Should You Repurpose Podcast Content on Social? [Podcast & Recap]

There are over five billion podcasts in the world and over five hundred million people listen to them. But getting your podcast in front of those people? That’s a challenge, isn’t it? So, how should you promote your podcast or your client’s podcast? And how are you supposed to position and frame your podcast so that it drives actual business results? 

After all, brands continue to lean into podcasting as a marketing channel. Here at Agorapulse, we have this MarTech show, a live webinar, then use that to power podcasts. And we’re in the process of launching three iterations of the Social Pulse Podcast. Other brands like Adobe and HubSpot and Reveal have formed entire podcast networks. They’re thinking like media companies, as Joe Pulizzi would say, and they’re finding new avenues of distribution and new measurements of success.

How? That’s exactly what Deirdre Tshien is discussing on episode six of The MarTech Show, hosted by Mike Allton, head of Strategic Partnerships at Agorapulse, and Robin Dimond, CEO and founder of Fifth & Cor. Listen to the entire podcast below or read on for the highlights of the conversation.

What Capsho Is

Mike: Deirdre Tshien a serial entrepreneur who lives and breathes content marketing, particularly podcasting, having authored Honey Trap Marketing and hosted the Win The Content Game podcast. Deirdre is a 2023 honoree of the 100 Women to Know in America and has co-founded Capsho, an AI-powered content marketing solution that helps businesses and creators leverage their content to amplify their message, grow their listeners, and build their movements.  Now, right off the bat, let’s get into what Capsho does for marketers, whether they’re creating podcasts or video content. What’s it about?

Deirdre: Yes. We’re in this really weird time where we’re actually about to launch a whole new CAPTCHA, CAPTCHA Next Gen. So I’m gonna talk about what the current CAPTCHA does and then where it is that we see, the next gen coming, which is going to be literally imminently in a few weeks’ time. So currently, CAPTCHA basically ingests audio or video. As long as there’s spoken word in it, CAPTCHA takes that and creates a whole host of content marketing assets. So everything from your title and description to social media captions for all the different social media platforms, emails, LinkedIn articles, blog posts. It identifies sound bites. It pulls out quotes. It writes short form video scripts, like, it does a ton of things. And what we realized unknowingly was that we were really overwhelming people.

If I were to tell you my story, I think a lot of people would vibe with it because it’s a common one. I started a coaching business four years ago. That was when I had my first podcast. And it was through that journey that I was like, “I’m creating content, but no one’s discovering it. No one’s really listening to it. It’s not really doing the thing that it was meant to do.” And so whenever I talk to anyone else who is trying to have their audience do something, take action, there’s a difference between creating content for content’s sake and creating content to actually get a result. And that’s kind of where we’re transitioning CAPTCHA to really address, and that’s what’s coming with CAPTCHA, next gen.

I think when we spoke about why that podcast shouldn’t just repurpose their content, it’s because of this. It’s this nuance or this difference that comes from, are we creating content for content’s sake? And why are we creating content? And how do we actually create content that’s actually going to drive outcomes and results?

Happy to dive into that, but that’s kind of what CAPTCHA does.

How Do You Start With Podcast Creation?

Robin: What—whether creating podcasts or video content—what are you supposed to do? How do you start with the actual creation? 

Deirdre: If we talk to eight people who are entrepreneurs, who have businesses, I think the great thing about any of us is that we have this message that is burning inside of us that we just need to share.

And it breaks my heart every time I speak to someone who, for whatever reason, they get held back from actually starting that podcast or that YouTube channel or whatever it is that they want because of all of the—I don’t know if you guys have been through this—but when I first started, I found every reason to procrastinate. I was like, “I don’t have the right microphone, and I don’t have the right lighting, and I didn’t have the background and all the things.”

Overcoming procrastination and perfection

And we do this to ourselves because I think we’re procrastinating. We’re just letting all these little excuses actually hold us back from just, as you said, just getting started in creating content. And when I realized that that was happening to me, I was like, “No. I’m not going to let that happen.”

I think Mike saw my original background. When I hopped on, Robin, you were like, “This background is amazing.” And it is. We actually only did this over, like, in December of last year. So what’s that? Like, three months ago? But for the longest time, I just had a plain white background, and it was frankly super-boring and ugly. 

And the thing is we can’t let that stuff stop us.

We have to lean into the fact that every one of us is here for a reason. We started a business for a reason, whether that’s because we’re passionate about something or because we’re passionate about helping our audience and our clients with something. And that content has to get out there.

And for me, I’ve seen three broad areas where we can really let our content shine, no matter what it is, no matter what type of creator we are.

Understanding your three superpowers

So there’s the expert superpower, which is essentially like, “Hey. I know what it is I’m talking about. I have my own frameworks and strategies. I’m an expert, and I’m going to share that.” That’s one type of superpower that a ton of especially coaches and consultants and service providers, you know, they have this superpower. They are experts. They know their stuff. And they can just literally turn on a microphone or a camera, even if it’s on your phone, and just talk about what it is that they are so good at.

1. Your expertise superpower

What is that expertise? That’s one superpower.

2. Your curator superpower

The second superpower is (and this is more where I lean) being a curator. I have this overall strategy, but I cannot profess to be an expert in every single piece of it, because every single piece of it is in and of itself an expert area. And so I actually love finding people who have that expertise, and I can nerd out with them on a podcast or on a live stream and get to know what it is that they love sharing with their audience and with their clients.

3. Your investigator superpower

And then the third superpower I call the investigator. And this is where no matter what the topic is, it’s really about the person. It’s really about the guest that the investigator gets on. And what they are so good at, which I wish I was better at, is doing the research upfront to be like, “Okay. This is really what this person loves talking about.” But, hey, what is different is we’re actually investing. We’re going deeper into something that they haven’t maybe ever shared before.

And so those are three broad contents of powers that I always go to. If you can figure out which one you fit into, then actually pressing the record button is so much easier because you can just lean straight into that. You can just be like, “Yep, I’m an expert,” or “I’m just going to talk about how I’m a curator.” Say, “I just need to find really great guests that fit into my framework that my audience is going to want to hear from,” or “I’m an investigator,” and XYZ. So, I don’t know if that quite answered your question, Robin, but that’s always where I start. Like, what are your content superpowers?

Robin: It not only answered my question. I wrote it down: what is my superpower? I love that.

Mike: I couldn’t relate more to a lot of the things that you were saying. And you talked about procrastinating, getting started. I know for me, I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I hate the idea of starting something and not doing it really, really well right from the start, even though that’s a foolish approach. And you talked about being an investigator. That’s what we’re going to do right now because we want to drill down. I want to go back to something you mentioned before that we just flew right by, and it was the whole topic of the show that we shouldn’t repurpose our podcast content.

Why Shouldn’t You Repurpose Your Podcast Content on Social?

Tell us again: Why exactly shouldn’t I repurpose all this content? Because that’s what my CEO wants me to do, and I’m going to get in trouble if I don’t. And what should we be doing instead?

Deirdre: Yes. This goes back to the whole idea of creating content for content’s sake. So whole okay. So when we first launched Capsho, over 18 months ago now, it was before the hype of AI.

At the time when we launched, we did the thing, and I think you guys talked about this with LinkedIn, where we spoke to people. 

One of the first conferences that we went to was actually Podfest. We were actually invited to go, and we just spoke to a ton of podcasters about what it was that they were struggling with. We had an idea because, as you know, I’m a content marketing nerd, and so for me, I knew that I wanted to bring content marketing to life.

But the more that we spoke to podcasters, the more they were like, “Oh my gosh. If you can just solve the whole show notes thing, like title and description, that would be a lifesaver,” because that was the number-one burning problem they had. And so that’s what we did.

So for the first iteration of CAPTCHA, it was relaunched with just show notes. And then we started to build it out in terms of, “We’ll help you.”  We know that you want to promote your podcast episodes, so we’ll help you with that, copy and email and things like that. And then Chat GPT and AI became this massive thing. And when I looked at the space, what I saw happening is what I call it the content vomit on the Internet, where now creating content just becomes so easy because we have access to AI and these tools that literally anyone can kind of almost be that expert or be whatever it is that they want on social media.

We had to look at what it was that we were doing and how to not play into that content from its space. We are powered by AI, and so it seemed a little bit counterintuitive to how I was thinking of what it was that we were building.

Audiograms weren’t working

And so what that meant and looked like was because I’ve repurposed my podcast before, and repurposing to me started as audiograms. It was all about the audiograms. How do I create really simple audiograms, put that out there? And then I was creating posts announcing an episode just dropped. You know, those kinds of posts which, by the way, got no engagement. No one wanted to see those. And then I was like, “Okay. Well, what if I just clipped really short videos and shared that?” And the problem with that is that if people are following you, they don’t either know or care about what my guests were saying because they are like, “Who is this random person on my feed now?”

I was starting to turn my audience off. So, I started talking to Katie Brinkley from Next Step Social Communications. She’s a social media expert, and she was taking me through her four post strategies.

Don’t create content just for the sake of creating content

I was telling her I was having this issue of not wanting to just create content for content’s sake. I do not think that the way that we are repurposing our podcast is doing what it needs to do. And she was like, “Well, what do you need social media to do?” And I was like, “I guess, to begin with, I want more listeners on the podcast. But even more than that, how do I grow my email list?”

I wanted all these things. I wanted more people on my email list, and I want more clients and definitely more users in Capsho and things like that. She was like, “Okay. Well, let’s throw out all of my previous ideas about social media and what it was there for.” And then she started talking to me about what we should be looking at on social media. And I don’t know about you, but I used to hear all the time, you have to be social on social media. Like, has anyone else heard this? Like, be social on social media. And I was like, “I don’t know what in the world that means. Like, what does that actually mean?” 

Focusing on engagement

Only when Katie started breaking down her four post strategy did I realize, like, “Oh, okay. Now I get it. This makes sense.” And what it really comes down to was, like, “How do we create content that actually calls forward the right people?” What we mean by this particular topic that we’re talking about is still in your realm, respective realms of marketing, content marketing, social media marketing.

But not everyone maybe cares about repurposing a podcast or not repurposing a podcast. Maybe they don’t even have a podcast. Not all of your followers or your whole audience is going to care about what it is that we’re talking about today.

So what we need to do is we need to call forward the right people, the people who actually will care about this. And that starts with what Katie calls the awareness post. Like, how do you get people raising their hands to be like, “Oh my gosh. Yes. I have this problem, too.”

And the great thing about that is that engagement is actually what gets visibility.

It’s actually engagement that gets your content in front of the same people. The people who engage, but also more of the right people like them, if that makes sense. So then we thought, “We’ll get people to raise their hands.” But we want to give them more value. So then the second process is the elaboration post, which goes into a tip. We raise our hands. We all have this problem that we’re struggling with. Here’s something that either me or my guest has done, and it’s worked for them. 

And then the third post is all about community. This is where the human element comes in. This is the one that AI just cannot do. Right? This is because AI, at this stage, cannot read your mind. It does not know your memories. And so this is where it’s talking more about you and how either how you struggle with the problem, how you solved it, or even how you met the guest, because I love your story, Robin and Mike, of how you guys met when Robin took you on a tour of Miami.

You could very well share that as part of your community post to be like, “This is how Robin and I met, and I’m so glad that we get to do this podcast together, and have these really great content marketing conversations together.” This is where you really want to draw your audience into, “Hey, This is who I am, and I have a puppy, and I have kids, and we love doing these things.” Just whatever. (I’ll talk about how we actually do this. I just want to go through what the four posts are.) And then the last one is then the actual action post. Because through this journey, you’ll have people actually engaging with you, which is where now it makes sense when people say to be social on social. We’re actually trying to create content that has people wanting to have conversations with us rather than creating content that’s just a repurposing of a podcast because all we want is to put something out there. Again, we’re creating content for content’s sake. Does that distinction make sense?

Creating Posts That Have Real Value

Mike: I like how you are drawing a distinction between just doing it to create posts and creating posts that have real value. And I also like that you’re unintentionally saying we’re not creating engagement posts just for the sake of engagement either. I see people do this all the time where they’ll say, “What do you think about brussels sprouts?” And that has nothing to do with their job or with their life. They may not even eat brussels sprouts, but they’re doing it because they know that’s one of 10 questions that they were asked. Ask these kinds of questions every once in a while. Just make your engagement.

Robin: It’s amazing. You said content. You talked about a couple different things. So many things. The first one was content vomiting. Why are we all doing this? We are. And it is vomit. It’s nauseating at its finest. And so I love that you said that, but then you talked about content dripping.

What Is Content Dripping?

Can you talk to us a little bit more about that? Like, how do you do that? How do you make something that makes people want to watch this?

Deirdre: When I think about repurposing, this is what comes to mind. This is how I used to do it: I had this 30-minute podcast recording. I’m going to just find 30-second clips of something. Hopefully, it’s hopefully entertaining or interesting in some way. But I’m just going to find these clips. I’m going to put them out there, and that was me content vomiting all over the Internet.

And then when I really sat back and thought about it, I thought, “The podcast can still serve a purpose, and it serves a very, very important purpose, but it’s not for that purpose.”

The purpose that it serves creates a topic of conversation, or what we call a premise.

And then alongside that is, when I spoke about those four posts dripping out our content, we want to be intentional. And this is again not creating content for a content’s sake.

We’re being really intentional about the outcome that we want. I wanted to get more clients. I wanted to get more listeners. I wanted to get more people on my email list.

So whatever that end action is, there can only be one when you do this, as in one per week or one each time you do this strategy. I always think, “How do I align my topic or my premise with that action?” My premise comes from the podcast.

Even though I say don’t repurpose your podcast, I mean that, but I also am not saying don’t use your podcast episode at all. What I mean is you spoke about something. You spoke about it for a reason. Maybe it was because let’s take this topic as an example again.

The reason could be you have a lot of podcasters in your audience, and they’re also wondering what to do with the content that they’re creating. And so we want to make sure that we get in front of the right people.

This is why this works really well because we want to call the right people forward. And so our whole premise and topic is going to be based on this, which is over the week, we’re going to be talking about why you should not be repurposing a podcast. Who here is repurposing a podcast? But the end action that you guys might want? Maybe you have a lead magnet for podcasters or maybe you just want them to listen to this podcast. You want more listeners on this podcast. Then we’ll actually, according to that, those strategies will actually show the premise.

What Is the Premise of Your Podcast?

So that’s step number one. What is our premise? Our topic is going to be what podcast, what podcasters should not be repurposing this, what they should be doing instead.

And then this is our action, and we just basically drip out the content that gets us to that action. And it’s all about calling people forward to create that engagement, give to them. So this is what you should be doing instead. Let them in to say you used to do this, too. And ever since I changed how it is that I approached content and creating content and my podcast content, these are the results that maybe I got. Or, Mike, we can talk about how we met and say Deirdre’s going to actually share with us. Then by the time the action post comes, you’ll say we actually recorded a podcast on this exact topic with Deirdre, who I actually introduced to you in the last post. People are going to feel like they’ve been following you on this journey already. Like, it becomes a no-brainer to want to then actually take that action. Anyways, I could talk about this very well, but I’m so passionate about getting really intentional with the content that we create.

Mike: Love it. Love it. Okay. I’m legit taking notes because everything that we’ve been doing with this show with all the other podcasts that we have coming up with my own podcast, getting tons and tons of ideas. But, Deirdre, another concept that you talked about set around this idea of not just publishing show notes, but creating show notes funnels. Explain that.

Creating podcast show notes funnels

Deirdre: Probably about 12 months ago, I was speaking to one of our users, one of our Capshovians, Adam Lam, and he was talking about how since he used CAPTCHA’s email and especially the subject lines, he was like, “Oh, my gosh. It’s amazing.” Went from an average open rate of 23 percent to something like 66 percent just from testing CAPTCHA’s subject lines. And then he was like, “But what I’m finding is that even though the email is all about getting people to listen to the podcast episode, I’m not really finding my listener numbers increasing.”

I said, “Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit more about that. How are you getting people onto your email list?” And he was like, “Well, on my website, I have a PDF checklist that people can opt into and and get.”

And the more that I thought about that, the more that I wanted to test this, actually. The lead magnet was for a very specific purpose, which it needs to be, but it was delivered in a very specific way, written. My brain started thinking, are they the same people who actually want to listen to a podcast? Because not everyone is created equal. Just because we might love audio or video doesn’t mean that all people do.

And so I wanted to test this. So what I did was test it with my own podcast first because that’s generally what we do. We always test with ourselves first.

I was actually recording a guest interview with someone called Kevin Schmidlin, who is also a podcast growth coach. We were talking, and he mentioned he did the same thing. He just flew by this one thought that he had and then just kept going. And then towards the end because it was on my mind, and I knew I needed to ask him this. But what I did was I actually ended the podcast episode, but the recording was still on. And I was like, “You mentioned this one thing that has been on my mind. Can you go deeper into how exactly you do it?” And so we recorded that, and it was like an extra three to five minutes.

And what I decided to do was go into the podcast episode as my call to action. (By the way, if you notice, Kevin mentioned this one thing that he didn’t go into, and it was on my mind.) So I actually asked him the question later. And if you want that bonus episode burn burners clip, I should say, go and get it in the show notes. And so people would opt in for that. 

What I found was that what we’re creating here were listeners opting in for something that they would listen to. And then when we actually emailed them about a new podcast episode, it was for them to listen. So what we were trying to do was get the right audience in the right on my list doing the thing that I want them to do in the right medium, but through the right medium. 

And so that became what we call the show notes funnel, which is how you actually content honey trap someone into wanting to go to your show notes, and I have a whole system there and actually opting in for the thing that you want them to opt into so that you can build your list and ultimately get them taking action. So that’s what the show notes funnel became. Content honey trap, really, all that is is creating curiosity.

So throughout the episode, we would create curiosity about something. I would say, “Hey, you can actually sage that curiosity by going to the show to the show notes and opting in for this thing.” But even in the show notes, I was actually thinking about how to create curiosity and have people wanting to come to the show notes. So I would actually embed rich media, things like photos and videos, and pull out quotes. So people actually wanted to stay on the show notes and actually led them into that action as well. So that’s what the show notes funnel became.

The Honey Trap

Robin: She talked about Honey Trap, and I feel like we needed just a little bit more. You just threw it out there. Can you tell us a little bit more about Honey Trap?

Deirdre: As I said, it’s really about how we create curiosity. And when I tell you, we test everything on ourselves first, it always comes from a spark of inspiration from somewhere.

I remember I was at this event, and it was one of those events that had multiple stages. So you had to look at your gender and decide which one you wanted to go to. And there was a particular presentation that was titled “How I Made a Million Dollars with a Nineteen Dollar Product and a Toilet Seat.” And I wasn’t sure. But it was a packed room, so clearly, it worked. 

We hear the word curiosity quite a lot. But I think where my brain always goes is the phrase “be social on social media.”

What does that mean? Create curiosity, but what does that mean and how do I do it? I started really noting how we create this curiosity.

When I saw that example of the presentation with the toilet seat, I wondered, “Why did that make me so curious that I had to go to that presentation?” There was this almost mind-blowing juxtaposition or paradox. You’ve got this big result of a million dollars, that a lot of us want or strive for. And then we have this nineteen dollar product in the toilet seat, which, when you try to wrap your head around, you’re like, “I don’t know how that’s possible.” This is this big gap that is getting called out, and there’s so much curiosity about how did this person close that gap? And so that became one of our mental models, one of our content honey trap mental models of how to create curiosity. How do you juxtapose this big result with this almost unbelievable fact?

And so that became one of our story-based content, honey trap mental models.

The more that we really delved into, there are some really typical ones like the cliffhanger. That’s the reason why soap operas have been going on for decades is because they have these cliffhangers based on the story. You need to know what happens next. And so we actually essentially created eight mental models. In total, four that were based on stories, and then four that were based on the tips that were being shared. When we’re creating content, a lot of times we are sharing a lot of value. And so we start thinking about how it is that we actually create curiosity about the tips that we’re showing as well. 

So, anyway, fast forward, I looked at this title, and wanted to try it with one of our episodes. And I just recorded this podcast episode with this amazing woman, Angela Taylor, and she essentially was operating a five figure coaching business working only forty hours a month. Like, not a week, a month. And so that’s what I decided to create a paradox content honey trap around. That’s how I promoted it. It’s like how this woman, this coach, makes five figures working only forty hours a month. 

I posted on social media, and literally it was one of my highest engaging posts but also one of my highest engaged list, podcast episodes. I had people DMing me being like, “I cannot wait to listen to this episode.” Like, it was crazy. And so that’s when we knew we were onto something around how to actually create curiosity via these eight mental models.

Mike: Yeah. That’s absolutely fascinating. Andrew Davis has an entire talk all about basically what you’re talking about, the curiosity gap. And he shared this great example where, and some of you may have seen the rubber band around a watermelon experiment that Buzzfeed did so many years ago, just wrapping one rubber band around a watermelon. And it went on for hours and hours and hours, and the watermelon slowly compressed, and people could not stop watching because they wanted to see when the watermelon would explode and then, of course, what that would look like. They wanted to satiate that curiosity, and it’s a tremendous approach to content. Thank you for sharing that.

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