Use Content Design to Connect with Your Target Audience with Emily Shiner

Transcript: Episode 4 of Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing

Episode Title: Use Content Design to Connect with Your Target Audience with Emily Siner

Emily Siner: I mean, I think this goes back to the idea of what is your show’s reason for existing in the world? What hole does it fill that doesn’t already exist? So rather than just throwing something up because you have an idea, thinking about where it fits into the context of this entire podcasting landscape.

Clark Buckner: That’s the voice of Emily Siner. She’s the news director of Nashville Public Radio WPLN. Over six years ago, Emily launched Nashville Public Radio’s first podcast, Movers and Thinkers. And now, they have an award winning fleet of shows. She joins us to talk about content design, including identifying the true purpose for your podcast and the importance of knowing your show’s goals and the target audience. Additionally, she shares her tips for deciding the right length and release schedule for your episodes. Welcome to Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing, the show all about how to build a professional branded podcast that delivers on your business’s goals. I’m your host Clark Buckner, partner and co-founder here at Relationary. We’re a turnkey podcast production agency for B2B content marketing. We help brands and agencies create engaging content to establish thought leadership, nurture key relationships, and promote events. For a recap and transcript of this episode and to download our free five step guide to building a branded podcast, head on over to relationarymarketing.com/podcast. Now, let’s jump in.

Emily Siner: I’m the news director of Nashville Public Radio WPLN and I am the host of a podcast called Movers and Thinkers, and I’m also one of the editors on the many different podcasts that we have at the station.

Clark Buckner: You have a whole podcast fleet.

Emily: We do. Yes, we’re very excited about that.

Clark: Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us here in our studio. We are just huge fans of you. I’ve said this before when you’ve spoken at the Nashville Podcasters Meetup and I mean every bit of it. You are truly, I believe, a hometown hero when it comes to audio, when it comes to podcasts, and we’re just super thrilled to have you on our show.

Emily: Thanks Clark. That always makes me feel good when you say that.

Clark: It’s a real thing and you really are. You did a Nashville TEDx talk in the past kind of right when podcasting was starting to get noticed in a new way. You’ve been really innovative on how you’ve incorporated audio podcasting with WPLN with this NPR affiliate to ultimately drive your goals forward, and those include things like creating better relationship with your listeners, trying to build that buy-in. So at Relationary we’re always talking about how content design of a show, of any podcast, there needs to be goals. And so we want to really unpack those items with you. We want to talk a little about designing shows and how all of the thought process goes into being intentional. So what better guests than you talk about content design because you have several shows on the fleet. What’s the fleet up to today?

Emily: We’re at six or seven. We have seven shows, but one is on hiatus so I guess six active shows.

Clark: Wow. So we’re talking about content design. And so when you approach a show, when you’re creating a show from scratch, just first thing that comes to your mind, why is it important to establish a target audience before you actually create the podcast?

Emily: I think it gives a structure to your show. Having that kind of target listener in mind helps you figure out how deep are you going to go into explaining things, how obvious is it. Most of our shows are targeted to a more general audience because we’re kind of getting the typical radio listener who is interested in a lot of things, but wants to learn more about something. And so that means that we are going to assume that the listener doesn’t really know when we start talking about something really specific and we’re going to give more detailed explanation. And that’s something that you wouldn’t do if you’re creating a video game podcast and your audience is video game listeners. You don’t have to explain what Madden is, but we would in our shows. So that’s important and also thinking about how you market it. So where are those audience members seeing content and finding content? Are they a very Reddit based kind of audience versus one that’s using Facebook? I don’t know. I think it’s super important. I would love to hear your insights too, Clark.

Clark: So I think it’s certainly helpful and I’ve heard this strategy from radio people, just creating that, I guess, persona or giving this person a name, who is she, or how old is he, or you give them a name, maybe even find a picture that looks like them in your mind and think about… Yeah, just like you’re saying. Some things that might be more obvious you don’t need to explain that, but you’re always speaking to that person. I think that’s part of the power of audio podcasts. Different than video, different than blogging. It’s so much more of an intimate experience. So I would hope our listener right now, I’m not saying listeners… Typically someone who is listening to a podcast, they’re alone, maybe they’re commuting, maybe they’re doing chores. They’re just sitting in the room with us. It’s me, you and our guest. So that guest, I have an idea of who they are. So that’s kind of one of the ways I think we’re thinking about it.

Emily: Can I ask, do you have the target audience member for this show?

Clark: I’m put on the spot here. So it’s less about the creative of just let’s do a podcast as a hobby. It’s more of how do we use podcasting in content marketing, so these are folks we’re trying to reach. These are the people who are in marketing. Maybe they’re at an agency and they have clients now who are asking them, “Hey, we want to get into podcasting,” but they don’t have maybe the in-house team, or the right gear, or the right expertise to do this and this is a resource for them. Also, people who are trying to take a forward step into the different vehicles. They’ve heard about podcasting, but we’re trying to help them think about how do you use this to drive your goals forward.

Emily: I think that’s one of the things that we think about too. Along with audience, you have what are the goals for the show and is it to reach new audiences of people who, for us, are not the typical public radio listener? A lot of what we talk about with podcasts is reaching younger audiences who aren’t already listening to us, but there are also some shows. I’d say Curious Nashville maybe fits a little bit of both, but with Curious Nashville, we are targeting current listeners to ask us questions and give this kind of feedback loop. So we’re deepening the experience for current listeners. Hopefully we’re also reaching new listeners too, but I think you approach a show differently when you’re thinking about am I reaching new people who aren’t already aware of this brand versus are we making a more personal connection with people that we already know.

Clark: That’s a really good point. So some of the clients that we work with… Okay, it’s all about your goals and we’re talking about goals in just a moment, that’s the most important part of content design. But some of our clients, they’re creating podcasts because this gives their audience, their friends with the brand, their fans, whatever you want to call them, a way to deepen that connection. So super fans, so Jack Daniels is one of our clients. We love working with them and through an agency, DVL Seigenthaler, but they have something called Tennessee Squires and they just love Jack Daniels. To become a Squire, there’s some steps involved and not everyone’s a Squire so they’re really proud of that.

Clark: And so that’s some of the kinds of folks that we create that podcast for. The engagement is really great. They listen to it for a majority of the episode, which is also good. So every goal is different. Some podcasts have a totally different goal. Maybe that’s just to try to advance someone in the sales funnel or the content marketing funnel that’s created. So I think this is a great segue to talk about goals and success. What does success really mean? So I’ll be curious to hear what are your goals for doing podcasts.

Emily: I think our overall goal is to become more of a presence in our community and deepen the connection with people. So we already have this platform to share content over the radio, but it’s not necessarily super personal. And our podcasts are more personal either because we are talking into someone’s ear bud, like you said, or because it’s a live event and we’re getting to interact with people in real life. It just gives more outlets for that so I think overall that’s our goal. Within that, a big part of it is increasing our membership at the public radio station. So hopefully if people like what we’re doing, they’ll become members. And then it doesn’t even matter if they’re listening to the radio or to our podcasts, they’ll just feel connected to the station.

Emily: A secondary goal but one that I find super important as one of the podcast producers and a journalist at the station is having this outlet to do more creative long form storytelling because you’re really constrained in radio by the clock. We very rarely put anything on the radio that’s more than six minutes. So to have this outlet to do a 25 minute narrative story is huge and has definitely helped us just become more creative storytellers in general.

Clark: I love that. It’s so interesting because going into this, my thought was, “Oh, this is just another revenue stream. Create content, sell ad,” because we look at, I love everyone has for names for this stuff, but we call it the B2C approach where the B2B approach. The typical B2C approach, the business-to-consumer approach, is typically going to be build a show, make it huge, sell a bunch of ads, but the B2B approach is a bit different. It’s usually connected to a business goal and the success metric is less about quantity of downloads and it’s more about the quality or what are those people doing. So it’s so interesting to hear sure you’re able to sell ads on this, and that makes sense for your model and your nonprofit and all that, but creating that emotional connection, that deeper relationship and broadening your reach, I love hearing that.

Emily: Yeah, and I think being a nonprofit in the public radio model, the existing public radio model probably contributes to that where there are many different legs to getting revenue and direct advertising or what we call underwriting in public radio is one of them, but a huge part is also donations and donations come from a sense of community and presence and all these touchy, feely things that I think in commercial media are sometimes not seen as super important, but I’m really glad that they are in our space.

Clark: That’s a great point. So we’re going to kind of popcorn around because there’s just a lot to cover. So what are your opinions on length of shows?

Emily: Yeah, so I have two thoughts and they’re kind of conflicting. One is that I feel like the perfect episode length is 25 minutes. It should never go beyond an hour. If it’s an hour and I see… If someone recommends a podcast and I look at it and the episodes are an hour and 15 minutes, I will like audibly scoff. I’ll be like, “I’m not going to listen to that.” But then on the other hand, I have friends who clearly listen to that. If they recommend it to me or people who will listen to the extended interview with Krista Tippett that’s like an hour and a half long. I have listened to episodes that are that long when it’s something that I really care about. I’ve listened to the long form podcast interview with Terry Gross about interviewing, which was an hour and 15 minutes. And not only that, I listened to it twice because I loved it so much. So maybe I just don’t personally care about as many things as most people and more people are willing to listen to that. I don’t know.

Clark: Hey. we agree. Average commute time around 25 minutes one way. So how about frequency? How do you normally approach frequency?

Emily: So we have a few different approaches and it’s kind of like the more frequently you do it, the shorter the run is. So what that means is we might have a season, for example, The Promise, where we had season one and it took about a year to prep. Then we had all seven episodes coming out week after week and that was a season and then it was done and it’ll be done for the next two years because we’re going to have something coming out next year. So very high frequency, high intensity of narrative structure and reporting.

Clark: She was embedded all year where she did the story.

Emily: Yeah. So obviously not something that’s sustainable more than a couple months out of the year.

Clark: It’s kind of bet because that’s a lot of time investment, resource investment.

Emily: Yeah. well, And then the thought is we put all this investment into it so we want it to be something that’s coming out every week that we can actively market during that entire time. I’m pretty sure when that came out, all of our podcasts were directing people to The Promise. So it sort of gives us this intense time to say this is The Promise’s two months. That helped us gain a lot of traction nationally too. So I think that worked well for that. With Versify, it comes out every two weeks and also has seasons so there is an end date, but it might there might be 14 episodes every two weeks and then the rest of the year is for episode prep. For something like Movies and Thinkers and Curious Nashville, we don’t necessarily have seasons, but they don’t come out as frequently. I think it’s really hard to do a consistent week after week show forever with no kind of end date season in mind.

Clark: Right. We certainly love having the season mindset because you give yourself permission to stop and you give a heads up to your audience. And also with Curious Nashville, it makes sense there’s going to be some infrequency, but the audience knows that, they expect that. If you only had one show, you want to stay as consistent as possible. But since we have this family, it works, but there’s a reason behind why you’re doing it.

Emily: The season model gives the audience a chance to catch up because if it really is coming out every week like a radio show like This American Life, it’s very easy, at least for me, to be like, “Well, I missed that week. I’ll listen to the next one.” But when people are recommending a show and you see there’s episodes one through eight and I’m going to start with episode one, I’m going to get through eight before the next season comes out.

Clark: Excellent. So we talked earlier about some shows are more narrative, you have the interview format. Any suggestions on how you’re approaching details like that? And also included in this is the structure of the episode. So we use something we like to call a “gold moment”. So for instance, on this podcast episode, we started off with a gold moment from you. Intro narration from me, boom, go to the full edited interview. So when you think about elements that make up the podcast episode, things that are really making it what it is, any thoughts you have around that?

Emily: Yeah. Also, this is fun. It’s sort of meta. I don’t know yet what the gold moment will be.

Clark: I don’t either.

Emily: But the listeners do.

Clark: It’s going to be great and it was great.

Emily: Yeah, we do the same thing. We don’t call it a gold moment. We call it a “billboard”.

Clark: I love how everyone calls it something different. I’ve heard people call it a “hero moment”. That’s cool.

Emily: I like the “gold moment”. I feel like that’s a good way to do it too. And we will often, even if it’s not a moment from the show, it might be a preview moment or it might be a standalone small story or a related thing. For Movers and Thinkers, I’ll pick out a question that kind of stands alone and that will be its own little segment at the beginning that’s maybe one to two minutes long. And then we have our show open, which is “from National Public Radio this is Movers and Thinkers.”

Clark: Of course. That’s so classic.

Emily: And I think the thing with that that’s nice is that you kind of get two chances to open. You have the very open and then you have your open after the show open, which is another way to hook the listener. I think the only other thing that we think about with where to put breaks is that we always have a space for a midroll even if we haven’t sold a midroll. So we have a natural middle ending point and then we have the end ending point.

Clark: So when you go into recording an episode, you know that’s going to be there.

Emily: Right. As we’re writing the script or as I’m kind of working through my interview I’ll mark here’s a good kind of mid ending point.

Clark: That’s lovely because we’ve had some people who’ve asked, “Hey, what are our options if we have a sponsor?” And we tell people what midrolls are challenging because unless you go into it like you do, intentionally, otherwise it’s going to be disruptive to just drop in a midroll.

Emily: We actually had to add midrolls to several of our podcasts once we started kind of actively looking for sponsors. I remember I had to go through all my previous episodes of Movers and Thinkers and figure out where the midroll was going to be and rerecord a little middle ending thing. I tried to do it in the voicing that I had at the time, which probably wasn’t as good.

Clark: I bet no one else noticed, but I see what you’re saying.

Emily: It’s hard to retrofit it.

Clark: Wow. Because there is something so special and intimate with that live show you do that… Yeah, once you’re in that moment, it’s really challenging to replicate.

Emily: Yeah. And I guess that kind of goes to a different thing about how we structure our episodes, which is that the structure of the live show is not necessarily how it’s going to end up in the episode. And so we can move things around. I necessarily think about that as much when I’m doing the live show because that’s a different space and there isn’t a natural middle breaking point. But then as I’m listening through, I can kind of pinpoint it.

Clark: I love it. Well, we’ve got a few minutes left with you. I know you’ve got to get back to the station and keep the good work going, but I want to ask you about in this content design process, one of the steps is to name the show. That’s important. Let’s talk about your experience with naming shows.

Emily: Yeah, it’s really hard to come up with an idea that you feel like encapsulates everything and also you want to listen to yourself say every episode. It took me a while actually to get on board. Even though I came up with Movers and Thinkers and it was approved, I still didn’t really love it for a while. People kept saying, “Movers and Shakers,” and then I kind of realized that’s fine. That’s something I can use. So anyway, it takes a while to, I think, come up with a name. And we don’t have a great process for necessarily the inception side of it, but we do have a process for what to do after you come up with a new name, which is primarily to make sure that it doesn’t already exist, which sounds very obvious, but you can sometimes forget to do that or someone else might come up with a name shortly afterward that actually happened with Versify.

Emily: There was a poetry project that a publisher was working on, not podcast related, and they were using the name Versify and the station had to figure out with the publisher how we were going to divide up that trademark. Our classical show, Keeping Score, is still in existence but no longer is called Keeping Score. It’s now called Classically Speaking because after we came up with that name and started producing episodes, we realized there was another show that had already trademarked the name. And so if we wanted to market it in any kind of national way, it was going to run into issues so we had to change it. So it’s something that now we are more cognizant of doing on the front end, to be like just in case this goes big. And I would say for anyone producing a podcast, just in case your podcast is a huge success, make sure it’s something that can be sustainable that you won’t have to change the name of in the middle.

Clark: Well, one of the final things that I think any podcast needs to be able to do, whether it’s the B2C approach, the B2B approach, it’s give value. So as we’re starting to wrap up, any thoughts you had around any kind of podcast just giving value to the listener?

Emily: Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to the idea of what is your show’s reason for existing in the world. What hole does it fill that doesn’t already exist? I think, for example, with Movers and Thinkers, I wanted to do an interview show, but there are also so many interview shows out there. So I wanted to think of a way to make that a little bit different, and part of that is just I try to have my own particular interview style, but it’s also having this live component, having sometimes a mix of three different guests. If you’re doing a show about a topic that you’re passionate about or working in, I think it’s probably a good idea to maybe survey some people in the field and see what they want to hear. What doesn’t exist yet already? If there’s a show out there that you really think you can do better, defining what you can do better about it to yourself is important. So rather than just throwing something up because you have an idea, thinking about where it fits into the context of this entire podcasting landscape.

Clark: I love it. What a great way to wrap up this whole dialogue around content design. I love it. So Emily, I want to ask you, what is your why? You started off at All Tech Considered in DC. Now, you’re the News Director here in Nashville at WPLN. Why do you do this, and especially why do you do this with audio?

Emily: I think audio is such a creative medium. I originally was a kind of a journalist in training in print and then early on in my career started working at NPR and started working with audio. It’s this really interesting transition that we see a lot of print journalists make where you have to start using audio and everything has to be listened to linearly. In text, you can kind of read around. You can’t do that in listening. You have to listen linearly. It constrains you a lot and so at first it feels like you can’t even tell a story and then you suddenly realize there’s so much more you can do with it like putting people into a scene and into a moment and hearing another human’s voice.

Emily: It’s so cool and such a cool way to show emotion and human connection. So that to me is why I do radio. I love that part of it. I love sharing stories. And on the new side, I love feeling like we’re providing this really important service to democracy by sharing information. And I think that storytelling in general does that by creating empathy between people, which is a super important thing, especially now.

Clark: This has been so much fun. So I want to close this out by basically what’s a way someone can connect with you, Emily, and your team at WPLN. Maybe that is they’re interested in sponsoring a podcast or maybe they also believe in this important mission. They want to become members. What’s a good way to learn more?

Emily: To sponsor a podcast you should contact our sponsorship team which is at sponsornashvillepublicradio.org. We have many opportunities for businesses or people who are interested in doing that. If you want to become a member, you go to wpln.org/give. There’s actually a little check box on the donation form now to show that you listen to podcasts so that we know that our podcasts are pushing people to become members, which is an important way to measure that.

Clark: That’s so cool. And the power of podcasts, especially if you’re interested in maybe growing your podcast, sponsoring other podcasts makes sense because if you’re trying to get in front of people who are already adopted the medium, who believe in the power of audio, who have it in their routines, your money can go a little further.

Emily: I agree. You should definitely sponsor our podcasts.

Clark: All right, Emily. Thank you. And what’s a good way for someone to connect with you, follow you on Twitter, all of that?

Emily: Follow me on Twitter @Sinersays. Siner is S-I-N-E-R like diner, but with an S. Siner says.

Clark: Siner says. Okay. Thank you so much.

Emily: Thank you, Clark. This is so much fun.

Clark: Hey, thanks so much for listening to Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing. We’re a turnkey podcast production agency for content marketing and we’d love to hear from you. For a recap and transcript of this episode and to download our free five step guide to building a branded podcast, visit relationarymarketing.com/podcast. And if you enjoy this content, please follow, rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time.

Clark: Brandcasting is a production of Relationary Marketing. This episode was produced by Darcy Mack and executive producers Clark Buckner, me, and Chuck Brian with editing support from Dylan Carrow and music by Jess Grommet. Additional production support is provided by Anthony Lucianni, AJ Meyers, Riley Wallace, and Jasmine Meriweather.