Full Podcast Production

Podcasting for marketing: communicating your brand, engaging your audiences, building loyalty and developing business

Podcasts are the fastest growing area of communications media. Global media research companies Nielsen and Statista report that every year more podcasts are being produced, more people are subscribing and listening and they’re doing it more and more often. As a standalone, or complimenting your film and video, Slate and Mortar offer you the complete podcasting service.

Our podcasting service is broken down into different areas for each of the podcast elements. Slate and Mortar help with all of these, or just the bits you need support for (and we can provide on-the-job training for the areas you’d like to do yourself). The key areas are planning, recording and editing, disseminating and reporting:

Planning

• Pre-interview discussions including creating and agreeing questions, themes and creative approaches
• Being clear about objectives, key messages and target audience (or audiences)
• Development of the ‘treatment’, which is something comparable to a rough or draft version of a script

The tone of a podcast is typically conversational which means that a full script is not necessary, however a treatment is something that sets down the subject, themes, approach and ‘flow’ of an individual episode or a full series.

Recording and editing

The recording can be facilitated face to face or remotely via Zoom, or other suitable online audio recording applications. At the present time it’s recommended that most recording takes place remotely, however when circumstances change, we can record ‘on location’ or in a studio. This will depend on your requirements but podcasting provides the flexibility to be used as you need it to.

We ensure that your podcast is produced to the highest standards. When recording remotely we’ll give you all the support and advice for a smooth and effective process. When on-location and face-to-face, we’ll ensure high quality and when a studio’s required, we engage sound engineers to guarantee broadcast quality.

The editing process is key. This is where the sound design is added (music, sound effects and narration). It’s the part where the episode is constructed. It’s also where things are ‘tidied up’, so alongside the music, links, introductions and outros, the edit will improve the overall sound quality.

Uploading and disseminating the podcast

This stage ensures that the podcast is available on the most popular podcast browsers and podcast apps, with subscribers being automatically notified when a new episode is available. Making a podcast available on channels like Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts and Google Podcast is key. Enabling your content to be readily available where your audience will already be accessing their content enhances the growth of your brand awareness. All these platforms make it easy for your listeners to subscribe and follow you and your content for as long as you continue to create podcasts for them.

Occasionally our clients only want to share the content with their own internal audience, in which case the ‘podcast’ can be provided as an audio file to be shared from an intranet, or password protected online space. Sharing on a podcast platform, or via internal channels is important but we can ensure you grow the number of people listening by helping you promote your content via social media. High quality, ‘home grown’ content is always the thing an organisation’s audience engages with the most. Sharing relevant third-party content is helpful, posting snippets of internal news can be interesting, but overall, audiences respond best to content that is closely aligned with the organisation that is posting it. Podcasts are an excellent source of repeating and engaging home-grown content.

The final piece about dissemination and sharing is to ensure that a “feed” or “podcast player” is also embedded on your website. Some listeners will want to engage via a subscription on Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts. Others will prefer to listen from your site, especially if relevant links to other content, news and offers are easy to access. We can show you how to do this and how to direct people to these pages. This will increase traffic to your site AND will increase your search engine ranking with Google leading to greater “discovery” of your organisation and your offer and services.

From concept creation to full dissemination, we provide full support to ensure high quality and audience growth.

Reporting

Finally, our podcasting services also include full reporting of outcomes. It can be frustrating to spend a great deal of time producing and sharing content but then never to know the effect. We’ll provide you with regular reports of how well your content has worked on social media and how many “listens” and “downloads” for each episode. We can help you understand which topics and themes work best and which formats are preferred. As with all effective communications content creation, observing, learning and adapting are key.

We’ll provide a report of the number of listens, subscriptions, likes and shares of the podcast itself and the related social media activity. This will grow exponentially over time as ‘old’ episodes will also attract listeners as more people are aware and engage with the podcast.

Our service doesn’t end with production, we partner you to ensure your success with your audience.