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Transcription:
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Well, last week I was talking to a couple of recruitment business owners and the subject of podcasting came up because obviously you’re listening to this podcast either on iTunes or on Super Fast Recruitment and they just sort of said “You know Denise, I am just wondering. Is it worth podcasting for us? Could it help us grow our business? And you know, what’s the whole podcasting thing about? We know it was really trendy a few years ago but where is it at now? Is it worth it?” Well, that’s the subject of today’s… corny though I know it… podcast.
So then, let’s have a conversation about podcasting and whether it could work for you and your recruitment marketing and getting your business even more out there than it possibly is at the moment. So podcasting – they all became really really trendy years ago and then seemed to die a death and it seems to be resurrecting itself particularly over the last year or so. And it’s really interesting because I’ve always been a big listener to podcasts.
I’m a bit geeky as you might imagine and I do like my iPhone and I like to listen to music. But I also like to listen to all my different sort of marketing tapes and different things like that. And I’ve got a few people that I follow online and I regularly download their podcasts. So you know, I’m getting some information and often I would share it with you guys as well.
So I know that it works and it particularly works because it gives you another channel to get you and your company name out. And to be quite honest, I’m not sure how many recruitment companies actually have their own podcast. And so therefore that means that it potentially could work very well for you. So let’s just go through some of the advantages should you decide that this is a route that you want to go down.
For instance, as I’ve said you know, I’ve been quite keen listening to podcasts over the years and a mentor of mine encouraged me and said “Well, why don’t you just do one yourself.” It is relatively easy to do you. You can record them quite quickly. You can get them up online and out there and we’ve had some really positive responses to our podcast.
In fact, I’m recording this in April just before we head off on a holiday and we’ve had just under 1500 views… sorry, listens, downloads for our podcast and that is in with the podcast that really isn’t being promoted very strongly. It’s basically put onto iTunes. It’s really there for our readers to go along and have a look at and then download the recording should they wish to so they can listen to it on their smart phone because one or two people asked us to do that.
Now, you imagine that potentially we’ve got our content being listened to by another 1500 people in literally just two or three months. And this is additional potential visitors to our website. Now it’s relatively easy access for people. They go on to iTunes or they go on to your website and they can download it. You know if you’re listening to this on the Super Fast Recruitment blog, then you can actually download this MP3 onto your computer whatever and listen to it whenever you want to when it is useful for you.
And there is some data that is current at the moment that says that the particularly types of clients or audience, I should say really, that listen to podcasts tend to be the more difficult to access. Which if that falls into your market, then this might just be something that you want to consider when it comes to your marketing.
Now for us, we like to deal with business owners and as you recruitment guys and girls will know, you are all incredibly busy trying to get a hold of you but we all know that majority of you have a smart phone. In fact I think now the latest data – 7 out of 10 people in the UK possess a smart phone. So this is a way for us to get in front of more people. And that means that if we can, it means you can too.
So if you imagine iTunes is its own search engine and by putting your content on there, people can find you. So if you’ve ever been on iTunes and you are having a little round of some of the podcasts and you want some information on something. Well then you can find… if you were to go to iTunes, go into the business section and just type in recruitment marketing. We will probably come up as the first podcast.
There are a couple of other podcasts there as well but ours does seem to come up quite high. So imagine if someone is doing that and they are looking for some tips and ideas in your particular recruitment sector and how they might either recruit the best talent or vice versa. If they are a candidate, how they can get themselves in front of the right company or how they can put together a CV that’s going to sell them, all those types of things as well. So they could be looking for that online and imagine if they could find your podcast!
And Google seems to love Apple and iTunes and you know, if you Google ‘The Recruitment Marketing Podcast’ then we come up on the first page of Google. Which you probably think “Well, yeah that would seem logical Denise but not necessarily when you look at the way Google seems to work these days.” So it’s going to raise your profile.
Now there’s a very corny phrase and I’ll use it even though it’s not my favourite and that is ‘thought leader’. You want to become the go to person in your recruitment sector then you want to become what’s known as a thought leader and one of the best ways to do that is to distribute as much content in as many channels as you can.
Now here’s the thing for you and you’ll notice on our website we have lots of visuals, you have podcasting so you can listen to things that we do and you can see things that we do as well with video. And we do that for a reason because these are known as different modalities. So here’s a bit of techno jargon geek for you… that people process information in different ways. Some people like to look at things and some people like to listen to things and some people like to read things.
So on our website, on our blog you’ll see things done in different ways. So most content that we place there now – there will be images that you can look at, there’ll be a recording and there’ll something that you can read as well. So therefore we make our content available to more and more people. And importantly we make it very easy to consume. So if you go back and look at some of the other blog posts about content marketing, you’ll see some of the formats and the way we talk about how important it is to make your content accessible for people.
So let’s just say, could you do podcasting on your own? Absolutely and I’ll give you some ideas on how you might go about that. Can you outsource it? Yes you can. So you know, there are two options for you and again, you may want to do little bit of analysis and look at your particular and see whether you think that’s going to work for you.
So, how do you go about podcasting? Well, first of all you need some topics. And we’ve talked about that in a previous blog post and we’ve talked about content marketing. You need some form of software to record it on or what you can do is you can record it straight into your smart phone and you can do that quite easily. You can buy some very inexpensive microphones on Amazon. We would recommend that you buy something a little bit better. There’s one called the Rode Smartlav which is a little microphone that you plug in. It can also be used for videoing as well. Because you want good sound quality – that’s the important thing. So you need really need good sound quality.
So you can record it to your smart phone then basically what you need to do is download it onto your computer and then edit it. We are using some editing software and then upload it through into iTunes. Now there are plenty, if you look online there are lots of places where you can Google how to create a podcast, how to upload a podcast. And yet on the first could of times it takes a little bit of getting used to. But you know, once you’ve done that then it’s pretty simple to do.
Another way to do it is I record this on an external microphone and there’s all sorts of different microphones again that you can use. Just today I’m recording on a Samsung microphone and I’m just going to have a look and see which microphone this is. This is the USBCO1U, a Samsung microphone. I think it cost me about £40.00 or £50.00 and I record this straight into some software. Now a member of our team, an amazing person edits it for me and adds music to the front and to the end and she transcribes it as well. So that’s Trini who does all that for us.
And the software that we use online to record into is free software. Out of interest it is called Audacity and you can find it online if you google Audacity so you can record straight into it. You can buy some music online and at end so you hear our Super Fast Music and we are keen on our branding being the same and very consistent all the way through so you’ll see that on our videos, and on our podcast all the music is the same.
And there’s a nice little intro so you do some little bit of teaser at the beginning to call people to listen to your podcast or not. And then the other thing that we do is we generally we either do Show Notes or we have a full transcription. And so people can read this. They could even download it as a PDF if they wanted to. They can copy it off the blog, whatever they wanted to do they can do that.
And obviously they can download the recording as well. So you know, they’ve got all that information that they can consume in many different ways. And really it’s as easy as that but you know for us we’ve had people email us about, you know, the usefulness of some of the podcasts that we’ve created.
So you know, all the time, it is improving our relationship marketing which is so vital when you are in a relationship business which you know, recruitment is and marketing is. This is Denise talking about podcasting and encouraging you to consider it as a marketing channel for your business. So this is Denise saying bye for now!
Tweetables:
Click To Tweet: [inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”null”]Will podcasts attract candidates?[/inlinetweet]
Click To Tweet: [inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”null”]Is podcasting the new blogging?[/inlinetweet]
Click To Tweet: [inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”null”]Can podcasting make you an authority in your recruitment sector?[/inlinetweet]
This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google +
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