For me, good podcast strategy starts before anyone gets anywhere near the equipment. One of the easiest ways to end up with a forgettable podcast is to begin with microphones, studios and technical decisions before working out what the podcast is actually for.
I understand why people do it. I work in audio, I like microphones, studios and all the technical detail that goes into making something sound good, and there is something satisfying about getting the practical side of a production sorted. But when somebody comes to us with an idea for a podcast, that usually isn’t the first conversation I want to have.
I’m much more interested in what they want to talk about, who they hope will listen and why any of it needs to become a podcast in the first place. Those questions can feel less exciting when you’re keen to start recording, but they tend to make almost every decision that follows easier.
Who are you actually talking to?
“Who is it for?” sounds like a basic question, but it can be surprisingly difficult to answer properly.
If the answer is something broad like “business owners”, “teachers” or “people interested in marketing”, there is probably still a bit of work to do. You don’t need to create an elaborate audience persona with a name, age, salary and favourite supermarket, but you do need a reasonably clear picture of the person who might genuinely choose to listen.
What do they already know about the subject? What are they curious about? What might they find useful, interesting or entertaining? More importantly, what would make them give this twenty or thirty minutes of their time when there are thousands of other things they could be doing?
Once you start thinking about a real listener rather than a vague audience, it begins to change the podcast itself. It affects the language you use, the guests you invite, how much background you need to explain, how long an episode might reasonably be and what subjects are actually worth spending time on.
You stop making a podcast in the abstract and start making something for somebody.
What are you hoping will happen?
I also like to ask what the podcast is supposed to achieve, because there are plenty of perfectly good reasons for making one and they don’t all look the same.
A consultancy might want somewhere to explore ideas properly instead of reducing everything to a LinkedIn post. A business might want potential customers to hear the voices, knowledge and personality behind the organisation. A school might use podcasting as a way for pupils to research a subject, discuss it together and make something they can genuinely share. Another organisation might simply have access to people, stories or expertise that deserve more room than they normally get.
None of those is inherently better than the others. The useful part is knowing which one you are trying to do.
The problems usually start when there isn’t really an answer beyond “we thought we should have a podcast”. That can be enough to get through the enthusiasm of the first few episodes, but it becomes much harder when you reach episode eight, somebody asks what the next one should be about and nobody is completely sure what the series is trying to become.
Would you listen to it?
This is probably the question I find most useful.
Forget for a moment that the podcast belongs to your business, your organisation or your client. If somebody else described the idea to you, would there be anything about it that made you want to listen?
That doesn’t mean every podcast needs an unusual format, a provocative hook or something nobody has ever tried before. Some of the best podcasts are simply good conversations between people who know what they are talking about, but there is still usually a clear reason to spend time with them.
Maybe the guests are people you rarely hear elsewhere. Maybe the host asks better questions. Maybe the podcast makes a complicated subject easier to understand, or gives people useful information they can actually apply. Sometimes the appeal is simply that the conversation feels more open, thoughtful or curious than the alternatives.
Whatever the reason is, you should be able to sense it in the idea before you worry too much about how the finished production will sound.
Then we can talk about microphones
Once you have a clearer idea of what you are making and who it is for, the technical and creative decisions become much more useful because they are being made in service of something rather than by default.
Does the podcast need video? Would shorter episodes suit the audience better? Does it make sense to bring everybody into the same room, or would remote recording give you access to better guests? Should it feel polished and tightly structured, or would a looser conversation suit the subject? Does it need to run every week, or would six genuinely strong episodes make more sense than committing to an endless schedule?
I’ve never been particularly interested in telling somebody that a podcast “should” be thirty minutes long, that every show now needs video, or that weekly publishing is automatically better. There are too many variables for rules like that to be especially useful.
It depends what you are trying to make.
There may be more value in the recording than you think
This is something that has become increasingly important in the way we think about podcasting at One Stop Podcasts.
A good conversation does not have to live only in a podcast feed. If you sit down with somebody knowledgeable for forty minutes and have a genuinely useful discussion, you have created far more than one audio file.
There is the podcast episode itself, obviously, but there may also be a full video version, several shorter clips, quotes, an article, newsletter material, LinkedIn content, website copy or something useful for internal communications. In that sense, the podcast can become the starting point for a much wider body of content rather than an isolated thing that gets published once and disappears into a feed.
That is one of the reasons I think podcasting can be particularly useful for organisations with knowledge, experience or stories worth sharing. It gives people enough room to say something properly first, rather than starting with the shorter piece of content and trying to stretch it into something more substantial afterwards.
Of course, none of that helps very much if the original conversation is not worth listening to.
Which brings us back to the reason for making it.
Before you record anything
Before getting too far into microphones, artwork, episode formats or publishing schedules, I’d spend some time answering three fairly simple questions:
Who are we making this for?
Why would they choose to listen?
What are we hoping the podcast will do?
You do not need perfect answers, and they will probably shift a little once you begin making the show and learn what works. But having a sensible answer to each of them gives you something to build around, and it makes the decisions that come later much less arbitrary.
Then we can worry about the microphones.
