Now we need to know our target market to fully explore this topic. To understand this, we need to know how local is local? Where I live 400 people covers the locals. Do I need to start a podcast for them or would a letterbox drop make more sense? Now if I lived 15 minutes up the road in a town of 20,000 then a local podcast would make more sense. In that town there are three, at least three, disability services. New ones seem to be popping up and dropping out all the time. The big three aren’t just in my local township, technically a city but you know what I mean. One covers the neighbouring local council areas as well as the major regional city and has just expanded into the state capital.
For them a local podcast would cover the state. The thing is, our RSS feed doesn’t limit listeners to geographic areas, usually. A podcast using explicit language is restricted geographically but I’m going to assume a disability service isn’t going to publish one of those.
The two non-state wide services cover our region. That’s their local area.
So how does a local podcast work?
The nature of podcasting means we may be aiming at locals but we can be picked up by anyone with an interwebs connection anywhere in the world. That may be fine, locals who now live elsewhere, people who might want to visit your area because of your content. The point though is to focus on the locals. The process of publishing content directed at the “local” niche, whatever you define as local, will resonate with those locals.
Think of it this way. You are an archer. The target you are aiming at has locals on the bull’s eye. The next ring out it has people who live near your locale, the next ring is people who used to live where you are servicing and so on until the outermost ring has people with little or no connection with the area you’re focusing on.
Knowing this allows you to focus your content to the inner ring. Say a season on how your clients and staff are part of local sporting clubs. The inclusion angle alone would make great episodes. Once you start following individuals through a season, winning or not, will show not tell your listeners how you make a difference in these people’s lives.
Aimed directly at the local. The next ring out would cover teams your local team plays against. People are happy to have their names mentioned and could be potential listeners who may wish to move into the sector as employees or use your service as clients. And people move house. They may do it for employment and/or services or they may just want to “come home” and any number of other reasons. You though are established as the service in the area for work and service provision.
If people overseas or interstate listen, so what? Well maybe there’s possibilities for collaboration. For interservice holiday provisions. Your service is in Tasmania, your podcast is picked up in New Zealand or the US or the EU or in all of these places by other services. The possibilities are endless. Zoom connections across the world, holiday swaps with built in support networks or just places to visit on holidays, depending upon client choices, capacities and senses of adventure.
The local aspect sells your service to your locals and this is the primary point of your podcast but never discount the synergies that may arise from that.
A local podcast is quite possible, indeed desirable.
Contact Jon:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrjonmoore/
or email at: jon@mrjonmoore.com