How to Launch a Podcast That’s Worth the Squeeze

The Juicy Rewards of Podcasting: Discoverability, Authority, Connections

Podcasts have evolved into more than just a trendy medium; they’re an effective way for brands to connect with their audience on a deeper level. A podcast allows businesses to have a direct conversation with potential customers, partners, or even investors—people who are genuinely interested in the brand’s story. Rather than waiting for the audience to discover content, a podcast delivers it directly to them.

Podcasting isn’t only about sharing knowledge; it’s also about offering a unique viewpoint. Maureen shared that starting Spilled Salt encouraged her to be more vocal about her opinions within the industry. This newfound confidence in sharing her perspective has extended to her daily posts on LinkedIn, where she discusses observations and trends in the food, beverage, and agriculture industries. A podcast can provide a similar platform for other entrepreneurs, helping them stand out in a crowded market.

Getting Started in Podcasting: Finding Your Angle

Maureen and Jennifer highlighted the importance of using a podcast to share unique perspectives and “connecting someone to something they love,” a sentiment that resonates with anyone in the food, beverage, or agriculture sectors.

Whether it’s discussing sustainable farming practices or the journey of launching a new beverage product, a podcast can position a brand as a thought leader in its niche.

Before diving into podcasting, it’s crucial to define the podcast’s purpose. What topics can be consistently discussed that align with the business’s goals? Maureen shared that Spilled Salt originated from a simple idea: exploring the “thrills and spills” of the industry. Entrepreneurs should consider what stories they can tell or expertise they can offer that will resonate with their target audience.

Consistency is a critical factor in podcasting success. Spilled Salt employs a season-based approach, which makes the process more manageable and keeps the audience engaged over time.

Tools for the Squeeze: Agency 29’s Podcast Tech Stack

The technical aspects of starting a podcast shouldn’t be overwhelming. While a professional studio isn’t necessary, good audio quality is essential. 

Maureen and Jennifer opted for Riverside to record their podcast, valuing its flexibility in video and audio sharing. 

They use Adobe Premiere for editing and Podbean for distributing the podcast across major platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Podcasts.

Maximizing Podcast Content: Create Once, Share Everywhere

One of the standout strategies from Maureen and Jennifer’s approach is the power of content repurposing. Each episode of Spilled Salt is not just a podcast episode; it becomes a blog post, social media content, and several video clips. This method saves time and maximizes the reach of the content, ensuring the podcast touches various platforms and audiences.

Starting a podcast might feel like a daunting task, but it’s an investment in branding that can pay off significantly. It goes beyond simply talking into a microphone; it’s about creating valuable, evergreen content that deeply connects with the audience.

For those in the food, beverage, or agriculture industries, sharing industry stories and insights through a podcast can be a powerful way to amplify their brand. With these insights from Spilled Salt, entrepreneurs are better equipped to hit record and start sharing their unique stories with the world.

Interested in appearing on an episode of the Spilled Salt podcast? Apply today at www.spilledsaltpodcast.com.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.

Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries. 

We have a well-known-to-me guest on today’s podcast. Jennifer Bosch Gyuricska is Agency 29’s Marketing Strategist and this podcast’s Editor and Producer. We thought it would be fun to create this episode as we are so frequently asked about how we launched the podcast and how we go about sharing episodes and I can’t take credit for that. A lot of it came from Jen. 

And so in today’s episode, we’re interviewing each other really about our different roles and responsibilities as it relates to getting Spilled Salt episodes and seasons out the door on a regular basis. 

If you have any questions about following up from this in terms of a brand perspective about whether or not it makes sense for you to have a podcast for your brand, I’d be delighted to talk about that, you can reach me at Maureen at agency29 dot com. Enjoy the conversation.

Maureen: Hey, Jenn, how are you?

Jennifer Bosch Gyuricska: Hey Maureen, I’m glad to be on the podcast in front of the camera instead of behind it.

Maureen: I know! I know I’m so excited to do this and just preparing all of our listeners that will probably be more giggling than usual on this episode and laughter, but it should be a fun one. Talking about how to launch a podcast. So with that, your background is a big reason why we’re here and why we’re doing this. So start us there.

Jenn: Well, I have to say I read your podcast transcripts and I know that there’s a lot of giggling which transcribes to hehehehe.

My background, however. So back in the day, a lot of years ago, I had this idea to be in marketing. I should go into radio promotions. I don’t know how those two things got synced up in my high school brain, but way back before Y2K, I graduated from a radio program at a technical institute. 

From there, I used all the skills I learned about communicating and news and interviewing and writing to launch me forward into a career in marketing and promotions. 

Since then, I’ve done a lot of years of experience in a lot of different industries, and I have finished a bachelor’s in communication studies, and I have been working with you and Agency 29 in different iterations since about 2016.

Maureen: A long, long time. You just said you don’t know how marketing kind of translated to radio promotions in your mind. But if you think back, where do you think that that really started? Because I can tell you, radio never occurred to me. So was there somebody that you used to enjoy listening to on the radio that you thought, man, that might be kind of fun.

Jenn: My gosh, so little nerdy Jenn, back in the golden years of the Edmonton Oilers NHL hockey team, used to listen to a guy named John Short do talk radio about the hockey games. I remember calling in and it being a small thrill in my tiny life at the moment. 

But what I really love is that feeling when you connect somebody to something and that they love it as much as you do. So that may have been where radio and marketing connected for me.

Back then I thought marketing was sales. Now I know they are not the same thing. But the ability to connect and communicate and get people to try or meet or do something new is really where my true love is.

Maureen: I love that: connecting someone to something. And I feel like that’s very Canadian of you to say that and just for, because it’s so loving, right? It’s about fit finding. We talk about that a lot in general, but well, yeah, that’s where the original idea came from. 

You said connect someone to something. And, you know, the running joke for Americans is that Canadians are the nicest people out there. So, which is true. It’s based on my experience. 

Jenn: I thought you meant the hockey reference. That’s very Canadian, too.

Maureen: I wanted to, from there kind of talk about, like Jenn said, we’ve worked together for a really long time. I wanted to talk about where the idea for Spilled Salt came from. And I came up with the name first, which is really backwards from what usually happens for me. But I was thinking, and came up with the idea.

And then I was thinking maybe it would be a series of dinners where we would bring people all together and then have a special guest come and spill the salt, like spilling the tea, about something that they had experienced. And some of the some of that idea came of the dinners came from I had once explored this concept of an event series called Fuck Up Nights. 

Do you remember when I was exploring that?

Jenn: Yes, yes it was such a big thing for a while where everybody just talked about how they messed up in their careers.

Maureen: It was some of the idea of the dinner series came from that. And I was like, this could be kind of cool. Bring some people in and talk about spilling the salt on something that they had gone through

I think where we landed was that the premise would be really limiting in terms of our reach, because it would have to be local. And we’ve at Agency 29 really been focused on expanding outside of our own backyard as much as we love the local community. We really needed to continue to look further afield. And so I think it was you who said, what about a podcast?

Jenn: Well, not only that, but I remember the time too, you were exploring your speaking options and how to get in front of audiences. And podcasting is such a great way to bring yourself to the audience instead of bringing the audience to you. So I remember that being part of the inspiration behind the podcast as well.

Maureen: So then I agreed to the idea of a podcast, reluctantly. 

Jenn: If this was a book, there’d be a few chapters in between.

Maureen: Yes, but I eventually agreed and then dragged my feet for many weeks. You said, are we doing this podcast or not? And I remember that was the moment for me where I was like, gotta move on this or not, you know? 

And I had agreed with you for all of the reasons that you gave for why we should do a podcast. The rest is history. Here we are. It worked out.

So for listeners, I would love for you to elaborate on that. What are some of the reasons why someone might want to have their own podcast?

Jenn: We touched on one there in that it’s a great way to bring yourself to the audience where they already are. It’s a little tougher to get in front of crowds at conferences and when you put on a workshop there’s a whole lot more homework that has to go on for a short-term benefit. 

But we’re providing evergreen content which is not only connecting you to people who we can help and that we are fascinated by, but also getting our name out there on a regular basis, having content that is up-to-the-minute, that’s very on-trend, that’s industry-specific, all the great things. And like I say, meeting these fantastic people.

Maureen: Right. And so then with the strategic underpinnings clear of all of the reasons why we should, what was then your approach to how to do the show? 

And I know we’re going to talk about tech stack and so that it’ll probably leave us into that, but take, take listeners first through not just the tech stack. We can talk about that next, but more so in terms of your approach for like, how do we record the episodes? What do we then do with it? 

Jenn: When you said that usually you don’t think of the name first, what it was is a bunch of showers where we’re ideating, drives in cars on back roads kind of thing where we had thought about these things for a long time.

And one of the major aspects that we wanted to touch on is what perspective do we have? What do we want to talk about? What can we talk about on a regular basis? 

And when you thought about spilled salt, that’s when it all coalesced for us. We started thinking about the thrills, the spills, what goes on in the real lives of these entrepreneurs and these businesses. 

And so that is the other half. Most people might not have a name that’s as fantastic as Spilled Salt right off the bat. But it’s for that purpose. What can you talk about consistently? What do you have a perspective on? And how does it tie back into your business goals? 

We thought about all of that stuff that was initial before we even got started on choosing guests or choosing tech or any of those things. 

And then because we are Agency 29, we needed to have a fantastic look to our brand. We wanted to make sure that we were hitting all the right notes. 

Then we reached out, we started talking about who would we have on the show, how long episodes would be. So we know that the average commute is between 20 and 25 minutes, although we have a little more to talk about than that. We didn’t want to have a super long podcast either. 

So we touched on all these things. Advertising, did we want to have advertising, and how are we going to tell people and how are we going to get listeners for the podcast. 

Basically, it was how do we tell people that we exist, the lights are on in this podcast home. So those are a lot of the homework we started to do and then how will we format it and how will we communicate it, which leads into our tech stack conversation. 

Maureen: So talk about how we share it, how we share the episodes and why we do it in the way that we do with like the blog and why we’re doing video and audio recordings and some of that.

Jenn: So in our content marketing strategy, we used to do a lot of different things. In the past, we’ve had the 29×29 series. We have blog posts. We have case studies. 

But when it came down to it, the podcast was the best mix of all of the things. And that’s really what we use for a lot of our content marketing nowadays. 

So we pull in those sorts of strategies into how we share the episode. One of the things is transcripts. We have full transcripts on our website because that’s right for SEO, it’s got all those terms in it, plus it’s giving our guests another moment of amplification. 

Plus it gives our social team a great spot to pull the fantastic quotes from. We have the sound bites that we pull from the podcast as well as the video. 

Many people have talked about creating once and distributing in a hundred different ways and you’re nodding because you know that I love that, that we create one big cornerstone piece like a podcast episode in which we can pull half a dozen videos out of, half a dozen audio clips. Plus we’ve got that content in the form of a blog post and all of those quotes that we can pull into different formats. 

Plus when we share it on social media, we think about our channels. Not only are we a long form podcast on YouTube, but we pull YouTube shorts and share them to our channel. We have reels and videos and carousels and posts for Instagram. Same with Facebook.

X, we’re not as hot on these days, but there’s so many potential opportunities on that channel and Pinterest, and we could even get going on Reddit if we wanted to. We have a lot of different ways that we can share it. 

Plus, we ask our guests, here’s the episode link, go ahead and tell your friends about it, because then we’re amplifying it to their audiences as well.

Maureen: I want to just highlight a couple of things that you just mentioned for the listeners that go into some of the things that people might not be thinking about when they’re thinking about launching a podcast. 

You mentioned that we have the episodes specifically around 20 to 30 minutes because that’s roughly the average commute for, you know, the average everyday listener. So it wasn’t just arbitrary, like, I don’t know, 30 minutes sounds good. You know, it was intentional with that choice. 

And then also in terms of syndicating the content, not only with the fact that the video and audio then gets repurposed and shared via a blog, which is meant to optimize SEO and drive social content to the website to then capture that user under our umbrella, all of those things. 

I think that that is the reason why when I talk to people and they realize that we have the podcast that they get really excited because I think that people know what goes into doing it well. 

And the juice is worth the squeeze, right? It clearly is on this. I’ve been really surprised at how excited other people are about the fact that we’ve got the podcast. 

So with that, in terms of anybody out there who is interested in doing this on their own, what are our preferred choices from a tech stack perspective?

Jenn: Well, the bonus about tech and software nowadays is there are a lot of great options that are not super expensive out there. And so, for example, I’m testing Adobe’s podcast beta right now. The Creative Suite’s just launched podcast software. But right now we use Riverside. We’re in Riverside right now recording our episodes. 

Maureen: So before you move on from what we’re doing, explain why we chose Riverside.

Jenn: We chose Riverside for the ways that we can share the video and the audio. So there’s a lot of opportunities on the back end of this where we can have one person’s video up at a time, both people, we can stack them vertically, we can make them horizontal. The software automatically pulls the transcripts, not perfectly, but pretty darn good. Thank you, AI. And that’s a conversation in itself right there, isn’t it? But yeah, it gives us a lot of different opportunities at a decent price point.

Maureen: Great. What else?

Jenn: And so again, we move to Adobe Creative Suites, that’s across the agency for a lot of different options. And their Premiere program is pretty fantastic when it comes to editing the podcast, layering in the graphics and the sounds, and then pulling just the audio as well from that. 

So we share our audio to Podbean. Podbean is our podcast distributor that gets us on Apple and Google, well, it’s YouTube Podcast now, Spotify, we have the whole list, all the podcasts, it automatically distributes through our RSS feed as well as providing a podcast website for us. 

Then of course we have our WordPress website which we host the episodes on, and we distribute across our channels. 

I will admit, I do use ChatGPT to help me with some of the transcripts and the wordiness. So that, I guess, would be our final tech stack option.

Maureen: And you use AI to generate a summary of the transcript. 

It’s funny, sometimes I’ll be reading that before it goes live, just as a check, right? Sometimes I am making true corrections there, but there will be times where the AI summary will say, this person started this business, or inherited it from their father. Sometimes, I don’t recall them saying that. Well, it is true 99% of the time because it isn’t pulling that information from anywhere else. So it’s just that the human brain didn’t remember it, but the computer got that all in the transcript.

Jenn: And a note of caution about the AI, we always have to go back. I tend to break all of my AI use into pieces because it wants to use repetitive, fancy sounding words that nobody uses in regular everyday speech. So I need to break that up. Sometimes it runs with an error and goes wild with it. 

And also, especially with Riverside here with the transcript that automatically generates, there’s been times we’ve been back and forth saying, what did he say here? What was this word? Is this what it’s supposed to be? 

And YouTube’s automatic captions never ever spell Maureen Ballatori correctly. I don’t know why that is either. 

AI is lovely and a bit of a time saver with things that I already know and I’m just looking to efficiently smooth things out, but it is not the answer. You really need a real person back here, a personal touch to make everything work as we want it to.

Maureen: I would say my philosophy across the board on when is AI most useful is when you use it as a tool and not as the solution. 

I’m glad that you mentioned that, that we use it as a tool and then we are making sure that we’re going through and fact checking is critically important. If we’re going to put it on a show, it is wildly important that it’s accurate, right? And that we don’t have a guest come on saying one thing and the transcript got it wrong and we ran with it. 

I read the transcript from the interview before it goes out. I read that summary and make sure that it’s accurate. And I’m doing that after you have already done that as well to catch any issues from your perspective, too. So all that to say that it really does take a number of eyeballs on this in order for it to be released effectively.

Jenn: But the other half of this conversation is about the guests themselves and you just talked about how important it is to be accurate with them. Why don’t you tell us how you find your guests? Is there a tool you use? How do you get guests on the show, Maureen?

Maureen: When we first started with the first season, there were people that I already had in my network that I thought had an interesting story that I could pull in. 

The goal of the podcast and the agency is to be positioned in food, beverage and agriculture. And so it was important to me to have guests in season one and still now we’re just heading into season five to make sure that we have a nice arrangement of folks from different aspects of the industry. 

We’ve had leadership development coaches, we’ve had CPG founders, we’ve had folks in cannabis, we’ve had farmers, we’ve had people in economic development that can speak to grants for food. 

I like that we pull in people from different backgrounds, that are doing different things now in food, bev, and ag space. 

Jennifer and I have been kicking the guest list for season five back and forth for the last couple of weeks, which includes some folks that we have reached out to from our own research. Jenn does a first pass and says, hey, I think these are some people that would be good to consider. 

Other guests are those I just meet in passing that say, I’d love to be on your podcast, or I make the invitation, I’d love to have you on the show. 

We’re now getting PR pitches too, from PR firms that are pitching us guests for folks that they work with. So it’s definitely changed over the five seasons, but I’m looking for people with an interesting background as well as a story for what they’re doing now, and a good variety in each season.

Jenn: Which leads me to my next question because, as you mentioned, originally you knew the folks you had that connection, now less so. How do you prepare and research for each of the episodes?

Maureen: First of all, I refuse to give anybody a question list because anytime I’ve done that, I have found that they try to pre-script themselves too much and I want a casual conversation. 

I tell them this is gonna be a conversation just between friends. I’m not gonna throw you any left hooks and it’s meant to be calm and casual and nothing that you can’t answer on the fly. 

In my research, I am ideally looking them up on LinkedIn. There have been a couple of guests that haven’t had LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn is really helpful because sometimes I can find something in their background that I want to specifically talk about that can guide the conversation. 

But otherwise I’m looking for like a couple of nuggets from their background. And if they don’t have a LinkedIn profile, then I’ve typed their name into Google and see what comes up there in terms of articles that they were mentioned in. What does their website say about them? What can I learn about their company if I’m not already familiar with it or a company that they used to be involved with? 

So I’m looking up from the background perspective there, some interesting nuggets about what they’re doing now, whether that’s recent news or anything coming down the pike. If I feel like they might be heading into an interesting space, I might ask them about industry trends. 

We’ve had a couple of guests from wineries and I always ask them about the no- and low-alcohol movement because there’s a lot of changes that are happening in that from an industry perspective that I want their thoughts on. 

And then I generally go into what’s next and ask them what they see next for the business or if they are launching new products or what they think is next for the industry? So I generally follow that cadence of history, the now and then forward.

Jenn: So you mentioned throwing left hooks for people and it reminded me of back in the day. I’ll share this as encouragement and inspiration for those who are either tentative about starting their own podcast or nervous about becoming a guest on a podcast. 

Back in the day when I worked at a small town Canadian radio station, I used to do something called the Tradio where folks called in and they sold their couches on the radio way before the internet. Now I’m really dating myself. 

But I also used to go on-scene. So I’d go on the weekends and go to the rodeos or the store sales or whatever and do cut-ins from those places. 

And the first time I was ever recognized at the Wainwright rodeo, this family came up and they said, my gosh, you’re Jennifer. We listen to you every morning. You’re always messing up and then you laugh at yourself and it’s hilarious.

Maureen: That’s one of those like, is that a compliment? I don’t know if that’s a compliment.

Jenn:  I was so excited somebody recognized me, but it was because I sucked. But that’s exactly it. There’s highs and lows and it’s a bit bittersweet sometimes, but it’s always like you say, the juice is always worth the squeeze.

Maureen: The other thing that I find really helpful to do in an interview in the moment is if I really try to listen for something that someone might have said that listeners might not know what it is. 

So whether that’s an abbreviation or they’re making reference to something, I know them personally and they’re making a local reference. We have listeners from far beyond our own backyard. And so I like to define, okay, you mentioned this place, which for anybody who’s not aware is, and give a little definition. 

And so that’s helpful too, I feel like that just makes it a more approachable show to listen to.

Jenn: Absolutely, I completely agree. I mean, I always say it’s the specificity that’s interesting. Generality is always boring.

Maureen: With that, we’ve talked about the history and the now, and so you know what’s coming. What’s next? What do you think is next for the podcast industry?

Jenn: Well, we’re already starting, we’re already in the future. We’re already moving into a place where all podcasts need video. It can’t just be audio anymore. You definitely need a vlog to go along with it. 

We talked about AI that’s being used more and more, but Meta and YouTube and other channels, they’re asking you to disclose it now whenever something is completely AI-created. We are not an AI-created podcast, but I do have to check off that we are not, on those channels.

And I think where we’re going and we do see it is more production values, better focus on the actual creation of the podcasts. We want to see value and a reason to tune in to every episode. I think that podcasts are really going to narrow down right now. It’s a great big field, but I think it’s going to narrow down based on quality and production.

Maureen: So I’m intrigued to hear you say that too because so much changed in video over the last four years, right? We were really seeing a trend of everything being very produced, very overproduced. COVID hits, right? We get to this TikTok type content, right? Where it’s authenticity first and the production value really could kind of go to the side as long as authenticity was coming to the table. 

And so I’m intrigued to hear you say that you think that the podcast industry is going toward more production value in what people are looking for. 

Speaking of specificity, could you be more specific about that in terms of, what do you think needs to happen with production value for a podcast to elevate?

Jenn: Well, I would agree, in that during COVID, we kind of got sick of looking at screens for a little bit, but I think it was just a blip in our radar. We have always been moving more towards face-to-face and that’s what video provides. 

And when I say that production values increase, I don’t mean that authenticity decreases because that used to be, I mean, Max Headroom. We’re not going to Max Headroom-level here. We are staying with real people doing real things, but recording in your backyard where your neighbors mow in the lawn, that’s not flying anymore. 

Podcasts where people just winging it and not providing steady content with each episode. Podcasts like that come and go. So not to stop anybody from trying it out because it absolutely is worth doing and is worth having a podcast to share your perspectives. But you have to be doing your best. Whereas you used to just be able to record anything.

Maureen: In summary of that, one of the things that’s very important is the audio quality. Anytime I see a guest that has AirPods in, we are both intentionally in wired headphones right now. Anytime I see a guest come on that I’m interviewing that has the AirPods, I am always cautioning them. Are you sure that those are not gonna disconnect and that they’re fully charged because that’s a big, that would be a big buzzkill. 

I have heard in student pitch competitions at the university level, that’s the biggest challenge that they face, is a student comes on aiming to pitch and then they’ve got a problem with the AirPods that won’t connect or something like that. 

From an audio quality, I think that one thing that is in a podcaster’s full control and that is important to maintain. 

Then you also mentioned consistency. I think one of the things that’s been great for us, and for me in particular recording all of these interviews, is that if I was doing it all the time, it would be way too much and not something that we could stay consistent with, which is why we launch in seasons.

We’re heading into recording season five right now. I will record those episodes over four or five weeks in August and September, and then we will release them in, I think we said October, November. And so consistency is important and our guests know that they listen to us in seasons and we release an episode a week when we’re in season and then we go away. 

Then we’ll come back later for another season. But It’s setting the stage for your promise of what you are committing to doing with the show so that guests can expect when they can hear you.

Jenn: And shout out to the team, I want to say, too, we couldn’t be consistent in what we do if we didn’t have Olivia and Donna and Franca and Michela and Colleen and Theresa all behind us helping with social media and the design and everything else that we pull together. It takes more than one person. We need the support to be consistent.

Maureen: The last thing I’ll say, too, is you mentioned that the podcast is a great platform to share your perspective. Jenn has been in my ear pushing me to share my perspective for years and years. And I have always been like, I don’t want to ruffle any feathers. I don’t want to upset anybody. 

Jenn: Honorary Canadian.

Maureen: I think that, and not to say that sharing your perspective has to be negative. But I think that one of the things that the podcast has done for me is invite me to be more vocal about sharing my perspective. 

It’s probably not a coincidence that we launched the podcast and shortly thereafter, I started posting nearly daily on LinkedIn with what I lovingly call my rants, you know, about just various aspects of the industry or the agency or food, bev, and ag in general, kind of observations and things that come to mind. 

I feel more willing and interested in doing that after having the podcast as a platform because it has made me a lot more comfortable in doing that.

Jenn: The contrarian stance always, always works, but you yourself have such a unique way of looking at the industry. Everybody has their own unique way. All the thrills and spills on the episode would not be a thrill, would not be a spill for somebody else. Your unique perspective, the world needs it.

Maureen: Totally agree. Thank you for this. I’m sure that our listeners will find it interesting. I’ll be interested to see what everybody thinks about this episode, too, as it’s a little bit of an outlier from our regularly scheduled programming. 

So as always, let us know what your thoughts are on content like this, if it’s helpful for us to share a bit of a how-to and thanks Jenn for sharing all the behind the scenes. Talk soon.