Internal branded podcasts are set for a meteoric rise in 2024 as Internal Communication Managers and HR teams seek out new strategies to improve internal engagement, particularly within remote teams.
Podcasts have emerged as a powerful tool in this arena, offering a unique way to align internal messaging with overarching corporate goals.
This article explores how to effectively integrate podcasts into your internal communication strategy to reinforce and achieve your corporate objectives.
1) The Importance of Strategic Alignment
In your fast-paced corporate environment, ensuring that every team member understands and is aligned with the company’s goals is crucial.
Podcasts offer a direct and personal way to communicate these objectives, making them more accessible and engaging for employees, particularly those that work remotely, across regions or countries.
2) Understanding Your Corporate Goals
Before launching an internal podcast, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of your corporate goals.
The Podcast Guys have a comprehensive onboarding process which helps you to establish the perfect podcast strategy before launching your internal podcast whether you are aiming to improve employee engagement, drive innovation, or enhance training and development. Your podcast content should reflect these objectives and provide relevant and targeted information to your employees.
3) Crafting the Right Content
Once your goals are defined, the next step is to create content that speaks directly to these objectives. For instance, if a key goal is to foster innovation, your podcast can feature discussions on industry trends, interviews with thought leaders, or success stories of innovation within the company.
Many of the Internal Podcasts that we have produced for corporate brands at The Podcast Guys aim to feature voices outside of the leadership team, to showcase talent and real-life stories from the field which offer relatable listening content to your employees.
4) Engaging Employees
The success of an internal podcast hinges on employee engagement. To achieve this, your podcast should be interesting, relatable, and valuable to your employees’ daily work.
Consider involving employees in the podcast, rather than the C-Suite. To keep things really interesting, why not invite questions from your team to answer exclusively on the podcast and highlight recent achievements by some of your key employees to provide that added kudos!
5) Consistency is Key
Regular podcast episodes help in maintaining a consistent line of communication with your employees. A consistent schedule ensures that employees regularly receive updates and insights, keeping them connected and informed about corporate goals and developments.
Most of the internal podcasts we produce for clients at The Podcast Guys, produce episodes bi-weekly or monthly.
6) Measuring Impact
To ensure your podcast is effectively aligning with and supporting your corporate goals, it’s important to measure its impact.
The Podcast Guys will work with you to develop employee surveys, feedback forms, and supply you with engagement metrics such as download data and listen rates.
7) Integrating with Other Communication Channels
For maximum impact, your podcast shouldn’t exist in isolation. Integrate it with other internal communication channels such as newsletters, your intranet, and team meetings.
This ensures a cohesive and multi-channel approach to communicating your corporate goals.
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Still don’t think internal podcasts are a viable option for your business?
Let us illustrate their efficacy with examples from the list of branded podcasts that we’ve had the pleasure to produce:
St. James’s Place:
SJP have been a long-serving client of ours now for years. Whilst we pave the way forward with them these days producing the excellent Everyday’s a School Day with the wonderful Hannah Frame and Nicki Finnigan, which sees their truly innovative and ground-breaking L&D team explore the world of immersive tech and its application within business, we actually started off producing internal mini-series, such as The Art of Communication.
This show, amongst a legion of other internal podcasts we produced for them existed to support their ambitions of upskilling their team in the crucial business skill of communication. Content in this podcast ranged from building self-confidence on sales and marketing telephone calls, to upping presentation skills and shaping personal brandings.
This series allowed us to re-purpose existing written training content of theirs that was beginning to show its age and breathe new life into it through the exciting and engaging medium of podcasts – which saw a massive uptake and renewed interest in internal training across their business.
The Body Shop:
As a global beauty retail company, The Body Shop are a name that we’re sure you’ll know.
What you might not know is that they have 84,000 employees working for them across the world – that’s A LOT of people…
and, obviously, they need to communicate their values & goals with one another and socialise across the business.
Meet The Body Shop: Unfiltered, the internal podcast channel that we set up with the help of the brilliant Anaïs Nebel. This show existed to rejuvenate their brand narrative to their employees, putting the emphasis on them, and their personal journeys – asking them to reflect at their time at The Body Shop and their relationship with their workplace.
The show tackled a range of topics from mental health, confidence, personal brand, inclusivity, and strategic goals talking to a wide range of their staff, from the CEO to Store Managers and more.
This series resulted in a lot more of their internal audience actively engaging with their company culture. The Body Shop saw an uptake of significant engagement from their US/UK markets and even a gradual resonance with employees from their non-English speaking branches, proving that good internal communication and authentic messaging can break down barriers and influence a company for the better.
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Incorporating podcasts into your internal communication strategy offers a dynamic and engaging way to align employees with your corporate goals.
By delivering consistent, relevant, and engaging content, you can enhance understanding and commitment to these objectives across your organisation.
Make podcasting part of your internal communications plan in 2024.
Talk to The Podcast Guys to take your first step towards corporate communication success.
