s or film’s owner. Otherwise, you could be sued if you don’t.
Traffic
It is challenging to attract and bring people to your website and make them aware of your business with podcasts unless they already know your company has a website. Unlike textual material that is easily searchable, these podcasts do not appear on the first page of the search engine.
Call to Action Gap
People who listen to podcasts in their cars, while working, or on a walk cannot press the Call to Action or CTA button the minute they feel inspired. Instead, they have to return to your website to explore and fill out the form and get what they want.
Benefits of Blogs
Blogs are Easy to Start
Unlike podcasting, blogging is easy to start. The steps for creating your blog are pretty simple: you need to choose a template from the websites like Blogger, WordPress, or Tumblr. You can then post your blogs regularly.
They Give People a Reason To Visit Your Website
Your business website is primarily inactive and, to be precise dead unless you are continuously adding new projects. Blogging allows you to add more depth and dimension to your voice. It also keeps visitors coming back because it is updated daily.
Blogs Help in Creating a Sense of Community
You can use blogs to add subjects that people can discuss and form a community. You can also use it to discuss the problems that you might have in the industry. Moreover, the responses or feedback you get from people can help you generate new ideas.
It Helps in Converting Traffic to Leads
Blogs help a lot in converting your website traffic to leads. Every blog post you create is an opportunity to generate new leads, just like every other indexed page. The process is simple as it includes a lead-generating call-to-action in each blog article. These call-to-action buttons often lead to things like free e-books, whitepapers, amazon products, etc.
It Drives Long Term Results
The blogs you create become a source of passive income as long as you are posting valuable content or articles for your target audience consistently. If you post consistently, it will make you an industry leader or authority in the eyes of your audience. The key is to provide value as much as possible, and you will get a lot of benefits in return.
It Helps With Link Building
Blogging helps you create backlinks among the essential factors the Google algorithm considers when ranking a site on its search engine result page. Many experts and small business owners believe that backlinks are the 3rd most crucial factor in search engine optimization.
Even though generating inbound access is essential, 41% of SEO experts say that link building is SEO’s most demanding and challenging part.
Disadvantages of Blogs
Doing a Lot of Hard Work Doesn’t Pay Off
If you want to start a blog, you must commit to putting a lot of time and effort into things that will never seem worth the effort. You will most likely spend days writing an article that never ranks anywhere on Google or gains any interaction. You will have to ask several people for guest posts and partnerships and be ignored entirely. You will have a lot of great ideas, but the audience will not be interested in them.
You Need Money to Run a Blog
Even though a blog doesn’t cost you a lot of money, you need to do things like buying web hosting, professional theme designs and invest in several SEO tools. You can lower the cost down to nearly nothing at a certain point, but below a certain level of investment, you will make your blogging life tough for yourself.
It takes time for a blog to earn money. The best thing that individuals can do is expect to put in at least a year of effort before expecting to see the results.
Your Level of Success is Not Entirely Under Your Control
It’s pretty nerve-wracking, primarily if you rely on your blog revenue to make ends meet. Several industry changes might affect your performance on your blog, ranging from how the search engines show their search results to the algorithms applied by social networks. Even if you conform to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, there’s still no guarantee whether or not the Google algorithm will rank your blog.
Some Tasks Are Very Boring
In most jobs, you have worked hard, and blogging is no different. For example, if you want to rank your blog in the google search, you will need incoming links from other sites, and one of the most effective ways to get them is to contact them. This means that you have to send out a large number of almost identical emails, knowing that the vast majority will be ignored.
People are Less Supportive
While you may believe that people around you will be highly supportive of your attempts to create an online business, this is not always the case.
There might be some people on your best friends list, but despite this, they never like your posts, statuses, or do anything to support your efforts. Even though it is not unique but your close family members can also be dismissive in some situations.
Podcasts or Blogs? Depends On the Nature of Business
Every business has different requirements, and so does every business owner. When determining whether you should start a blog or podcast to create your business’s online presence, you should keep the pros and cons in your mind about the two.