Breaking Down The Breakdown: A Grand Experiment in Branded Podcasts
”You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
You probably know that quote. It's Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent in Christopher Nolan's penultimate Batman film, The Dark Knight. Since the film's release in 2008, that quote has been referenced and misappropriated to fit situations because, well, let's be honest, it's a cool quote.
Well, you can add another reference to the pile because it's the first quote that came to mind when I thought about the prolific podcaster, Matt Medeiros. You either Podfeed or your podcast long enough to try every format.
Matt has certainly been around the block. He had perhaps the first popular WordPress business podcast, The Matt Report. He has a short-form news podcast called The WP Minute. And finally, he has a locally focused podcast called We Are Here, celebrating businesses in South Coast, Massachusetts. And now, he hosts The Breakdown, a podcast by the popular forms plug-in, Gravity Forms, for Gravity Forms users and web builders.
Even though podcasting has been around for a while, most brands are just now coming around to their importance as part of a greater community content strategy. I wanted to capture the breakdown story as it was starting. It's easy to say after it's worked that it was the right decision, but we're still at the point where Matt and the Gravity Forms team are experimenting. And that's a great thing for brands and podcasters alike to see.
So in this episode, look for these top takeaways. No matter how many downloads your podcast gets, it can be an integral part of your overall content strategy. Create case studies from interviews you publish on your podcast, whether you're a brand or a solopreneur, and be open to experiments. You never know what will resonate with your audience.
Welcome to Podcast Workflows where you get daily tips to improve your process, grow your show, and maybe even make some money. Each week, I also do a daily dive into the process of the world's most successful podcasters and reveal their tools, processes, and systems to help you simplify the production of your own show and reclaim hours in your day. You can improve your own podcast production process by seeing how the pros do it. I'm your host, Joe Casabona. And it's Wednesday, which means we're doing a deep dive. We are breaking down the Breakdown, a grand experiment in branded podcasts.
So first, let's talk about what Breakdown is about.
The official description of Breakdown is this, discover new WordPress opportunities through stories told using Gravity Forms.
WordPress developers and agency owners rely on Gravity Forms to solve complex problems for their clients.
Breakdown explores their stories to extract the most useful lessons for our listeners. It's super clear as a mission statement. And it states their target audience and how the podcast serves that audience. But when I spoke to Matt, he also gave the hopeful description, ‘to educate and entertain’.
This is a problem Matt has thought a lot about. In fact, as someone with multiple podcasts in the business niche, you used to be able to publish a straight interview, and people would listen. But podcasting has evolved. There are plenty of great podcasts out there. And if you want to compete, you need to tell a good story.
But Matt's aware of another difficulty. The push and pull between his goal and the goal of every branded podcast return on investment or ROI. But why should brands have a podcast in the first place?
Matt was hired as the WordPress evangelist and community leader for Gravity Forms. This can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. In fact, I am the evangelist for the popular podcast platform rss.com. So here's how Matt puts it in his bio in his role at Gravity Forms, Matt creates written, audio, and video content to help WordPress power users understand the Gravity Forms plugin and ecosystem more deeply”.
Let's focus in on one part of that.
Audio content to help WordPress power users understand Gravity Forms more deeply.
Measuring ROI however is super hard for a branded podcast. If you sell sponsorship, It's pretty easy. If you sell a membership, likewise, the more sponsorships you sell, or the more memberships you sell, the more return you're getting on your investment.
Selling your products or services is a little harder, but doable. You can associate sales to a podcast-specific coupon code, or have URLs in the show notes that you can reasonably associate with a podcast and make an educated guess as to how well you're doing. But with a branded podcast, there needs to be balance. You cannot spend the entire time hawking your product. No one wants to listen to an infomercial, but at the same time, you need to weave your brand or your brand's mission into the content.
Gravity Forms had a previous podcast called Input. And while I enjoyed it, they interviewed the lead singer of one of my favorite bands. it was sometimes hard to see the connection to the brand and podcasting for the sake of podcasting is a great hobby, But it's not great for a brand's mission. That's why I'm always preaching the importance of a good mission statement for your podcast.
So we must go back to Matt's mission with the show, educate and entertain.
The entertaining part is to keep people listening. The education part is to keep people informed. We'll get into their format later, but first I want to lay out how Matt believes Gravity Forms can benefit from a branded podcast. He believes that they can benefit from having a podcast so much that he's essentially made it part of his job. Here's why.
1. Brand awareness and recognition. Matt knows that having a branded podcast will help more people discover Gravity Forms and recognize the company and its mission. This is especially important for Gravity Forms, for a little bit of historical data here, because Gravity Forms is one of, if not the first premium forms plugins for WordPress. They've been around for a long time, but since their inception, competition has gotten stiff and Gravity Forms needs to try to remain ahead of the pack, and recognizing the company and its mission is part of that. So that's number one, as far as branded podcast benefits.
2. Long-form content. It gives the Gravity Forums team even more long-form content as well as the ability to repurpose other long-form content they have. They can take their podcast segments, and turn them into blog posts in short form, and vice versa.
3. Retention. Related to long-form content, this helps people stay on Gravity Form's content longer. So I touched on each of these a little bit, but let's take a closer look at each one.
First, branded podcasts create awareness and recognition. This is a really important point. They aren't using the podcast to grow their podcast audience if that makes sense. They're using the podcast as a single part of an overall strategy to make people understand who Gravity Forms is. Remember, the goal is to educate and entertain, so they create a podcast that is informative and shareable. This helps elevate their brand.
Number two is long-form content. Remember that overall strategy? That's where the long-form content comes in. They are already making blog posts about their releases. Matt is doing more live streams and videos too. A podcast allows them to repurpose those pieces of content into an audio format that will be more consumable for more people, but they're also creating a new piece of content. An interview with someone from their community. They can take that interview and turn it into a long-form blog post. We'll talk about that more in a minute.
And finally, user retention. On that same token, long-form content retains users. They have a strong presence on short-form platforms like TikTok. But platforms like that... as well as YouTube are more concerned about keeping users on the platform. With a branded podcast and other long-form content like blog posts, you can retain users by keeping them on your own content longer and potentially capturing them better by getting them on your mailing list.
So here's your first takeaway. No matter how many downloads your podcast gets, it can be an integral part of your overall content strategy.
Now, let's talk about how their format contributes to their mission.
The podcast has several segments. Some banter between Matt and Dustin, another member of the Gravity Forms team. Then they do updates from Gravity Forms and what's coming down the pike. They do an interview with a Gravity Forms user, developer, or partner. They look at what content to look for next from Gravity Forms. And then they have a segment called, What's New with WordPress? A segment to keep listeners informed on the latest news in the greater WordPress ecosystem. Then they have closing comments from Matt and Dustin.
So first let's talk about the host, co-host format. I think this is essential because it means Matt isn't just coldly reading a changelog. He gets to talk to one of his co-workers.
Dustin is a video producer at Gravity Forms, about the stuff they're working on. This banter helps the audience feel more of a connection with the co-hosts. For example, in an episode from June, Matt talks about his 4th of July plans. That's a little personal insight to help forge a relationship between the brand and the listener.
Since Dustin's main job appears to be creating video tutorials, he also knows the software really well. That means on top of updates, there's more context around why they decided to push certain updates and how to use those updates.
In that same June episode, they talked not only about the new turnstile feature but why it's better than the alternative, which is CAPTCHA. Educate and entertain.
Subsequently, they move into an interview between Matt and someone from their community. I want to dive deeper into this in a minute, but for now, I'll say, it's always good for brands to highlight the people using their products for cool stuff. Then they close out with more news and updates, what to look for next from Gravity Forms, and the content team, and updates about the greater WordPress ecosystem.
The latter is super helpful for this podcast audience in particular because if they're creating WordPress sites, they'll want to know how changes to WordPress will affect them. Each of these segments serves a purpose that relates back to their mission statement to help WordPress developers and agency owners that rely on Gravity Forms, as well as hit the show's goals: Brand awareness and recognition with the updates to the platform and content. They're making long-form content by creating a 30-minute audio show and retention by keeping listeners engaged with their content instead of relying on an algorithm. But there's another strong argument for brands to format their shows the way Breakdown does, especially when it comes to interviews.
Pat Flynn often says people love hearing the sound of their name. Public interviews with customers allow your users to hear their names in your content. On that same token, you want to find more customers by looking for similar users. You want that lookalike audience by highlighting your customers on your podcast and teaching a bigger audience how those people are using your products. You're doing two things: You're saying, “Hey, look at how this person, just like you, uses our stuff.” And you're helping listeners generate ideas. Maybe the customer being interviewed does something that doesn't exactly apply to you, but they may spark an idea to help solve a problem you encounter. That makes these interviews prime content for case studies.
Gravity Forms can take the audio, transcribe it, and turn it into a narrative for their blog.
Case studies are great content, and you're basically getting the content for free when you interview customers on your podcast. Leverage that as a way to create social proof, demonstrate your expertise, and teach your potential customers about your product.
Takeaway number two. Create case studies from interviews you publish on your podcast, whether you're a brand or a solopreneur.
Because they're in the early days of the podcast, they're still finding their sea legs. Or, I guess, they're still making their gravitational adjustments.
Matt knows this and is using it as a time to experiment. It's part of the reason that they are a fortnightly podcast. The every two weeks, Cadence allows them to spend time on each episode without feeling like an informational firehose or a week of boring updates. Bug fixes and improvements neither educate nor entertain all of the major companies who update their apps on iOS.
It also allows him to drop a bonus episode on off weeks if he'd like to, and he's already done it a couple of times. Once with a webinar and once with their 101 live stream. By making these events available in the feed, Gravity Forms is making Breakdown the source for all of their helpful content. It also allows them to see if a weekly format is something that they should explore and if there's an opportunity for similar audio-first content in the future.
By creating segments, there's another opportunity. Break those segments up into separate dedicated shows. Matt mentioned he created segments in the first place because he knew his audience might be interested in different things. Many will likely want to know what's new, but won't care about the interviews. Some will be searching for new ideas, so the interviews are important.
He mentioned that he's working with a podcast producer now to make the transitions between segments even better. By creating the narrative and moving the listeners along from segment to segment, it will ensure more people stick around for more of the show. The audio engineering for certain shows can be a difference maker, the difference maker.
If the segments work together to create a three-act story, it can take the podcast to the next level. The last bit he's experimenting with is dynamic CTAs. Presently, the primary CTA is subscribed to the podcast, but the team also travels to various WordPress-related events. When this happens, they add a dynamic pre-roll clip to each episode using Transistor telling people to find them and say hello.
So your third takeaway: Be open to experiments. You never know what will resonate with your audience.
Now, before we get into how you can leverage these lessons, I want to point something else out. This is a mostly manual process for Matt at the moment. I'm a big proponent of understanding your process before you try to automate. and it looks like Matt feels the same way. Even though he's been podcasting for over 10 years, he knows this endeavor is different. It's for a brand. There are more stakeholders, and the landscape has changed since he started. As a result, he's been doing most of the production himself. He edits in Descript before moving it to Hindenburg for sound design.
The show notes are in Google Docs, and he and Dustin share that doc and he does the description himself. Matt also publishes the episodes and creates the audiograms in Descript for sharing on social media. Note, he does not record video at all. So this is a simple static image with moving text in a waveform.
As they move forward with the show, Matt has two goals:
1. Improve the quality, which is why he started working with a producer,
2. Get feedback from listeners.
The experiments are the small bets that will improve the manual process over time and hopefully increase the ROI for the brand. Getting feedback from listeners will help him discern which experiments are working and how he can make a truly entertaining educational show.
Okay. So let's talk about using breakdown to improve your podcast workflow.
When you're starting a podcast for a brand, the whole thing can feel a bit like a scary experiment. I'm doing that right now with rss.com. You don't know how it's going to be received. You're investing money into a relatively new marketing channel and you need to strike the right balance. You don't want it to sound like an infomercial, but you do want it to measurably improve the bottom line of your business.
I think we can learn a lot from what Matt and the Gravity Forms team are doing with Breakdown.
So, number one, make a branded podcast an integral part of your overall content strategy. You don't need a lot of downloads or direct sales to start getting ROI from your podcast. By repurposing current content, you can reimagine it in a different format that might resonate with a different set of listeners.
There is also the opportunity to resurface helpful educational content to give it a second life, FAQs you get from customer support, and better customer stories. You can form a stronger bond with your customers by highlighting them. and you can create more long-form content from it, namely with case studies.
So number two, create case studies from interviews. This is definitely my biggest takeaway. You're already spending the time asking customers or other folks in your ecosystem about how they're using your product, the problems your service solves, and more. Leverage that insight by turning it into a case study on your website. This will attract new users to your site.
SEO disclosure. I'm not an SEO expert. And by including the episode in the case study, you can attract new listeners to the show as well. It's a customer case study flywheel.
Finally, be open to experiments. The breakdown is still in the early days. So they're trying new things to see what resonates with their listeners. No matter how long you've had your podcast, it's worth mixing up the type of content you create. Maybe your audience would love to hear other voices in your company or from your team. For example, Jay Claus in an earlier episode this year interviewed his video editor. Perhaps your audience wants quick tips. Or maybe they want to hear from more customers. You'll never know until you try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks. And if you're a brand considering a podcast, the show in and of itself can be an experiment. Take some of that Facebook ad money and throw it at a podcast for six months. You might find that it's a much better lead generator for you at a much better price.
But that's it for this episode. If you want to read the full article, you can head over to [podcastworkflows.com] or find the link in the description for this episode.
If you want to get in touch, you can find me @jcasabona on X, formerly Twitter, Threads, and pretty much every other social network.
But that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time. I can't wait to see what you make.
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