Can Your Business Make Friends with Podcasts & Metaverse?

As a business owner, you can easily get overwhelmed with all the current trends and buzzwords that claim to be a must-have technology or solution. And it’s difficult if not impossible to become a master of all.
However, two things have turned out to be very difficult to ignore if you engage in any discussion regarding running a business successfully – podcasts and metaverse.
Before you decide these aren’t for you, at least try to give them a chance.
Here’s why.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

business challenges

Illustration: MilicaM

From an intimate experience to a marketing tool   

We live in a world where it’s become a necessity for cutting-edge businesses to have a podcast of their own. For enthusiasts, this is great news, since their inner geek can now finally become the popular one. But for others, this is yet another task on their to-do list that doesn’t excite them as much. 

Either way, when you think about it, it doesn’t come as a surprise that podcasts have become such a powerful tool nowadays. If you manage to understand the essence of it, you might as well learn something new about your potential customers. This new piece of knowledge may help you grow your business, or at least have more fun while doing so. 

In the following, we’ll list some of the reasons why podcasts became a popular marketing tool for businesses worldwide. 

For starters, it has become outdated to think of your customers as passive consumers. Rather, they are your newly founded community and, as such, they should learn more about you as a company and your employees but in a non-formal, spontaneous, and quirky way. 

For example, let your audience know what routine helped you progress in your career while also maintaining to enjoy your free time. Or, if there’s a unique combination of interests or hobbies in your office, let your listeners inside of that intimate discussion and make them feel as if they’re a part of your special club. 

This kind of intimacy and trust is unique for audio media such as radio or podcasts, and it has proven to motivate the speakers to open up more than they usually would in an interview. 

After all, podcasts can make your business more humane and create a feeling as if you’re stepping into the everyday life of your customers. 

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Podcast guest appearances are the best ROI marketing tactic. You’ll reach a new, engaged audience. You can improve trust, credibility, and relationships, and you only need to put in relatively minimal effort. You’ll get 2-10x more content out of one appearance. This only works if you have a POV. Having a POV makes you interesting, vulnerable, and it makes you money.

Trent Andreson, Head of Publisher Partnerships at Podchaser and guest speaker on BTN WebCON23 

Moreover, it can allow you to expand your professional network by inviting some of the people you admire for a conversation. Keep in mind that, what’s even more enjoyable than a friendly chat is when people with somewhat different or opposite opinions engage in a debate, each of them bringing quality arguments onto the table. 

If the guests were provoked, it’s most likely that the listeners will be, too. In practice, that means your reach and engagement will increase as well. Not only that, but if you managed to grab their attention, your audience will probably want to subscribe to your channels to stay updated with new episodes, or at least come back from time to time to check if there’s new interesting content. 

Hopefully, this has made you reconsider podcasts as a marketing tool. If you’re now willing to give it a chance, don’t get put off by all the technical requirements, necessary equipment and other digital tools. 

Up until now, there have been several quality platforms built specifically for this purpose, such as Podchaser Pro. It provides you with all the features that you may need along the way, along with insights into analytics, useful tips, contact database, and more. It’s available for individual podcasters or for businesses. 

Moreover, on their blog, you can find useful articles such as “How Podcasts Can Help with PR Crisis Management” or “Which three PR issues can you solve with podcasts?” 

How significant could the metaverse’s impact be? 

Another, possibly an even scarier term for many businesses is metaverse. What will it change, is it necessary and is it expensive? 

Since this virtual world is still taking shape, it’s no surprise that businesses find it hard to navigate it. Paradoxically, defining the metaverse in a strict way is most likely to limit the imagination of those who will create these virtual environments. 

Still, some questions need to be answered. 

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Consumer behavior has largely shifted toward adopting digital personas, yet many brands have yet to provide a solution.

Irene-Marie Seelig, co-founder and CEO of AnamXR for McKinsey 

McKinsey tried to do so by gathering industry leaders who have already developed ways for introducing metaverse into their businesses and collected their experience to help those who have yet to enter the field. 

These are the most important takeaways from their 2022 report titled “Value creation in the metaverse”: 

  • In 2021, venture capital and private-equity funding into the metaverse reached $13 billion. 
  • In 2022 already, investment into the metaverse space is more than double what it was in all of 2021. 
  • 57% of metaverse-aware companies say they are adopters. 
  • Top 5 enterprise use cases companies are implementing are: marketing campaign or initiatives, learning and development for employees, meetings in the metaverse, events or conferences, product design or digital twinning. 
  • The top 5 activities consumers are excited about in the metaverse are social aspect, entertainment, gaming, travel, and shopping. 

In other words, only you (and your team) define how your metaverse space will look like and for what purposes it will be used. You can combine some of the aforementioned aspects that seem the most convenient for you at the time and, if it sticks, gradually upgrade from there. 

General advice from this report is to: 

  1. Develop a value-focused strategy – Define your goals and the role you want to play that will generate value. 
  2. Test, learn, and adopt – Launch initial activities, monitor results, and refine. 
  3. Prepare to scale – Align talent and tech capabilities, embed in your business strategy and operating model. 

However, if you wish more personalized advice and expert opinion of your idea, you can use the opportunity to chat with people from the industry on tech events, whether it’s in person or online. Luckily, there are plenty of networking opportunities since the metaverse is an inevitable topic nowadays. 

For example, on WebCON23, Vlado Damjanović (Head of Sales at Beyond42) shared his view on utilizing metaverse tools to solve business challenges. He even invited anyone interested to schedule a meeting with him to talk about virtual and hybrid events. If this is something you would be interested in, you can get in touch with Vlado via this link

A journalist by day and a podcaster by night. She's not writing to impress but to be understood.

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