Amplifying your Content (Audio Companion)

Leveraging your podcast to supercharge a content strategy and get the maximum efficiency for your messages.

Each individual podcast episode can be used to create a whole wave of content. This can be pushed out across all of your channels. Then, it’s not just the immediate audio listener-ship that generates the value for you. All of the subsequent readers and viewers who are touched by your content across all platforms will benefit.

Think of it like a theme – whatever you’re discussing in your podcast becomes the theme that you share in your other messaging. If you think of it systematically, you could consider what values you want to represent. How you want audiences to see you? What topics do you want to highlight?

This podcast episode is an audio companion to the blog article “Extending the Content Conversation”

Episode Transcription

0:21
Hi, this is Martin Franklin. Welcome to Metapod. This episode is an audio companion piece to run alongside a blog article I wrote called Extending the Content Conversation. There’s often a sense that podcasts are separate entities that sit outside of an organization’s wide communications or content strategy.

Viewing your podcast as an integral part, if not, the actual hub of your messaging, will let you maximize the potential to bring your key topics to life for your audience. We’re going to look at a few examples of using a single podcast to create the audio content, or blog piece, or pre episode social post or post episode social post, a transcription and a video.

1:03
So the real watchword for this way of thinking is economy, you can make the effort that goes into producing your audio episode, work that much harder and traveled that much farther, with only a small amount of extra resourcing. So each individual episode can be used to create a whole wave of content that can be pushed out across your channels.

Ducks In A Row

1:25
When I talk to people about more kind of broader digital strategies, I often use this idea of identifying each month, what are the key topics they want to talk about. And it’s usually connected with a product or a new new announcement that they’re making. And so that makes it easy. So if they’ve got a new course coming out, or a new book coming out, or any sort of key event like that, then it’s easy to say, Okay, this month, that’s what you talk about, you don’t talk about anything else. It’s about your core piece of content, and anything that sort of surrounds that. So in the same way, you can be using a podcast to expound different kinds of details about something which is either a value use support, or a feature that is connected with one of the products that you roll out, or something which is sort of connected with brand new, or any of those sort of distinguishing things, and you just pick one, and then decide – okay, this month, we’re going to have a number of responsive slots where we can sort of interact with things that are going on around us and maybe comment on those. But then in terms of our actual content that we’re pushing out, it’s going to be about this and there’ll be a podcast, and then we’ll do a video version of that podcast. And we’ll do a blog article that quotes from that podcast. And then we’ll pick out a few headlines. And we’ll spin those out as as graphic tiles.

Audiograms

So right away, the popular short audiogram videos give you a new piece of content for your social channels. This can either announce the new episode, or feature a little bit of that episode in there, along with some eye catching visuals, super common, I know. But it’s just saying this is a thing that you could be doing, which uses the same piece of podcast content, but takes a little headline out of it and a little tantalizing grab.

3:17
Here’s a couple of recent ones that we produced here. First one is from the REIQ’s Property Brief, hosted by Rob Dorey.

“G’day I’m Rob Dorey. Join me this week for the latest episode of the REIQ Property Brief podcast.

I went to Butterfield Street, Hurston which is a CBD location, one or one and a half k’s out of the city. It was pitch black and literally it felt third world I didn’t even recognize the street, a street that I’ve kind of lived around for years. Most of those streets are still without power. A lot of people have been eating canned food for the week because they don’t have power. They don’t have a car. And yet just because the street looks clean and clear again, we forget that there’s still trauma there.”

Sarah Butler, REIQ Property Brief

This show’s actually paused at the moment, but I still love it. It’s the Fintalking podcast.

The accumulation phase whilst it’s pretty new, it’s pretty robust, but the D cumulation phase yeah is a is a bit more challenging. And she had likened it to a half built car, and then sort of saying what we’re asking people to do then is to then finish building it. Here’s the spanner here’s the wrench Go Go sorted out that really resonated with it. I heard this years and years ago but it just to me that visual image of that half built car and the poor retiree trying to build it to have a really happy and fulfilled and financially sort of healthy retirement is a big undertaking.

Erica Hall, Fintalking

So these grabs have accompanying bits of animation and video to go along with them: You can post them as native content directly into your LinkedIn into your Facebook. And then they become searchable on those platforms,

Whatever you do, don’t put them on YouTube, and then put a link in another platform, because people won’t go off platform to watch this stuff, it has to be in the feed that they’re scrolling at that moment.

AI Transcriptions

5:26
So, next piece of content, and it’s really, my thought is kind of, you can get two pieces of content out of this if if you’ve got the resources to do that. So the no-brainer piece is the transcription of the podcast, you can get an AI transcription, which is 90% accurate at this point in 2022, probably in 2023, it’ll be 95 99%. Accurate, who knows?

There’s a bit of variability with accents and the quality of audio recording that it’s being uploaded to the AI transcriptions at the moment. But it’s, it’s easy, and then that gives you an absolute flying start. If you want to go through your transcription and correct the names and any of the technical terms which the the AI didn’t get, right. That’s it. Put a couple of subheadings in there to help people understand what it is that they’re reading. And you’ve pretty much got an article right, right there – super searchable, and you can publish that alongside the podcast release.

And the other thing that I think is, anyone who’s got an interest in the topics under discussion, will have some sort of reflections after they’ve had the conversation about that topic in their podcast. So it wouldn’t be that much work to then summarize your response and your feelings and the highlights that you the kind of takeaways that you got from the conversation, I guess. And then intersperse that with a few a few quotes and make that another standalone blog piece.

All of it kind of has a nice synergy. They also mutually support each other.

Here Be Treasure – Easy Articles

Here be Treasure. That’s a great sub-heading. Now I’m going through my blog article, (it’s really interesting to contrast how you write things with how you say them). In this point, I’m trying to convey where there’s value, I guess. So gaining an expert opinion, from the guests on your podcast through conversation, and allowing them to voice a novel thought is a huge win.

So that’s the point – that if you get someone who’s an expert in their field, then quite likely will have said what they say a number of times, probably on a lot of the other podcasts which they speak on. And maybe they’ve written about it, people do this, they have these little snippets that they sort of store away, and then they’ll just retrieve those and roll them out every time something kind of needs illustrating in that in that field. But if your interview technique just has a little bit of flexibility, and a little bit of ability to dig deeper, and ask those follow up questions and tease out some kind of novel thought from that expert, then there’s your treasure, there’s your gold nugget, because they’ve said something on the spur of the moment that they haven’t said before, and possibly haven’t even thought of before. There we go. That’s podcast gold dust, when you get that stuff. You can make that a headline or quote, run with it in your blog articles, because you’ve actually done a unique piece of journalism there.

8:41
I’ve got another example of this in the article which once again, it comes from the Fintalking podcast who on their website, they’ve created a section called insights, which I quite like. It’s drawing stuff out from the podcast and running alongside other finance related articles, which is the theme that they generally explore in the podcast.

Graphic Small Bites

9:06 Graphic quotes are a good one. I’ve got a couple of examples here from the Net Positive podcast, which we produced is run by a company called Upflowy in Sydney, and features conversations with pretty well established product marketers, and product developers who work in the digital space. So they’ve got people from Atlassian from Canva, pretty big names, that they they get on to talk about some of the mechanics and the sort of insider stuff in that industry. So what they’ve done after that is do a series of both video grabs, but also just graphic tiles, which just have like three or four lines that the guest has said with a bit of attribution name and company name.

10:00
It just gives another kind of easy piece of content not really like fancy design or anything. But it’s another easy piece of content that’s drawn out from the podcast and kind of create that wraparound effect. What I’ve got here, I’ve got another great example here from one of my favorite podcasters Anna Dower, The Uncool Designer.

Anna wrote a blog post and simultaneously released her podcast episode titled “The Uncontrollable”, both of those pieces of content approach the same topic, but in different formats. It’s like an opportunity to read a book or have 20 minutes with the author of that book, both valuable but different experiences.

Hello, welcome to the uncool designer, it is Anna here. And I’m finally finally diving into 2022. I know it has been hard to get this year started. I know, I’ve been listening to designers who are all struggling to jump into the new year, I feel exactly the same. I’m here today to talk about when life gets in the way of business, and motivation, and how we deal with that. And I’m going to also talk about how to set goals for the new year that you can actually achieve. If you are on my email newsletter list, you would have received an email from me talking about how I haven’t worked in my business for the last two months. That’s probably the biggest break I’ve ever taken from my business. Even when I’ve had babies. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. And it wasn’t something I planned. I definitely didn’t have control over it. And it kind of sent me into a spiral of stress, anxiety and guilt, all of those really shitty emotions that are not productive or motivating at all. So I want to talk about that.

Anna Dower, The Uncool Designer

And this topic of the uncontrollable was basically exploring this theme of how you can be sort of motivated and continue to progress your career or your your self employed business while navigating through the sort of uncontrollable currents of life when stuff just happens around you. And how do you deal with that, you know, if something is happening in your personal life, which takes you off the roadmap that you had to kind of release your new product or just kind of advanced things so that you’re delivering projects and earning money. How do you how do you cope with those things?

So yeah, it’s really nice blog post and podcast episode.

Video Version

So we’re already kind of talking about this idea of multi-platform use of our content, and lots of podcasts are already doing this and already kind of rolling with it. But converting your audio into video is also not that hard. Obviously, you’ve got two approaches, one of which is to actually video, the recording of the podcast with cameras. And in the case where you’ve got multiple people talking, you know, sometimes that’s actually not not a small undertaking to produce video.

But with a heap of people now doing remote interviews, you’ve got your recorded Zoom chat, or Riverside FM chat, if you’re using a more high quality platform. That gives you something which is, you know, more or less, it’s kind of 80% there already, you might want to do a little post production to it just to kind of up the quality of the video. But either doing that, or creating some kind of simple animation and then using that to support the audio, exporting it as a video and putting it on YouTube is the other. The other approach. My feeling is that a YouTube audience is a different audience to your podcast listenership.

14:35
It’s that sort of difference between audio and video and the kind of levels of attention that each of those mediums ask of us. Audio is much more relaxed, it’s happy to sort of sit, sit back and let you come in, but equally, if you’re doing something else at the same time, that’s okay. Audio doesn’t mind. So it has a whole have different sort of emotional and practical considerations around it. Whereas video, you might as well think of video, like TV, you have to be static. And you have to be looking at a screen. In order to experience video.

I guess you could sort of say, well, if the if a video is playing, and we’re not watching it isn’t that kind of just like audio, and you probably have a point. But if we’re going to the trouble of creating a video and putting it on a video platform, I think we can assume the audience that gravitates towards the video platform is there because they like watching stuff.

15:41
And there’s a fun and a sort of entertainment in seeing things, seeing what people look like seeing the expressions on their faces, seeing how they engage with each other. So if you’re producing multi camera video of your podcast recordings is definitely giving a different dimension to the show. But from my point of view, with that content economy idea, it’s the same conversation, it’s being captured at the same moment. So in terms of your time, and the time of your guest, that’s it and you’re absolutely super maximizing the potential of that by recording the audio really well, sticking up some kind of cameras, and doesn’t necessarily need to be really high end production.

So I’ve got clients who recorded podcasts using iPads, the camera in your iPhone is a really great camera, it’s more than capable of capturing something like this, and you can get the video out of it, and produce some kind of edit out of it. And as I said, if you’re recording on Riverside FM or an online platform anyway, you can just download either the individual streams or that kind of to up create view of the conversation.

Wrap

So there you have it, really that is extending the content conversation. It’s just something I felt like needs to be pointed out because you’re either doing it already, in which case, you know, you can, you can pat yourself on the back, because you’re there already, but if you’re not doing it already, it’s not that far away for you to be able to maximize what you’re doing with the podcast, and then spin it out into some other assets that you can cascade through all of your other platforms.

So there you have it. Good luck with extending the content conversation.