When you’re in the early stages of considering how you’re going to get your message out to the world, one of the most important things to have is a branding conversation. Using your company brand as your podcast show brand may not benefit you, unless in special circumstances where your brand really is you. We have seen it be not in your best interest, and it does not do as well if your podcast show brand matches your company name or if there is a clear distinction between the company brand and your podcast show brand and/or videocast brand or whatever that might be. When we see that, they are less effective and they draw less audience. At the end of the day, what you want to talk about is what your company can offer. You want to have an ability to have a broader topic because you can reach more people through that broader topic than you can if you keep it narrow to only what you sell or only what your business is about.

 

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The Secrets Of Successful Podcast Branding Revealed

Today, we want to talk about a really important subject, especially when you’re in the early stages of considering how you’re going to get your message out to the world. It’s a branding conversation. We want to have high-level branding conversations with you. There’s an argument by which you make everything your company brand. People do this all the time. There is a case for that if your brand is you, if you are the brand, if you’re Les Brown or you’re Tony Robbins or you’re Michael Jordan. The brand is you at the end of the day. It’s always about you.

That’s very different than if you have a company and you have a personality brand somewhere, it might be a book or your podcast or videocast or whatever that is. That show that it is, whatever that show is, has its own personality and its own brand. Here we are, we’re Brandcasting You as a company, yet Feed Your Brand is our podcast name. There’s a really good reason for that. Number one because it gives us ability to be absolutely non sales, that’s not what we’re about here. We’re about content, we’re about delivering you useful information, we’re about giving you something. If it was associated with our company brand, 100% you’d be thinking, “They’re going to sell me something. I’m waiting for them to sell me something.”

We don’t want that perception here because that’s not what we’re about here. We want to separate that. This is our way to give back to you and content deliver. If that’s what your book is about, if that’s what your podcast or your videocast or any of those things that you’re doing, that show is about that. The other thing is that we want to have broadness ability to our show. I want to be able to talk about more than what my company might offer. You want to have an ability to have a broader topic because you can reach more people through that broader topic than you can if you keep it narrow to only what you sell or only what your business is about.

This is probably one of the first questions that I get asked. My last talk, definitely this question came up where people were like, “Can my podcast name just be my company name?” It’s like the number question we get asked. We thought it was important to talk about that today. Or, “I wanted to be consistent in my branding because that’s what my branding expert tells me.” We get that all the time. I’m going to say, in this particular case, we have seen it be not in your best interest and it does not do as well if your podcast show brand matches your company name or if there is a clear distinction between the company brand and your podcast show brand and/or videocast brand or whatever that might be. But when we see that, they are less effective. They draw less audience.

Let’s talk about one of the reasons why. One of the things that I’m sure all of you are intending to do is push your messages out on social media. If you create a Facebook Like page that’s your company name, that’s going to appear very corporate and I think less people are likely to like it or click on it or check it out unless they already know, “I really want to get that content.” But when people are coming across it in other areas across social media, if you have a cool show name about a provocative topic, like Feed Your Brand, Feed Your Brand doesn’t sound like a company name. It sounds like, “I need to feed my brand. I want to find out what that’s about.” Rather than, Brandcasting You, which may not be the worst company name that you could have as a podcast show brand, but it’s different. Or if you’re Coca-Cola out there and you’re going to put out a podcast or a videocast, you wouldn’t want to say The Coca-Cola Podcast. You probably would have some other name by Coca-Cola, it may be as a sub little brand.

There are very few exceptions to that. You have to be extremely famous or have high brand recognition for it to be valuable. Maybe Coca-Cola is not the best example in that. The Freakonomics Podcast, one of my favorite podcast, I absolutely love it, but Freakonomics was bestselling book, best listened radio show before that. That’s what it’s about. You’re tapping into that. But they never once in the whole process were a corporation selling you something. They’re selling books, they’re selling information, they’re sharing information. You knew what you were getting and you are already into it, but their name recognition was so high that you can’t lose it.

I think most businesses over estimate, they think that they’re more popular than they are, they think that they’re a bigger brand than they actually are. That’s not the case. You may be that in a very small niche, but you’re not that on iTunes or on YouTube. You probably will have a much, much greater success getting a larger audience for your videocast or your podcast and your content in general pushing out on social media if you had a different name. Some people, they just get so, with their blinders on, about their company brand, that they think, “That’s it.” They can’t see outside of it and passed it and how having an adjacent brand or an ingredient brand that has a different focus can actually enhance and grow a bigger audience for their company brand. I want to clarify that. It’s not a different focus, it’s a broader focus.

Because the use of podcast and videocast, you want to cast a wide net on people who might be interested in you and give them a chance to taste you. You want to cast that as broad as possible so that you can maybe reach more people. This is the real thing. This is a search engine at the end of the day, YouTube, iTunes, Google, even the Amazon Alexa, which is what comes through when you post your podcast up on TuneIn. They are all ways of searching. But people don’t search for your exact name unless you’re so well known that you’re a name brand. They’re not looking for you that way. They’re looking for their problem. “Alexa, please list podcast about social media marketing.” That’s the way you ask for them. That’s what you’re going to type in if you’re typing it into iTunes, social media marketing.

You’re not looking for the exact name of a podcast unless you met me or you met the person whose podcast it is and then you type their name in and it’s going to show up because it’s my name, I’m the host of it. It’s going to show up anyway through one of those things. It’s a very, very top level SEO, and you have to think about that. It’s search engine optimization whether your search engine is iTunes or your search engine is Google. Let’s talk about just SEO. I don’t want to take a huge deep dive into SEO today, but just so you understand, there’s the old school SEO, which is like optimizing your website in total so that it shows up higher on searches, just for whatever your website is about or the name of your website. That’s not really what we’re talking about. We’re just talking about keyword phrases in general that are going to lead to or be associated with your podcast show brand or the things that you talk about on your podcast frequently, associated with you. Ways for people to find you.

You want to be optimized in every area of your platform, which is what we’re going to talk about in our next episode. In every area of your platform, that means your web, your social and however you deliver your content, whether it’s video or a pod or livestreaming, however you’re delivering, webinars. It doesn’t really matter how you’re delivering that content, but however you do that, that all needs to be optimized to come through that in order to attract the right audience because that’s a better match. We want to match those things up because if they are searching for those things, they want to be finding you. You got to think about how people are searching for what they want to know about. They’re just going to whatever search tool that they most commonly use or they’re thinking is going to give them a best result and they’re entering in the terms that matter to them.

One of the key things though is that when you’re doing that, you want to make the name not self serving of your show. That’s really where when you match it to your company brand, it sounds self serving, it sounds like it’s a complete promo for you. You want to be attracting to your brand, absolutely. It doesn’t mean that you’re not promoting your brand within that or in the sponsorship or in the outro as we sometimes call it in our show. You do that, you’re associating the two things together, but the name itself and the show identity, it’s attracting. It is and it needs to be. I think it needs to be enticing, it needs to build anticipation and make people who just find the podcast, because some people are going to find your podcast by searching on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever the channel, or Google and they’re going to find this podcast show. If it’s obviously corporate or the name of a company, that doesn’t build a lot of anticipation necessarily.

They’re highly likely to skip it over and not even try it. That’s a huge mistake for your brand. You want to have a name that really provokes some curiosity or anticipation and it makes people want to know more. Popular Mechanics Podcast, their podcast show brand or name isn’t Popular Mechanics. They’re a big brand. They’re a highly recognized brand and yet they chose not to make their podcast Popular Mechanics Podcast. It’s funny and it’s tongue and cheek arrogant. It’s The Most Useful Podcast Ever. If you think about Popular Mechanics where they’re teaching you how to do things, it’s a DIY magazine, do it yourself, that it’s actually The Most Useful Podcast Ever. It makes sense with who they are. It expresses a personality, which is different from the magazine itself.

That’s a great way to attract in an audience who might not have read the magazine enough. Popular Mechanics, because mechanics, it’s a little old world, it’s maybe not your generation if you’re a millennial, but the Most Useful Podcast Ever, that’s pretty fun. I might give it a try. By giving it a try, be a new fan of Popular Mechanics Magazine. From that perspective, this is what we’re talking about, a wider net on your brand, it’s perfect for that. I think it was a brilliant marketing move for them to create a podcast when they were an old medium of a magazine. Print magazines have been diminishing in circulation and in availability really with all kinds of online media now. To now have a way to reach out to millennials, new generations with their information, with their message was quite smart.

That’s how we want you to think about it. It’s a show in and off itself, it’s an attraction, it’s its own thing. For those of you who are authors out there, you would never title, in a very, very rare case of doing an autobiography, but even in that case, very few people entitle their biography with their own brand name. You don’t do that. You give your book title an enticing title in and off itself to attract someone on the shelf or on your Amazon listing, on your Kindle, however you’re searching for books. That’s really what you should be thinking about your videocast and your podcast too. They should have that kind of enticement where it’s about the topic that you’re teaching or it’s about the area that you’re an expert in or it’s around the problems that you’re solving.

When you think about those things, then you come up with a brilliantly funny name. We’ll have a whole separate episode on naming things because that’s a whole can of worms. Short and sweet, that’s all I’m going to say right now. Short and sweet, not long titles. There’s plenty of room to put long titles in your descriptions and other areas, but the podcast show brand itself. But the descriptions, now you’re forced writing something else that I think is painful when we get to descriptions. That’s another whole episode because while you can do anything you want, I think there are some best practices to consider there and not make it a resume that I think all too many speakers, authors, thought leaders want it to be a resume. We’ll definitely have to have an episode about that.

For a lot of you who are our clients out there, Brandcasting You clients and everything, these are things that we try to advise you on, but sometimes you don’t listen the first time around. At the end of day, it’s your show and you could do what you want. This company brand versus podcast or videocast brand is a problem that we encounter, that a lot of times people don’t want to listen. But I can tell you, from our experience and with all of the ones that we’ve helped produce over the years, it is more likely that if you have a unique show name, you will do better than those who don’t. You’ll have better organic traffic, you’ll have faster growth, you’ll get more traction. Invariably, those that didn’t listen from the get go changed their mind.

That’s why we’re putting this out there so that you are listening to that because if you’re feeling still at the end, you’re not getting the conversion, the traffic, the organic growth you thought you should have, this might be one of the many factors. That’s our goal with our show here, on Feed Your Brand, is to help you through those things that you didn’t understand, you had too many decisions to make in the very beginning when you were setting this all up and getting going. Now, these are some things that maybe you want to rework. I think that what people end up finding sometimes the hard way is that when they do have a platform name, a podcast show brand, a videocast name that is different, it can be fun and catchy but it’s more topical in your genre, more in general who you’re about and what you’re talking about, but not your primary brand name, that it ends up actually enhancing and marketing your brand better than if you just used your company name.

You build an audience quicker, you build a following faster. It could be an ingredient of the name, by so and so, a company, or with you, the author as the host or whatever. You can be there as an ingredient, but it’s an the main part of it. You will actually benefit from it better than if you just had that consistency. To me, consistency is orderly, it’s simpler, but it’s really not always the best way to go. A little bit of personality goes a long, long way in this genre of being a video or a podcast host. We really want to make sure that you get that across and have that personality edge to your brand, add that topical genre edge to your brand so that people find you and try you. They don’t discount you. That’s our goal here.

You can find us on social media @FeedYourBrand. Thanks for listening, everybody. We’ll be back with another episode next week. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed Your Brand.

 

Important Links

• The Freakonomics Podcast
• Freakonomics
• Most Useful Podcast Ever
• Brandcasting You

 

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