Podcast Strategy Basics: Choosing Your Format
When a business sits down to create a podcast strategy, one of the very first questions that has to be answered is: what kind of format do we want to use? There are several main formats that exist, but not every format will be appropriate for your business. In this article we’ll take a look at the most common formats and give some context to help you decide whether a given format should be considered for your type of business.
Creative, Mass-Appeal Format
You’ve heard these types of podcasts before. They are highly polished, engaging, story-telling productions that have hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of downloads. Examples include:
Homecoming (one of the first podcasts to jump from this format into television, when it was made into a series by Amazon)
Serial (a true-crime podcast that went viral and got many people into podcasts who had previously never heard of the format)
Podcasts are now being seen as helpful additions to published books, with John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, now releasing a podcast called Bad Blood: The Final Chapter as a very long epilogue as Elizabeth Holmes, the villain at the heart of Bad Blood, goes to trial.
The production quality necessary to pull off such story-telling doesn’t come cheap. It’s not just the need to pay script writers, you’re also going to need sound design in addition to all the standard podcast production basics: editing, mastering, show notes, promotion, etc.
On the very low end, you can expect to spend $6-8k per episode. On the high end, north of $30k. Those numbers don’t matter for companies that have the budget and already have a strong following or community. That’s why you’re seeing Disney and Audible jump into a space that NPR and Gimlet Media were early movers in.
If your company is looking to build brand awareness, has the budget, and doesn’t have a need to show ROI from the project, a creative, mass-appeal podcast may well be worth looking into.
Interview and Networking Format
While the creative and narrative podcasts may get a lot of publicity, interview-based podcasts also garner a large percentage of the attention of podcast listeners. Think of:
The Joe Rogan Experience (this podcast became so popular that Rogan inked a nine-figure deal to have it exclusively on Spotify)
The Tim Ferriss Show (a perfect example of how a book helped launch a podcast)
WTF with Marc Maron (an example of how powerful the format can be: Maron managed to get President Obama on the show)
Now, while getting a $100M deal with Spotify or interviewing a President are great outcomes, they are not what most businesses expect when starting a podcast. But such outcomes make sense when you understand the fundamentals of the interview and networking format:
Networking
Adding value through insights
Content creation
This format costs a fraction of the creative, mass-appeal format, and while ideal for smaller or mid-market companies, can be used for all business sizes.
Networking
Here at Content Allies we actually see networking as the primary value of this podcast format. You have the opportunity to interview industry leaders who may refer you to potential clients or may become clients themselves. But that’s not how the relationship starts: it starts by asking for them to give some of their time to share their wisdom. Necessarily, as an interview progresses, the beginnings of a better understanding of each other are born, and when the podcast is finished and shared, that relationship has a chance to be developed through how the audience responds to what was shared.
Adding Value through Insights
Hand-in-hand with networking is the value creation through thoughtful interview questions. By properly preparing with more questions than you’ll use, you will be prepared to follow the interview down the most fruitful avenues instead of just knocking out a list of questions. There is so much great knowledge locked up in the heads of leaders and market movers that just needs the right question to bring that knowledge out into the open.
Content Creation
It cannot be understated what a fantastic engine podcasts can be for content creation. While it’s obvious that the podcast itself and the corresponding show notes will be positive for SEO, you can also create dozens of smaller pieces of content by slicing up the podcast in different ways. Think of:
Articles that go into more depth or explain material covered in the podcast
Short video clips (if you have a video component to your podcast)
Audiograms (in addition to or in place of video clips)
Quote blocks (great funnels to get people to listen to the entire program)
Before you excitedly start booking guests for your new interview format podcast, a huge mistake we see people make when creating a podcast is building it around what they do. For example, a video production company making a podcast around video production. You can really only invite colleagues/competitors onto the show. This offers you no chance for networking and offers you a limited number of people you can speak to.
What that video production company might do instead is do a podcast about storytelling in general, allowing video, audio, and even written storytellers and their companies to speak about the hows and whys of their work. As we noted above, this will often lead to collaboration and business opportunities, in part because those opportunities were not forced by an obvious device.
Educational Format
We love this format for a number of reasons. We even have one in-house called A Guide to B2B Podcasting. We created it for the same reasons that others may have created an educational format podcast: we had great information to share and, rather than repeat it over and over in a one-on-one format, we decided to bottle up that information in a podcast and share it with everyone, forever. Seth Godin did that in 2013 with his limited-run Startup School podcast.
While you can continue on indefinitely in this format, Godin’s podcast was only 15 episodes and has never been updated.
Three big wins for this format are:
Sales enablement (you can give your sales team great resources to help them bring on new clients)
Customer success (you can outline a path for new customers to learn how to use your products and services better, in concert with or as a replacement for a traditional email autoresponder)
Repurposing existing content (you can take webinars and conference presentations you have given and present them in this format)
Remember that having an interview and networking podcast doesn’t rule out you doing an educational one as well. Just remember to be smart in how you deploy your time and resources for podcasts. They can really eat up a lot of time if you don’t know what you’re doing.
In-house Education
An interesting variant that we have seen at some companies is the use of an external host to interview subject matter experts on a team, to share that expertise with everyone in a useful and engaging manner.
Consulting Format
You might be familiar with the Dave Ramsey Show, in which callers call in about their financial problems and, after getting verbally beat up by Dave, get some personalized advice for their specific situations. Think about that in a B2B format and you have More Cheese, Less Whiskers hosted by Dean Jackson. On each episode you’ll hear him give an unscripted brainstorm of a particular business.
This format doesn’t really offer the same level of networking that the interview format does, but it can lead to direct customers if the people who you brainstorm with decide to hire you for some specific services.
Panel Format
This format is particularly hard in a podcast format because it requires a lot more scripting to make sure that one person doesn’t dominate the conversation. The scripting is necessary because when panel discussions are in-person, people can associate a voice with a person they are seeing on a stage, whereas in an audio format that visual sense can’t work, so speakers have to consistently be set up by a host.
This can be a good option for an internal podcast, when the listeners will know, by voice, all of the speakers.
While there are certainly other podcast formats we haven’t mentioned here, these are the most relevant for those considering B2B podcasts, and the most successful B2B podcasts are in these formats or are mix-and-matches of them.
Have a topic you want to see us cover on the podcast? Write to our host at hello@contentallies.com.
This episode is brought to you by Content Allies.
Content Allies helps B2B companies launch revenue-generating podcasts. From startups to Fortune 500s, we have helped some of the world's leading companies build and run profitable podcasts. Contact us for your free podcast consultation at ContentAllies.com