Sam Birkett 0:06
Well, hello, one at all. Once again we are back with Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam and today we are very privileged to have a special guest, Matt Eastland-Jones, who is the founder, proprietor, director, Creative Director, I think, of Story Ninety-Four, and actually, Matt supports us with our podcasting and so funnily enough, today, we're going to be talking, an extended conversation about podcasting as a medium and all the ins and outs of it from a podcaster's perspective and an expert like Matt's perspective, and then putting in some of our own experiences and questions from a marketing point of view. That's what we're planning to do. So without further ado, just wanted to welcome you Matt to the podcast, obviously, you're familiar with us. So hello, Matt.

Matt Eastland-Jones 0:54
Hello, thank you so much for having me.

Sam Birkett 0:56
Well, it's a pleasure. It's fantastic to have you on board and you obviously support us fantastically well. So we'll get to some of the bits of your experience and what you do with lots of other people as well, which would be great in the conversation today. But before we get to any of that, I obviously have to ask you the most important question which we always ask our guests and that is, can you give us your favourite dish, Matt?

Matt Eastland-Jones 1:19
I can give you my favourite type of dish. Is that suitable?

Sam Birkett 1:23
That's okay. That's okay.

Matt Eastland-Jones 1:25
So my fiance and I, we absolutely love curries and that's, I would say 75% of the meals we cook are curries. So it could be a katsu curry, green Thai curry, an Indian curry, any kind. As long as it says curry in the title, that's good.

Sally Green 1:42
Lush!

Sam Birkett 1:42
Oh, wonderful. Ooh, I like that. Yeah, as I say I always always like everything that everyone says. But I mean, curry is definitely one of my... Friday night is good curry time, isn't it? You know, I mean, I can just imagine with the sunshine, we've got at the moment, just sitting outside and tucking into something, although I'm not terribly into hot curries a lot of time and I can take a bit of heat from curries, but you know, I'm kind of more on the namby-pamby medium scale. But yeah, good choice, very good choice Matt, I like that. So yeah, I thought I'd throw it open really and, first of all, then and get us started with a very general question. So why podcasting? I mean, what's this all about? Why should people even consider starting a podcast Matt? What the thinking and the sort of the genesis of it do you think in people's minds?

Matt Eastland-Jones 2:27
Yes, so podcasting. It's an interesting one and it's something that, you know, during the pandemic, more and more people started to become aware of podcasts. I mean, podcasts have been around for quite a long time, I can't remember exactly when they first started, it was either 2006/ 2007. But not many people really listened to podcasts in 2006, or 2007. I started listening to podcasts in 2017. So you could even argue that I was slightly late to the party in terms of starting to listen to podcasts, they had already been established for about a decade. But the majority of people, yeah, only really started listening to podcasts during the pandemic and I think it gave people an escape from everything that was going on and I think the nice thing about podcasts is, there's so much breadth to the topics that you can listen to, there really is a podcast for every interest. So whether you're wanting to start a podcast about business, or about a hobby or a passion, you're going to find an audience there. There are people that are going to want to listen to what you have to say, so long as your conversations are interesting and engaging and I think that's what's so nice about podcasts is that they're really for everyone.

Sally Green 3:38
Yeah, that's right and you're right, you do get people's passion because people have had to actually bother to do it, they actually want to speak to you know, a lot of people it's not just the boring person in the corner of the pub droning on, this is someone's made the effort to kind of put their passion out there and it's they're really engaging podcasts.

Matt Eastland-Jones 3:56
I think the average podcast, usually only lasts about seven episodes. Or sorry, that's the average time that people quit and kind of stop podcasting. So you do, yeah, you do have to be passionate and keen to keep going. So those podcasts that kind of breached that threshold of seven episodes, if you're able to get 20, 30, 40 episodes deep, you're going to be passionate about what you're talking about, and you're therefore, you know, going to provide a lot of value to the people that listen to it.

Sally Green 4:31
I mean Sam and I have been going for ages, haven't we Sam, we must have over 100!

Sam Birkett 4:35
Yeah, we'll have some sort of celebration thing and we're planning a dinner ourselves so we should have dinner then record over a curry perhaps.

Sally Green 4:48
Here's hoping we don't destroy the brand!

Sam Birkett 4:53
Absolutely! That's the thing, but I mean, that's the thing when you get to, gosh, I can't believe we're at 100 episodes over a period. I found it interesting listening back quite recently to some of our stuff, which we've done and then you start to build a picture, don't you, obviously, the people you talk to and the thinking that you had at the time. So it's almost in a way, I think for the podcaster. It's quite an interesting sort of archive as well. So for working out, I mean, depending on your topic, and how you're presenting it, which is great. But I was gonna say Matt, I mean, really, I should have said, to begin with, when you said, 2017, when you sort of got into it and started listening, what motivated you and to get involved and actually start working this and what are the sort of things you do with podcasting? How did it all begin for you?

Matt Eastland-Jones 5:34
Yeah, so as a listener, as I said, I started listening in 2017. So that was around about the time I first started to become a freelance videographer, and kind of start my career. I was splitting my time between filming for clients, but then I was also filming, I was an extra for TV and films and the film that I was an extra on at the time was the second Fantastic Beasts film and one of the extras that I met, we got on really well, because we kind of bonded over our kind of shared passion for comic-books and comic-book movies and so he told me to listen, this podcast called 'The Weekly Planet', and that was the first podcast that I started listening to, and the first podcast, I started really listening to quite religiously every week as they release episodes. And I think it's always nice that my first exposure to podcasting was not something where I was trying to, you know, improve by myself or you know, learn about business, it was just something that I really loved listening to, and really enjoyed and so when I then eventually in 2020, I want to say, or 2021, when I started actually, you know, providing podcasting as a service, my background in it wasn't just in, well, this is something that I know it's going to benefit businesses, but it's something that I know, can actually just benefit kind of everyone because I came from it from a place of love, as opposed to just, well this is a savvy financial decision or a good marketing opportunity.

Sally Green 7:08
And what is the service you actually offer? What's the difference between what you do, and what Sam and I were doing before, which was, you know, basically recording almost audibly, to put out pods?

Matt Eastland-Jones 7:21
Yeah, so in terms of the kind of service that I provide, so we have the podcast studio in central Oxford. So that's a place where hosts and guests can kind of come together to record podcast episodes and the benefit of that is that the conversations that you have in person are different to conversations that you have, you know, like we're having by zoom, yeah, you can do a really good job at trying to replicate face to face, but there's nothing quite like having a conversation face to face. So that's one of the main things that we do is how it is we have this space where we can, you know, facilitate these conversations. But then we also manage everything else around podcasting. So we'll help people, you know, with their ideation and strategy for their podcast, we'll record the podcast for them either in our studio, or virtually as we're doing, and then all the post-production. So that's the editing, the hosting, distribution, and then also helping the podcasters promote their podcasts as well. So it's kind of an all-in-one service because when we first decided to start podcasting, my idea was well, we'll create the studio and that will be the main services having this one place. But what I quite quickly realised was that it only really solves one problem and that is having a place to record. But actually a lot of the challenges around podcasting, it's usually everything that happens before you hit record, and everything that happens afterwards, actually, the conversation is usually the bit that people find to be the easiest, especially if it's something that they're very knowledgeable about and very passionate about. Talking about it, it's quite easy. But all these new skills of having to edit and, you know, plan an episode and distribute it, promote it, those are new challenges that people will face and so by being able to help them by taking on a lot of that work, you know, we're able to provide even more value.

Sally Green 9:15
It's incredibly valuable because it's a fabulously valuable marketing tool, actually having a podcast out there. Because it's very immediate people hear you, it's like having a video on the website. It's like that, but it's everywhere. But it can be slightly overwhelming and if you don't plan it properly, you do hear some that just seem to have no purpose, that you just think what exactly... where are we going now? Because people change tactics all the time and you're right, having someone to help you actually say, no, let's just park that and come on to it later or not talk about that at all would be invaluable because it can take so much time thinking about it that it's a marketing burden after a while. So, Sam and I obviously just started off the hoof and just waffled on for ages. That's why we called it Meander. So we thought we'll just hide the fact that we haven't planned this at all by calling it a meander.

Sam Birkett 10:09
I think that's the thing is it's interesting in terms of I supposed to interest in terms of styles as well, and things that you've observed, Matt, because we like our style, as you know, is that Sally says this meandering through subjects and through topics and this, obviously, whether there are certain areas we want to talk about and if you find there's these natural, connecting themes, golden threads through what we say, again, like I said earlier on the whole thing of going back and reviewing what you've talked about, it's very interesting to sort of almost understand your own thesis, your own feeling about your subject area and there's clearly I think we do because we've got to 100 episodes, we clearly have that passion, that interest in our subject, but there's also the golden threads of you know, what is actually most important for us in the way we work. So I think that the reflective option is very useful for us. But I suppose I'm interested in knowing about, you say the ideation stage, and people when... do people typically come to you with a, oh, I've heard a lot about this podcasting lark, this sounds pretty good, this could be useful to us, or have they got sort of more of a defined idea and how do you sort of shape that process? And that sort of you said, that sort of strategy for how they can actually create the podcast?

Matt Eastland-Jones 11:23
Yeah, it's quite interesting. So as well as podcast production, we also do video production and usually, when it comes to people getting in touch about video, they already know, they've got a quite good idea as to what it is they want to produce. They want to do a series of testimonials, or they want to do an About Us video or a case study. But when it comes to podcasting, yeah, a lot of the times people are just like, we've seen that podcasting is thing. Usually, the business or the person at the company is interested in podcasting already. They kind of drive the force of we should do this. But yeah, usually, it's very much like, well, what is possible, what would a podcast look like for our business? So there is quite a bit of, you know, kind of exploring that we do and that's when I kind of then introduce the BROAD models. So the BROAD model was something that I designed for video production. So it stands for Brief, Restrictions, Objectives, Audience and Distribution and that's how I try and strategise and plan a lot of the videos that I produce for clients and so we kind of work through a variation of that for podcasting. So we talked about the brief, I mean, what is it that the podcast is going to be, is it going to be something is that is a Q&A, are we going to be talking to other industry experts, or is it going to be something that could be entirely internal, because there's a lot of breadth when it comes to podcasts and what people think like, oh, podcasting is just a Q&A and it's not really, it can be a lot more than that you can have, you know, a solo podcast, which is just one person is sharing, sharing their views and thoughts on a topic, you can have co-hosted, which what you guys do, which is where you have a conversation with each other, you can then have, you know, guests-led when you have guests, which is also like what you do, or you can have ones that are, you know, entirely internal, and it's just for employees, or of a company. So there's a lot of scope there and so a lot of the time, it's just trying to understand entirely well, what is the business trying to get out of the podcast? And that's the brief, and then we kind of go through everything else. So the restrictions, what's gonna be difficult with the audience who they're trying to attract. And yeah, so a lot of it is this kind of discovery session, which we'll do, you know, either in the studio or on Zoom like this and that usually takes, you know, a couple hours to kind of really start peeling everything back to understand exactly what it is they're trying to get out of the podcast.

Sally Green 13:47
This is a difficult question, Matt. What do you think is the difference between a good podcast and a bad podcast?

Matt Eastland-Jones 13:54
A good podcast keeps going.

Sally Green 13:57
Okay.

Matt Eastland-Jones 13:59
And a bad podcast stops.

Sally Green 13:59
Right, okay. So there are people that kind of stutter, and it just kind of grinds to a halt.

Matt Eastland-Jones 14:05
No, so podcasts that just manage to keep going in terms of releasing episodes, because the reality is your first episodes, it's not going to be very good. Let's be totally honest, you know, even with my support, and my kind of guidance, and in terms of, we can make it sound really good, we can make sure that there's structure, but the reality is, it's probably not going to be, you know, as good as the last episode that you put out or, you know, once you're a couple years down the line or a couple episodes down the line. And so I think you just need to accept that and just be confident enough to just put it out into the world and then to come back and record the next episode and it's that persistence and constant improvement that creates a good podcast. It's not just... you can do all the planning in the world, but that doesn't mean you're going to hit gold at the very start. You've got to keep digging.

Sally Green 14:56
That's true because I think... I mean I have heard ones that are so obviously scripted, conversations that were so obviously scripted that it was just torturous and you think that this would have been so much better if either you just had one person just to did a scripted monologue, or you just didn't pretend you were chatting to each other, and that was really torturous.

Matt Eastland-Jones 15:17
Yeah, you can quite easily fall into the trap at the very start of overly scripting podcasts, especially for hosts that don't feel comfortable, they kind of want that safety net. But, you know, on the flip side, sometimes other people think, oh, it's okay, we're just gonna, I'm just gonna wing it and it goes horrifically wrong. So you do have to kind of strike a balance. What I usually recommend is we'll have an objective for the episode, so we know exactly what it is we want to talk about and we will know what key messages we want people to take away at the end and then it's identifying, you know, the chapters as it would, that will get to that point and then within that, there's room to play and room to discuss.

Sam Birkett 16:01
I was gonna say that, oh, gosh, there was one thing I was gonna say and its turned into three. But very briefly, I suppose one of the things which I think Sally's gonna pick up, a question about confidence, and about actually people starting is one thing. So I'll leave that for Sally to pick up shortly about that confidence how you get going. But it also made me think about as quite often I catch up on the podcast, and I do the whole catch-up of you know, maybe sometimes, like 200 episodes, or something... I have a recent one I started listening to, and it's interesting to get to see the story of how they've evolved, you know, you go to episode one and then you start to see they kind of started to get their formula, right, as it were over a period of time. But I mean, I suppose there's also that question about, as you say, when people have started doing podcasts, perhaps as a business started doing a podcast, and they clearly need to have that defined purpose of why are we doing this? And then what success looks like, I guess, from a purely marketing standpoint, so do you sort of see, I suppose help people sort of understand, well, we've been going for, I don't know, 20, 30 episodes now, perhaps if you do get to that stage, and you go, I mean, obviously, they need to be aware of is this working or not? But do you sort of help observe that process with or without, you know, is this working or has it become something else? You know, has it actually, you know, evolved effectively? Do you see that happening at all?

Matt Eastland-Jones 17:16
Yeah, it's definitely important to identify what success is for your podcast. Because that could be just you know, just downloads, just listenership, in which case, you'll you know, you'll probably have this idea in your head of I want to have 1000 people listening per episode or 10,000 people listening per episode. Or it could be, you know, actually from like, a marketing perspective, well actually we're going to look at how many people have clicked through to the website or how many new customers that we acquired through this podcast. So there are different ways that you can kind of measure success.

Sam Birkett 17:56
Yeah, I think it makes sense and it's just interesting too because I would imagine people who start off with not without having a terribly clear idea about what they want to get out of it, perhaps either find they discover something as they go along so that's more sort of risky way of doing it I suppose. But the people who say well no, there's a very defined idea of this as the channel we're missing out on and we really want to hit this, develop this medium for ourselves as a business because we are driving you know, we're trying to get to the commuters who are you know, going to listen in and get Haley's messages about how we can help them sell more handbags, there you go, back to handbags again and you know, leather working etc., we want to get this call and develop a community perhaps, perhaps focus on an online community you want to start and you started the podcast to develop it. So they would have a very clearly defined idea of well what are we doing to onboard people, make them into you know, patrons or whatever it might be on a site and how do we develop that community so that would be clear, but you might just say let's just give this a go let's have a plan for at least 10 or 15 episodes and then see if people like it and how it goes to the people with more looser side who've got more you know, obviously there's investment of time and energy to do that and budgets, but I guess people are more sort of hopefully have correct, clear goals about what they want to achieve and where this actual channel sits in their other parts of the marketing strategy, I guess so. Yeah, I think I said that very nicely. Well, that's it everyone thank you very much for listening today. In the meantime, if you want to keep in touch you can find us @meanderspod on Twitter, or you can get to us on Facebook. You can also email us which is meanderspod@gmail.com So we hope to see you or hear you or for you to hear us next time anyway and good luck everyone. Take care, bye for now.