The Benefits Of Having A Private Podcast For Your Business' Brand And Marketing With Raphie Wagner
7 Dec 2025 · 19 min
This is a transcript of a podcast episode (Feed Your Brand) where host Tracy Hazzard introduces guest Raphie (Raffi) Wagner of Podetize to discuss private podcasts. Wagner defines a private podcast (no public RSS feed) and outlines many internal and external use cases: internal team communication, leadership touchpoints, SOP updates/education, onboarding, department-specific feeds, remote team culture, investor/crowdfunding updates, VIP client campaigns, course/summit supplements, and launch support. Benefits highlighted include intimacy (one-to-one feel), reduced email burden, alternative to webinars/meetings, better engagement for training/multisensory learning, and targeted distribution (subscription or domain-restricted). The episode includes host background on the guest and closes with a partners/CTA plug.
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June 30, 2022
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Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard, but I am not going to be hosting this episode today. I have turned this over to Raffi Wagner, and Raffi is our amazing certified strategist program manager here at Pottiti. And I just have adored every moment since I've met her. So here's how we met, because I want you to hear that story. And then I'm gonna let Raffi talk about this topic today that she's picked out, which I find fascinating, number one. And I'm gonna have her back because we want other members of our poditized team to be able to contribute. And Raffi is just one of the most fascinating ones who's just got this kind of incredible backstory and incredible way that she's drawn into podcasting. And she's come to be such a great contributor here and a great partner for us with developing our certified strategist program. So I just adore her. But here's how I met Raffy. She was fangirling me, and so she was listening to the Binge Factor and feature Brand and she was reaching out and commenting in LinkedIn. She's great at doing that. She's great at, like, making insight comments and just getting your attention. And so that's what she was doing. And so I had seen her name and I'd seen her show, and her show was called Not a Mama Life. That was the show that she had before. She now has the other podcast, and so she's got more going on now. But back then it was Not a Mama Life, and that was a very intriguing title. And she appeared in one of our Clubhouse rooms, and so we brought her up, open the mic, and she started talking. And I just realized I've got to connect with this person. So I was private messaging her while we were on Clubhouse together, invited her to come on the Binge Factor. We got to know each other, and now we're doing business together. Isn't that fun? Like a fun path of how things happen in the podcasting world? And I think it's really typical of, like, how we connect, we build a relationship, and then it turns into something so much more. So let me just give you a little bit of background on Raffi, because I want to make sure that you have just a little bit of background on her. So she's recently. Well, I mean, it was probably recent at the time she wrote this bio, but it's farther along than that. A retired occupational therapist, lover of all things podcasting, she created a space in the podcasting world for her podcast and herself. Her passion is taking action, no matter the outcome. And she honors diversity and inclusivity, and I honor that as well. And I'm so glad that she's a.
Part of our team.
She lives in a small beach town on the east coast of Florida with her husband and her six parents. And I love when I get to hear them on a call, they have personalities that you can actually hear through the microphone. So I don't know, there might be a whole future show in that. But in the meantime, Rafi has not a mom in life. And the other podcast, you should check out the other podcast. It's really interesting and quite an interesting view on the world. But she does such a great job on focusing on the production value of everything and thinking about the podcasting tech and systems, and she's obsessed with that. And that, to me, is why she's part of our team right there and why I've had her come on and talk to you about all kinds of subjects here. And I'm going to have her talk to you about all kinds of subjects here on Feature Brand because I just think her perspective, her viewpoint on podcasting is so worthy of bringing forward to you. But her technical knowledge is so wonderfully in depth. She really tests everything out. She really researched them. So she's going to talk today about a topic near and dear to her, which I have learned a lot about as well, because I've been starting a private podcast recently. And so between the two of us, we have been exploring this behind the scenes. And she has got some great viewpoints on why you might want to do this in the near future. So check this out. Raffi Wagner, talking with us here on Feed your Brand about private podcasts.
Hello. Hello. My name is Raffi Wagner, and I am a program manager here at Potati's Brandcasters. And I want to share with you today the value of a private podcast. So let's get started. First of what a private podcast is. A private podcast is a podcast that's not syndicated. So what that means is it does not have a public out in the world RSS feed. It's meant to stay in a certain area. It's meant to stay closed, private for whatever you decide to use it for. That's the main goal, is to keep it private and keep it inside. So let's go ahead and jump in. So I will be sharing ways that you can use a private podcast for your business, your work culture and marketing. There are truly so many ways to use a private podcast. Whether you are a solopreneur or a larger business. It's truly unlimited details on a private podcast. So I just talked about what private podcast is versus a public podcast. So a public podcast is the one that you have an RSS feed and it's on hosted on Potted Ties and it's distributed out to different players. That has a purpose as well. So those are the two differences, the private and the public. Why you would want to do a private is if you want to keep it small, internal, for specific use case and not for the world to hear. Whereas a public podcast is really out there in the world, has that public facing ability to get to everybody and to be on all the players. There are some internal use cases and then there are some external use cases. So I'm going to be going through a little bit of everything, but here's some examples for you. So internal use case would be something like communicating with a team, communicating with employees, communicating with contractors, communicating with a design team, or in something like that, or communicating with investors. Those are some examples of internal use. It's also can be used for education internally. So think about a private podcast as well. For example, if you are educating a sales team on a launch or educating a customer service team or client team on specific way of doing something, this may be an alternative to a zoom call, a meeting. It could be in addition to an update on standard operating procedures. So you've made a change to that and you want to let the team know. That is an example of how you could use a private podcast. In addition to that sharing news within an internal organization or within a team. That is a really unique way of using a private podcast. If you have a campaign recently, potatoes brandcasters, we did that investor campaign and we used a private podcast to speak to those who participated in that campaign. If you have something like a fundraising campaign, having a private podcast to announce it, to promote it, to do some of the work for you, as far as promoting it for fundraising, that's an example. And privately it stays within wherever you want to put It So if it is a private podcast for your corporate team, it's staying within that team. So that is how you can really customize it of where it's going to be distributed. It's not public, so it's going to either stay within your company domain emails or it's going to be subscribed based, but it's only going to a certain amount of people. So there is an opportunity, just like with a public facing podcast, there's still an opportunity to have what we sometimes call like a gate, you know, like it's behind something, so it's private, but it also has the components of not being out in the world. So it's really very specific to whatever that goal may be. So if you're considering a private podcast, consider the goal and what you're looking to do and where that's going to land what department. Or it even could be some examples of an external private podcast. It could also be for a particular campaign for VIP clients or a particular campaign for existing clients. An example, you could use a private podcast for existing clients for a referral campaign. So you can simply kind of reach out to existing clients and customers and share your brand story and share different things that are going on in the company or different successes from other clients and, and use that as an opportunity to have like a referral campaign within that private podcast. When you're doing a private podcast that is going out is going out to clients or going out to people outside of an internal team, there are again, many use cases for it. But one thing I want you to consider, whether a private podcasting within an organization, within a team, or a private podcast that's just very specific to a niche or a group of people, clients, customers or part of a campaign, there are still a few things that kind of overlap. And one of those things I think is very important and I think is something that the industry and businesses can be that you can be seen as doing something different because you can replace endless emails with a private podcast that's internal. You can replace a lot of emails for a campaign that you're doing for your next launch by using a private podcast. So it can be an additional way to distribute a campaign or a launch that is not going to be an email, that is not going to be another webinar or another zoom call. So it's just truly a unique and different approach. I also think that because podcasts in general are very intimate and what I mean by that is most people are listening to podcasts in an earbud or by themselves. The statistics show that it's not common that people are listening to a podcast in a big open space on speakerphone. That's generally not the case. So it lends itself just like a public podcast would. A private podcast lends itself to that little touch of intimacy, a little touch of, oh, this is special for me. This is just for me. So that also adds a nice component to it. It's not a broadcast email. It's a little bit more of a one to one feel, a little bit more of an intimacy feel. And I like that. I like that touch. And also the trends out there that we see is that audio content is on the uptake. The trend is always going up for audio content. So why not consider bring audio content into different areas of your business to just kind of mix it up a little and approach content in just additional types of ways of delivery.
Another thing you can do for internal, which I think this is a really unique. There's a couple different unique things I'm going to talk about now is touch point with leadership. So one thing I think for work culture these days, especially since we had everything on the news about the great resignation, that I think incorporating a private podcast for a company, a business from a small team of 1 to 10 or 2 to 10 to even larger companies, is that it can be a touch point for leadership. It can be an opportunity for leadership to, in their own words, to share what's going on in the company and to create that work culture that may not be there now or add to a current work culture. So that's something to consider as well, like getting that episode delivered to you from the CEO that is thanking everybody for all of their work on the latest campaign or whatever they may be wanting to share with the team. Another idea you could do for podcast, and these really could be types of episodes within a private podcast, or it could be a specific line for the private podcast. So the touchpoint with a leadership team, that could be its own podcast in itself, and then that could just be an ongoing podcast with different parts of the leadership team, but smaller ways and ways that you could make individual episodes for a private podcast would be something along the lines of like education. So whether it's that internal piece educating your team on that SOP I mentioned earlier. So let's say you've made some updates to sop, since maybe your company's coming out of doing a lot of virtual things or a lot of virtual employees, and since then you've kind of changed the SOPs, why not launch that with a private podcast in addition to the actual connection to the SOPs. So think of it as just kind of a creative outside the box to provide that same content, but kind of make it a little bit more intimate, a little bit more on one on one, even though it's a bigger message. And for the flip side of that, that was internal for businesses, those same things can be used for clients outward facing, but still in a small private podcast feed. And that could be feedback or FAQs or anything like that, like Q&As that have come up and to help clients work through a process, department specific communication and education. I kind of highlighted on that. But a private podcast is a great way to. If your company is going to remain remote after this global pandemic and you need a way to communicate with that team, why not start a private podcast? Why not cut down on some weekly emails and have an opportunity for your team to hear your voice, your team to kind of create that bond with each other and they could listen to the updated podcast and then you could bring it to your work chat, that type of thing. So it's also a way to keep people connected if, for example, your team is going to remain remote and it's going to need that little connection piece. So those are some ways that company can use internally. Specifically internally, I've talked about the remote build, the remote team building. So we took care of that. And so now those are all business related and within company related. And as you could see, there's a lot of different ways that you could even build on some of those ideas that I've mentioned. You can also look at a private podcast and break it down based on your department in your company. So if you have a business and you have a small marketing team that needs to speak to the customer relations team, or if you have an HR team that needs to speak to customer relations, so you could look at how to kind of find ideas, you could do it the way that way you could do it by department as well. And the way that that could look is that you could have a private podcast for your company and each episode might be from another department. So it could be something like highlighting what's going on in hr, but then the next episode could be how HR can communicate with customer relations, something along those lines. So those are different ways that you can come up with not only why and how and how it's an amazing idea to use a private podcast, but even built within that allows you to have some ideas for content for those podcast Episodes as well, which I think is kind of nice because sometimes when we do our podcast, it doesn't always lend to us immediately knowing what our content is. Whereas a private podcast for internal use, that's kind of like a open book of content. So that's great bonus. Right? So now I want to share some external ways that you can use a private podcast. And again, there is a way that you can have a smaller group of people subscribe to a private podcast. Even though it's out there, it's going out there, it's still subscription based only, so it's still considered a private podcast. So there are some very related ideas and related ways, whether it's external or internal. But I'm going to talk about some kind of unique and outside of the box that you could use for client customer campaigns, marketing, that type of thing. So it's truly all the same thing. It's just whether it's going to stay within house or go out to a certain select exclusive group of people. And again, I might want to mention that for Potitize we use this recently, we used this technique recently for our worthy and used notes to stay connected and serve and build trust within the private community for our crowdfunding investors. So that's an example how it was a private podcast for a very specific amount of people.
The next thing let's talk about is how brands can use private podcasting within their own company. Let's see. So now if I'm a company, for example, let's say I have my own business and I'm doing a branding change, let's say I'm decided that I want to change some things on branding. Private podcasts, just a one time private podcast campaign can be a great way to share your brand story and kind of promote that you're going to be changing your brand. So you can kind of have episodes where you talk about what the brand was to now what the brand is going to be and your inspiration for that. So that's an idea of how you can use a private podcast to kind of help your brand story. So whether you're brand new company, it's a great way to kind of promote what's about to happen. Or if you're making changes, it's a great way to communicate the story behind changes. So when you think of a podcast a lot of us think of it's like storytelling or education. So it lends itself so perfectly to be used when those opportunities come up within your company or within your business. Another way that you could use it for clients and customers in your company is for onboarding. So onboarding for different packages or onboarding for contractors or anything like that, it's a unique way to provide that education that they're going to need in addition to obviously whatever systems you're using. So it does not replace signing into something to do a task, but it can be a creative way to help that process and kind of make that process a little bit more intimate and make that process just a little bit different. I think as consumers and as employees and contractors and clients of other businesses, we would welcome a change of different processes. As long as you're getting covered, what you need to get covered, why not throw in some creative mixes there along the way? You could use it for courses. So as a supplement to a course that also consider when you're doing, when you're educating someone, it's proven that people most likely retain information when it comes to them in a multisensory approach. So that means getting writing, getting something in writing, something that they could read in addition to an audio version of that. But then a private podcast could be even more support to that. And for summits, there's been a lot of summits that have transitioned to a private podcast. So it could be a virtual summit, it could be something you do all the time, it could be a retreat, but in a podcast version. So that's also a unique approach. It could also help you with a launch. So if you're launching a program, a course, a TEDx talk, a book, having a private podcast feedback as a, I guess a lack of better words is like a lead magnet to that TEDx talk or lead magnet to that book launch. So just another unique approach. Instead of endless email series, kind of mix it up and throw in private podcasts into that mix as well. And one thing I found was really unique use case that I stumbled across and that I would consider myself is right now in the world, there's a lot of companies that are using text message, the SMS technique to kind of throw out like little daily motivationals or anything like that. And it's something that could possibly be used in a private podcast. So you have subscriptions to your private podcast and you send them little daily motivationals. So it's kind of a little outside the box. But I thought it would be a unique thing to just kind of mention and I like that idea because SMS marketing platforms are really expensive. So I think it's a little bit more of a cost effective option to have something like this available to you and to use it almost the same way, so it's kind of a unique approach there.
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