Behind the Podcast: Building Your Team and Filling Essential Roles

Jul 31

Today, we're diving deep into the world of building a well-oiled and efficient podcast team. We'll be talking about how to delegate like a boss to take your podcast to new heights.

Assigning Roles and Responsibilities

If you are a solitary content creator, donning multiple hats becomes a necessity and you will be taking care of all (or most) of the roles below.

However, should you seek to extend your reach and involve a larger team to help you with your production, these are the roles that you’ll probably need:

Content Creator: As the heart and soul of your podcast, you, the content creator, breathe life into every episode and foster a deep connection with your audience.
Audio/Video Editor: The audio/video editor, wields their expertise to craft seamless and captivating content. Outsourcing this task can ensure a polished final product.
Content Writing and Editing: Equally significant is the role of content writing and editing. Compelling show notes will allow for content repurposing across a wide-ranging number of platforms.
Graphic Design: Visual appeal is paramount, and thus the graphic designer lends their artistic touch to craft alluring podcast artwork and captivating episode thumbnails.
Social Media Marketing/Scheduling: Time to spread the word and get social. You need a marketing whiz who can create those thought-provoking quote cards, audiograms, and videos to keep the momentum going.
Data Analysis and Content Development: Lastly, the data analyst delves into podcast statistics, unlocking valuable insights that inform content development and strategic growth.

Communication and Team Leadership

To ensure a productive and happy podcast team, nurturing efficient communication and collaboration is imperative. We liked to use platforms such as Trello, with its structured workflow management, and Google Drive, facilitates seamless organisational workflow and data management.

I also like to encourage regular podcast team meetings to help build a cohesive working environment, enabling positive discussions on content, data analysis, and constructive feedback.

Delegating to Leverage Strengths

A cornerstone of building a fantastic podcast team resides in astutely aligning tasks with individual strengths.

Have you got the right person for the role that you’ve assigned. Really look at the skills and passions of your team members, and allocate responsibilities accordingly. Seek transparency in communicating with the team about their aspirations and preferences to help keep the excitement flowing. You’ll achieve better results for your show if you’re all playing to your strengths.

Unleash the Podcast Dream Team

We've covered the A to Z of building your podcast dream team and I hope this leaves you feeling inspired to delegate! Remember, it's not all about the “benjamins” – podcasts come with so many positives outside of monetary gain too. From connections and collaborations to personal growth, it is truly a fantastic medium to be involved in.

If you wanna take the fast lane, hit us up at Bamby Media, and we'll be your podcast hype crew. But if you're more of a DIY warrior, go for it! This podcast universe is big enough for all of us!

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Welcome back to my face. My name is Brianna. I'm the head honcho here at Bamby Media. Today we are going to be discussing building a podcast team effective delegation and collaboration. Oh, what a juicy one that I can't wait to get into today. So I'm just going to do it.
[00:00:19] I'm going to get straight into it. I've got a few great tips for you. the first thing that we need to kind of establish is identifying the roles. and responsibilities for the show. Who is going to be doing what? Now, if you're all by yourself, this is your project, no one else is involved, then you're going to be wearing all of the hats.
[00:00:40] There are many hats and you will be wearing all of them But if you have more than you on your team or you're looking to actually delegate and get a producer involved or a production team like us here at Bamby Media, then establishing what roles you need to hand off and outsource, uh, is going to be one of the first steps that you need to do.
[00:01:00] So when I think about what's involved with a new podcast, there are some key responsibilities. The first one being the actual content creator. This is me in this situation. I'm creating this content. I'm talking at you. You are listening and watching. I'm the person that's creating the content. Okay. So for your podcast, it's probably you that is the content creator.
[00:01:23] Next up is the audio / video editor so once you've done the content creation, who is handling the actual editing of that audio, unless you're an absolute gun at talking and you make no mistakes and you're not awkward and you're totally fine to be unedited,
[00:01:42] then you're going to need someone that's helping you if it's you or someone else to actually edit the audio and put it together. This is probably one of the most labor intensive parts of the whole podcast production space and this is why it is generally outsourced to [00:02:00] us here at Bambi Media because to learn that skill takes some time.
[00:02:05] If it's something you're really interested in, if you want to be an audio editor, if you want to take that on as a job, then go for it. but for a lot of people, this is the bit that's like, ugh, man, especially if you're on a longer show and you're like, man, do I just sit here now and edit this for literally six hours?
[00:02:23] Like, this is a long time for me to do this. So for most people, it's something they want to outsource and we do that. In our smallest package, which is our chocolate package, we will literally just edit the podcast and upload it for you. So that is something to think about who is gonna do that job. depending on the industry that you're in, how you're wanting to present yourself, that's going to sway what kind of editing you need, but most people need some form of editing.
[00:02:50] Okay, so that one's there. The next one is the content writing and the editing of that content we've done the content creation, we've done the video or audio editing, the actual content writing is the next step. That is very important because it's those show notes, and again, I have a different podcast episode on this, it's those show notes
[00:03:10] that you use, that you write, that you then can put onto podcast platforms. They can use, be used as your YouTube description. They can be used as articles. They can be used as blog posts. You can put them on LinkedIn. You can go and distribute them to a medium. You can try and get them syndicated. If you have time and space to have that kind of thing happening, then you please, please do this because it's such a waste otherwise that extra bit of repurposability is like, Oh my God, it's a no brainer for us. And again, we have packages where you can have that included, but that can be someone on your team as well.
[00:03:46] Maybe it's you. You can use the power of AI these days to help you generate some really quality content still needs to be edited by you. You still have plagiarism issues and things like that. If you're not making it [00:04:00] yours. But it can help you get over the hump as well, if you are doing it yourself. And again, I have a podcast episode on that topic.
[00:04:09] So you can go and suss that out if you want. Okay, the next thing would be graphic design so your podcast artwork. Who's doing that? That's the first bit. And then who's doing your episode artwork? So each episode should have a, a different kind of artwork that goes with it that you can then use on your podcast website.
[00:04:29] That's a different image. And you'll see for our show, if you go to Bamby media.com/podcast, you'll see there's different artwork for each of those episodes that gets uploaded to, podcast platforms as well. It's now starting display on Apple and Spotify as different artwork for that episode, and it's like a thumbnail, right?
[00:04:48] And so you have a thumbnail for that, you also have a thumbnail that is in a widescreen format for YouTube, if you're posting to YouTube. And you could have a Reels version too, you know, like a long version that then goes with your social media assets. If you want like a nice cover on all of those so that your grid looks nice.
[00:05:07] You see what I mean? So it's graphic design is, and it doesn't have to be super fancy, but it is a part that, and a role that someone is going to have to play in order to get the most bang for the repurposability of your show. Next thing is social media marketing / poster and this could also be the person that's editing your social media snippets, although
[00:05:31] again, depends on the skills of the person and we will get it, get into that later. But that would be the next role to establish. Okay, who is doing my social media scheduling of anything that I've got coming out that is helping to promote the show, whether that's quote cards, whether that's the episode artwork, audiograms, social video snippets, anything like that, who's handling that role.
[00:05:53] And the last one is the person that's doing the data analysis the person that is helping with content [00:06:00] development, exploring, looking into the statistics, seeing what's working, what's not working and structuring that and also like collecting it over time. So for all our clients here at Bamby Media, we do a data collection.
[00:06:15] We don't give it to the clients. although it's something that I'm going to explore this year, going to our clients and saying, Hey, if we're an extra cost every month, we can collate your data and go, this is what's working and this isn't. That could be something that I think a lot of our clients and people more generally would probably be interested in.
[00:06:32] Maybe they've got some other things handled, but maybe it's the, yeah, but what's tracking well. How am I monthly stats, changing are they not changing? Am I stale? What contents not working, those kinds of things. Someone in your business needs to be doing this because it's kind of like The insights that you get for Social Media of it then any of it then you don't know what's working, and what you
[00:06:55] you should continue to do. This is what you can really just stop doing. So someone in your business or outsource, then that would be something that is definitely a role that needs to be filled. If you're a client of ours already, and you're listening to this and you're like, Oh my God, that sounds amazing.
[00:07:10] Yes, please. just send me an email and just say, Hey, I listened to that podcast episode. That's something that would be really great. just so that I can get a bit of feedback as to whether I should bother with that. I feel like I probably should. Now we're going to move into once you've established the roles, like these are all the things and they're the main ones. We're going to go into the communication and collaboration section of running your show. The best way I've found and what we use here at Bambi Media to track the roles, how everything's going, ticking things off, that sort of thing.
[00:07:46] Uh, and keeping in mind, we work on around 60 shows weekly. We have to have a very process orientated, lots of tick boxes. Has this been done for every show? You're only doing one show, so it won't need to be as insane but [00:08:00] it's very important to have a structured process that you follow for every single episode that you have ticked off for every single episode.
[00:08:08] Have I edited? Yes. Have I done the social assets? Yes. Are the content writing bits done? Yes. Have I uploaded it? Yes. Now we use Trello for that, Trello is a fantastic tool.
[00:08:21] I'm going to put all these links in the resources so that you can go and have a look at these things. A lot of people also use monday.com or Asana. I found Trello to be the best workflow in the way that it looks for us here. And we have many staff that we are working with. So it's important to have it all looking the way we need it to look there.
[00:08:39] Then we use Google Drive. We use Sheets for our production schedules for every single client. And we use Docs for all our transcripts, our show notes, things like that. Google Drive is just fantastic. I absolutely love it. Then it's also important to have regular team meetings to discuss the content of the podcast and that's where as well you can have that person that's handling your data collection, whether it's us or someone else, to go, Okay, well, we've established. I've assessed this now for the last two months, let's say.
[00:09:10] here's the things that are going really well, because the person that's creating the content might not be sort of aware as to, they might think that something's going really well, or they really enjoyed that topic or whatever to deliver the content on, but it kind of fell flat. They're just going to continue creating the content and then
[00:09:26] you can have a meeting around cool these things are really great. Let's do more of this. Social assets weren't so good. Video snippets were a bit lackluster. You know, your captions were too small, whatever, like those sorts of things, the things that you would pick up in a team meeting, try to keep them fairly brief.
[00:09:41] I don't like long team meetings. I don't think anyone does. Okay, The last area that we want to make sure that we're hitting is delegating the tasks and workflow appropriately based on The zone of genius or the area that people are actually interested in, in your business. [00:10:00] So if you've got like a VA or you've got someone that does your social media at the moment, or you've got someone that does some writing for you.
[00:10:08] Is that delegation correct for the podcast space? So a lot of the times what I see is that we've got people that obviously have VAs that then they outsource. They go, cool, my VA can handle my show notes or my social snippets or my whatever, but they're actually not very good at it. And that's like a kick in the face to actually even say.
[00:10:38] But when you see the result of giving a VA a task that they're not very good at, because that's not something they really know how to do, they're kind of learning on the fly. it's something that they're kind of just doing because they have to, because they've been given that role. The result isn't powerful.
[00:10:59] And I really want you to soak that in to go, am I delegating this job to the right person that I should be delegating it to? And that can be a hard one to swallow to go, yeah, but I'm paying that person. So I want to give them more jobs. Yeah. Okay. I get that. But in the same way, are they giving me something that's going to return on the investment?
[00:11:24] Are they actually good at graphic design? Are their show notes actually good? Are their social snippets, other videos they're creating powerful? Are they picking good bits out? That sort of stuff. And then it wouldn't be about you going straight away. Okay, well they're fired. That's it. They're done. No, it would then be like, okay.
[00:11:48] Where am I failing to provide the training that that person needs to actually do a good job and have a conversation with them to go, do you actually enjoy this? Like, is this [00:12:00] something that you want to learn? Am I flogging a dead horse, giving them this content, giving them this job to do that they really don't like and they're never going to be good at because they just don't like doing it.
[00:12:11] They'd rather be part of the organizational workflow, you know, so it's something to kind of assess and go, right, well, I've got all these people on my team. I've got a VA, I've got a social media person, blah, blah, blah. Really developing where their best fit is.
[00:12:29] If you're going on this new venture of creating and starting a podcast, and you want them to help you with it, then it would be something that you start off with and go, Hey, these are all the roles that we've got for this show. Who's interested in what and then they come in and it's more collaborative because this is a whole new process and go, Oh, cool.
[00:12:49] I love content writing and I'd love to do a bit of that or I'd love to learn a bit about video editing or whatever. But know that if you're, if you're going to be working with people that have never done any of this before, then it's going to be very slow to begin with, while everyone's learning new skills, you're learning new skills as well.
[00:13:10] So sometimes the cost reward type thing then makes you go, Oh man, this is not part of my business that I want our team to be handling. And this is where clients come to us and go, I want to invest my marketing budget because a podcast is a massive chunk of your marketing. In fact, I would argue it, it helps just.
[00:13:41] So I'm going to invest my marketing budget into you as a podcast production team so that you handle everything or A, B, C, D, E, I don't have to think about it, I create the content, you do your job and the rest of my team supports me in the other business [00:14:00] things that they've been hired for as well. So you see there's definitely different things you have to think about as to who's doing what, are they good at that thing, and who's giving the feedback and being reliable on the, is this working front.
[00:14:19] I wouldn't say you should start assessing if this is working or, you know, if the podcast is, is tracking well until at least maybe four months in or something around that sort of range, because you're finding your feet in those early stages. Personally, I like to sort of see it grow over nine ish months before I kind of jump in and go, okay, cool.
[00:14:43] You, you know what you're doing enough now. Like, let's have a look at what's working and what's not working. Let's look at what potentially could be upgraded and things that you didn't initially spend money on. Maybe you need to spend money on them now. Do you like this? Do you like what you're doing? Is it helping?
[00:14:58] are you repurposing properly? All those sorts of conversations come later. But in the beginning, it's like giving feedback on the little things like, this social snippet has a weird ending or, you know, we need better graphics here or whatever. Those little tweaks are the things that you're doing.
[00:15:16] So to recap, building a podcast team is like building any other team that's within your business. Have you got the right person for that job and be brutal with yourself just like I'm brutal with our staff here and with my own roles and what I know I can do and what I need to outsource as well. You need to constantly assess it and go, are they the best person to be doing this thing?
[00:15:43] Am I the best person to be doing this thing? And what kind of budget do I have to increase my spend if I need to? And what's going to be the return on that spend as well? So not everything is going to be like money back in your pocket [00:16:00] either. There are so many other facets of podcasting that are non monetary where the connections that you make, the people that you're then able to interview, your speaking skills improve, the way you actually think about the work
[00:16:14] that you do changes the feedback that you receive from audience or other people that had podcasts, the collaborations, the marketing, the sponsorships. Like all sorts of things happen from a podcast that you don't expect, and it's not necessarily money. To begin with. But these are things to think about when building your team.
[00:16:34] What are you creating for yourself that can help you grow and how can you build out that team further as it grows? And if you're stagnant, I can bet you it's because some part of this podcasting wheel is falling off. So things to think about there. I've loved delivering this one to you today because it's a topic that I'm extremely passionate about. Team building for me is huge and getting the best person for the job.
[00:17:06] If you've listened to this and you're like, Oh my gosh, please handle my podcast. You're so passionate about it. That's cool. You can definitely reach out to us, bambymedia. com slash services. We'll show you all the different services that we have and all the different packages and all the ice creams that go with them.
[00:17:22] you don't get physical ice cream. It's just the way we like to show things on our website. But yeah, if you're just doing it yourself, props to you as well. I love seeing people just do it themselves and it's really a joy to witness. Any questions at all, put them in the comments here on YouTube or on the DMS over on Instagram.
[00:17:44] You can also email, use the contact form. There's like a billion ways that you can get in contact with us here at Bambi Media. And I hope you've really received very good value from this episode. If you've liked it, please hit the subscribe button or the follow button, depending on how you're listening slash [00:18:00] watching this podcast.
[00:18:01] And I will speak to you again soon.