Introduction
How do you turn content creation into a strategic powerhouse?
In today’s digital landscape, podcasts are essential for knowledge-driven brands, especially in the science and engineering world. But jumping into podcasting can feel like navigating a maze, right?
Join host Mikkel Svold, owner of Montanus—your go-to for tech-savvy content—as he breaks down the must-haves for launching a killer corporate podcast!
🎙️ From nailing the perfect episode length to picking the right frequency, Mikkel spills the secrets on keeping your audience hooked.
And guess what? He’ll explore different formats, like monologues, dialogues, and montages, so you can choose what resonates best.
Plus, learn how to align your podcast goals with your overall content strategy.
Ready to create a podcast that’s not just heard but remembered?
Dive into this episode for tips that will set your podcasting journey ablaze!
What You’ll Learn
1. How to determine your podcast’s frequency for optimal engagement.
2. Tips on deciding your podcast’s ideal episode length.
3. Exploring different podcast formats: monologue, dialogue, montage.
4. Defining your podcast’s end goal and its importance.
5. Leveraging podcasting for creating diverse content assets.
6. The importance of consistency in podcast production.
Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Content Universe. You know, yesterday I had a really interesting talk with a company about potentially creating their podcast and marketing director. She asked me actually some, well, I would say pretty basic questions, but, when I came to think about it, well, yeah, they’re basic to me because I work with it every day. But she asked some pretty clever questions about the podcast, some of the foundational questions to a podcast, and that’s what we’re going through today. I would say some of the foundational decisions that you need to make when you want to have a podcast, some of the groundwork before actually starting, that’s what we’re talking about today.
My name is Mikkel Svold, for those of you who don’t know me, and I own the company Montanus. We produce podcasts, blog posts, social media posts, all that kind of jazz for knowledge-driven companies, mainly in the technical department. So that’s what we do anyway when it comes to podcasting. I think some of the really obvious questions that you need to answer have to do with frequency, length, form, and lastly, and I think some people forget this one, the end goal or the larger goal of the actual podcast.
Now let’s go through step by step. So the first one is frequency. What is a good frequency for a podcast? What is a good frequency for a corporate podcast? Well, the answer to this question is basically the more the merrier. So a daily podcast is going to be better than a weekly podcast, and a weekly podcast is going to be better than a monthly podcast, and a monthly podcast is going to be better than a quarterly podcast. If you go less than a quarterly podcast, I would say that it becomes a little bit meaningless, and probably you should choose another medium, but the more episodes you can fling out, the better it is, and it simply has to do with—it’s actually quite not basic, but it’s quite like down to earth why that is, and it has to do with real estate on each podcast player.
So if you pull up this podcast right now, maybe listen through to your podcast player, you will see the icons of four to eight, maybe even ten episodes, or a podcast that has new episodes coming up, you see that on the list, and they will have a little dot probably notifying you that there is a new episode. For me, I follow let’s say thirty to fifty different podcasts, so the competition for occupying one of those eight spaces, for myself, is going to be quite competitive because I follow, let’s say, fifty podcasts. So the more times that you have a new episode coming out, the more often you will be occupying that real estate when I open my podcast app, so you will be the one at the top of my list. If you only put out one each month, well, then you will only occupy that space, say, one to two hours each month, so obviously that is going to have a significant impact on whether you will get listens or not.
So that is frequency. One thing to of course consider when we’re talking about frequency is also workload and what we are actually able to do. So I would say for many businesses, one a month is going to be good. It’s what most businesses in a busy workweek can accomplish, but if you’re really in on wanting to have a successful podcast, you should probably go for one a week or more.
Okay, so that’s frequency. Then we have length. How long can a podcast episode be? Well, let me tell you, there’s not really a rule like I’ve seen podcast episodes that are three minutes long. Personally, I don’t like them, but that’s just a matter of taste, and I would say the most successful podcasters in the world, they fling out three to four episodes per week and they’re all plus two hours long. So they would be, you know, if you say Joe Rogan, like him or not, but he puts out episodes that are frequently up to six hours long and people listen to them. So I would again say the longer you can make your episodes the better, because it will give you more attention time from your target audience, however, it should only be as long as you can keep it interesting. That’s kind of an obvious thing, but length is not a goal in itself. I would say that preferably your episodes have more or less the same length. I often aim for 30 minutes to maybe 45 minutes and that’s because I find that we can then come in real deep on the podcast topic so that we can go deep into the knowledge of that particular expert that I’m talking to and then I go for that specific time, that specific length, because 30 minutes to maybe 40 minutes is usually what people tend to spend commuting every day, and I want to kind of fill in that time slot where they’re sitting in their car relaxing, driving home, or driving to work.
So talk about the form. What form should a podcast take? And when I say form, what I mean is should it be a monologue like the one you’re hearing right now; it could be a dialogue between two or more people—that’s a very common way of doing a podcast—or it could be like a montage type of podcast where you’re out in the field doing interviews and then you cut and paste and edit a lot and you have jingles and background music and what I would call like b-roll recordings coming in. And that’s a really powerful way of doing a podcast as well because it becomes more of a series, more of a radio program, you know them as well; many of the true crime things are done like this.
Now pros and cons of those three types of podcasts. So the monologue, the really cool thing about that is that you can make them very, very easily. It is by far the easiest way of making a podcast. Quite literally, I am on my way to pick up my kid from kindergarten and I just had this idea to do this episode so I jotted down like five lines on my phone and then I start recording. So that’s also why you can hear a little bit of car noise in the background because literally I am standing next to my bike on my way to the kindergarten, so that is such an easy way of doing it.
Then you have the dialogue podcast, which is also fairly easy but it does require a little bit of planning and a little bit of scheduling. I personally use, I have a planner employed, and that’s just a really, really nice little hack—if you can afford it, employ someone to manage the calendar mingling all these to get these episodes and these interviews arranged. The cool thing about having a dialogue is you can then invite specialists on all kinds of topics and those specialists’ knowledge will drip onto your brand as well. So no matter whether you actually have that knowledge in your company, just the fact that you are hosting and that you are the microphone holder shows your clients and your listeners that you have these people in your network, and you can easily gain access to their knowledge as well, which is obviously pretty cool when you want to drive a knowledge-driven brand.
And then of course the last one, the montage one. I would say it’s a really nice thing to do. It’s not something that I would ever recommend a company unless they have like a dedicated team of, say, five people only doing the podcast, and that is because it is simply such a big workload. It requires so much time and it’s going to be so demanding on your resources. It is really cool if you can do it, but I would suspect that you will get much more from your money if you go for a dialogue-based podcast or something like that.
Alright, so that is the three out of the four ones, and the last one I want to talk about is having an end goal or being sure about what is your end goal. Maybe I should have actually started out by talking about this because it’s kind of the very foundational thing. This is the, you know, the reason why you would have this at all is the basic, the basic of the strategy, why are you doing this at all. You should really think about what is the end goal of your podcast? Is it because we just want to have a podcast because it’s really cool? Well, cool, that’s fine with me. Is it because we want to measure a number of listeners, we want to really build a big audience with the podcast? Well, sure, that’s also very cool, it sets certain demands to what topics you want to talk about, it sets demands to frequency, all of this.
Again, the more the merrier if you really want to build a big audience, you want to talk about topics that appeal to a lot of people. If you don’t care so much about the audience size, but more the quality of those people, you can go much more, much deeper. So that’s a really cool thing to talk about as well. And then I would say the last reason to host a podcast is having podcast interviews is, in my opinion, the most efficient way of gathering knowledge that you can then use for gathering like, basic, main, or I call it master content, to create a masterpiece of master content that you can then use to build other content types from. So that can be video clips for social media, it can be graphical posts for social media, it can be text posts for social media, it can of course be blog posts, you can use the interview as the basis of a blog post or an article, advertorials, all of this kind of thing. So you can actually build your entire content production around those interviews if you choose that. Well then you can actually go with much fewer interviews because you don’t actually need an interview a week to have a really vibrant and highly active account. I would say if we kind of turn up the volume as much as we can on our production engine—when I say engine, it’s a lot of people—but anyway, if we do that we could probably produce, I would say, 30 different pieces of content just from one half an hour episode. So obviously if I want to fill up my content calendar I only need a couple of episodes a month and then I’m actually all good. That would be what you measure also because if you don’t have many episodes it does not make sense to measure, say, listeners, it makes sense to measure all the other things. That is something that you really need to think about.
Alright, so I think summing up now, the most important things when you are doing your podcast strategy, when you’re kind of settling on the foundations for your podcast, is you have to choose your end goal first. You need to figure out why are we having this podcast, what’s the reason for it. And you know what, I really find it a valid reason that it’s just because we want to have it. I find that a really valid reason because it’s cool, that’s why I have a podcast, it’s because it’s cool to have and I like doing it, and I find it really valid. But anyway, choose your end goal first.
And then I think the second most important thing, once you’ve chosen your end goal and you maybe have thought about all of these other things, you’ve got to keep at it. You’ve got to continue creating podcast episodes week on week, month on month, year on year. You’ve got to keep at it because it is a long-term game. This is not something that you’ll succeed in overnight. You might have a lucky strike and then have one episode that goes pretty viral—that’s really cool if you can do that. And of course, there are strategies on how to go more viral and how to kind of grow your podcast audience quicker rather than slower, but the most important thing—and this is where most podcasts fail, I would say probably 80% of all podcasts fail—is they stop doing it after half a year, after a year, maybe even after 2 years they stop, and when you stop, well then it all falls down. So two most important things: Choose your goal and then keep at it.
And I think that is gonna be the last word from me here on Content Universe today. I hope you enjoyed, and if you did, leave me a comment and of course, like and subscribe to this podcast. That will make me so happy; literally, I’ll clap my small hands and yeah, give me a shout. Reach out to me at podcast@montanus.co, and that was podcast@montanus.co, and that email will land straight in my own inbox. So I’d love to hear from you, what do you think, and what questions you might have considering driving a podcast for your company. That would be really interesting.
Alright, that is it for now. Thank you so much for listening and see you on another planet in the Content Universe, guys. Outro.
