A few days ago, I was reading on the Google blog, the post “Listen up: Google Podcasts is now on Android” where Zack Reneau-Wedeen, Product Manager, Google Podcasts announced a new Google podcast app for Android devices.
For a very long time. I’ve been a big fan of podcasts. As you know, Surefire Local has a podcast called Remodeling Mastery. To subscribe to Remodeling Mastery, it’s as easy as going to your Android phone or your Google Home Smartspeaker and just saying, “Okay Google, play the latest episode of the Remodeling Mastery Podcast”. Or if you have your favorite podcast app on your phone, you can subscribe to it from there as well.
It seems Google has realized that it hadn’t been paying enough attention to podcasts, which is why they’re catching up. Google has introduced a Google app for podcasts (Android only for now). This new Google Podcast App uses A.I. to give you special recommendations. And also it’s as easy as continuing to listen wherever you want to, from your phone, to your computer to your car, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Why Should Contractors Pay Attention to Podcasts for Their Marketing
I think people communicate and choose the medium that is the most convenient to them. We know a lot of Surefire customers who are contractors like to communicate by text message. Just over the last weekend, there were two contractors who came for an appointment for a remodeling job. And both of them prefer to communicate by text.
Text is a good medium to set up appointments, share updates on arrival time, and answer quick questions. But text is still a medium that you cannot write long articles or share tips and other helpful information. Creating a podcast gives people a chance to listen. So when you think about content creation, and you think about reaching homeowners who are looking for a contractor, why not try a podcast? Also in the future, podcasts will probably appear in Google search results…they already do directly from a search on Google’s Android devices to the podcast itself, without any middle apps in between.
Now, the other uses of podcasts are that the podcast itself serves as a blog post and it can also be uploaded to YouTube, even though it’s not a video. What you can do is add a nicely designed image of your business to be the visual in the video as the audio plays.
A lot of homeowners on an average have a commute of about 32 minutes. I’m not an authority on this, but from what I’ve read, an average commute in the US is about 32 minutes. So if your podcast is about 20 minutes and talks about something that the homeowner cares about, you probably are in a good position to be heard, just like radio was big several years ago. I think podcasts are the next big thing in content marketing and getting your message across to your prospects and get more projects.
Producing Podcasts
Now, how do you record podcasts? There are two ways to start. Number one is to experiment. You can do it just like I’m doing with this podcast, which is just using my mobile phone.
You can easily get some intros and outros produced (sometimes by professionals) that help customize the podcast with a introduction to the topic and your business and ends with asking the listeners a specific question or idea. It doesn’t cost very much that actually tells you about the podcast. And you can upload it to places like MixCloud, we use SoundCloud. You can upload to a lot of different podcast platform and don’t forget to publish your podcasts to Google Play. Once you upload this to any of these, they get syndicated to iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and a lot of other places where podcasts are shared.
To help you produce podcasts, if you’re a Mac user, there are some native applications on the Mac that’ll help you edit podcasts. But if you’re using a PC, if you download a free open source software called Audacity, you can actually take your podcast and introduce an intro.
And now I know you’re going to say like you don’t have enough time during the day to to manage everything. So what we can do is figure out a plan of action. I mean, there may be other virtual assistants who can help you with this and there are people who specifically create podcasts for companies. With everything that you do, your time is very valuable. So you have to measure it by the ROI that you get for any of these podcasts. So the reason why you’re doing this is this is content.
We know one of the four signals that Google cares about is recency…one of the most important signals. What this means is does this website have fresh content? Having a podcast is a great way for you to generate that fresh content. And if you use the material that people are thinking about and searching for, then you have a good chance. Google in its announcement today has actually said that they will be able to introduce automatic titles for the podcast, which I thought is a really great progress. And once they introduce titles, people can look at it in case they are in a place where they cannot hear the podcast properly, they can actually listen to it now on the blog post that will accompany this podcast on the Surefire blog. I’m actually going to post an unedited version of the transcription of this podcast from another app Otter.ai which I find very useful. Otter.ai is actually transcribing this podcast into a nice blog post as I talk out loud so you’ll see both of this published on the Surefire Local blog.
Now I would strongly urge you to not only subscribe to Remodeling Mastery, but also subscribe to the Surefire blog . If you’d like to know more about how to create a podcast please send an email to my team at marketing@surefirelocal.com and we’ll send you a checklist.
Hope you’re having a nice day.
Thank you.
This is Shashi Bellamkonda, Chief Marketing Officer at Surefire Local.