Audio Podcasting and the Portfolio Executive

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Audio podcasting has now become a mainstream medium. You only need to see how the BBC has jumped on the bandwagon to realise it now stands alongside TV, radio and audiobooks as an essential ‘broadcast’ medium. The number of podcasts is huge, and the great joy of an audio podcast is that it can be a long-format medium. Whereas a video clip that you want to put on social media will probably last between 30 and, at a stretch, 180 seconds, audio podcasts can easily run for 20-35 minutes. Podcasts can also have the advantage of being ‘evergreen’ content. Not content that just vaporises as Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook posts move on, but something that, if discovered, people can subscribe to and listen to a whole series. The final thing is, if you are attracting the executive market, podcasts allow people to attend in their downtime. They can listen to the podcast while they are gardening, taking their kids to school, driving to work, commuting, or sitting on a plane. It’s an opportunity for people to engage without interacting directly with others.

The best podcast can develop an intimacy, style and a following that can be very compelling. You can support the podcast with promotion on other social media. For example, introducing podcasts with short video clips, taking the content of podcasts and turning it into blogs or using a podcast series as the basis for a book. It is a very flexible medium.

Podcast Audience

But who should your podcast be for? At one level, it doesn’t matter. But I do think there are three distinctive options for a podcast.

1 - Develop Fans

The first option is just to develop fans. So, let’s say you are a Finance Director Portfolio Executive, but you are passionate about trainspotting. Building a train-related podcast could be a great way of developing fans. You might be surprised how many people care about trains, model railway sets, the age of steam, great railway journeys, or great railway stations. It has been a refuge for many TV personalities to extend their careers! Your fans can then make other people within their sphere of influence aware of what you do, and you are developing a distinctive persona as the ‘Trainspotting FD’ that makes you recognisable in the marketplace.

2 - Appeal to your buyer

The second thing is to appeal directly to your buyer. So, if you are an FD, your buyer is the CEO or maybe the Chair of the Board. Is there something that you care about relevant to a CEO or Chair where you can have a distinctive point of view and build up a regular podcast? Is there a rich enough seam for you to mine month after month? As a Finance Director, appealing to CEOs and Chairmen, you could develop a podcast on capital fundraising. Or maybe you want to talk about how organisations are re-organising themselves. Or, perhaps you want to discuss how companies respond to environmental, social and governance agendas.?

3 - Become an expert

The third thing is to be seen as an expert in your profession or industry. You might be bringing insight and opinion to the Finance Director community. Then, Finance Directors will talk about you and your name will be mentioned by Finance Directors to the CEO or Chairs they know.

Podcast Format

You now need to decide what style of format is suitable for your podcast. Here, I think there are real insights to be gathered from how radio works. I have been a Radio 4 listener almost since it converted to Radio 4 from the Home Service, and three kinds of radio programmes could be models for your podcast.

1 - A magazine programme.

If you ever listen to Radio 4’s Money Box, it’s a typical magazine programme. It lasts around 30 minutes, and they will have four or five items. It’s fairly topical, and it is based on interviews and investigations.?

2- The guest format.

For Radio 4 listeners, this is the Desert Island Discs scenario: a guest you give an extended interview with some kind of little twist that draws people in. The Food Chain has adapted this format to walk through the career of a famous chef, linking their journey to five favourite recipes. For your guest format, you need some kind of link, twist or theme that makes it more than just a very long interview and establishes a distinct style and audience.

3 - The discussion programme.

This is a hybrid of the guest and magazine format. The classic Radio 4 example of this is ‘Any Questions?’. You have a set of guests on the panel to whom you bring one, or possibly several, discussion points for the panel to explore. The key to a successful discussion programme is to ensure the panel members have sufficient diversity to bring a good debate and enough experience for their opinions to have weight.

You may well have your favourite format. Perhaps you will draw on the reality TV genre or the lone ramblings of an individual where you just have somebody who does an extended monologue. There are a variety of formats, but talk radio gives you a set of models you can adopt.

Making the most of your Podcast

As in any content-based brand development or awareness-building process, it is all about rhythm and consistency to build an audience. I would strongly recommend that you get a number of podcasts ‘in the can’ before you start promoting them. I would also suggest you plan a sequence of podcasts as a season. You can do a season and then pause before you do another season. Or you might want to leave a podcast theme if it’s run its course and develop a new podcast.

Don’t forget that your podcast will be invisible unless you actively promote it through all the channels you can access. If it’s a panel-based, magazine-based, or guest-based format, use your guests and their social media profiles to promote your offer to your widest possible audience.

There is a whole series of technical issues that I won’t get into, but there are distribution platforms for podcasts that are well worth investigating.

Finally, remember that any content can be reused in other media. So, if you are going to produce a podcast, why not capture it on Zoom and then you can use video segments to promote it? Why not transcribe it, and then you can convert it into articles that can go out as blogs??

There are a range of ways to take a podcast and become a powerful tool to build your personal brand, promote your offer and develop relationships with fans, your target customers or as a guru within your profession.

Conclusions

Audio podcasts can be a powerful tool to build awareness of your offer as a Portfolio Executive. However, ensure you are clear about your audience, your format and plans to promote it.