“We need to have a podcast together,” is the Millennial, “Dude! We should totally start a band!”

A lovely piece of insight, spotted on Facebook, taken from Twitter, and shared with you here now.

But before we get into that, let’s rewind (that's such an analogue term in a post-digital world) back to the end of June 2019.

It was a heady time for the team at Social INK. We were close to completing our biggest challenge yet - writing 100 blogs in a month. And now we needed a new challenge. You see, we’re big believers in practising what we preach. Trying, testing, and evaluating ideas and approaches ourselves before suggesting them to our clients. It’s easier to convince someone of the merits of doing a particular thing if you can back that up with experience and data. 

We’re also great advocates of pushing ourselves to continually learn and improve. Consequently, we’ve found setting a monthly challenge, as an agency, ticks all these boxes. Think of it as continual professional development.

So, it’s the end of June. We’re down to our last 10 blogs of the 100. And the conversation goes a little something like this:

- What’s our challenge going to be next month?

- We should probably make it something less taxing than 100 blogs in a month.

- Yeah. That’s been brutal.

- Hey. We should start a podcast!

- *Groans*

(Dramatisation. May not have happened.)

A Podcast Is Nothing like Starting a Band

Without knowing it, we were on the cusp of becoming a Millennial meme. But, we had a digital marketing ace up our sleeve.

We weren’t going to start a podcast because we enjoy smashed avocado on toasted sourdough for brunch and an early-afternoon craft beer. No. We were going to run a podcast experiment!

Content marketing is more than just blogging. It’s about creating as many online touchpoints for your audience across as varied a range of channels as possible. The ‘audience’, as a concept, is becoming increasingly fragmented with the exponential rise in the number of devices and platforms competing for our attention. Written content remains the cornerstone of all marketing. Graphic design and imagery are great attention-grabbers. Video is the current golden goose on social media. But audio is always a bridesmaid.

Audio content (podcasting in this case) is under-explored, under-valued, and misunderstood. For many, it seems too technical, too time-consuming, and too much bother. So we set out to prove them wrong by launching our own podcast, from scratch, in a month.

For What Purpose?

As already mentioned, the whole point of our monthly challenges is to learn something new and test ideas out before recommending them to our clients. The point of launching a podcast in a month was to:

- figure out the techy side to podcast recording and hosting
- prove it’s an easy thing to do without a huge investment
- create another channel for our audience to enjoy content in a different format
- have fun being creative 

We pretty much figured things out as we went along. In fact, when we recorded the first episode, the podcast didn’t even have a name. But it didn’t matter. Because we were creating a podcast about creating a podcast (that’s quick thinking right there).

By episode two we had a name - The All About Digital Marketing Podcast (AADM for short). And by the end of the month, we had seven episodes ready to launch, with a dedicated website on its own domain and servers, and podcast profiles on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

You see, podcasting is actually easier than you think. Effectively, you’re creating your own radio show. Which is pretty cool. Plus, it adds variety to your content marketing. And, you just might enjoy doing it. 

We’re still developing new episodes and ideas for AADM. But since launching we’ve become more creative on social media, we’ve repurposed a lot of content, created a lot of new material, and received a number of approaches.

For our next monthly challenge, we should totally start a band!

Read more about our podcast journey, here. Catch up with all the latest episodes, here.