Why Your Business Should Use Podcasts to Understand Word of Mouth

If you are selling any kind of product or service, no matter if it’s consumer or B2B – it’s essential to understand what people are saying in your niche. The better you understand your audience, the more equipped you are to sell them your product or service.

The problem is that word of mouth is hard to capture and quantify. The ultimate ideal is to know everything everyone is saying at all times. Not only is this unethical, but impossible. Today, companies can learn what people are saying on social media, but we’d argue that’s not the best indicator of word of mouth because social media content is ephemeral and constantly being generated. Besides, one sentence in a random post doesn’t provide the context you need to fully understand what public consensus is.

In this article, we discuss why podcasts are the best way to understand word of mouth, and how you can capture word of mouth with Podchaser Alerts.

Why Podcasts Are The Best Way to Understand Word of Mouth

Podcasts are Longform

As we mentioned earlier, true understanding of word of mouth takes time. You need to give your potential customers lots of time to fully explain their opinions.

The average podcast episode is 41 minutes, so when people talk about what you’re interested in, they do it for a while. This massive amount of context is extremely helpful for businesses, and unique to podcasting. 

Not only do you have the words, but you can hear the tone and emotion of the hosts’ voices adding an extra layer of information for your word of mouth research.

Podcasts are Authentic

While there is some aspect of performance inherent to podcasting, by and large, the opinions people share on podcasts are their honest beliefs. This authenticity is a major appeal of podcasts for the audience, and has come to be one of the mediums biggest strengths for businesses as well. 

Advertisers love that they can tap into authenticity for host-read ad reads, and PR professionals love using it to promote their clients with podcast guesting. For word of mouth, authenticity is crucial. Luckily, podcasting has that in spades.

Capturing Word of Mouth with Podchaser Alerts

The question remains of how you capture word of mouth on podcasts. Unless you are superhuman, you can’t listen to the mind-melting amount of content the 4.5 million available podcasts produce everyday.

Luckily, as a part of Podchaser’s mission to turn that firehose of content into a drinking fountain of knowledge, we created a way to capture word of mouth: Podchaser Alerts

Podchaser Alerts is the most comprehensive media monitoring solution for podcasts. Alerts track titles and descriptions of every new episode, and new episode transcripts from the top 5,000 podcasts. Alerts allows you to track podcast episodes for your target keyphrase and receive daily alerts of new mentions. 

Once you’ve set up your alerts, leave the rest to us. You’ll receive a daily email highlighting all the recent episodes that have mentioned your keywords, plus the timestamp of when in the episode the keyword is mentioned so you can access the crucial context to understand the mention.

Create your first alert for free by visiting your My Alerts page.