This is how you plan before starting a podcast channel.

You keep coming across new podcast channels, which only makes you more determined to start your own channel. You have tons of ideas, you’ve already gathered interview subjects in your head, and you’d love to get behind a microphone right away.

However, you shouldn’t jump into podcasting without thinking through a few important things first. Even if you initially plan to use your channel as just another marketing tool, you need to give it a chance to build a solid audience!
Success now depends on planning.

Here are four key questions to consider before hitting the record button:

Content:

What is your goal, what do you want to achieve?
Who is your target group, who is important to hear your message?
What topics can you cover?
How, in what form can you best convey all this?

1. What is Your Goal?

Why do you want to start a podcast? What is your goal and what do you want to achieve? The answers to these questions should accompany every episode.

If you have a business or want to strengthen your personal brand, then it is quite clear that a podcast will also be a kind of marketing communication tool.

What is the goal in this case? Mainly to increase brand awareness and collect leads or subscribers.

Specific goals can generally be to reach potential customers and interested parties; to share an important message, or educate; or to become a recognized leader in the industry.

Here’s a quick example where all three are achieved: If, say, Tesla were to start a podcast channel about how an electric car works and why they believe it’s the future, it would be a powerful educational message, and everyone interested in this would listen to it – even the competition! – and because of that, the podcast channel would immediately become an indispensable element of the industry. A kind of reference point.

And this would work even if Tesla had only started yesterday. At most, the process would take longer.

The point is that if you have these goals, even a start-up business can benefit from it. Almost everywhere there are misconceptions that need to be dispelled, new things that are worth talking about, or instructive cases that are important to share.

2. Target audience

Who is your ideal listener? It’s easy to forget this question, but it’s the most important one of all.

If you’ve been running your business for a while, you probably know exactly who your target audience is, what your niche market is, and what your best customers are like. It’s worth thinking about these things now, as you’ll be addressing them in your podcasts.

Don’t just think about a group of people, think about your ideal customer when planning and recording! This way, the listener will feel like the content is about them and for them.

When creating your ideal listener persona, you need to ask yourself a few questions. The basics can include:

Are they male or female?
What age group are they in?
What do they do for a living? Are they unemployed?
What is their social life like?
What do they like to do in their free time?

Relevant questions for podcasts are:

What does the target audience want to know about the topic of your podcast?
What problem does the podcast solve for them?
What are their hopes, dreams, and challenges?

The more specific you answer, the better, because this could even be the basis for the first few episodes.

3. Topics

Collecting and selecting topics is closely related to defining your target audience.

The first thing everyone asks when they see a new channel is: Why would I be interested in this?

If you just throw yourself into it, you will easily lose focus. And if you are going to make a show about topics that are somehow unrelated to the main direction, from which the listener cannot gain value, you will quickly lose your audience that you have already formed.

And here comes an IMPORTANT aspect!

While collecting topics, it is worth stopping for a moment. It often happens that the selected topics do not sound exciting at all for a podcast episode.
So, should you discard the possibility of creating a podcast? Not necessarily.

Let’s look at an example!
Let’s say you are in the business of renting out offices. The industry is changing due to home offices and co-working spaces, which is something that you could talk about a lot, but the target audience will not really be interested in this. More about what your office looks like and what opportunities you can offer them. It is not so easy to make a long-term talk show about this.

However, you should not give up on your podcast channel because of this, you just need to take a step back and re-examine the area.

Now ask yourself these questions: What is your market position? What makes you different from your competitors? Are you the most innovative? The most flexible? The most sustainable?

If you have found such an aspect, then you should focus on it.
Staying with the example, if you rent out offices equipped with the most innovative furniture, then it is worth making a podcast show that covers current innovations in the world. Then there will be a greater emphasis on creating exciting and interesting conversations and the business will appear in the broadcasts more as a sponsor with the same values.

The ultimate goal can still be achieved, since in the minds of the listeners the main message of the broadcast – innovation – is connected to the brand promise and when they need to rent an office, this brand will be the first thing that comes to mind.

Are you now convinced that you should start your own podcast channel?

Back to planning.

The key to podcast success is consistency.

This is especially important if you want your podcast to be part of your content marketing. It will be difficult, however, to come up with a new, valuable show every other week for months if you don’t plan it in advance.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can never make a show about something topical.

Quite the opposite. If you create a calendar where you keep track of your planned episodes, you will make your own work easier. It will be easier to change things, replace future shows, and keep track of topics.

So you need to write down the topics of your shows, the main topics, and always ask yourself the question: why will my listeners be interested in this?

When choosing topics, I usually recommend collecting at least 12 different categories. This way, you can have a topic each month that you can explore in the podcast.

For example, if you are a marketing consultant, then everything from online advertising to copywriting can be discussed.

Then see how many different stories, “subtopics” you can list for your minimum 12 categories. This way, it will be clear how much content certain categories provide, what your audience may be more interested in.

Staying with the marketing consultant example: for online advertising, you can talk about social platforms, influencers, remarketing, etc. By the way, if you have already written blog posts, that can be a great help now, feel free to use the topics you have already written for your episodes.

Some categories may seem exciting at first, but when you collect the possible “subtopics” and episodes, you may easily find that you run out of ideas too quickly. This also indicates how specific your chosen topic is. If you can list too many options, you probably need to dig deeper or create a new category. If you run out of topics quickly, you are too specific, and perhaps the number of relevant listeners will not be large either.

With this method, you can also get a clear picture of what area has the most potential for you, where you feel most comfortable, plus – based on this, it will be much easier to organize the circle of potential guests.

And here comes another aspect of the target audience.

If you run a shoe store and want to make a channel about skateboarding shoes, but when collecting shoe topics, you think of much more about running… Then this is a warning sign – you need to rethink your goal or your target audience.

The planning of topics can also indicate the frequency of the appearance. There is no specific rule regarding how often a new episode should appear. Biweekly is considered average, but you will not be less successful if you appear weekly or monthly.

It may be logical that if you have many shorter topics, you can appear more frequently with a new episode, but if you plan in-depth interviews lasting several hours, it will take longer to absorb it, so listeners will not take the less frequent appearance for granted.

Before we delve deeper into formats and genres, there is one very important step left for planning!

After collecting your topics, you should analyze the market!

Look in the podcast apps in different categories to see who has covered your topic and how.

Don’t be scared if you find a channel in your topic! This is the best thing that can happen to you in this situation. Listen to the episodes and pay attention to what they talk about and how.

If you don’t agree with what you hear, chances are you are not alone and there are listeners who are just waiting for someone to explain another point of view. Your point of view. Examine what unique insight you can provide on the topic, what you have the most personal experience with!

The same will be true for style. If other podcasts are long, interviews, conversations, then you should make short, to the point episodes. If that’s close to your style. There will be listeners who will need exactly that.

Let all flowers bloom.

4. Genre and style

Now that we know what we want to deliver and to whom – let’s talk about how.

The great thing about podcasts is that they can follow almost any genre.

Some are interview-based and have one or more guests talking, while others focus on storytelling or educational monologues.

Which format is best? The one that best suits the podcast’s topic or the style of your target audience.

If you think you could invite a special guest for each category, it’s worth doing longer, in-depth interviews. On the other hand, if you have a lot of practical ideas, it’s worth doing shorter, more to the point episodes that you can appear with more often.

The most popular genre is clearly the interview. It is highly recommended to invite guests to share their experiences or to challenge opinions, as this way the guest can attract new listeners. There will be people who find you just because they know the guest, but they like the show so much that they listen to the other episodes and you already make a new subscriber!

But don’t get stuck with one solution! The more unique your content is, the more you will stand out from the crowd. And you will need this, as the number of podcast channels is growing every year. So feel free to come up with a format that best suits your message or brand.

Here’s a fictitious idea:

Develop a topic in 3 different shows.
In the first show, explore a topic alone or with a co-host. Present the main issues casually, just to make it clear to your listeners why the topic is important.

Then in the next show, invite a guest who is an expert on the topic or who may have a dissenting opinion. You can dig deeper with them, in detail, with cross-examination.

Finally, after the in-depth interview, explain the most important terms, expressions and conclusions in a short third show.

So you’ve already built a lot of content on a topic that you can use in your online marketing, but you’ve used a different genre and style in each episode, thereby giving the listener new and fresh value.

Choose a host.

It may have been obvious that you would be the one, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’ve never been a man of words, reach out to a colleague or someone who is professionally representative and ask them to co-host. It can also strengthen your position as an expert if you’re asked by a quasi-host, but it will also be much easier to cover the topic if you have help.

Bonus: How long should an episode be?

This is one of the most popular questions among podcasters.

The answer is that there is no ideal length for a podcast episode. It all depends on the content and the genre.

The average podcast is around 30 minutes, but there is no correlation between length and success. As always, it’s worth putting your audience first. Try to create a show that doesn’t drag or waste your listeners’ time.

As radio producer Roman Mars said, “If you have 100,000 listeners and you cut one useless minute out of your show, you’ve saved the world 100,000 wasted minutes.”

Finally, remember that podcasts are still evolving. What worked yesterday may not be as popular today, and what didn’t work a few years ago may be the next big thing.

As a rule of thumb, this chart will always help:

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Are you sure you need to start your own podcast channel?

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