Many people reach out to us to help them with producing their next podcast. And it’s true that we are making podcasts for many companies such as Dell Technologies, Charles Schwab, Rocket Mortgage, Adobe, Red Hat, and Morgan Stanley. Our podcast productions are our most visible output—you can find them on all podcast platforms and they are made to be worth the while of the audience's attention.
The truth is that podcast production is only part of what we do.
We are not just audio storytellers. What we really do is create business success for our clients through podcasting.
Each one of our clients has a business goal. They not only have great stories to tell but they have specific objectives they want to meet. We help our clients articulate these goals, come up with a podcast strategy, and create the podcast(s) that will earn them an audience.
The principle we apply to create successful projects is always the same: create an awesome podcast and do all you can to get it into the ears of the right audience. We call this winning recipe Creative Bravery + Commitment.
Creative Bravery means making an incredible show; a podcast that can compete with all the other millions of shows out there, and a show that the listener will love. Podcasting is an opt-in medium. So, Creative Bravery is about telling a story that will first and foremost engage a listener.
Commitment means using all our clients’ superpowers to get the show in the ears of the audiences that matter most. And, tracking the right data points to measure our success. Commitment is a strategy to market the podcast and measure listenership.
Commitment and Creative Bravery have very distinct jobs: the audience generation through Commitment brings new people to the podcast; an audience that is sampling the podcast. Though, not even the smartest promotion tactics will convince someone to love your podcast.
This is why Creative Bravery matters. Each episode of a show should be worth listening to—all the way through. When a listener has an exceptional experience they will make the commitment to follow, subscribe, and even tell their friends about what they have heard.
In a world of 2 million podcasts, there is no room on somebody’s playlist for a mediocre one, and brands possibly have an even higher bar to reach: listeners might come to a branded podcast with more caution, expecting an advertising or product presentation. They need to be convinced otherwise.
Only by combining Creative Bravery with Commitment will we be able to make that business impact for our clients.
And Pacific Content is experts at both. We make (what we believe are) exceptional shows, and this is what most people know us for: our shows are publicly available, known even to pop up in podcast charts and win awards from time to time.
Our Audience Development Services, on the other hand, are not publicized but equally as important as our Production Services. Our Audience Development team works with all our clients to design and realize the Commitment part of our podcast success equation—from strategy to execution, including marketing and promotion, podcast packaging, measurement and attribution, media buying, and coaching.
Our clients are benefiting from all our trials and errors. We have learned what we know by trying it first, and now we have the data to show what works and what doesn’t. We have refined what we know over the last 6+ years, and the results are a set of best audience development practices that have been uniquely designed for original podcasts made by brands.
So we are not a podcast production company. But we also don’t like to define ourselves by what we are not. So what are we? A Podcast Strategy and Services Company for Brands seems to be the best we have come up with so far, but word-smithing is likely going to continue…
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