Video, Storytelling, and Podcast Series - Under $250,000

Description:
"Heart of the Big Bend" is a podcast about visiting Alpine and the Big Bend region, featuring popular evergreen episodes on visiting Big Bend National Park and other area attractions as well as highlights of Alpine's amenities: downtown murals, the Museum of the Big Bend, historic preservation and the local music scene. The show is a partnership with local radio stations KVLF & KALP, who handle the audio production and do a local broadcast of each episode every other Friday. The hybrid broadcast/podcast model allows the show to fulfill multiple purposes for different audiences simultaneously, building community with ongoing subscribers, reaching potential visitors through search results during their trip planning, and engaging/serving the resident community through the local radio broadcast. "Heart of the Big Bend" won the 2022 statewide Texas Travel Award for Best Travel Destination Podcast.

Objectives:
1. Presence in multiple channels -adding the podcast "covers another base" in our content offerings on social platforms, etc. 2. Local engagement -the largest listenership for the show is actually the local radio broadcast. A recent survey by the radio stations placed Heart of the Big Bend among their top-voted favorite shows. The broadcasts provide visibility for what the DMO is doing to further the interests of the local community, as well as encouraging residents to take advantage of the area parks and other attractions that can be forgotten in the grind of the day to day. 3. Community building - the show is prominently featured on the website home page and recent podcast episodes are highlighted in our monthly email newsletter. The podcast feed has had8,217 plays across 57 episodes. This isa fairly modest number, but we are finding that podcast listeners are quite engaged. We regularly get comments in the Alpine Visitor Center from visitors who have listened to several episodes before making their trip. 4. SEO benefits - We are gradually producing transcripts of the most popular episodes and/or ones with a strong niche audience (such as "Birding in the Big Bend"). This should give those episode pages more traction with search engines and improve discoverability on web search as well as in podcast listening apps.


Project Costs: $150 per episode for production and radio broadcast, plus staff time for scheduling and interviewing guests.$15 per automatic transcript, plus staff time to make corrections.

https://visitalpinetx.com/podcast

In-house or Agency: In-house