Prep and Planning Your Podcast Content
By Cliff Dumas
Apply the three “R’s” to your podcast storytelling. Reason, Reveal, Resolution. Give your audience the hook at the beginning of your podcast and restate it throughout. Give them the reason they need to listen and stay engaged. Reveal the content of the story and take your audience on a journey.
Prepare the road-map of your Podcast. Some performers feel more comfortable writing everything they will say word for word, others are comfortable in point form. The most important thing is to do what is comfortable for you and will allow you to sound informed and confident in your content. The third “R” is resolution; what is the point to your story? What is the takeaway? Always have a culmination to any story you are telling. Think about what the benefit to the audience is and craft your narrative in a way to deliver a consistent resolution for all of your content. The resolution could be a punchline to a joke or humorous story, a powerful realization either personally or as it applies to the specific content or story you are sharing, or it could be a call to action.
Who is your target audience? Identify these 5 attributes of your audience
As your podcast gains an audience, you will be able to use the analytics of whatever platform you are using to identify the key attributes of your listeners, age, geographic location etc., and if your content is connecting based on number of streams and or downloads. To begin with, consider who your target is; movie lovers, people interested in cryptocurrency, Tesla owners? Once your podcast attains an audience you may consider a deeper dive into your target listening group;
1. Age
How old are your audience members and what are their age ranges? Younger audiences have different understandings, different cultural knowledge, and different backgrounds from older audiences. Knowing their age is very important.
2. Gender.
What is the gender mix in your audience? Whom are you playing too? Who are you hoping to reach with your content? This gender breakdown will influence how you design your remarks and make your points.
3. Occupation.
What do your audience members do for a living? Are you playing too, presenting or speaking to a group of iron workers or entrepreneurs? What is happening in their particular fields today? Is this a boom time or a bust time for the work that they do?
4. Family status. (This will help in targeting your content and any personal stories that would relate to your audience)
What is the family status of your audience? Are audience members married, single, divorced, or widowed? Are they mostly married or mostly single? Do most have children?
5. How familiar is the audience with you or your subject?
How much does it already know about what you will be saying? Are audience members beginners, or are they somewhat knowledgeable? Are they fans?
How much prep should I do?
The first and most important skill of well know podcasters and broadcasters is their ability to be vulnerable with their audience. Your audience, regardless of the content or theme of your podcast will exponentially benefit by allowing your audience to know who you are and what you stand for. It’s important to include key personality attributes into your preparation so you reveal them consistently in every episode.
The amount of preparation required varies per individual and the kind of content you intend to deliver. Are you a solo host sharing your passion? Interviewing guests? Telling a story that requires production? On some of the well-produced news and true crime podcasts, production alone can be 20 to 30 hours for a single show. The guideline is, enough to feel confident in your material and to be able to deliver your content in a compelling way. I believe you can never do enough preparation. I would always choose to be over prepared than under prepared. Remember, your podcast is recorded so it can be edited, new or updated content inserted or fixed before you publish.
Jon Stewart & The Daily Show
As host of The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015 Jon Stewart became the source millions turned to for an unfiltered look at the day’s top stories. I miss Jon as host of the Daily Show but Trevor Noah has done an outstanding job.
Jon and his team were committed to intense prep and planning. "You'd be incredibly surprised at how regimented our day was and how the infrastructure of the show was mechanized," he says. “We had a very strict day that we have to adhere to. And by doing that, it gives us the freedom to improvise."
Jon and his writers and producers would meet each day at 9 a.m.to go over all of the previous day's top news stories and how they've been covered by the 24-hour news channels and other news programs. They would identify and isolate the events they would use to create their content.
The final hours before the 6 p.m. live taping were spent rewriting chunks of the script that didn't work during the dress rehearsal or adding material that the staff has found between writing sessions.
Writing, producing and executing a television show is obviously more complicated than creating a podcast or radio show, presentation or speech but the level of commitment to prep, planning and rehearsing your content should be the same.
Effective Storytelling is not show business, it’s good business
So, this is the most fundamental challenge we face in the “attention economy”: how do you capture people’s attention? How do you override the natural tendency for your audience’s mind to skip away from whatever you are telling them or showing them? By telling stories. In normal life, we spin about one-hundred daydreams per waking hour. But when consumed by a good story—when we watch a movie like The Avengers or TV shows like Game of Thrones or Ozark—or listen to a compelling podcast or read an inspiring book we experience approximately zero daydreams per hour. Stories are the “ice bucket challenge” for shocking people back on point and focused on what you are saying.
Share, don’t read, the story