Planning Your Podcast: Branding
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After you’ve started planning and laying out your podcast’s particulars like its target audience, general theme and outline you’d follow every episode, the most important thing to do next is to create an identity for it. Establishing one will absolutely set it apart from other podcasts out there and will be crucial for when you have decided to start marketing it as a product / service / added bonus content offered by your brand.
With imagination, a bit of foresight and some marketing know-how, you can easily devise a strategy for your podcast’s branding. And depending on the marketing materials and copy you and your team have created, your branding can either make your podcast shine and steadily create a following, or it can fail immediately. Sometimes, the latter is necessary so you can find out what exactly works for you and what should be scratched off your campaign. Here are some of the important elements to include when branding your podcast.
The Theme
To determine a good branding strategy, you can start by specifying what the overall theme of the podcast is. As a general rule, it should bring to mind some familiar image for your listeners. As we previously discussed, the theme you choose should revolve around the brand you’re representing though you shouldn’t limit your every episode on its products and services. Instead, make sure your listeners, whether clients of your brand or not, have something to learn from like commentaries and rich information they can live by.
The Title
Make sure that the name reveals or at least hints at your podcast’s focused field of interest and content, and that you choose one that has novelty and offers some recall in your potential listeners’ mind. CNET’s stable of podcasts is a great example of this execution with show titles like Car Tech, CNET Tech Review and The 404. Leo Laporte’s TWiT network of netcasts, likewise, offer a lineup of shows with titles that reflect wit and novelty, like Muchcast, Security Now, NSFW and This Week In Law.
The Site URL
Normally, podcasts are set on a dedicated page either within the brand’s main site or treated as a separate entity with its own domain. To give your podcast its own identity on the Web, you can get a domain name for it from any domain name registrar. This will make it easier for your listeners to remember and will be indexed by search engines for potential new followers to discover. In addition, shorter URLs will save space-useful for when you need to link pages on your social networks, microblogs or for offline marketing campaign materials.
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RSpears @ May 13, 2010
