What is podcasting for brands all about? I've produced over 1000 podcasts and worked with brands like McKinsey, IBM and AirAsia in my time. And I found that the problem roughly breaks into three areas for brands. One is concept, two is conversation and three is community. Let me break these down for you. One concept. A business podcast is fundamentally different from a consumer podcast. Now that's a challenge because most of what we understand and experience in podcasting today is popularized through consumer podcasts names, such as Serial; that true crime podcasts that brought millions to the format from Serial to Real Dictators to My Favorite Murder. Rich audio, narrative formats, deep in storytelling and research have really pushed the envelope in terms of what's possible in podcasting today. And while these consumer podcasts raise the bar of expectation for everybody, they are not business podcasts. They certainly give us ideas about how we can increase engagement with audiences and produce more engaging narratives for business podcast. But their objectives are different. Whereas the goal of a consumer podcast is ultimately to create advertising real estate. For business, the concept is different. So what is the concept of a business podcast? Ultimately a business podcast has to move the needle on the business objectives. Those business objectives can be one of four potential outcomes with a podcast. Firstly, campaign awareness. Secondly, brand authority. Thirdly, news and analysis and lastly business development. I'll share how that works in this guide. These all boil down to ultimately Thought Leadership because Thought Leadership means attention and attention leads to trust and trust converts into business outcomes. So, how do you convert all those amazing conversations and that talent within your organization into content that people care about? This is the second area for podcasting, for brands, which is conversation. In podcasting for brands, conversation challenges often manifest in a number of different questions. Those questions can be, for example, who hosts our branded podcast? Secondly, people may be wondering who they should get as guests. Thirdly, do we use the podcast to sell our products and services or do we talk about other things? And most commonly asked, what should we call our branded podcast? The last challenge for brands when it comes to starting and building successful podcast is community. Because without a community, every podcast is simply a vanity project. As our client podcasts grow, one of the areas we focus more time on is audience building. Once you're through the proof of concept, stage two is all about engaging your community and growing your audience. And to do this, we found that you need a number of factors, which I'll talk about in this guide. Firstly, you need good data. Understanding of what's worked in the past, but also understanding of what's working on store with platforms like Spotify and Apple. These platforms have hundreds of millions of listeners. And if you understand how they work and design your podcast with them in mind, you can tap into large jet streams of organic audience. That's why one of the things I'll stress in podcasting for brands is working smarter as opposed to working harder and this is no different when it comes to building an audience. As they say in the old world, if you want to find the gold, mine where the gold is. and the gold is on Spotify and Apple. The last factor to consider in podcast audience growth is how do you relate to the community? How is your podcast taking them on a journey? Quite often when a brand comes to me with a podcast idea. It starts with a conversation about, this is what we want to talk about. My challenge is to take that starting step and help the client realize that ultimately it's about what the audience wants to he