Internal podcasts are increasingly popular for enhancing communication and building company culture.

They offer a unique platform to connect, educate, and engage employees in a personal and accessible way. Our goal in this brief article is to share six key tactics for companies looking to leverage internal podcasting to strengthen their internal communications. By focusing on these strategic insights, organizations can effectively launch and sustain a podcast that resonates with their employees.

1. Strategic Planning and Content Diversity

A well-planned internal podcast can significantly enhance corporate communication and culture.

Here are a couple of things to consider when planning your podcast:

- What do you hope to achieve with your podcast?
- Are you educating and training frontline workers? They may not have time to log into laptops and can safely perform their duties while listening to a podcast - a perfect fit!
- Looking to streamline the onboarding new hires in a hybrid workplace? A podcast can create a single, evergreen employee value prop narrative.
- Innovating internal communication and boosting employee engagement? A podcast can share information, support company culture and use employee time more efficiently.

Understanding your objectives and getting details in who you’re serving will guide the content creation process, ensuring the content is relevant and alignment with your company’s goals.

If content planning is step 1, understanding your audience is 1a. Tailoring your content to meet the needs and interests of your employees is vital to your podcasts success. Consider using a variety of formats, like interviews, educational segments, and panel discussions. How can content planning and audience insight intersect? Try featuring stories from various departments and illuminate different aspects of your company culture and initiatives, ensuring content diversity, relevance, and a thorough audience activation.

Additionally, episodic content revolving around ongoing projects or thematic series can keep the audience coming back for more. This varied content approach keeps employees engaged and encourages regular listenership.

2. High-Quality Production

Investing in quality production equipment and ensuring professional sound quality are fundamental. Microphones like the Samson Q2U are recommended for their clarity and durability, suitable for both studio or field recordings. Remember, your recording environment should be as quiet as possible, but life will always life at you. The less background noise, the better your podcast will sound. (”Best in, best out!”) You can only fix so much in post production.

3. Ensure Easy Accessibility

It’s important to be mindful when creating your podcast to make it accessible to everyone in your environment and consider all the ways employees access the content.

Utilize platforms like Supporting Cast to support ease of access across multiple devices and optimize the podcast for mobile listening for on-the-go employees. The platform empowers your employees to listen to your company communication where they're already listening - the podcast apps on their phones.

Your distribution strategy should provide the opportunity that every employee, regardless of location, department, or personal ability, can easily find and experience the podcast episodes. Try to create as little friction as possible for your team during this important user adoption process.

Some other standard accessibility moves:
- A full transcript of the episode - You can use tools like Otter.ai or Zoom to create transcripts to give employees another option to consume your content, depending on their preference and ability.
- Written summaries and links in your show notes - These that can be accessed along side the podcast in the players.
- Visual contrast - This is a 10 second task and ought to be a standard process. Make sure that your podcast artwork, logos, and website color schemes all have adequate contrast and accessible colors. You can check for free here.

4. Interactive Engagement

To foster a high level of engagement, incorporate interactive elements into your podcast. Use features like calls to action for leaving comments, clicking links in your show notes or submitting comments to a community forum. For example, including the ability to submit questions after an All Hands meeting or add comments after having a guest speaker are some of the many ways to leverage the ability to drive engagement from your podcast platform.

These interactive elements not only enrich the content but also enhance the listeners' experience by making them feel involved in the company’s narrative. Fundamentally, they also make the podcast more integrated with your other efforts, from training to newsletters. (Not to brag, but all of this functionality is native to Supporting Cast).

5. Feedback Loops and Community Building

Establishing feedback mechanisms to gauge how your podcast is being received can be key to gaining momentum and building a committed audience. Utilize comment sections, or communities to collect listener feedback in addition to survey tools to compile the data you collect. This information is invaluable for continuously refining your podcast to better meet the needs of your audience. If you see a particular episode style working, double-down on it and see if you can replicate the same success. Maybe your team loves interviews with leadership; maybe they love interviews with customers; and maybe they just like having access to the town hall meetings at the click of a button. You're making a podcast for your team, so be sure you're listening to what they want to hear!

Building a community around the podcast can further enhance engagement. Supporting Cast enable you to create dedicated forums where employees can discuss episodes, share ideas, and even contribute topics. Recognizing contributions during podcast episodes can encourage participation and make employees feel valued and heard. Additionally, our creators can enable comments and emoji reactions on a per episode basis, so you’re able to get direct feedback from listeners on how they feel about the episode's content.

6. Comprehensive Promotion and Measurable Success

If you record a podcast and nobody hears it...does it make a sound?

Promoting your podcast effectively within the company is essential for its success. Leveraging internal channels such as emails, company newsletters, and intranet portals to create awareness and excitement about new episodes. Consider cross-promotional tactics, linking podcast episodes to popular posts or articles on the company’s internal platforms ro intranet to enhance discoverability.

To measure the success of your podcast, leverage industry standard metrics like downloads as well as more custom analytics, like comments per episode or sentiment analysis on feedback you receive. If the content isn't reaching the engagement you want, the content may need a marketing boost. Is your leadership referencing the podcast? Do department heads know about it? If a particular division isn't engaging, maybe it's time to feature someone or a project from that division.

How will you measure the success of the podcast? Our standard is to track listenership’s growth month over month, but you’ll need to understand your baseline communication effectiveness too. For example, if the open rate for your newsletter is 5%, you can promote the podcast constantly in the newsletter…and not have much impact. Further, different podcasts have different expectations and cadences (mandatory, quarterly, daily…). Only you will know how your podcast fits into your broader internal communication strategy. Also consider all the other channels to connect with your listeners: Office TV screens, QR Codes in break rooms, and messaging from company, department, and team leaders.

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Employing these strategies can significantly enhance the effectiveness of internal podcasts for improving communication, building culture, and increasing employee engagement within an organization. By focusing on strategic planning, quality production, interactive content, community engagement, and effective promotion, companies can leverage internal podcasts to foster a more connected and informed workplace environment. This holistic approach ensures that your internal podcast not only reaches all employees but also resonates with them, reinforcing their connection to the company and each other.

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