If you need new, fresh marketing initiatives, then evolve your advertising to include a podcast. A podcast is a radio or video show that is streamed online or downloaded. Podcasts are most often listened to on portable media players. This medium is on the forefront of gaining better understanding of your audience and, therefore, more leads.The podcast, theoutdoorsation.co.uk showed a boost of 20% in sales of products mentioned in his podcast. This week, we’re giving you three ways a podcast will help your business, and next week we’ll outline exactly how to set up a podcast:

Be seen as an expert—With 2015 being the year of content marketing, businesses want to deliver any content while being perceived as an expert. Podcasts allow you to do just that—advertise your best knowledge. What are you passionate about? What do you consider yourself an expert on? Ponder those questions and then start a podcast on a particular topic.

Focused audience—Podcasts can cover any topic. You can be as broad as “Marketing 101” or as narrow as “Social Media Marketing for Print Shops.” But, this ability to create narrowly-focused shows automatically attracts other businesses as leads. Podcasts have a more loyal audience, because it’s seen less as advertising and more as building a client relationship through free deliverable content.

Costs little money—The beauty about using a podcast as advertising, is that it costs almost no money. All you need is your time, your knowledge and a computer. If your podcasts gain a large audience, then you may be investing in books and other resources to create more content. Otherwise, podcasts are a no-brainer.