Blogging vs Podcasting: Which Is Better For Your Marketing?

In October last year, marketing guru Seth Godin published a piece announcing that “podcasting is the new blogging”. Cue the sound of marketing plans being ripped up and podcast microphone order confirmations hitting inboxes around the world. I had a few wobbly people message me asking what to do with their blogs now: could they still carry on with them? and “I don’t really want to do a podcast but…”.

I get that people are torn. You don’t want to be falling behind, the slow adopter that misses out while everyone else cashes in with their podcasts. You don’t want to go against the experts who ‘know more than you’. So here I want to look at both sides of blogging and podcasting, as someone who does both in equal measure, and clarify some basic truths about content marketing to help you find the direction that’s right for you.

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Podcasting is, unquestionably, possibly the way to connect with your audience, particularly as a service-based business. There is no place more intimate you can be as a businessowner than in earbuds within earholes. The listener (your possible customer) is able to connect with you on a very human level, get to know your voice and approach, and imagine one day having this conversation in a more two-way form with you. It’s a wonderful place to share ideas and what you stand for, demonstrating your expertise in a personable way. Because your voice becomes the soundtrack to their commutes, thoughtful walks or days in the studio, you become like a trusted colleague and are able to set the tone for a future working relationship.

And in practical terms, visitors to the podcast section of my website overtook visitors to my blog within a few short months of Grow With Soul launching last year. Which tells us that my audience, at least, are big into podcasts and are choosing to consume content that way.

HOWEVER.

There are limits to what else a podcast can do for your marketing beyond connection. It can’t help you show up on keyword searches, it can’t have links or calls to action, it can’t be skimmed through to get a salient piece of information. With step-by-step guides or recipes, it’s impractical as listeners will have to keep pausing and rewinding. If you’re trying to explain a complex topic it’s hard to get the right words in the right order when speaking aloud, and if you want to do an in-depth feature quoting sources and authors it’s going to be really clunky.

But what can do all of those things? You guessed it: blogging.

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THE TRUTH ABOUT MARKETING IS, THERE IS NO ONE THING.

No one wants to hear that, not really; they want to know the guaranteed, surefire, 10/10 strategy that they can just do to make all their dreams come true. That’s why, to borrow an analogy from Paul Jarvis, the online marketing world is like 6 year olds playing football: there are no positions on the pitch as everyone is just chasing the ball around, clustering round it and elbowing everyone else out of the way. The ball has been webinars, it’s been talking to camera on Instagram Stories, and now it’s podcasts.

The reason that there are so many different channels, activities and things to do for your marketing is because they all work together as a whole. Your Instagram nudges people to your website, your blog nudges them to your mailing list, your mailing list to purchase. A blog and a podcast can work in tandem; because being in my earholes is such an intimate space I’m not going to let everyone in, I want to read a few blogs first to see if I want you in there. Marketing activities are tiny stepping stones towards an end goal, rather than one quick jump.

I’m not saying you have to do it all, though. Going back to the football, you’ve got to find your position on the field. No one knows you, your work and your strengths better than you. Play to them. Know that you’re a visual processor? Double down on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, fill your website with images and keep your newsletters brief. Are you always better in person? Then podcasting and chatting on Stories is going to be where you thrive. If we think about marketing as a machine, you don’t need every single cog turning to still have movement – just the strongest ones.

Ultimately, what I want you to take away from this post is this:

The content of the content is what’s important, not the format.

What’s important here are your ideas, your stories, the knowledge you have to share. If they are honest, valuable and resonant, people will engage with them no matter what format they’re in – after all, who’s not going to read something which will solve their big problem just because it’s not in podcast form?

And all that time you’re spending agonising over whether to podcast or blog, WordPress or Squarespace, Stories or caption, there’s only one thing happening – you’re not sharing those ideas. You’re not putting your work out into the world, you’re not providing value, you’re not being seen, you’re not making a difference. This is just another form of procrastination. The format doesn’t matter. Just publish that content.

And to illustrate all of this, the fact that there is no one thing, that all activities work together, that format isn’t important: what did Seth Godin use to share that podcasting is the new blogging? A goddamn blog post.

All this is why in Campfire, we focus on the content of content. We look at how to consistently generate great, on-brand, valuable ideas and plan how these are going to be published and work with the rest of the cogs in your marketing machine. We use blogging as the basic example of this, but what you learn is equally transferable to your podcast, YouTube channel or Instagram (it’s the method I use to come up with content ideas across all my channels, after all). So if you’ve read this and thought ‘but I don’t know what my ideas are’ or ‘what is the content of my content’ Campfire might be for you. We start next week, and it’ll be lovely to have you.