When it comes to launching a new podcast for your business, a positioning statement is critical for success. These statements provide a clear and concise centralized goal for a podcast by answering three key questions:
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Who is your target audience
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What are their challenges
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How will you provide solutions to those challenges
Podcasting has become a major tool for businesses to grow their reach.
Currently, there are well over 500,000 different podcasts and millions of unique shows to choose from. These trends are only growing too, as the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. is projected to double by 2023.
With such a large database of available podcasts it may seem difficult to find the right positioning statement for your show. However, by using the proper formula and idea generation tools, you can craft a statement that’s unique, yet effective.
In the following article, we provide an easy-to-follow three-step guide to generate the best positioning statement for virtually any podcast.
Planning on starting a podcast for your business? Then download our workbook!
How do you create a positioning statement?
As mentioned above, positioning statements are critical to the success of a podcast (or business) because they summarize the central purpose of a show in a concise, transparent way.
Essentially, a positioning statement does this by articulating two things:
- Who you’re creating content for
- Why they should care
Without identifying who you’re speaking to and why it’s important for their consumption, it’s unlikely your podcast will ever grow to its full potential.
So, given the importance of a positioning statement, you may be wondering how to effectively format one for your podcast.
We recommend using this formula:
We connect with people who [Audience], but [Insight], by [Theme]
These three factors (audience, insight, and theme) help articulate who your audience is and why they should care, which also establishes the foundation and structure for your podcast and overall campaign.
Also, by using the chart below, you can formulate a number of ideas to ultimately craft the best possible statement.
Still not sure about your podcast’s positioning statement? Follow our three-step guide below to help fill the gaps and ultimately grow your reach.
1. Identify your Audience
As mentioned above, in order to deliver meaningful content, it’s vital you understand who exactly you’re speaking to. Without an understanding of your ideal audience, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever establish credibility with listeners/viewers.
So, how do you identify your ideal listener? Start by creating a listener persona.
This semi-fictional representation of your ideal listener is heavily based on market research and data. Chances are, you’ve heard of a buyer persona, which is similar to a listener persona in that it identifies who exactly your content should reach.
Furthermore, for businesses looking to grow their reach, buyer personas provide a blueprint for the common challenges and issues your customers face on a regular basis. From there, you can craft a business plan that aims to address those challenges with helpful solutions.
In doing this, you’ll eventually establish your business as a resource and ultimately, build trust.
The same principles apply to listener personas. In fact, given that most businesses use podcasts to help grow their reach, it can be helpful to view listener personas as an extension of a buyer’s journey overall.
In order to create accurate personas, extensive research and feedback is needed. When conducting your research, keep these factors in mind:
- Background (Age, Occupation, Interests)
- Motivations
- Goals
By evaluating these factors, you’ll have a better understanding of who exactly your ideal persona is. From there, you can start to ask questions through surveys, online forms, or even through face-to-face interaction.
Need help with possible interview questions? Check out our guide on student persona interviews for a good point of reference.
2. Understand their Challenges
Once you identify your ideal listener, it’s important to understand their challenges and pain points. This helps further cement your podcast as a go-to resource while building trust with the audience.
This philosophy is a vital component of inbound marketing itself, where mapping out a buyer’s journey with an empathetic mindset aims to help all consumers. The same principle applies to a podcast.
For instance, 74% of podcast listeners tune in to a recording to learn something. So it’s important to ask: What does your audience want to know?
Your persona research will ultimately reveal a number of helpful insights, but if you’re struggling to identify your audience’s challenges, start with these basic questions:
- What is preventing your audience from achieving their goals?
- What are some common struggles?
- Is there a knowledge gap for your audience?
Finding answers to these questions may seem challenging, but it doesn’t have to be, as there are several online resources available to help you connect with listeners.
Some of these resources include:
- Quora – An online question and answer forum where people come together to find answers to commonly shared questions.
- Survey Monkey – A database with countless surveys. You can also create surveys to gain feedback on virtually any question or topic.
- DataBox – A comprehensive business analytics platform pulling data under one platform to render real-time results.
- Google Forms – This platform allows users to create colorful surveys for distribution. The easy-to-use database works in collaboration with Google Drive Office Drive Suite as well.
Try using one of these resources to gather relevant information about the common challenges and issues your ideal persona faces on a regular basis. In doing so, you’ll have a better overall understanding of your target audience.
3. Provide Solutions
Identifying the common challenges your audience faces is important, but it’s only part of a positioning statement. Without solutions to those challenges, you’ll never establish your podcast as a valuable resource.
Here are the main questions to ask: How do you plan to address your audience’s issues? What information can you provide to fill their knowledge gap? What other issues can you help with?
Not sure how to provide audience members with solutions? Try these tips:
Interview a Subject Expert
When it comes to podcasting, gaining another perspective is always a solid idea. Conversational style podcasts centered around interviews offer the audience a number of benefits.
Most notably, a subject expert’s opinion provides greater clarity and transparency for listeners. And, as a podcast host, it’s your job to become the audience’s advocate. Highlight their challenges and present them to a subject expert to find the best possible solution or solutions.
Effective podcast hosts and directors consistently search for their audience’s greatest roadblocks, reach out to subject experts, and conduct interviews with them to distribute the best possible solutions.
Conduct Adequate Research
It may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how well you can present solutions to listeners by simply taking time to conduct proper research.
Research should not be limited to online searches either. For the best possible results, be sure to include:
- Data from your competitors
- Findings from case studies
- The latest trends and news
Competing podcasts should especially be taken into consideration in order to identify the gaps within your own podcasting plan. Do your competitors use any techniques that your podcast should emulate? Do they highlight any issues that your podcast is missing?
These are all relevant questions to ask and not just during the podcast planning process, but throughout your campaign as well.
Ask for feedback
Gaining feedback from your viewers and/or listeners is a great way to enhance your podcast. Fortunately, in the current digital age, podcasters have the capacity to gain feedback in real-time.
For example, if you choose to simulcast a live recording on Facebook or Youtube, you can access comments from viewers almost immediately.
These platforms also require minimal setup and offer another point of access for consumers to view your content.
Asking for feedback also helps identify any gaps in your current plan to offer solutions. Is there a missing component to your recording that would be more helpful? Does another listener have a better understanding of the topic? Would they be willing to offer their insight by speaking with you?
Feedback provides clarity to these questions. And in general, asking for feedback is a good practice for virtually every aspect of your podcast as well. Things that may seem innocuous, such as lighting, camera angles, or audio quality may need improvement to make your podcast look and sound more professional.
Simply put, without asking for feedback, it’s unlikely your show will improve or grow to its full potential.
Positioning Statement Example
Now that you have an idea of what goes into a positioning statement, you may be wondering: What does an effective statement look like?
We’ve provided an example below using Pepperland’s podcasting services.
We connect with people who wish to grow their organic traffic, but don’t have the expertise or internal capabilities to do so, by educating and creating comprehensive campaigns that make the process easy to understand and effective.
Let’s break down this example:
- Audience: We’ve identified our audience as people who are wanting to grow their organic traffic. This not only narrows the target audience member, but it also paves the way for their challenges and pain points.
- Insight: The insight into the audience’s pain points is the fact they want to grow their traffic, but they don’t have the expertise or internal capabilities to do so. In other words, they have a need, but cannot properly address that need in the most effective way possible.
- Theme: We plan to address the issues of our audience by educating them with comprehensive campaigns. These campaigns make the overall process of increasing organic traffic easy to understand.
In summary, this positioning statement identifies the target audience, outlines their challenges, and provides a short overview of how those challenges will be solved.
Create the Best Positioning Statement for your Podcast
As you can see, positioning statements are critical to outlining the goals of your podcast. Without a positioning statement, it’s unlikely you’ll produce meaningful content or grow your reach.
Need help crafting a positioning statement for your podcast? A podcasting service can help.
These services provide the proper tools, resources, and guidance to help launch and maintain success for a podcast. They can also help your business with setting up the proper equipment, uploading recordings to the proper platforms, or any other technical issues you may come across during your podcasting campaign.
Need help launching your podcast? Download our podcast planning workbook to learn about structuring and formatting your podcast to generate the best possible results.
