By having a deep understanding of your customer’s desires, pain points, and lifestyle, you can craft messaging that draws an emotional connection, drives engagement, and ultimately increases revenue.
Most founders today rely solely on one-on-one customer interviews and conversations to understand their audience. But, one of the most overlooked, underrated, and insightful tools for gaining these insights is podcasting.
While podcasts have typically been used as a mechanism for growth, we prefer to use it as a tool to learn how to speak to your target customer on each channel and develop a playbook for how to later invest dollars into rapid growth.
We recently launched HOSTED by POSH, a podcast that is intended to teach us about POSH’s target audience and how to build a growth engine that drives revenue. In this guide, we’ll breakdown how we use podcasting as a research tool, and we’ll use this HOSTED as an ongoing example.
Launching a podcast that resonates with your audience and provides meaningful learnings requires thoughtful planning.
The first step is to start by outlining topics that align with your audience's daily challenges, interests and needs. These challenges are not necessarily directly related to your product, though. They may—and should be—adjacent to your product offering.
Pointing to our example, POSH is an events-management and ticketing platform. Event hosts have many questions about managing their events. But they also have many questions in general about how they can grow their careers as event hosts. Our goal is to speak to both.
There are two great places to start with this:
Notice how the sales team is receiving questions that are exactly the same as what people are searching for on Google. This is exactly what we want, because our goal is to produce content that answers questions that are simply in the back of the heads of our target customers.
Step number 1 should be to produce a list of 10-20 key questions that your audience is asking.
Now, let’s talk about who we’re actually going to interview on the pod. We want to invite guests who can offer valuable insights, stories, tips, and experiences that address the key questions. These guests should have a strong connection to your industry and be able to speak to the challenges and opportunities your target audience faces with exciting, personal stories.
At POSH, our first episode featured Justin Dauman and Charles Hochfelder, the Co-Founders of We Belong Here Music Festival.
Justin and Charles have incredible experiences booking venues and DJs, hosting small and big events all over the US, and have had a myriad of failures and successes to share.
We were careful to pick guests that are great at storytelling, would show up like professionals on camera, and would be meaningful for our audience to hear from. Since we are attracting aspiring music event organizers, Justin and Charles felt like the perfect fit.
We recommend making a list of 40-50 people in your industry that are influential and have a track record of being great on camera. Start a spreadsheet with their names, and begin ranking them based on their level of influence (how many followers they have on each platform) as well as how attainable they are for you to book time with.
We also recommend starting small: pick a few investors, friends, or colleagues who have decent followings—maybe a few thousand people—and would be very willing to help you get the pod off the ground.
It’s very okay to make mistakes on the pod, and it’s much better to make those mistakes with folks you are already close with, as they are likely to be more forgiving.
Then, when you have a few killer episodes that you can use as case studies, it becomes MUCH easier to book the “big fish” in your industry.
You’ve probably seen a bunch of Zoom interview recordings scattered all over your LinkedIn and Twitter feeds over the last year. A lot of startups have been doing this and considering it a podcast. We would highly encourage you NOT to do this.
Think about it; when was the last time you sat down and watched a full Zoom recording between two or three people that you’ve never heard of, with mediocre audio and video quality? We’ll assume you’ve never actually done it, and probably never will.
Our goal is to captivate and capture as many eyeballs as possible in order to collect as much data and learnings as we can. Thus, we recommend creating HIGHLY produced video-first podcasts.
Nobody should be wearing headphones or sitting at a table with a microphone blocking their mouth.
The audio and video quality should be top-notch. Audio should be mixed professionally and video should be color graded perfectly.
Why? Because if people don’t clickthrough on your content or bounce after 5 seconds of watching, we don’t actually know why they didn’t engage. Was it because the conversation was boring? Or was it because the audio was muffled? Or was it because the cover image didn’t catch their attention?
In this case, it is crucial to minimize the number of reasons why somebody DOESN’T engage so that we can get the most actionable, insightful data as possible.
We firmly believe that it’s better for your brand to not launch a podcast at all then to launch a poorly produced one.
We also know what you’re thinking right now. “But, that’s way more expensive, isn’t it?”
The answer is no.
The good news is that the tools to create high quality video and audio content are becoming more and more abundant by the day, and as such, are also becoming much cheaper. The trick is to work with a team or an individual that knows how to use the most cutting edge tools to create the highest quality content for the lowest possible price.
If you thought the cost of high quality content was high, wait until you see the cost of low quality content!
All that said, here is episode 1 of HOSTED by POSH. Notice the amount of care and investment we put into production quality:
Here’s where things get really fun! Even though we assume you’ve been having a blast already…
Don’t worry about how many people listen to the podcast. Assume nobody is going to listen to it. That’s okay!
There is just SO much long-form content out there today that we encourage not worrying at all about hitting top charts in your first week. Sure, that would be nice, but that’s not the goal of this project.
The goal is to use the 45-60 minute episode as the source of all of our additional content that we haven’t even mentioned yet. Let’s break that part down:
First, you’re going to want to cut 8-12 short clips out of every episode and work with an editor to make them super quick, fast-paced, and visually engaging. Then, scatter these short clips all over TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube shorts. The goal with these clips is to get people to stop scrolling their thumbs while they’re enjoying their daily doom-scroll session before going to bed.
Here are a few examples of short clips that we pulled and edited from HOSTED episode 1:
While we don’t care about our audience engaging with the full episodes, we do care a lot about their engagement with the short clips.
With these short clips, we want to test a large variety of styles with many different treatments and placements.
The goal is to gather as much data as possible about how our audience is engaging with our short clips on each platform, if at all. This allows us to start to build a rock-solid playbook on HOW to use all of the various social media channels out there right now.
Here are a handful of things worth paying the most attention to:
In addition to producing short-form video clips, it is vital to also cross-produce the clips across other mediums and channels.
For each of the 8-12 clips that you pull out of a long-form episode, we recommend grabbing the transcripts from 2-4 of the top clips and turning those into long-form blog posts and a weekly newsletter to share with your audience.
Remember, some people enjoy audio, some people enjoy video, but many prefer reading written content on a blog or in their inbox.
For HOSTED Episode 1, we identified two short clips (shared above) to turn into valuable blog posts that were also sent out 7,000 people in a weekly newsletter:
Overall, the goal is to have daily content on as many channels as possible to reach the largest cohort of our target demographic. Thus, we are able to produce the most robust playbook as possible over the course of a few months.
Here is a graphic that demonstrates how one 45-minute episode turns into at least 43 pieces of content across 9 channels. 12-episodes in “Season One” equals 516 pieces of content to post over 6 months. Talk about a lot of content…
To deepen audience engagement and gather valuable insights, incorporate interactive elements in your podcast, such as Q&A sessions, polls, or live events. Posting to Spotify via Anchor.fm now allows you to host audience Q+A, which is another fantastic way of capturing insights into the questions that people are asking about your industry.
Utilize polls on Instagram stories to promote new episode drops and blog posts, and encourage your audience to submit ideas for future episodes, guests that they’d like to see you interview, or opinions on conversations that you may have surfaced.
Collecting feedback through surveys, reviews, and direct communication allows you to identify trends and areas for improvement in your podcast. If you consistently analyze this feedback on a weekly basis, you can not only refine your content and better address your audience's needs, but also continue to gain deeper insights as to how you can better serve your customers.
Next, use the insights gained from your long form podcast, short form clips, and editorial assets to personalize your communication style and tone across your entire funnel. Speak to your audience in a way that feels authentic and relatable, building trust and fostering loyalty.
We also always encourage a bias toward storytelling.
People don’t remember what you said. They remember how you made them feel. And the best way to make somebody feel something is to share a compelling story.
Encourage your guests to share real-life examples, failure stories, and behind-the-scenes scenarios that they typically don’t share publicly. This allows you to better illustrate your points and make your content more relatable.
In summary, launching a podcast can be an incredible way to not only build your startup's brand, but also to gain invaluable insights into your target audience.
By nailing your strategy, finding the right guests, focusing on quality, repurposing content, and encouraging audience participation and feedback, you can make your podcast a powerful tool for designing your growth engine.
If you're interested in launching a podcast for your startup or need guidance on how to optimize your existing podcast to better understand your customers, don't hesitate to drop us a line.
