How Podcasts Fuel Content Strategy (Plus, Our Brand-New AI Search Function!)

November 26, 2024

Even if you're currently maintaining a content library of your old webinars, events, and other materials — which, kudos to you because that's hard work! — it can still be tricky to figure out how to best repurpose and reuse that content.

To find out how podcasts can help, Goldcast's VP of Marketing, Kelly Cheng, met with Founder and CEO of Share Your Genius, Rachel Elsts Downey. Rachel shared her expertise on why podcasts are taking the B2B world by storm, how to measure podcast success, and how to think about repurposing on purpose.

Read on to learn:

  • Podcasts are in their B2B era
  • Why people watch their podcasts now
  • 3 goals you can achieve with podcasts
  • How to measure podcast success
  • Repurpose on purpose
  • Reminder: Just because you're tired of it doesn't mean your audience is!
  • Easily scan your content library with AI Search
  • Podcasting frequently asked questions (FAQs)

You can always watch the full episode below, too!

WATCH ON DEMAND

Podcasts are in their B2B era

Podcasts are certainly not new; in fact, they date back to the 1980s! Yet you may have noticed that B2B podcasts and video podcasts are on the rise lately.

Rachel thinks this is because people are hungry for genuine connection, and the best way to connect with someone is through conversation. Podcasts are a great way to get that need met! While not every podcast is interview-based, people still respond to hearing the host engage in rhetoric, and podcasts typically feel organic and in-the-moment in a way that rehearsed lectures do not.

Podcasts also happen to be great candidates for repurposing because they typically come along with a ton of video and audio content that was recorded during the production process. Plus, for brands that work with contract writers or ghostwriters to create content, the recorded conversations are the best way to create on-brand content for your multi-channel strategy.

And podcasts present low barriers to entry! You can create a podcast pretty fast, with no hefty equipment investment. All of these factors combined have led to more businesses getting in on the podcast game.

Why people watch their podcasts now

In the last couple of years, the way people consume podcasts has drastically changed. When Rachel started her company in 2016, almost all (93%) of podcast consumption happened on Apple Podcasts, which offers an audio-only experience.

Today, Rachel notes that consumption has fallen to around 12%. Most people now catch up with podcasts on YouTube — which, as we all know, is a video-first platform.

This trajectory shows why offering video options to your audience is important. Where audio allows us to hear people's tone of voice and inflection, video takes it to the next level by showing us body language and facial expressions, completing the picture.

People want video options when they're on their mobile devices, scrolling through their feeds. Whether you're creating a podcast or another type of content, be sure to offer video whenever possible!

3 goals you can achieve with podcasts

There are three major goals you can work toward with a podcast:

  1. Organic growth: You can build your brand, showcase your personality, and own your space.
  2. Demand: You can drive demand by strategically building relationships that are going to help your business.
  3. Audience expansion: If you're launching into a new space and need an audience there, or if you want to engage with your existing audience more often or in a different way, podcasts can help.

While all of those goals matter, Rachel recommends honing in on one so you can assess your efforts in the podcast channel.

How to measure podcast success

Let's say you pick demand as your goal. How can you measure if your efforts are successful?

The power of three applies here again; ask these questions as you analyze the data:

  1. Am I growing? Look at your brand channels. Are you seeing positive growth? Is your reach growing every time you look at the data, whether that's biweekly or monthly?
  2. How is my content performing? How much time are people spending with your brand? How much of the episode are they listening to? Are you seeing upticks in social engagement?
  3. Is my audience taking the intended action? Are people doing what you asked them to do on the podcast? That might be following the show, subscribing to the show, signing up for an event, or something else.

There may be other factors you consider as well, like website traffic, since podcasts can push people to learn more about you outside of the podcast episode. Or if you're focusing on relationship-building, you might consider how many people are saying yes when you ask them to be on the show. Higher numbers would be a good sign.

Remember: It all comes down to human connection. The only way to drive sales and revenue is through connection and conversation. When you're coming up with metrics to evaluate your performance, keep that at the heart of your analysis!

Repurpose on purpose

Video ensures your podcasts become a lasting part of your long-term content strategy and allow you to be a multimodal creator, distributing text, audio, and video assets to your audience in all the places they hang out.

When Rachel's working on a show, she's thinking of it as both audio and video. She's proactively thinking about all of the distribution channels they'll be using to promote and repurpose the content — and this isn't just a random, peanut-butter-spread-everywhere repurpose effort.

This is intentional repurposing!

For example, she's thinking about LinkedIn and the native social content that works best there. How can the team use the show to help design for that?

Maybe Rachel even has the host of the podcast ask five questions of every single guest specifically for social. Those questions won't ever make it into the podcast itself because they don't fit the premise, BUT they can be turned into video shorts, used as sales enablement clips, or posted on social.

Reminder: Just because you're tired of it doesn't mean your audience is!

We're calling this out separately because it's such a common trap. Don't think that because your message is already out there, you shouldn't post about it anymore.

Your audience likely hasn't even seen your messages yet! How many people are actually reading each and every post in their feed?

When you hit a creative wall or feel like things are getting stagnant, it's time to repurpose. Find new ways to get your same messages out there. (We've got a great hack coming up next that will show you how to do exactly that in just seconds!)

Easily scan your content library with AI Search

Let's say that you want to repurpose content around a specific topic. How can you find video clips about that one topic without going through every single video in your library?

We just released a very exciting new feature called AI Search that allows you to scan through your entire content library and find clips that match your search! Let's take a look at how it works:

As you can see in the video, Rachel's Content Lab contains all of her recordings. Using the AI Search bar, she can search specifically for one of her client's segments called "Unpopular Opinions." AI Search will crawl the entire library — no matter how big — and then return any relevant clips!

You can also use AI Search to:

  • Generate multimodal social clips to post on LinkedIn and other sites
  • Easily edit the clip or captions
  • Change the color or branding
  • Adjust layouts to optimize for different sites
  • And so much more!

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There are so many use cases for AI Search. You could start asking each guest a question for research purposes, and then scan your library for that question to get all of the answers and analyze the results. Or you could take a question you get a lot from your audience, search your library, and see if there are video clips you can share to answer that question. The list goes on!

Want to give AI Search a try? Sign up for Content Lab today for free! You'll get to upload five hours of videos to play with and one hour of video each month after that. We're looking forward to seeing how you revolutionize your workflows!

TRY CONTENT LAB

Podcasting frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Q: What if I don't have the budget or bandwidth to create video versions of my podcast? Can I just repurpose the audio?

A: First, is this truly a budget or bandwidth issue?

Remember that you can still create great videos even if you're primarily gearing for audio or podcast distribution. Videos don't have to be hard to make! There are low-cost platforms like Riverside that you can use to capture both the audio and the video, and then you can splice that up and distribute it accordingly.

Ultimately, the answer is yes, audio can still work — but we think it's also possible to create video even with the constraints you're working with.

Q: Starting a new podcast feels so intimidating! Do I really have to do two episodes a month? What's the bare minimum I need to do to get started?

A: Begin with your goal. If you're trying to grow an audience on the podcast channel, then consistency does matter, and two episodes a month is a good starting point.

However, if you're just trying to fuel your content strategy, you don't have to worry about consistency as much. For B2B brands with small marketing teams who want more content assets, a weekly or biweekly show might not make sense.

If more content is your goal, you should instead focus on doing an intentional show that aligns with your content pillars. Then, you can take your recordings and turn it into other pieces of content via Content Lab to distribute across platforms!

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