Coming up with a format for your company podcast
These days, having a company podcast – where you can tell your story, build a closer relationship with an existing audience, and bring new customers to you – feels just like something you should have, like a website or a presence on social media.
But even once you’ve decided that you want to make your own company podcast, while you’ll probably know what you want to talk about, the next big question you have to answer is what the format of the show should be.
The format of a podcast refers to the underlying structure. Now, oftentimes, people’s impression of a podcast is pretty vanilla: a regular host or pair of hosts interviewing a guest or a couple of guests, with everyone sat around a table chatting informally. We would call this format an ‘as-live’ conversation, because even though it’s not actually ‘live’ in the sense of being broadcast as it happens – and that’s a great thing because you get the opportunity to edit out stumbles, re-take lines till they’re perfect, and add in additional information in post – it seems to the audience like it’s just a bunch of articulate people sitting around a table chatting. (The table can be real or virtual, by the way; there are brilliant virtual studios you can use for remote recording that in some ways sound even better than having everyone in a room together.)
This is a perfectly fine format, and has a lot to commend it! But you shouldn’t think of it as the only way to do a podcast; there are hundreds of ways of making a show, and in order to be able to make sure your company podcast reaches as many of the right people as possible, coming up with a format that resonates with them – and creates habit and joy in consuming it – means you’ll be onto a winner.
Of course, Message Heard is very experienced in developing formats for the branded podcasts that we make for a huge range of companies, and we’ll tell you how we can help at the end, but if you want to start thinking about this on your own, here’s how you can begin to frame the challenge.
Who is your audience?
The first and most important thing that matters is your intended audience. Who are they? Try to be specific; ‘anyone with an interest in the thing my company does’ is likely to struggle to attract the kind of passionate, dedicated audience you really want to be tuning into your company podcast, episode after episode.
Are you going to be trying to find new customers?
Reward and build closer relationships with your existing ones?
Is it important to you that your industry or peers listen and respect you?
Do you have an ideal customer profile already – an ICP – that you can reference?
(Remember though that with any new thing you make, and a podcast is no exception, you have the opportunity to pivot from your classic ICP to an evolved one; does your brand want to attract a younger audience segment? If so, then creating a podcast format that is quite formal or businesslike, or putting a grey-haired C-suite exec as the host, might not be the best approach. But on the other hand, if you want to use podcasting internally within your company, to share culture and best practice, then having senior figures appearing on it is often a really good thing, as it humanises them, and lets the team connect with the leadership in a more authentic and effective way.
Clearly define who you want the podcast to appeal to – in interests, demographics, relationship to you and more – before you move on.
What does your audience want?
Once you’ve identified who you want your company podcast to appeal to, consider what they want.
Do they want to feel like they’re in a special club?
Do they want to be made to think?
To get exclusive access?
Do they want bite-sized, digestible news or facts?
To be entertained?
To get an edge when it comes to their job?
This kind of thinking will shape your podcast, not just in terms of its format, but its duration, release cadence, talent and more. All these things are interrelated too; even if you decide, for example, that what your audience needs is a weekly news roundup for your industry – to demonstrate that you have your finger on the pulse, and to become a can’t-break habit in your audience’s work week – then a podcast released on a Monday is quite a different beast to one released on a Friday every week.
People have to want to listen to your company podcast if it’s to have any chance of answering the strategic objectives you built for it, and so you have to give them something they actually want.
When can you reach your audience?
So now you know who you want to reach and what would be useful to them – the ’who’ and ‘what’ of your podcast format development process – you also need to answer the ‘when’ too.
Now, company podcasts, of course, are an on-demand medium, so it’s not like you can completely control when your audience will listen, but that’s not really what we mean.
Do you want them to listen to something when they’re not explicitly in work mode? Then you’d better come up with a format and tone that makes them want to listen when they’re on their personal time. You can’t lecture someone (or, worse, make them listen to a sales pitch) when they’re walking the dog, but if you craft a format that is warm and engaging, then they might – and you can sneak in your messaging into that once you’ve built a rapport.
Commuting remains a key opportunity to reach people, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because they’re on their way to or from work, that they necessarily want to consume content that feels a lot like work; more likely this is time they feel is stolen from them by work, and so you’re going to have to be subtle about including information that feels work-like.
When considering commuting as an opportunity to reach people with a podcast, a lot of folks try to research the average commute time in their location in order to come up with a target duration for their podcast, and that does make sense, right? If people spend half an hour commuting, producing a half-hour show should make it easy for them to make listening to your company podcast a habitual start of the day.
But while that isn’t wrong, consider this: lots of people listen to many different podcasts at once, and they’re all different durations. If – and it’s only an ‘if’ – you want to target people on a commute, consider a show that’s 5 or 10 minutes long; that way, if another show they’re listening to finishes just before their commute finishes, they could be persuaded to plug that little gap before they arrive at their destination with your show.
Example formats
Okay, let’s think about some of the classic formats you can deploy. The below list is in no way exhaustive or definitive, but it covers a few of the most popular formats to give you somewhere to start.
One-on-one interviews
In this format, a host – usually the same host across the series – interviews a different guest each episode, to get the most and best information from them. These work well when the host is comfortable and charismatic (but don’t worry, we can train and support even the most microphone-shy non-broadcaster into a superstar!) and the audience develops a strong parasocial relationship with the host as a result. This is great as it builds a real connection between the audience and your company, and as an added bonus, this kind of format is usually the easiest to record and edit – which brings logistical advantages as well as being on the more affordable end.
But even with such a simple format as this, there’s room to innovate.
Do you want to ask all the guests the same basic list of questions?
Do you take the listener through a chronological journey?
Is the interview about the guest, or about other ideas and experiences that you can use the guest to illuminate? What are you trying to get out of the interview?
Is it worth ending on a series of actionable insights and take-aways?
Are you going to be silly, serious, something else?
Round-table interview
Adding another layer of richness but also of logistical complexity is the round-table interview. This might be bringing together several guests with complementary experience, more than one host who can share the responsibilities of hosting and create more chemistry, or something else.
It can be harder to get everyone in a place at a time (even remotely) for these, but they can be more lively, and take the pressure off an individual host.
Still consider structure; if you have more than one host, does one take the main ‘ringmaster’ duties of welcoming people to your company podcast and helping move the conversation along, and if you have more than one guest, do they fulfil different duties on the show? Does one explain the problem and another detail a solution? Is one an expert and one light comedic relief?
Clips with linking narration
Podcasts don’t have to be all recorded with everyone in the same place at the same time, though, and one of the best ways to deploy this approach is to record a series of voices asynchronously – which might mean your podcast producer doing interviews as part of pre-production – and then clip and arrange the best bits to tell the story you want to tell. You can then script and record voiceover to link all those clips together.
This is also a great way to use the opportunity of a lot of people being in one location – such as at a conference or company retreat – to ‘mop up’ content that you can then chop up and weave into a coherent narrative, but consider what result you want to get before you start recording this content.
For example, if you were to ask delegates at a conference five different questions – which should really only take five or ten minutes of their time – then you could group all the answers from the first question into an episode, all the answers from a second into an episode, and so on, and then do a sixth episode with senior leaders reflecting on the insights from the first five.
Narrative storytelling
You can, though, go all the way to rich and immersive storytelling, of the sort that remains incredibly popular across podcasting. There’s a reason that true crime podcasts are still some of the most popular shows out there. You might think that there’s no way you can or should use these emotional and intense formats for your company podcast, but actually, they fulfil that key first requirement of making a show that people actually want to listen to, and then once you’ve gotten their attention, you can then ensure you can communicate the strategic messaging you need to.
We’re not suggesting that ‘a true crime podcast’ is always the right approach here, but there are lots of ways of using the tricks and tropes of drama and filmmaking to tell a story that is more enticing and a little lateral to the ultimate messaging you want to get across. This approach takes confidence (and money!) but it can be incredibly effective, and can attract the attention of awards more readily than many other formats.
Repurposed webinars
If you’re already recording content such as for webinars, then you can consider repurposing it for a podcast. There are two major considerations here, though, and both are related to ensuring you’re doing this work intentionally from the start.
First, consider the technical implications. If you’re delivering a webinar or similar live, you should be using a platform that allows each participant to be recorded onto their own track with no degradation in quality; it’s easy to reach for Zoom, but it can deliver some pretty sub-optimal results. And of course it should go without saying that you should really be using high-quality microphones in quiet and non-echoey locations, as well as headphones for all participants if remote, to reduce distortion and feedback.
And then think about format! Simply re-publishing the raw webinar or other content type is often not the best solution; webinar content is designed to be consumed when an audience is in ‘lean forward’ mode where they’re actively trying to learn something, while podcasts are often ‘lean back’ experiences. Consider structuring your webinar in such a way that you can easily and with value repurpose parts of it as a company podcast, or at the very least, consider clipping the best bits of it and then creating an opportunity for people to reflect and build on those bits in a conversation recorded afterwards, that might be more personal and more informal, to attract and speak to a podcast-native audience.
How to get inspiration for your podcast format
The very best way to dream up formats for your company podcast is to listen to podcasts! You still need to do the work above too in order to understand your audience and what need they have that your show will meet in them, but also there’s no substitute for listening to lots of different shows in wildly varied genres; this not only helps you figure out what you like and don’t like about different podcast formats and how they’re executed, but it can directly give you ideas for your own show.
Learn to look at the underlying structure of a podcast, and even if it’s got nothing to do with the topic that you’ll be covering, think about if you can adapt that structure to your own needs. That’s the magic of formats!
How Message Heard can help you develop the format for your company podcast
All this thinking can be pretty overwhelming, but happily, Message Heard is very experienced in working with companies of all sizes in every sector to interrogate the mission of a show and then craft original, compelling formats that answer that mission head-on.
If you’d like our help then reach out and we can begin our Discovery process; all you need to bring is some idea of what you want your show to achieve and who you’d like to listen to it, and we’ll do the rest!