3 Hidden Lessons Behind Top Podcasts to Help Yours Stand Out

Ask yourself: What’s my show’s episode format? B BLOCK: Lead story – 4 to 5 minutes: Scott then gives one quick headline (e.g., “LinkedIn Spam”) that’s compelling enough to make you keep listening. 1 job of any good host: Get listeners to finish the episode. G BLOCK: Outro – 30 seconds: A similar sign plays each time, culminating in him saying, “I’m Scott Monty, and I’ll see YOU … on the internet.” The announcer reminds listeners to subscribe to the newsletter. But now that Scott can predictably and consistently create a high-quality episode, he can experiment with that rundown, produce more and better shows, and ultimately help the listener fall in love with The Full Monty. I know you love listening to your own 60-minute episode. He knows the value of maximizing every moment, and while this certainly makes the creative amazing, it also makes him way more productive than the average marketer. The experience gets better when a listener feels that sense of intimacy, and a semi-recurring content brand helps your audience feel like they’re “in” on it. The concept is simple but addicting: The co-hosts’ boss and Gimlet CEO Alex Blumberg finds a tweet involving internet culture that he doesn’t understand, and the boys help him get it. Want to hear how Jay’s three lessons work in CMI’s podcast, This Old Marketing?

Every morning, I commute to work with about 20 of my closest friends. And they all fit neatly in my pocket.

OK, so I’m really talking about podcasts. There aren’t actual tiny people in my pocket. Except for Steve, the tiny person who lives in my pocket. Obviously.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of podcasts like I am, you’ll know why I dubbed them my “friends.” Each show feels built just for you. You get to know a host or a brand’s quirks and personalities in a deeper way than you can with most other forms of content. Podcasting is intimacy that scales.

However, that personal, almost casual feel of many podcasts belies their true nature: A great show is incredibly hard to create.

Despite the difficulty in creating an addicting show, more brands are launching their own podcasts to support their marketing, including Slack, GE, eBay, HubSpot, Buffer, and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to name a few.

But marketing teams face problems in keeping their show both consistent and high quality. Just ask brands that started strong then “pod faded” like Prudential or those with endless resources and smarts who can’t seem to grasp the simplest quality issues in their sound or listener experience like McKinsey.

While there’s virtually no barrier to entry to create and share a show, there’s tremendous friction in making that show great.

Luckily, if we squint hard enough, we can see how top shows stay afloat and, more importantly, innovate. Let’s take a look at a few podcasts, each with one major productivity lesson we can learn for our own podcast process – as well as other forms of content marketing.

At the end, I’ve shared a template for a Trello board to help organize your podcast’s editorial pipeline.

Lesson 1: At first, format trumps talent

This is a hard pill to swallow, especially for someone like me. (I host two shows – one for my own business about creative intuition, and one for NextView Ventures about early-stage startups.) But as my executive producer Andrew Davis likes to say, “The audience has to fall in love with the format before they can fall in love with the talent.”

In thinking about any truly big, special podcast, he’s right – there needs to be some kind of underlying plan to your show. It improves both efficiency and quality. It helps you ditch the meandering, awful intros that lose listeners. It helps you keep producing episodes when other things get in the way. And it ensures that you spend time thinking about the experience for the audience, not just the name of the guest and the size of his or her Twitter following. (Besides, if you’re in an industry that has a popular list of influencers, as I am in marketing, your listeners will be sick of the same names that appear on every single podcast or in every single blog in the industry.)

Ask yourself: What’s my show’s episode format?

Where we can learn this: The Full Monty from Scott Monty, CEO of Brain+Trust Partners

Scott Monty is the former head of social media for Ford and a well-known keynote speaker and brand strategist. He now leads the C-suite advisory group, Brain+Trust. His weekly newsletter, The Full Monty, features a companion podcast of the same name – a weekly, 15-minute show.

The hallmark of the show, aside from Scott’s golden voice, is a really tight format that helps him produce episodes with minimal time and budget while still delivering a really great product to his listeners.

Looking under the hood of his podcast, here’s Scott’s format, broken into blocks, similar to how a TV show writers’ room would view it:

A BLOCK: Intro – 60 seconds: Scott intros the show concept in about 30 to 40 seconds. Then he gives you the headlines he’ll cover in the episode in the next 20 to 30 seconds.

B BLOCK: Lead story – 4 to 5 minutes: Scott then gives one quick headline (e.g., “LinkedIn Spam”) that’s compelling enough to make you keep listening. He gives you the source of the story first, whether it’s coverage of a news event or a personal anecdote that led to a realization. He finishes this section with a clever limerick about the story.

C BLOCK: Trivia question – 30 seconds: You then hear tuba sounds and an announcer briefly introducing the trivia section. Scott delivers the question and promises the answer at the end of the show – a great tactic to help him accomplish really the No. 1 job of any good host: Get listeners to finish the episode. The tubas then transition into the next section.

D BLOCK: Page 2 – 4 to 5 minutes: The second and final large chapter of his episode is called Page 2. Scott teases a larger lesson from something that happened in the last week. For instance, when CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood retired, Scott used Page 2 to talk about the cult of personality – a large topic with something both brands and individuals can learn in the era of social media, personal brands, and mini-media empires built around people. As in B Block, Scott closes with a limerick about the preceding story. He then plays a quick musical tone to move to the next section.