B2B - Pitching it right...

There's a whole new sub genre of books out there, advising businesses on how to make podcasts for their marketing and PR offerings. Some companies do-it-themselves and get it so right. One of my favourites is still Wiggly Wigglers (who started off marketing wormories!). But there are others who, in my opinion, get it so wrong and compromise their brand image by releasing sloppy sub standard audio.

Then there is the 'research' that says podcasts don't 'work'. And I agree that if you don't get the content right they won't. Plus, once upon a time (about a year ago) simply having a 'podcast' was enough to flag up that you were at the cutting edge and automatically brought you kudos. That is now a quaint old fashioned attitude! It's also vital that it integrates with your website and all the other aspects of your marketing strategy, but that is too big a subject for the scope of this post. We'll come back to that one at a later date...

The Podcats audio in the business to business category that I have been most pleased with recently is the piece we made for eglue.

eglue is a global business technologies company that - and I quote from their website - ' provides uniquely effective real-time customer interaction management solutions that are enabling customer-facing mass-market corporations to do just that'.

They have a very specific target audience - considerably fewer people than those interested in the success of this year's peregrine breeding season of this month's Nature's Voice. And every person who is interested enough to listen to the audio may have the buying power to be very interesting indeed to eglue!


eglue are clients of Penknife Design - with whom Podcats has worked on similar projects in the past. And this new commission from Penknife has kept me on my toes in that I am working with subject matter that is way over my head. I have had to draw on all my experience as a journalist in order to pitch it right. Simplifying it so much that I can understand every word would be dumbing it down too much for the people eglue are interested in attracting so deciding the level of complexity of the conversation is crucial.

In this case Peter Hurst - eglue's marketing consultant in the UK - who is the interviewee put up to take part, is pivotal in advising me on what needs explanation and what doesn't. Once we've established that my job is to package it into a format that makes it a 'good listen'.

It will be interesting to see how well it works for them.