From long nights of editing to the challenges of finding guests and growing an audience, Ben Norman, strategy director at Principles in Leeds and host of podcast Marketing Room 101, lifts the lid on the real work behind launching a marketing podcast.
Bruce Lee allegedly said, “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
Bruce obviously worked in a creative agency at some point.
That’s where I was at just over a year ago; having sat on the idea of starting a marketing podcast using the Room 101 concept for a few years, thinking and rethinking every aspect of it, I realised there was only one thing left to do… start.
After all, that’s what the advice of every start-up owner, influencer, and podcaster I spoke to led to. I needed to just make a start and figure out the details on the way. Just do it.
But while this advice gave me the nudge I needed to buy a microphone and get on with it, it didn’t prepare me for the learning curve I was about to climb.
In fact, as Marketing Room 101 turns one year old, I can only describe it as the most rewarding yet challenging year in my career thus far.
In my naïveté, podcasting was something I could do for a couple of hours on a Monday afternoon, getting the chance to meet and learn from some of the most interesting people in the industry, while casually gaining thousands of listeners and batting away guest requests like wasps in a beer garden.
Alas, nobody told me it would be any different.
I quickly came to realise that the fun bit, the bit a listener hears, makes up around 5% of what goes into making a podcast.
So for anybody tempted to pick up the mic for the first time, here’s what nobody tells you…
First off, believe it or not, the people you really want to speak to won’t always want to speak to you. You’ll be rejected, ignored, and teased. You’ll need to be resilient, to research, to sell yourself and your idea – and you’ll be just as surprised by the people who say yes, as those who say no or nothing.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve managed to interview some genuine heroes of mine within the first year, some of the most important voices in marketing like Adam Morgan, Dom Dwight, and Lindsey Clay, but I’ve failed five times more than I’ve succeeded.
Then once you have guests on board, and you’ve accepted that recruiting them never stops, it quickly hits you that you have proper grown-up responsibilities as a broadcaster.
You have a responsibility to your guest: to research and understand who they are, their expertise, and how they communicate, so they feel comfortable and prepared. This penny dropped a few episodes in, when interviewing a guest I’d never met before, and realising I had no idea what they were talking about.
You also have a responsibility to your audience: to reward their listening with insight, or entertainment, preferably both. I still have to check myself before going too far on self-indulgent tangents that could lose the audience entirely.
And most importantly, you have a responsibility to the industry: to be diverse, inclusive and representative when providing a platform. For instance, I want to interview at least as many women as I do men, but I need to invite over four times more women than men per committed guest. You have to be prepared to put the work in to give a platform to underrepresented voices. And you have to take your responsibilities seriously.
Then we get to the biggest hurdle nobody ever mentions… podcasting is laborious beyond any reasonable expectation.
It turns out a half-decent mic doesn’t make a meeting room or your back bedroom sound like Abbey Road.
You’ll need to clean, process, edit, listen back and edit again painstakingly into the early hours; removing “errrms,” “you knows,” breaths, and bangs, all to the tune of your partner snoring next door. It’s a lonely place, and a place where you start to question… why am I doing this again?
And just when you think you have your first episode locked and loaded, you’ve written algorithm-friendly intros, recorded some intros and outros in your best radio voice and figured your way through the hosting platforms, you’ll come to realise nobody is listening. If you build it, they don’t always come.
It’s estimated there are now over four million podcasts (more than twice as many as in 2020), so you have to work hard if you’re going to steal that pocket of attention from the other 3,999,999.
In fact, attracting new listeners has become as much of a job for me as attracting new guests. It means leaning on (sometimes badgering) each guest to access their own network. It means testing, learning, failing and testing again on LinkedIn. It means editing to a commute or gym-friendly episode length. It means trusting in the compound effect of gradual, incremental growth, not explosive growth.
But, despite all this, I keep doing it. I keep doing it because it’s worth every 2 am finish, every flutter of doubt just before an interview, every moment of frustration when I’ve messed up a question or every time an episode flops.
It’s not worth it financially (I don’t earn a penny from it), nor because it has now been listened to thousands of times and in over 25 countries. It’s worth doing 95% of the podcast that isn’t the conversation, for the 5% that is.
In every single conversation, I’ve laughed at something and I’ve learned something. I’ve had the chance to meet people I would never have otherwise, I’ve shared beers and brews with them, and made connections that benefit me long after the interview ends.
So while I’d underestimated the learning curve I’d have to climb in starting Marketing Room 101, I’d also wildly underestimated just how fulfilling it would be. Starting a podcast isn’t for everybody, but as long as you’re not doing it to get rich, it might just be worth it for you.