Which US$1 trillion industry needs a host, and why that means you could be one in your niche.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. Today I'm going to talk about podcasting and how in an industry sector podcasting could be a major opportunity for you and for your company. Now I'm going to do that because I'm working for a client at the minute in the telco space and we want to help them to get some profile. Now we're going to the mainstream media, but I also know that podcasts are a great way to share a message. So I'm doing some research into top telco podcasts around the world. I'm going to share that with you, not because you're in telco necessarily, but because it's going to give you an idea of the vacant spaces that are out there for any entrepreneurs or business owners that have got the muscle and the tenacity to get a podcast up and running, or even would like to work with a publishing and podcasting partner, of which there are many out there. So let's just look at telcos and podcasts today. Now, I mentioned that I'm doing some work for a client because what we want to do is to get our clients onto podcasts for a couple of reasons. Podcasts are intimate, they have a long tail, they're on people's devices for a long period of time. They also create an opportunity for our client to speak at length without editing and without necessarily any interruption or interference. And also, our clients can take the content and repurpose it on their own websites, not only as a podcast, but they could make that into an audiogram, put on their YouTube, or they can make it into snippets, or as I do, repurpose that into an article which could go into their LinkedIn, to their Medium, to their own company newsletter. So speaking even just for 20 minutes on a podcast gives you about 1,000 words, which is 1.5 pages of text. It's enough for an article and can even make a great article both for your own content website, but also if you're going to share that with, for example, the podcast host may have a website or a newsletter or a publication in the industry. Now that all sounds like it's great, but isn't it a lot of work? Well, I can tell you now, as I've gone past the 400 episodes, that podcasting takes a little bit of getting used to, but it is possible. Especially with new technologies like the one I'm using, Descript. And if you manage your time well and your aspirations well, then podcasting is no greater burden than any other kind of content creation. But here I think is a real opportunity because although there are some 4 million podcasters, Buzzsprout alone has over 100,000 podcasters that it's hosting for. In the B2B segments, there are precious few. There are lots and lots of people producing podcasts in their own, if you like, consumer or personal interest space. But when I look at podcasting as a category for B2B, there's a huge amount of opportunity. So if you're a company that's in a sector, or if you're an agency, this is something that you might want to think about. I mentioned I'm doing some work in telco for a client at the moment around the Mobile World Congress happening in Barcelona next January to talk about 5G. So I'm reaching out to traditional print media, but I also wanted to reach out to podcasting. Radio is good, but of course people go on air and you may get 2 or 3 minutes, but radio is a great way for someone to have a voice. And I mean that in the best possible sense. You can hear the warmth or the timbre of their sound, but it's a great way to build a personality. TV is also great, but TV is very hard for most B2B clients to get into. But a podcast, that could be very good. Now, I looked at the universe of podcasts for telco, and you can use a website called listennotes.com, and they have a search directory there, and they have all of the podcasts curated for you there. Now, when I put in the keyword search telecom into Listen Notes, I got initially very excited because there are 416 results. But that soon turned to some disappointment when I looked at both the quantity of podcasts that are focusing actually on telco itself and then the listener score of those podcasts, and then the frequency of podcast production. In my own show, I have a listener score of 32. Now, a listener score is a metric that shows the estimated popularity of a podcast compared to other RSS, Real Simple Syndication-based public podcasts in the world on a scale of 0 to 100. So the higher, the more popular. Now, this show you're listening to, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, we're with a score of 32, and I have the ranking of being in the top 5 around the world. So I'm pretty happy that after a year of producing this show, I've got that kind of listener ranking. But this is just me, and I don't mind to tell you I'm making this from a garden shed. I call it Shed Studio in the gardens of Somerset. Now, if I then look at my 416 episodes for the telco industry, bear in mind this is a multi-billion dollar industry. It affects all of us in one way or another, whether we're holding a mobile device or whether we are using it at work or whether we're using it for automation. Telco touches the world. But does the world listen to telco on podcasts? Now, the number one podcast, Sanctioned: The Arrest of a Telecom Giant, by CBC Radio, which is of course in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, now has a listener score of 50, and it's in the top 5.5%. Um, but Sanctioned: The CBBC Podcast has only issued 14 episodes, and it's not all about telco, of course. Now, coming top was Telecom Reseller. It's a listener score of 28, but it's only in the top 10%. Now, they've got some 413 episodes, which is great. So a bit similar to myself, they've been going since May 2020. The next is the Andean John Talk Telecom. Now, uh, they've got 29 episodes, and they're in with a listener score of 32, and they're in the top 5% as well. Now, next down comes CBRE, which is of course the Richard Ellis. Now, they've only done 22 episodes, and they started in May 2016, but their last episode was a year ago, over 12 months. Now when we move further down, we have Leonardo Furtado, who's got 53 episodes, but he posted— he posts in Spanish, uh, and 18 days ago, and his handle is actually technology, not telecommunications. Syrupcast, Mobile Syrup, talks about Canadian telco news. And Danielle Royston Um, has a show out of Texas. She's in the Telco in 20, and she's in the top 10% with a listener score of 29. Um, so she's there, but she's only got 30 episodes. So you get the idea. Head in the Clouds has 90 episodes, uh, since July 2017, and they are also only in the top 10. JSA, which is out of the USA. It's actually a PR firm in telco. They've got 230 episodes, but they don't have a listener score and they're not ranked at all. After that, we get down really to what you might think would be, would be big podcasts. Deloitte, the accountants. 55 episodes in over 4 years, and only 2 months ago did they post something. So you're getting the idea here that actually even publishers like Total Telecom only had 2 episodes, and the list goes on. So what we're learning is even organizations like the IEEE, which is in charge of standards They stopped their podcasts over six months ago. It's a huge opportunity to get out there. Let's see telecoms.com. The telecoms podcast seems to have been rebranded, and they have a listener score of 34, and they're in the top five. But this is a publisher, and they are some guys. They say. Once in a week together in a studio somewhere in London. We get together to take the piss out of the telecoms and communications industry for an hour or so. So this is one of the world's largest industries, and yet the number of people issuing podcasts with the title telco somehow in a tag is quite large, but the number of people actually delivering on content consistently over time is very, very small. This means that, just as one example, a vertical like telco is an opportunity for any company or frankly any PR firm to step into and to take some ownership. Now, I mentioned this because telco isn't the only vertical. That has got this kind of opportunity in podcasting. It's a bit like contract publishing may have been even 20, 30 years ago when people started to be able to produce low-volume print. Before, when you had to go into the Heidelberg print presses and print 10,000 copies, it all changed with digital printing. And now we have lots of niche publishers using platforms like Issuu to create basically PDF in the cloud but with the kind of layout of a magazine. There are many people that are extolling the benefits of podcasting. You're listening to one, so you plainly know. But podcasting is a great way for a company to build content, but also to build community. I invite guests onto my show. It's possible to facilitate the conversation and to be seen in an industry as the Nexus of conversation. Now, it can't be that difficult to start to create a plan, and if it feels difficult, it's possible to go to one of the many agencies out there and independent podcasting professionals that will help to make it so that you are just in front of the mic only. I produce the show, and I edit it, and I air it myself. But most people have got more important things to do with their time. But if you, for example, wanted to take a sector, take a niche, and take ownership of that sector, you could create a podcast and work with a consultant, either in the scheduling for you of the guests, the writing of the show notes, the post-production, and the airing and the promotion, and have it all done for you except for your time on the mic. There are people like Dr. Steve Day who's got a systems and outsourcing podcast, and he has streamlined the whole process. In fact, Steve and I are working on a product or a service that will help people to keep track of all the tasks when it comes to promoting their podcasts. There are more and more players and more and more tools available for podcasting. There are over 4 million people that have registered a podcast. But that's very different to the number of people who actually produce podcasts. And this is where the opportunity lies. In reality, creating a podcast, yes, takes a little bit longer than writing an article, but it has all sorts of benefits above and beyond producing an article. Not least, you can invite people to come and participate in your podcast. And that's really very hard to do if you're writing an article. You can create, for example, a frequency to the show that's manageable for you. I put together 2 episodes of 20 minutes each week. Some people produce a podcast every day. Some produce a variable length podcast. Some people create hour and a half long conversations. There is no right or wrong to the frequency. What matters is to be both predictable and consistent. So that's why I've done over 400 shows, and my goal is to make sure that on a Tuesday and a Thursday my show goes out around the world and people can rely on that. Also, the implication of that is my team know what's going to happen next. So I produce content on a Tuesday and Thursday, and then the team in the Philippines can take that on a Wednesday and a Friday and promote it and also repurpose it ready for the following Wednesday newsletter. So I started this with talking about telco just because it's a multi-billion dollar industry and I'm looking for ways to promote a telco company. It's a very large American telco and podcasting is the growth category in terms of medium And yet it is really an open playing field. It's an opportunity for any company or any agency or even individual to take ownership of some of these very small niches. And I think this would be an interesting space. We shall see over the next 3 to 5 years who takes these over. Obviously Spotify in the B2C space is buying content and really becoming just like a regular publisher. Um, or broadcaster. But in B2B, that hasn't happened yet. So I'm very interested that's the case. But what it does mean from a PR point of view is if you've got an industry that you can lead, check out listennotes.com and you can find a directory. Put in your keyword or your tag, your industry, and you can find out how many shows there are. And maybe there's an opportunity for you to build An inbound marketing platform, which is your podcast. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Unnoticed Show. And if you've got any questions, do just drop them in the show notes. If you can rate this show, follow in the show notes, there's a rate this podcast, it really helps. And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this podcast. If you find it useful, even share it with somebody else. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Jim James.