#content-podcasting

Totally agree there's a lot of ways to look at it @Anne Merkert. Little challenging to answer the question without knowing the audience (eg. consumers vs. B2B partners) and intent. That said, pragmatic content could work. To me, it's dependent upon format and whether it feels forced/natural to the approach.

Here are two different podcasts I developed, where one felt a little more forced and the other worked more naturally because of the approach:

For one—the product related content was around software helping businesses with digital transformation. Each episode had two separate interviews, one (my client's) customer story and the other a celebrity/influencer's (who helped draw traffic) story, each speaking about personal or business transformations. It kind of worked—but it felt a little unnatural since the audiences for these types of transformation stories were different. The customer story included pragmatic advice about tools/software (that the company's service supported)—which was very different than the personal triumph/pivot stories of the celebrity/influencer.

Comparatively, I also developed Floodgate VC Mike Maples Jr podcast Starting Greatness—where the product was his advice on how to scale a startup. The product we were selling here was Mike's frameworks for how to scale startups (so it is thought leadership). (His goal was to win deals with startup founders—so impressing them with his strategy/advise/network were important.) The format we took was a Q&A interview with a celebrity/startup founder explaining their experience doing X/Y/Z—married with a shorter form episode that featured a particular framework of Mike's that was illustrated/tied to the interviewee's experience. In this instance, because the pragmatic content was so intrinsic to the interview which the audience was seeking to listen to—it worked. Had we just done a podcast that focused solely on Mike's frameworks (the short form episodes), I think the podcast would have felt like a lecture and wouldn't have been as successful.

Similarly, if you do episodes of content that are solely about applications of the product—I'd suspect they'd feel like webinars or tutorials—whereas the most successful podcasts tend to be tied to storytelling.

this is great, very helpful

Awesome! Starting Greatness is one of my favorites, glad to know you helped develop it @David Johnson-Igra

Hey @Anne Merkert! Here’s some background on our two podcasts, which might help you in considering those two directions:

Our first show began in the early pandemic days, with our CEO talking to agency leaders about what changes they were seeing in the marketing landscape. It’s morphed into exactly that kind of top of funnel, thought leadership series you mention, where we’ve now talked with everyone from Rand Fishkin to @Jimmy Daly (Superpath) to Peep Laja on a huge range of marketing and entrepreneurial topics. While it isn’t geared exactly towards our target audience, it’s had a few major benefits:
• lots of visibility for our CEO/host and brand with social sharing and distribution
• steady stream of interesting content for our blog, email, etc.
• halo effect by connecting with well-known names and providing actually interesting insights
• genuine enjoyment - our CEO loves having these types of high-level conversations, and it’s a cool way to connect with folks he wouldn’t otherwise have an excuse to sit down with for an hour
On the flip side, we’re now starting a second podcast (hosted by @Ryan Sargent) where he’ll be talking peer-to-peer with other Directors of Content around a consistent, tactical set of topics: how they set up their team, workflows and tools, getting buy-in for content, etc. As a content creation platform, this is much more closely aligned with our target audience, both in terms of the guests and listeners.

These are two very different podcasts, but they both feel natural for us because of who’s hosting and how we’ve set them up. Trying to have our CEO do a more tactical show on the nitty-gritty of podcast creation, for example, would not go as well or be nearly as enjoyable for him (and that enjoyment matters when he’s responsible for doing an interview every week!) Giving him the chance to freewheel with other smart industry leaders, on the other hand, is perfect.

There’s also a symbiosis between these two shows because we can have the CEO of a potential client on podcast #1 and get an intro to their head of content for podcast #2, or vice versa, and build multiple relationships within the company.