Podcast Styles and How To Use Them for Content Marketing

Ed Pronley

March 21, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

two people sitting and talking in front of microphones

As businesses look for new ways to promote their brand and attract their target audience, more and more companies are turning to podcasts for help. Podcasts have become a trendy way to market your business by providing your audience with engaging audio content that entertains them while advertising your products and services. But with so many podcasts flooding the market, it’s important to pick the best podcast style that attracts your target consumers. In this article, we discuss:

How Can a Podcast Help with Marketing?
Structuring Your Podcast
Types of Podcast Styles
How To Choose a Podcast Style
Tips for Boosting Your Podcast’s Audience

How Can a Podcast Help with Marketing?

Image via Unsplash by @jonathanvez

Podcasts are a type of content marketing, which focuses on delivering information to your company’s current and target audience and creating an ongoing relationship with them. Whenever you develop those relationships, whether it’s through podcasts, videos, or written content, you can increase your brand awareness and loyalty. That can help you convert more of your target audience into customers and give you more opportunities to promote your brand.

For example, if you develop a podcast, you might use it to talk about relevant and exciting industry topics. But you can also use it to discuss your products or services and the benefits they give to your consumers. By generating an audience with informative and entertaining content, you create listeners with which you can easily promote your business.

Structuring Your Podcast

Though the structure of your podcast might vary depending on your chosen style, every podcast includes a few key elements that listeners might expect and recognize. Those three parts include:

Intro: The intro presents the hook that engages with the audience and entices them to keep listening. Depending on the style of podcast you choose, you might even use the intro to discuss your previous episode or inform the listener about an upcoming show or event.
Body: The body is the main content of your podcast and often depends on the style that you choose. This might include an interview with your guest, a conversation about your topic, or a narrative you tell to your audience. You can even break the body into sections, separated by advertisements for your business or brand.
Outro: The outro finishes the content and often includes calls-to-action to encourage people to interact with your company further. That might include a call to follow you on social media, visit your website, or sign up for your newsletter. The outro generally ends with information on the next episode, such as its subject and release date.

7 Types of Podcast Styles

Here are some of the main podcast styles companies might use for their marketing:

1. Interview Podcast

Interview podcasts include a host and the guest they’re interviewing. The guest changes every episode, sharing their expertise and experience with the audience. The host asks questions and guides the conversation to help the episode fit a certain theme or topic that’s relevant to your business and its industry. For example, a real estate agency might create a podcast where they interview realtors, sellers, and home or building owners to discuss the journey of buying and owning property.

Some example interview podcasts include:

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Song Exploder
Without Fail with Alex Blumberg

2. Solo Podcast

Solo podcasts involve one person who talks to the audience for the whole episode. In each episode, the host talks about a certain subject or theme that’s relevant to their experience or career. If a business creates a solo podcast, it often uses the business owner or CEO as the host. That helps to humanize the brand and keep people engaged with the employees and people running the business, as well as the business itself. Most often, the business owner uses the platform to talk about industry-related news or problems its target consumers might face and how to solve them.

Some example solo podcasts include:

The Lazy Genius
Flash Forward
You Must Remember This
The Solo Dad Podcast

3. Conversational Podcast

A conversational podcast often takes the direction of an interview podcast or a solo podcast with one major difference: it has more than one host. These multiple hosts either interview people together or talk to each other during the episode, creating a conversation. For businesses that create conversation podcasts, the topics often revolve around their industry or trending topics and the host’s opinions about them. Listeners like conversational podcasts because they feel a part of the conversation and often enjoy the dynamic between the hosts.

Some example conversational podcasts include:

Scriptnotes
The Boagworld UX Show
The Marketing Cloudcast
Errthang Show!

4. Educational Podcast

Educational podcasts focus on providing the listener with helpful or interesting knowledge. Each episode generally gives in-depth information on specific topics and gives listeners a thorough understanding of the subject. For instance, let’s say you own a book publishing business. You might create an educational podcast that talks about writing your first novel. This can include topics such as how to craft a story, how to develop characters, and how to write your first query letters to agents.

An educational podcast can work as a solo podcast, an interview podcast, or a conversational podcast. You can even combine elements of each. For example, most episodes might be a solo podcast, telling the audience what they need to know about novels. Then, some other episodes could be interviews with established authors or literary agents to help provide more expertise and information to the listener.

Some example educational podcasts include:

Property Briefings
TED Talks Daily
Listen Money Matters
The History of WWII Podcast

5. Panel Podcast

Panel podcasts often have a single host and group of guests that vary from episode to episode. The host talks with the group of guests about a specific subject and guides the conversation. The panel then discusses the subject, offering their expertise on the topic or debating with one another. For example, during the Olympics, a panel podcast might discuss different athletes and their performance at the games.

This style of podcast is like a conversational podcast because it makes the listener feel like they’re a part of the discussion. That helps to humanize brands and develop stronger relationships with your audience.

Some example panel podcasts include:

Doug Loves Movies
The BeanCast
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: Ears Edition
Slate’s Mom and Dad are Fighting

6. Non-Fiction Podcast

Non-fiction podcasts can include things like intriguing non-fiction stories to simple news updates. This style of content helps target people who want to know more about current events and engage with exciting historical events. If you decide to create news updates, you can include relevant industry information. For example, if you run a board game e-commerce store, you can create a podcast that talks about exciting new board game releases and board game publisher announcements.

If you decide to focus on non-fiction stories, you can choose stories relevant to your industry that hook your audience through shocking, exciting, or emotional content. You can tell these stories in one-episode chunks or you can create a mini-series of episodes surrounding the same subject. These are a very popular form of podcast and range from things such as true crime to crazy historical events. Creating these types of podcasts often takes a little more effort in research and production. But they can intrigue your audience and create a space for you to easily market your products and services.

Some non-fiction podcast examples include:

Lore
This American Life
The Daily
Radiolab

7. Fiction Narrative Podcast

Fiction narrative podcasts, also known as radio theater, include episodes that tell engaging and exciting fictional stories. You can create these stories using a single narrator or multiple voice actors and impressive soundscapes. Businesses don’t often use these types of podcasts because they require a larger production and don’t always fit their industry very well. However, the market for these podcasts is a bit smaller. Depending on your business and what it does, it could create an intriguing and unique marketing campaign for your audience. That could create a place for you to easily promote your products and services.

Some fiction narrative podcasts include:

The Black Tapes
Limetown
We’re Alive: A “Zombie” Story of Survival
36 Questions

How To Choose a Podcast Style

Here is a list of steps to help you choose the best podcast style:

1. Listen To Your Audience

Listening to your target audience and understanding them better can help you create a podcast you know they want to listen to. To find your target audience, start by creating customer personas. Personas are fictional representations of who’s most likely to buy from your company. This includes information like their age, location, occupation, and interests. It also includes the main problems or pain points your audience is experiencing and how your products or services, as well as your podcast, could benefit them. Once you know who your audience is, you can choose a podcast style that interests them the most.

2. Conduct Competitor Research

Conducting competitor research is another great way to see which podcast styles your audience wants. For example, let’s say some of your competitors host an interview podcast. It might be beneficial to create an interview podcast of your own to stay competitive. It’s also helpful to see what keywords and subjects your competitors are targeting. Understanding the keywords they target can help you see what podcast styles would pair best with them and start targeting those keywords yourself.

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Director of SEO at Auto Revo

3. Try Combining Multiple Formats

Combining multiple formats can help keep your podcast style fresh and relevant. It also helps you tackle different industry subjects and open your podcast up to new audiences. For example, let’s say you run a solo podcast. Conducting an interview every once in a while with an industry expert or doing an in-depth educational series might attract new audiences to the show. But be sure that combining podcast styles is helpful to you. After researching your target audience, you might find that a single style attracts more listeners compared to two or more styles combined.

Tips for Boosting Your Podcast’s Audience

Here are some additional tips to help you boost your podcast’s audience and reception:

Add Video To Your Podcast

Adding video to your podcast helps you market your content on multiple channels. That’s because you can add the video to hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, along with audio platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The easiest way to do this is to record yourself and your other podcast members on camera while you record the audio. This allows people to view or listen to your content in whatever way they prefer and generate a larger audience following. Essentially, it provides another place for you to market your content and brand.

Pair Your Podcast With Other Content

Other content marketing strategies can pair well with your podcast’s content. For example, you can use written content, such as blogs and articles, to promote your podcast and include links to its episodes. You can also convert your podcast stories or subjects into repurposed articles and blogs or expand your blogs and articles into new podcast material. This allows you to market your business on multiple channels, creating larger brand awareness and building stronger relationships with your audience.

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Market Your Podcast

Though podcasts can help you market your business and brand, it’s important to make sure people know about them. Marketing your podcast on different channels, like social media and search engine ads, can help you generate more brand awareness and increase your audience following. This allows you to develop your podcast further and use it more effectively with advertisements for your products and services. It also helps you generate more interest in what your podcast is about and the industry topics it covers.

Creating a podcast can help boost your brand awareness and give your audience informative and engaging content. The first step is to understand what your audience wants to hear and pick the most suitable podcast style for the job.