Sterling

Married to a strategic public relations plan, analyst relations can substantially shape business strategy through credible industry insight and influence. Moreover, industry analyst reports, reviews, and feedback can significantly impact reputation and brand perception — and map directly to an organization’s share of voice, qualified lead generation, and return on investment (ROI). Coverage in official research publications such as Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Forrester’s Wave, and IDC’s Marketscape are game changes. As with media relations, a successful analyst relations program requires honing relationships to build your company’s reputation and create credibility in the marketplace.

There are loads of free resources online for royalty-free and copyright-free podcast music, including the Free Music Archive, Pixabay, and the YouTube Audio Library. While you can use standard smartphone recording features or even conferencing apps like Zoom or Skype to record your sessions, we recommend exploring applications purpose-built for podcasting. You’ll also need a podcast hosting service to store and distribute your episode files and to submit them to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other podcast directories. Aside from using headphones and a mic and recording in a quiet space, here are a few other tips for recording company podcasts:

While this digital audio content delivery format has been around for about 20 years, it’s still largely neglected for brand audience development and messaging amplification. Just as with creating a company YouTube or Vimeo channel — or featuring video webinars, sizzle reels, and product or service explainers on your organization’s website — a company podcast can deliver powerful encapsulated content directly to interested individuals at scale. Other deliberations will include cadence (episode posting yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily); whether there’ll be guests, mapping out a content calendar to plan episodes by theme and/or topic, and budgeting investment (in both dollars and time). And the ultimate aim of a company podcast should be to supply engaging content for a pretty specific audience (say, your desired customers, potential partners, industry influencers, and future recruits).

Working with third-party stakeholders meant concepts were challenged and road tested, and gave Drax’s transformation greater credibility in the market. Now, Drax is planning to become the world’s first carbon-negative business within 10 years, furthering their sustainability credentials. The competing stories of Volkswagen and Drax demonstrate how leadership and communicating effectively with all stakeholders can allow you to rebuild after a crisis, but also that pivoting boldly to face the realities of a new landscape and setting the right communications strategy up-front can have real impact on success. One created a crisis and handled it badly initially, before finding a path to restore its image and embrace technology that would allow millions of people to drive electric cars.