Kickstarting A Podcast: A Case Study

The brief

The DLG (German Agricultural Society) is an organisation committed to securing yields and top-quality produce as well as sustainable practices and innovations in farming. With more than 31,000 members across Europe, it is a leading agricultural and food sector network.?

The DLG hosts Potato Days UK, a field-day event that showcases the complete potato production and supply chain. It combines trade stands with crop plots, expert talks and discussions, and live machinery demonstrations.

A key part of the event team is chair, trustee and advisor, Greg Smith CB - who ran the Royal Norfolk Show for many years. Greg approached us with the idea of creating a podcast, his ultimate goal was to drive awareness of the event and drive attendance.

The solution

Our Content Marketing Director James Gill worked with Greg to develop a strategy for the podcast. Podcasts are a fantastic tool for engaging existing audiences more deeply to create advocates and remain front-of-mind over the long term. As such we knew that a new podcast would not be an effective driver of sales for an event in a few months. However, the DLG has a large membership and the podcast would provide a fantastic way for the DLG to engage their audience more frequently and at a deeper level, over the long term.?

A debut podcast would be able to reach this group quickly and for free to drive some ticket sales, but the ongoing strategy was to create an audience of regular podcast listeners so that future events could be promoted. Key to this was that the podcast would include a wide range of relevant topics, rather than simply describe the event. We worked with Greg to define these topics, from innovations within potato farming to current challenges of climate and economics.?

As an experienced public speaker with an extensive network of high-profile individuals within the sector, he would host each episode and interview someone from the industry.?

Selesti helped to develop the structure of the episode, advising about length and style. We worked with Greg on intro and outro scripts, ensuring that relevant information and calls to action were included. Around the interview itself, we helped to brief his guest - Mark Taylor of Agrimark - advising on technical best practices, from the use of headphones to recording voice notes. We scheduled the video call and set Greg and Mark up before turning our mic and video off to let them chat - always in the background to support if the sound/video/internet had issues. (This proved good practice as the internet did cut out and were able to help the participants rejoin the conversation).

We then edited the audio, removing ums, ahs and pauses from the conversation to help the flow and build momentum. This included dropping in Greg’s preferred ident and bed music at the beginning and end to give the episode neat bookends. We also like to fade up the music at the end towards the end of the conversation to let listeners know that they’re coming to the end. Finally, the intros and outros were scripted, recorded and added.

The Results

The pilot of the Talking ‘Tatoes podcast was published in August 2024 to great fanfare. You can listen and subscribe here.

Greg Smith said:

“The DLG wanted to use podcasting to boost interest in our Potato Days event. We could have done it in-house but I’m new to podcasting, and Selesti was recommended to us.?

“[Content Marketing Director] Gill talked us through the process and set everything up. On the day he was behind the scenes working on the technical stuff as well as providing creative and production input. The edit itself was fast and smooth and within 48 hours our pilot was born.?

“We couldn’t recommend Selesti more highly and we look forward to working with them on future episodes.”