Easy Ways to Find Content for your Podcast

You’ve decided it’s time for your organization to begin podcasting in order to build an audience and expand the business’s reach. Once you’ve settled on the right spokespeople to sit behind the microphone, how do you go about sourcing interesting content to be discussed and debated?

It’s not uncommon for firms planning their first podcast to struggle when deciding on the best way to demonstrate the brand’s value to listeners. It can be difficult for marketers to pin down the issues they want their organization to own and even more confusing knowing where to source the content. Another common issue is that the perceived extra work required to create thought leadership of any real quality can be daunting for stakeholders being asked to contribute.

However, the reality is that most businesses are already sitting on a gold mine of content that would perfectly fit the podcast format. The tips below describe some of the best methods of tapping into existing sources of content that require very little additional resources or effort to turn into successful podcasts and help you grow your online audience.

Start with your existing PR assets

Your firm may already have adopted traditional PR tactics in order to build awareness of the brand and share its noteworthy achievements. The content generated by your PR agency or in-house communications team represents an excellent starting point when considering topics for your first podcast.

Press releases often give the nuts-and-bolts details of major company milestones, deal announcements or reactions to key sector developments that can be interesting points of discussion. A traditional press release or media briefing note will provide the key take-away information that grabs headlines, but a podcast will allow your firm to go into much more detail. Adding anecdotal background information will provide valuable insight that goes beyond national and trade press coverage.

The benefit of leveraging your PR assets is that the hard work to develop interesting content has already been done. Press releases, news pitches and Q&A documents can help you develop an engaging framework for your podcast.

Leverage your relationships

Still having trouble coming up with fresh topics to discuss? Just ask your guests!

Making the most of your firm’s partnerships and third-party relationships is essential to demonstrating your value as a brand. Your association with recognized institutions and industry commentators is a valuable proof point that shows would-be customers you have important connections both within and outside of your sector.

Leveraging the opinions, achievements and experience of your podcast guests can provide listeners with valuable content that also serves to underscore how well connected you are. It doesn’t matter who is delivering the thought leadership, as the content is on your channel and relevant to your audience.

An added benefit is that your guests and their audiences will feel compelled to share your podcast with their own networks if the content is of interest to them. Harnessing your guests’ audience network allows you to build a community around your content and grow your social media following.

Identify your social media champions

Although your firm may have been reluctant to fully embrace social media up until now, chances are that several of your stakeholders are already quite far down the line in building their own followings. Even without content support from a central marketing team, there will always be those individuals who take it upon themselves to find new ways to sell their services and connect with new audiences.

If you can identify which internal stakeholders are your most active brand advocates on social media, you can take a closer look at what they’ve been sharing to promote the business and single out the content that resonated most with their followers. For example, they might be sharing blog posts on LinkedIn or uploading video responses to key sector developments that could form the basis of an informative and shareable podcast.

Infinite Global is often engaged by clients to conduct “influencer mapping” of their brands—determining which internal stakeholders and external commentators are mentioning their organizations on social media. By using various social listening tools, a firm’s social media champions can be quickly identified and their ideas can be tapped into.

Make the most of your existing marketing collateral

What marketing content has your organization already created that you could build a podcast episode around? Even material that was created for internal audiences only can be updated and repurposed with little additional effort. The following forms of content could easily be reworked to provide the foundations of a podcast:

• Keynote speeches
• Presentations and slide shows
• Blogs
• Webinars and video tutorials
• Guides
• Case studies
• Internal data and research

Which topics and types of content have received the most interaction on your firm’s digital channels? If recent enough, they provide clues about your audience’s key interests. Additionally, Google Analytics (or other website analytics tools) can give you insight into which blog topics have driven the most traffic to your website. If people are interested in a particular blog post, then it’s probably safe to reason that it could be expanded on in a podcast.

Most legal and professional services firms already have more than enough content around which to build a podcast than they first realize. Resourcefully leveraging these materials, along with strong third-party relationships, can go a long way to providing you with the engaging content your business needs to thrive.

Read more about podcasting in our blog “Can Podcasts be Valuable to Legal and Professional Services Firms?”