Case Study: How repurposing a podcast generated a year's worth of content
Blog
B2B podcasts are increasingly popular, and it's not hard to see why.
With 44% of decision-makers listening to business podcasts — and brands who produce them reporting higher awareness, higher buying intent, higher engagement, and higher… well, lots of other good stuff for your business — starting your own can seem like a no-brainer.
But are you making the most of all the time, money, and effort you put into producing a banging podcast?
Or is it all going to waste?
The problem: 15 minutes of fame
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
You publish an episode of your podcast
You share it on your socials
Perhaps, you create a transcript, so people who can't listen or prefer to read can follow along
But then?
That's it.
Much like an actor who's been typecast in a role that's no longer in demand, your podcast episode soaks up its 15 minutes of fame and disappears into the black hole that's the See Older Episodes button on your website. Replaced by new episodes that will eventually suffer a similar fate.
That's a huge waste.
Every single podcast episode is an absolute goldmine of content ideas, based on insights none of your competitors have, especially if your format involves interviewing one or more guests. You have a series of expert interviews at your fingertips.
So using them to create compelling content is smart (and much more efficient) than trying to come up with ideas from scratch.
This is exactly the issue one of my clients — a spend management platform — was facing.
When they got in touch, they had 60+ podcast episodes.
For each episode, they'd created a landing page and a blog post with the key takeaways. And they'd also created several special themed episodes with snippets from relevant episodes.
But that was that.
Each episode inevitably ran its promotional course and got replaced by the next one and the next one.
Meanwhile, their blog was in need of some fresh perspectives.
Method: Making new connections with old content
When the client got in touch about working together on a content strategy for their blog, looking at the podcasts was the obvious starting point.
Each 30 to 50-minute episode had a different guest on, and they all had unique insights to share. The trick was to repackage them in fresh ways. This would enable us to:
Come up with new topics and angles for the blog
Speak authoritatively, sharing expert quotes and perspectives readers wouldn't find anywhere else
Link to the podcast episodes, giving them a fresh source of traffic
First, I listened to the podcast episodes and grouped them by theme.
Next, I created a content matrix with four overarching topics that would be relevant to the client's target audience.
Finally, I went through the episodes once again, this time theme by theme, mining the content for interesting angles that would work well as blog posts and fit into the overall strategy.
Next, I created a content matrix with four overarching topics that would be relevant to the client's target audience.
Finally, I went through the episodes once again, this time theme by theme, mining the content for interesting angles that would work well as blog posts and fit into the overall strategy.
Results: One year's worth of content
Over the next several months, I produced two 6-month content plans: working titles, plus synopses.
Just three podcast episodes became:
💡Five bottom of the funnel, educational articles
💡Five awareness articles
💡Four thought leadership articles
💡 One branded article published on an industry website
All based on content that was already there, in the client's podcast.
The takeaway: Podcasts are a goldmine of ideas
Podcasts are great for raising awareness, educating decision-makers, and getting more leads. But you can get much more value out of them if you repurpose them.
My client got one year's worth of blog post content out of them. And even that's scratching the surface of what repurposing can do.
Alongside blog posts, your podcast episodes can also become:
Several bits of social copy
A downloadable ebook or white paper
Even a course, if you were so inclined
And, the more podcast episodes you produce, the more raw material you have which you can repurpose into new content.
If you stick with podcast production long term, you could easily come up with new content ideas indefinitely, using material you already have.
Need help working out how you can milk every single drop of value out of your podcast?