Does My Podcast Need to be Video?

Okay, let’s talk about the video elephant in the room.

When to Video Is a Good Idea for Your Podcast

One of the things that made me the most angry and frustrated over my career as a producer was something that I learned the first time we did the State of Business Podcasting report. At that time, I was a very firm believer that podcasts were podcasts and they were audio, and that was good. And video was video, and they lived on YouTube and on Vimeo and other places, and that was good.

But when I started doing the research and looking at the top business podcasts, the ones that do perform the best, the ones that get the most attention, the ones that are doing the best for the companies that run them – a really big percentage of them were also on video. And over the six years we’ve been doing the report, that number has climbed year after year.

More and more podcasts are becoming video first, which means that they are designed, filmed and produced with video in mind and audio as a still important but not primary focus. What does that mean for you as a potential producer? Not much, to be completely honest. I’m still a big believer that if you want to do an audio only podcast, you can do an audio only podcast.

In fact, I have an audio only podcast, the Business Podcast Spotlight. We record the video, but we don’t release the whole video of that episode. That’s different from what you’re watching right now, which is a different type of podcast – designed to be video first and it has different goals. That’s what it really comes down to. What are your goals for the podcast and is video the best way to achieve them, or can you get all of what you need with audio?

Now that’s a big conversation. It’s something that is worth some time and doing some thinking about. If you’ve got a relationship building show for example, and the most important thing that you want to do with your podcast is just connect with other people – it doesn’t have to be on video. You can do that just fine with an audio only show.

If you want to get a lot of conversions, and if you want to get a lot of audience engagement on different platforms, then the data pretty much does indicate that you want to have video, because that is the most engaging of the media types that we have available to us. It’s worth experimenting with. It’s worth trying.

It’s worth trying different methods. It’s really different, which I can say from very personal experience, to try and record video by yourself alone and then doing it with someone, with having a producer to actually help you through the process. It makes a world of difference. And for me it was the difference between possible and impossible.

So if you decide that video is the most effective way for you to reach your business goals, which of course is the reason that we’re doing this, then experiment with different methods to try and make it as easy on yourself as possible.

Does My Podcast Need to be Video?

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