In this section, I'm going to talk about podcast design. Solid well-researched designs are like the foundations of your podcast. You can't build a house on quicksand. It's the same as starting a podcast without researching who your audience is and what the right design is to achieve your business objectives. That's why anecdotally, a large percentage of the podcasts that do fail, fail, because they aren't set up right from day one. No matter how successfully you build their house if the foundations aren't sound, at some point it's going to collapse. So, how do you create sound foundations for your podcast? We use for designs for business podcasts, which you can find out more about in the guide that accompanies this audio. If you don't have a copy of this guide you can download it from the pikkal website, which you can find atwww.podcastingforbrands.com. The full podcast designs for business are effectively each objectives for that business. They are one campaign awareness, two brand or authority, three business development for news and analysis. Think of these designs, like blueprints for the house. It's a lot easier to build a house that has an established, tried and tested design. Then build one from scratch. That design contains many factors inherent to the success of the podcast long-term. Just as any blueprint would give you indication about how deep to build the foundations. A podcast design should also give you indications about the length of a podcast who should be the host, who should be the guest? What the call to action on the podcast should be how often you should publish a podcast. And what the content narrative of said podcast should be. If you want to build an apartment block to house 100 people, you don't start building a house and if you want to build a holiday home by the sea. You don't start building an office block. But that is what happens when many people start podcasts, especially for brands and do it without an informed design. So, how do you choose a podcast design? This process is like working with an architect. Here is my idea. Please make that possible. How do you choose an architect? Well, I imagine if you're choosing an architect to build a house for you, you choose somebody that has experienced, have they done this before? Or are you bankrolling their education? Just in the same way that, because you love eating food, doesn't make you a good choice for a restaurant manager. The fact that somebody likes podcasts or has a podcast himself doesn't necessarily make them a great choice to turn your podcast idea into a business success. And are they a specialist? A landscape gardener may know the basics of design and be able to use tools and equipment. But can they actually architect and build a house. The danger here is that you respect their designs and trust them to create beautiful landscapes. However, put to the test on bricks and mortar, it might be a risk too far. Those landscape designers, maybe PR agencies, digital agencies, creative agencies. They may have ideas about design, but once again, you're bankrolling their education. In choosing a partner to design and execute. And grow your podcast successfully. You should look at a couple of factors. Does this partner actually have a podcast themselves? Secondly, what kind of results have they delivered for their podcast clients in the past? Show me the metrics. Good podcast partner, ideally a specialist podcast agency. Is defined by the quality of the questions that they ask you in the introductory stage You architects, first question should be what's the objective? Why are we building this? And in the context of podcast, it's the same. One of the first questions we want to find out is how does the brand see itself? Is it it leader? Or is it an enabler in its industry? Is it an enterprise or is it a startup because each has its own different voice An enterprise that sees itself as a leader, for example, is well-suited to a brand or authority podcast. This is the design we use for the McKinsey future of Asia podcast. Future of Asia, one McKinsey nine communication awards last year, including one award for the podcast episode, with the United nations director of inclusivity and diversity, that podcast episode was about parity in the pandemic and it won a platinum marcomms award. But if I said to you that was all planned in the design from day one. I'd be lying because day one was 2019, not 30 episodes later, as it is now. We learn those designs from producing thousands of podcasts and not all of them were successful. That's what architects do they learn from their own mistakes? They put in years of practice. They study the patterns of success. So clients don't have to and if there's one thing that we have learned in all of this time it's this. The best podcasts have this success baked into their design and this all starts with the right choice of metrics. Peter Drucker, the management guru famously ...
