Engagement Strategies for Corporate Podcasts

Why You Need Engagement Strategies for Your Corporate Podcasts

Companies are increasingly leveraging private corporate podcasts to connect with, train, and enable their workforce. With 49% of people in the U.S. saying they listen to podcasts on a regular basis in their personal lives, it only makes sense to leverage this newish channel in a corporate setting. But developing a streaming podcast network for your employees is more than a live broadcast of a conversation with a company leader or a sales training video. If you want your podcasts to succeed, you have to develop engagement strategies for your corporate podcasts to ensure your audience listens, learns, and connects with them.

Podcasts are an effective channel, but they take creativity, understanding your audience, and delivering relevant content that’s meaningful or few will listen. By developing engagement strategies for your corporate podcast, you can have a blueprint for aligning content with audience preferences and workflows.

What Makes a Good Engagement Strategy for Private Corporate Podcasts?

A good corporate podcast engagement strategy comprises three main things. First, you need a great creative strategy. It’s more than coming up with a content calendar. You have to balance content with what your audience wants and needs—what they’ll engage with. And that begins with defining what kinds of streaming content you need to achieve your business objectives.

Types of Corporate Podcast Content

In a corporate podcast engagement strategy, organizations should consider a mix of content types that resonate with various employee interests and needs. 

• Leadership updates are essential, offering insights from executives on company direction, values, and major decisions, fostering transparency and trust. 
• Another valuable type of content is training and development content, which covers skill-building, compliance, or role-specific guidance and enables employees to learn on the go. 
• Employee spotlights and team showcases can personalize the corporate environment, highlighting achievements, career journeys, and collaborative projects across departments. 
• Project and initiative updates provide timely information on key goals, helping teams stay aligned and informed. 
• Finally, podcasts featuring industry news and insights can engage employees by keeping them aware of market trends and business challenges, promoting a forward-thinking culture. 

This variety ensures that secure corporate podcasts are a versatile, engaging resource for fostering connection, growth, and organizational cohesion.

Surveying Employees to Discover Their Podcast Wants

While you will have specific content you need to produce, surveying employees to discover the types of podcast content they would like is a smart move for companies. When it comes to engagement strategies for corporate podcasts, getting your employees involved can be highly advantageous.

Employee feedback can provide direct insights into topics that resonate, ensuring the podcasts are relevant and engaging. By asking employees about their content preferences, companies can create episodes that cater to real interests and needs—whether that's leadership insights, team highlights, personal development, or industry news. 

Additionally, surveys can uncover preferred podcast formats and lengths, helping tailor the content to fit busy schedules. This input not only improves podcast engagement but also demonstrates that the company values employee voices, fostering a stronger connection and sense of inclusion in the organization.

Planning the Podcast Promotion

No corporate podcast engagement strategy is complete without mapping out how you will promote your podcasts. You can have the best content on the planet ready to go, but if your employees don’t know about it, can’t easily access it, or aren’t sure how it’s relevant to them, your engagement rates will suffer.

Create a Value Proposition

To maximize engagement for a corporate podcast, it's crucial to ensure employees are aware of the podcast and motivated to listen. A well-thought-out promotional strategy begins with establishing a clear purpose and value proposition. Employees should understand why the podcast is beneficial—whether it’s to stay informed about company updates, gain insights from leadership, or access exclusive training content. Messaging that highlights this value will help drive interest and make it clear that the podcast is a convenient, valuable resource in their day-to-day work.

Take an Omnichannel Approach

Leveraging multiple communication channels is also key. Announce new episodes across high-traffic internal channels like email newsletters, intranets, collaboration tools (e.g., Slack or Microsoft Teams), and digital displays. Short teasers, snippets, or summaries can capture attention, giving employees a preview of the episode’s content. 

For instance, an engaging email subject line and a brief preview can entice employees to tune in, while a dedicated Slack or Teams channel for podcast updates creates a centralized place for reminders, discussions, and feedback. Additionally, consider leveraging a corporate podcast platform like uStudio that becomes the central podcast network hub where all podcasts live, categorized by purpose and topic. This specific platform also provides robust user engagement analytics, such as who accessed which podcast, how long they listened and if they completed the podcast.

Encourage Feedback

Encouraging feedback and interaction around the podcast is also a good engagement strategy for your corporate podcast. After each episode, prompt listeners to share their thoughts or questions in a company forum or through a quick poll. Employee feedback can be highlighted in future episodes or through follow-up discussions, creating a sense of community around the content. 

Create Incentives

To boost early adoption, the company might create incentives, such as raffles for listeners or recognition for those who contribute content ideas. Acknowledge frequent listeners or hold Q&A sessions with episode guests, encouraging employees to interact with leadership or featured team members. This is where having access to detailed podcast usage analytics can really help.

Be Consistent

Finally, consistency in release schedules builds anticipation and routine. If employees know that new episodes are released on a certain day, they’re more likely to incorporate the podcast into their schedules. 

Promoting the podcast as part of a broader engagement initiative, aligning it with other internal communications, and celebrating milestones—such as the 10th episode or reaching a listener target—also help to create excitement and long-term interest. Through these practices, a corporate podcast can become a trusted and engaging communication tool, effectively connecting employees to the organization’s culture, goals, and community.

A good video strategy has to pass the 3 C’s test. It has to be Complete, Competitive and Connected. Complete because it addresses all of the aspects I mentioned above. Competitive because it defines how you plan to use the medium of video for competitive advantage. And Connected because it should connect to and support your business objectives over the longer term.

How Do You Approach a Corporate Podcast Engagement Strategy?

When getting started with an engaging podcast strategy, ask two basic questions. First, how experienced are you with podcasts? Second, how revolutionary are you trying to be in your organization right now with podcasts?

Some companies are completely new to podcasts, while others are very experienced, and that affects what they're able to achieve right out of the gate. Those who lack basic development and production infrastructure should start there. More experienced podcast users can focus on acceleration—developing a streaming network of all kinds of podcasts—a library of podcasts neatly organized and easily accessible, just like personal podcasts are. One of the best engagement strategies for corporate podcasts is to make your network look familiar so the user learning curve is minimal.

Next, how revolutionary are you trying to be with podcasts? Some people are looking for quick wins. They already have their workflow figured out, but they want to move faster, they want to do it better, they're looking for efficiency -- those incremental improvements. Other customers want to be completely revolutionary. They're more comfortable trying things that have never been done before with podcasts. They want a partner who inspires them and can help them think outside the box. That’s where choosing the right media streaming and podcasting solution provider comes into play.

How Has Corporate Podcasting Evolved and Where Is It Going? 

Employee engagement is a moving target. What was once attractive can quickly become passe if you don’t strategically plan for ways to keep content fresh and technology evolving with the times. In the past, video was all companies had, and they were really only being used in two main ways in the enterprise. One, marketers used it to create advertising and promotional videos, and two, if you were lucky, your company might broadcast a big announcement or a quarterly meeting. 

The reason video usage was so limited was a function of time, cost and opportunity. Time, because to use video required plenty of advanced planning and man hours. Cost because it required more people with specialized skills sets as well as expensive tools and materials. And opportunity, which is linked to cost, because most people didn’t have access to the tools or training required to make video. Even those with access didn’t have an easy way to distribute it. You really had to know what you wanted to make, how are you going to make it, and then go invest in a tremendous amount of infrastructure to deliver a video to your organization in an engaging way.

Fast forward 20 years, and video looks a lot different. Video is everywhere now, and it’s morphed into podcasts. Anyone can produce a decent quality podcast with a few basic tools. Podcasts are great during down times and in-between-times. Increasingly, it's the main format that people want to consume information.

When you think about how that impacts an organization or a business, it can be both exciting and scary. The demand for corporate podcasts is growing rapidly, which can be intimidating, but the means to make and distribute engaging podcasts are more accessible than ever, so it’s fairly easy to supply the podcasts needed to meet that demand. 

You can use podcasts in marketing, sales engagement, internal comms and more if you want to. And yet, many organizations are struggling with how to do this effectively – how to supply the right content, at the right price to create the desired effect. That’s where having an engagement strategy for corporate podcasting becomes critical. There’s a lot of opportunity out there to do new things with podcasts, but it’s also easy to get lost.

Ultimately, organizations will learn to embrace podcasts as a fact of life in all areas of their business and come up with more comprehensive engagement strategies to deal with it, both creatively and technically. Still, in the same way that email as a utility has changed the way we communicate but hasn’t displaced the need for creative or carefully-crafted forms of communication, the same will happen with podcasts.

Corporate podcasts are becoming a mainstay in many organizations. The key is to build a solid network and get your employees to embrace it. By developing proven engagement strategies for your corporate podcasts, you can get ahead of the game and launch your network with strong adoption rates. By balancing content, employee needs and wants, and technology, you can generate the biggest wins. Need help with your engagement strategies for corporate podcasts? Our team at uStudio can help.