How to Create a Private Podcast
Zoe Bell | Podcasting
If you’ve wondered about launching a private podcast for your business or organization, you’ve come to the right place.
In this guide, we’ll explain:
- What private podcast is
- Why have a private podcast
- Private podcast use cases
- How to launch a private podcast
- And how to use uStudio to easily and securely produce, host and manage your private podcast.
What is a Private Podcast?
A private podcast is a podcast delivered only to specific subscribers or listeners, typically within the walls of a company or an organization, such as a government entity or a nonprofit organization.
It’s not available on public podcast applications, such as Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Podcasts.
Private podcasts use robust security protocols to protect the information delivered over the podcast network so nobody outside of the intended audience can access the audio or video content.
Why Should I Learn How to Create a Private Podcast?
Why should your particular company turn to podcasting in order to communicate with employees and other stakeholders?
An interesting phenomenon has been occurring in recent years: podcast usage has seen dramatic growth, whereas reading levels have been declining.
In addition to the benefits of taking advantage of a growing trend, here are five more reasons your organization should have a private podcast.
1. You can reach non-desk workers.
Private podcasting enables you to reach workers who are not tied to a desk, such as your sales force, mobile service workers, or executives who are always on the go.
2. Podcasts give you the ability to make transit time more productive.
Despite the growth in remote working arrangements, there are still many people who commute to and from work everyday.
What better way to get them up to date on company news and information than to enable them to turn their transit time into productive listening time?
3. Podcasting is easy and lowers the bar to production and frequent use.
Organizations always have more information they want to communicate than they have time to produce, especially if a newsletter is their go-to communication tool.
But producing a podcast is super easy. Just put a microphone in front of somebody and let them talk away!
Obviously after recording you’ve got to edit the content. And it always sounds so professional to have some sort of introductory jingle. But after that, just upload it to your private podcast platform and it’s live for everybody within your organization to listen to whenever they want!
4. It’s a better way to connect with your employees
Podcasting has that familiar feeling of a friend communicating to another friend. It allows the speaker or speakers to express their personalities to an audience through voice intonation that connects to listeners and creates a sense of community.
5. Podcasting is the preferred form of communication
Finally, employees prefer to listen to podcasts, with 73% saying they would prefer to listen to a private podcast than attend a meeting, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of uStudio.
That same study said “...47% of respondents were apathetic or actively disliked reading emails and company newsletters to stay up to date with their company’s news.”
Why not deliver a podcast to employees instead of making them read emails or attend meetings?
When Should I Use a Private Podcast?
The question that’s surely on your mind right now is when to use a private podcast? There are three main use cases that make a pretty compelling argument for when to use it.
For Sales Enablement
Training your sales force is one of the most important tasks you can do, since they’re the people closest to the money.
A private podcast is ideal for sharing product and customer news with sales reps while they're in the field.
- Turn written sales talking points into an audio or video pitch practice.
- Customer feedback can become live conversations, with customer spokespeople sharing their experience with your company.
- Competitive battlecards can become podcast tutorials. Invite the sales reps who have the inside scoop on the competition to teach a couple of tutorials.
The topics are endless! Short, 5-minute daily or weekly audio updates can make a huge difference in keeping sales reps consistently informed.
For Training and Learning
The breathtaking technological and market changes sweeping the business world today makes training and learning - or continuing professional development (CPD) as it’s often called - a must-have process for your employees.
It can help your workforce stay up to date with changing trends, become more effective in the workplace, enhance knowledge to provide better service, and keep your employees more competitive.
Private podcasts also modernize training in the business. Audio and video are 500% to 700% more effective than text for communicating information and enhancing knowledge retention. It’s just a better way to learn.
Private podcasting allows your workers to get training while on the go. They can pause, save an episode or lesson, and listen again later.
They also enable you to track audio and video consumption so you can ensure employees are getting the knowledge they need.
For Internal Communications.
Whether you'd like to broadcast internal meetings, executive communications or product launches to your offices worldwide, private podcasting makes sure every member of your team has access to the most up-to-date, accurate, and highest-quality information no matter where they are.
Many enterprises now live stream town hall meetings via private podcasts. Executives can share updates in a conversational format without a lot of prep time while avoiding the tyranny of ‘looking camera-ready.
Private podcasts are also a great way to deliver topics covering supplemental-learnings and sensitive items, such as employee emotional health topics, leadership advice for management, employee diversity, and more. They
The sky's the limit with private podcast topics!
How to Launch Your Company’s Private Podcast
You’ve established why you should launch a private podcast, and you’ve determined three valuable use cases for it. The next step is to launch your private podcast.
Here is our six-step process for launching your private podcast.
1. Creating a Team for Your Private Podcast
Your success with private podcasting will likely require a dedicated team with specialized roles. As you plan, it helps to know the types of team members who will need a seat at the table. Here are the most common categories of stakeholders that you should keep in mind as you create a private podcast.
Executive Sponsors: These are the people who underwrite your private podcast show and/or allow it to exist. Maybe they fund it directly, or maybe they simply give you permission to spend time on it.
Titles: C-Suite, SVPs, Executive Directors
Producer / Creative Team: These are the ideates and makers who are great at transitioning what needs to be said into the best way to say it. They brainstorm private podcast content ideas, come up with innovative ways to engage the audience, make the private podcast content, and release it according to a schedule or editorial calendar
Title: Producer, Editor, Creative Director, Content Manager
Strategist: These are the messaging mavens who are looking for new or better ways to reach or engage their audience. They translate company goals into communications objects that are observable and measurable. Sometimes, they will take an active role in private podcast content creation; other times, they will brief a creative or content team.
Title: Communications, Enablement, Engagement or Strategy
Audience: Treat your audience as part of the team! Done right, your audience strategy shouldn’t merely be about acquiring listeners. It should be about creating feedback loops between you and your audience. How will you create participation and engagement within your private podcast?
Titles: Employees, partners, customers
2. Host Your Private Podcast
To create a private podcast, you’ll need to find a platform to securely host and deliver your podcast to your employees.
With uStudio, you can skip the RSS feed and distribute content securely from a private app that you control. Our enterprise media cloud meets the most stringent IT requirements and includes secure, redundant infrastructure for podcast hosting.
Your high quality original files are always available and backed up. And, you have complete visibility and control over who can access those assets.
When you pick a hosting platform for your private podcast, it’s important to look for a platform that offers the toughest IT security, detailed podcast analytics, an intuitive interface, and features that mimic a consumer podcast experience.
Request a free personalized demo of uStudio here to see how our application can work for your businesses’ private podcast.
3. Record and Produce Your Private Podcast
There are helpful pieces of equipment that every podcaster needs to create their private podcast. Our helpful shopping guide will outline the items to consider buying at all different price points.
Many uStudio customers find success recording from their phone. If you can talk, then you can start podcasting. Check out our podcast gear guide here.
For producing an episode-driven podcast, it's helpful to plan out a few episodes to batch your podcast recording all at once. By planning ahead, you can maximize your editing time and keep to a strict release schedule without feeling the constant pressure to record, edit and publish.
Just like with popular consumer podcasts, there should be a regular cadence so employees develop listening habits and expectations.
4. Distribute Your Private Podcast
For businesses concerned with privacy, it's important for your media app to tie into an approved user directory. You'll need to quickly authenticate users using SSO or other authentication protocols. A sophisticated user authentication function provides the peace of mind that your corporate podcast content will only be accessed by those it is intended for.
uStudio is the only media platform company with a multi-tier security model that offers security configuration optionality at each of the page, player, and stream levels. uStudio’s grouping and audience segmentation features allows private podcast admins to restrict access to podcast content by location, department, seniority and more.
This allows you to produce personalized learning material to different pillars within your organization and deliver the exact type of content certain groups are looking for. The private podcast end user will also feel more in control and more important, as they have podcast content that’s just for them. With a simple tap, you can upload your private podcasts securely from any device and make them available when and where they need to be in seconds.
The uStudio mobile application supports push notifications to audience members who have allowed push notifications on their app. A new push notification can be triggered to your audience if a new episode is added to the news section or a new episode is added to a podcast show in which the audience member subscribes.
When you combine this with the ability to distribute content to any device, it allows for successful content distribution for your employees.
5. Promote Your Content
Promoting your private podcast is one of the most important steps to audience engagement. And it’s much easier than you might think. From leveraging internal champions within your business, to embedding share links, to forming a reliable release cadence to create listening habits, there are many ways to promote your private podcasts to your employees.
We’ve put together a few tips and tricks to successfully promote your business podcast to your employees in our blog here.
6. Measure Your Success
As with any technology or communication medium you implement in your workforce, you’ll want to measure the success of how it is performing. It’s important to observe how your employees are consuming and reacting to your podcast so that you can realize if changes need to be made within your content.
We recently spoke with CommPro about the keys for successful measurement of your private podcast. You can read our tips and tricks on their website here.
Still confused about the benefits of private podcasting? The ability to deliver and consume key messages and training on-the-go will turn commute and travel time into found productivity gains for you and your teams. Enter your current business metrics in our ROI Calculator to view your potential results.
Other Helpful Resources from uStudio:
- Potential Hosts and Guest Speakers for Your Private Podcast
- Elements That Can Level Up Your Business Podcast
- Free Resources for Improving Your Private Podcast
- Tips for Designing a Podcast Editorial Calendar
- Customize the uStudio Podcast Application to Your Business
- How Dell Exceeded 30% Podcast Adoption Rate Within Their First Year
- Podcast FAQs
Creating a private podcast for your business is a lot easier than it might seem. uStudio is helping companies leverage podcasting and video for their internal communications and training needs without sacrificing IT security or scalability. Contact us today if you have any questions.
