A new way of promoting products and services on the web is Podcasting, which appears due to popular digital systems. Who hasnīt heard about Ipod? Or better said, who doesn't have one for hearing or watching movies downloaded form the internet? What makes it a new mean is the use that takes as an advertising support. However, it was something reasonable because of the big numbers of users. According to PodTech.net, the main podcasting web of USA, 1% of north Americans daily download and listen podcasts, a number that will increase to 34 and a half millions in the next three years. Nielsen Netratings assures that 9,2 millions of north American users had recently downloaded a podcast.
Podcast (term that came from "public on demand" and "cast") or podcast marketing consists on creating audio (mp3) or video files (mp4) distributed through RSS contents, that allows the registration and use of downloading programs, commonly for portable systems. That's how podcast is like a registration to a "talking" magazine through the internet.
In one recently podcast, Heather and Jonelle, two High School students were talking about guys, music and young stuff. They end up saying "Now a big hi to our sponsor: Acuvue contact Lenses". Podcasting was just appearing: Acuvue, owner of Johnson & Jhonson, hired the two young ladies to create a number of episodes about teenager life, named "Download with Heather & Jolie". According to Naomi Kelman, Acuvue President, the program increased in sales among teenagers. Young people and their podcast have now a website of Acuvue, and the program is also found in the Apple Itunes digital Store.
Enterprises are starting to use this technology, following two different models: producing their own podcasts for promoting products, explaining features and advantages; sponsoring podcasts of any kind (on podcasting web that can be downloaded and appear by categories) in a way that the brand or the products are mentioned.
Technically speaking, there are very simple steps to follow: the first one is finding an interesting topic that results useful to promote services and products, developing a script, recording audio and video files MP3/MP4. After that you have to create a RSS card index with all the url addresses for sending the card index whenever a user program requires it.
The difficult part is finding an adequate topic, strong enough and interesting that won't only call the users attention, but also will keep them. It's not just about making a brilliant unique podcast, but being able to make the others podcasts successful, in order to keep target users waiting for the next "spoken subscription".
For example, Purina opened a web section called Petcasts, in which podcasts about care pet can be downloaded. Maybelline offers weekly web videos about beauty and makeup advices. Nespresso offers a combination of music and recipes free downloads through Itunes. Kraft offers recipes too for Ipod.
First evaluations of Podcast campaigns can't be better: according to marketing directives, companies that use this toll will show an increase of 200% compared with others e-marketing. This blog data was posted on the Virtual Marketing Community of the Virtual Company Institute.
Surveys show that users see podcast suitable for promotion of products and services with the advantage of having contents, better consumer preference, a good knowledge of the podcaster, and above all, the possibility of listening and watching it whenever the user wants to, something that makes definitely better the brand message.
