ADB partners with Isle Utilities for special edition Podcast

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to this short teaser into how to record, edit, and market a successful podcast. My name is Piers Clark and I'm the founder of the Isle Group, and I've been asked to do this by the Asian Development Bank. Our credentials for doing this come from the fact that we run the award-winning global Water Action Platform broadcast, which is something we've done for the past five years. In the last six months, we've been running something called the Executive Exchange Podcast, which is a 15-minute weekly podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares stories to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders around the globe. The aim here is to share some of those learnings so that anyone listening to this can hopefully build upon those learnings to create your own successful podcasts.
Now there's gonna be three parts to this. I will share an initial sort of five-minute overview as to how you go about generating your podcast and how you find your speakers and how you get an engaging content. My colleague, Bradley Lusk will then spend five minutes talking about the editing activities. How do you take that raw material, clean it up, and turn it into something that's an engaging listen. And then finally, my colleague, Anna Gunn, will talk through the channels you can go through to make sure that once you've created your podcast, you get maximum coverage, you get maximum outreach hitting the audience that you want to reach.
Now the idea here is that this 15-minute overview isn't going to answer all your questions, but maybe it will help you on your journey of thinking about how to generate a podcast. If you want to know more, I will be in Manila for the ADB Water forum at the end of May [2025] and would be delighted to meet with people there. Or you can raise your queries via email and we will answer them directly to you as to any questions about the marketing or the editing or the content. And if need be, we can also set up some virtual forums, some virtual meetings later in the year to help make sure that you get the information you require.
Let's start with the recording of the podcast. What do you need to think about? What's the prime thing that should be occupying your mind? Now you might think it's identifying who is going to be the person you are going to be interviewing, but that's not what I would advise as your starting point. Your starting point should be your audience. Think carefully about who they are and what are they likely to be doing when they're listening to your podcast. Will they be in the bath, driving to work? Will they be out for a run? How is it that you are going to be engaging with them because that's going to draw conclusions as to whether this is an audio only podcast, or whether you are going to be doing it with video. That will also influence whether it's going to be a descriptive podcast, where it's just what's in the ears, or whether you are going to be providing photographs and PowerPoint slides, which will help make the story come alive. You need to use different tools for different people.
It's worth thinking about your audience as to what group are you after? Most successful podcasts are not trying to be universal. They are aimed at a specific group. That might be an industry sector. It might be a particular geography, it might be a particular technical area, but you've got to think through who you are talking to and what the messages are that they're listening out for.
And that will then feed of course into whether or not just it's an audio or a visual podcast, but also the length of the podcast. It's actually easier to produce an hour-long podcast than it is to produce a compelling 12-minute one, but the 12-minute podcast is what's going to be listened to.
Secondly, having worked out who your audience is, then you've got the next thing around content to think about. What is it that matters to them? What are the things that keep your audience awake at night? What are their worries, in other words. But also, what are the things that get 'em excited? What are the things they're proud of? What are the stories they would want to tell and the stories they'd want to hear. It's also worth thinking that sometimes, for good content, you want to address how the rest of the world might view that group. So, for example, if it's a technical group, you might want to think about can we get a perspective from a regulator? Can we get a perspective from a customer? It's useful sometimes to find interesting content where you are bringing in an alternative perspective to that very group that's there.
Now, the reason it's worth thinking through all of this is of course, it helps you identify interesting topics, which you can then structure your podcast around and then break it down into bite-sized chunks. You don't want to try and describe brain surgery in one 15-minute podcast, you will break that down into 20 different small components which are bite-sized and able to give the listener something new to learn, something they can take away from each podcast. You want to try and make it so that people are hungry to stay listening, to hear what's the next sentence going to reveal to me. And of course, the beauty of breaking things down into individual micro topics is that you are then able to create a series and that creates stickiness with your clients.
You want to try to tell a story in a way that isn't patronizing yet is suitable for a wider audience than maybe just that select group that you've identified as being your key group. You want to make it so that it's palatable to everyone, yet also has sufficient detail to be of interest to the technical specialists. Once you've worked out who the audiences are and what topics matter to them, then you get to the bit where most people start, which is who you are going to be interviewing; what's the main topic of your podcast.
If your podcast is around interviewing people, then you've gotta interview someone who's got a story to tell. They also have to have an ability and a willingness to tell that story in a way that's going to align with your podcast. If they want to tell a 45-minute story and your podcast is only going to be 12 minutes long, they are not the right person to invite along. They also, ideally, need to be confident and outgoing, gregarious in how they tell their story. It's not an absolute necessity because, if you are a good interviewer, you can tease facts out of people who are maybe a little bit more introvert or a little less confident, but it's much easier if they are hungry to tell their story.
The hardest part is probably going to be fixing a date in the interviewee's diary, because that's finding a time when they are in a quiet area, and you are in a quiet area, and you can do a recording that is slick enough to mean that you've got all the information you need, ideally, in one take. That is a challenge! And don't think that you can do it by just slotting your half hour slot with the interviewee in the middle of two meetings. You've got to give them enough time to have the mental bandwidth to know that, "Oh, I'm now going on a recording. I'm about to be doing a broadcast and what I'm going to say might be listened to by many other people." So you've got to buy them some time for that.
Now, once you are in the interview, think about how you keep the story moving forward. What are the questions you want to ask people? I find it best to not over rehearse. I like to get my interviewee onto a call. We agree, the arc of the conversation, we agree the sort of general direction we're going in, and then we press record, and we're off. Because over rehearsed, it actually becomes a bit dry. People get a bit conservative in their answers, and you lose some of the dynamism and spontaneity that makes it feel interesting. You want the listener to feel like they're a fly on the wall listening into a secret conversation.
Of course it doesn't always work, and you'll sometimes get someone on a call and on a recording and they won't tell an interesting story. But don't worry, because this is where the next part of the training podcast comes into play. Resolving the issues when you've got a not quite perfect recording can be done through clever editing. And for that, I'm gonna hand over to my colleague Bradley Lusk to walk us through how you might edit a raw recording.
[00:07:31] Bradley Lusk: Hey everyone, my name is Brad Lusk and I'm the chief editor for the Executive Exchange Podcast at Isle starring Piers Clark. Today I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about how to do some editing and recording for your very own podcast.
The first thing I wanna talk to you about today is hardware. If you are thinking about starting a podcast, it's really important that you get a good microphone and a good headset. The last thing you want to do is use the built-in microphone on your phone. It's gonna sound really echoey and not very good. There are a lot of things that we can do in terms of increasing the audio quality of your podcast after the fact, but the general rule of thumb is garbage in, garbage out. So, if you wanna have good final audio quality for your podcast, you want to start with a podcast that's been recorded using good audio equipment. You also wanna try to use a directional microphone. Today, I'm talking to you using a directional microphone. Essentially what that means is that microphone is recording from one direction rather than multiple directions. You don't wanna be picking up multiple voices on the same microphone. You want to get one voice per microphone.
When you're recording, you want to try to separate each voice into different files. That way the individual voices can be edited later. There are a lot of times when you're recording a podcast and the two speakers end up talking over one another, and it's a lot easier to clean that up if you have multiple recordings; one for each of the individual speakers.
In terms of the room that you're recording in, you wanna use a studio if you can. A lot of times you don't have access to a studio. Just try to avoid rooms with echoes, avoid rooms that have external sounds; if you have windows in that room, close 'em. You don't want to hear airplanes, police sirens, or other people talking in the background when you're doing your podcast.
In terms of the recording software, you have a lot of different options. If you are interviewing someone over the internet, this is probably gonna be an app that you are used to. Something like Zoom, Teams, Google Meet... they all offer recording options. A lot of them, if you go into the settings, you can set the recording parameters for a high-quality format when you're choosing to record. Oftentimes they let you separate the different speakers into different tracks. You may also choose to record all of your audio locally. In other words, you have a Zoom meeting, but all of the audio is being recorded on your computer.
In terms of the format, you wanna try to export your audio in uncompressed format, so avoid things like MP3s, WMAs, AAC. Those formats compress things and it can sound a little jarbled when you come back to listen to your podcast. So, you wanna use lossless formats. Two good examples are WAV formats or FLAC formats. These formats are gonna require more storage space, but have superior sound quality.
For software, there are a lot of options that you can use for editing your podcast. For this particular clip, I'm using something called Audacity. It's a free audio editing software that you can get online. There's a huge amount of public support and community around it, so there are a lot of plugins that are being added all the time to help you with things like mastering audio, eliminating background noise, adjusting your audio levels, pitch, all these kinds of things. You also get to edit your audio files while looking directly at a digital waveform of your audio. That makes it easier to go in there and see: is my audio too loud? Is my audio not loud enough? Generally, the software is a bit of learning curve, but because there's such a huge community, there are a lot of tutorials to help you get started with Audacity.
Something that Audacity lacks is a plugin that enables you to automatically convert your speech into a transcript that people can read. It's really important that you put transcripts out for your podcast 'cause it makes them accessible to a broader audience. When you're using Audacity, you're gonna need to manually create your subtitles. However, there are other apps that are out there, happy Scribe is a good example, where you can plug in your audio file from your original recording and it'll auto generate subtitles for you. Just keep in mind, anytime you're using something that auto-generates subtitles, you're gonna have to manually correct it 'cause it always makes mistakes. And sometimes those mistakes are innocuous and sometimes those mistakes are quite embarrassing. So, make sure you go in and make sure that your transcript is actually saying what you're saying and not making up silly things.
Audacity also lacks an AI audio correction. So, in other words, if someone's doing a recording and the audio suddenly drops out, it's gonna be really hard to fill in that gap unless you go back and rerecord with that speaker. You might wanna look for something that has AI correction. It's not to make your speaker say something totally new, it's just if I'm recording and I'm trying to say the word "water" and all of a sudden it sounds like "[sound]" you want to be able to go in and have AI use the voice that's been recorded for that speaker and be able to generate the word "water". Another option is you can cut out a clip of "water" from somewhere earlier in the episode and paste it in where it cut out.
Some of the premium, higher end software you can use are things like Adobe Audition or Adobe Premier. Although Premier is traditionally used for video, you can still use it for audio. These are gonna cost a little bit more, but they have features like automatic subtitle generation, AI for correcting spots where audio cuts out, and a lot of features for really getting into your audio and being able to edit the wave form in a way that really can make certain words pop more than others. However, generally when you're doing a podcast, you don't really need a lot of dynamic range. You want all of the words that are being spoken to have about the same level of loudness to make sure that when your listeners listening, all of the words that are being spoken are able to be heard. And so, you don't have to worry so much about using higher end audio editing software packages.
One that we use at the Executive Exchange Podcast called Descript has an editing interface that uses autogenerated transcripts to make it seem like you're editing a Word file. You get the transcript in front of you and that's what you're editing from. You have the waveform on the bottom, but it's not as prevalent as it is in some other audio editing software. However, Descript has some great plugins, like something called Studio Sound that makes it simplified to make your recording sound better. It kind of gets rid of echo, all these kinds of things. Again, plugins that exists on the other apps, but in Descript, that learning curve for coming in and starting to edit is gonna be very low compared to Audacity and some of the Adobe packages.
So those are just a few of the basics for getting into audio editing. I would absolutely love to talk to you more and give you more detail about specific hardware that you can choose, specific software that you can use for editing, and really help you find a custom-tailored approach that makes the most sense.
[00:13:53] Piers Clark: Thank you very much, Bradley. That was very interesting and, as I promised at the beginning, there is the ability to engage with Bradley to learn more about how to edit a podcast, either directly via emailing him, or we can set up a separate virtual session.
We now move to the final part of this three-part training podcast, where we look at the marketing; how do you make your podcast have maximum impact with the widest possible audience. And to share some thoughts on that, I'm going to introduce my colleague, Anna Gunn, head of marketing at Isle. Anna, over to you.
[00:14:27] Anna Gunn: Thanks Piers. So, you've recorded a podcast, you've said some smart things, you've even edited out the dog barking in the background. You're now staring at a file wondering how do I get people to listen to this? Don't worry, you are not on your own. And distribution isn't really as scary as it sounds.
It's really about getting your podcast into the right ears of the right people at the right time. But there's a lot of smart people out there who've already figured that out for you. So, the good news is you don't need to be a technical wizard or a marketing pro in order to handle this. You just need a few simple steps to get your podcast into the right places.
First up, you're going to need a hosting platform, a little bit like an Airbnb for your audio. And this is where you upload your episodes and they do all the heavy lifting for you, and they'll distribute it out to all of the well-known platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Amazon, all of those great places that your audiences will be. And there's a lot of beginner friendly options out there, such as Buzzsprout or Podbean or even Spotify for podcasters.
Top tip, before you publish it to your host, you can put a poll; where are your audience listening to podcasts right now? You can do that on LinkedIn or in your WhatsApp group, and it'll help you determine where your audience are already listening to the podcasts. Don't assume that where you listen to your podcast is where other people are gonna listen to them. Some people like to listen to videos only with captions. They don't like to hear it. They like to sit on a train and read the captions, or perhaps they like to listen to it whilst they're washing up. Perhaps you just want people to click and play on LinkedIn. You need to make sure that they are being distributed where your audience is and to a lot of different platforms.
For instance, if your audience is on LinkedIn a lot, perhaps you can try prioritizing Apple or Spotify. If you are big on Instagram or TikTok, you can perhaps try short videos on short clips. If you've got a YouTube channel, perhaps you can try a Short or even the audio just with a still image on their upload.
A pro tip here is to add your podcast link to your signature block of your email or your social media profiles to allow everybody else to know where to listen to your podcasts. Next tip is to go full on spy mode and check out where other podcasts are in your space or area. Now, I'm not suggesting that we copy and paste. I'm suggesting that we take inspiration from. And you can look at them and look at where they're distributing to and where their platforms are getting shares or re-shares. Do they get their guests to reshare? How are they communicating out and gathering inspiration for your own podcast? You can also try different channels and testing things out, and you can do that by sending out different links that have Bitly links and trackers on them to see what are getting clicks and what aren't.
One Instagram post isn't gonna do this. It's like baking a cake and expecting everybody to turn up to the party you didn't invite them to. Make sure that each episode is an absolute great opportunity to celebrate, shout about, tease people in, cut up small episodes as a little teaser for them to come in, invite them in and give your guests themselves graphics or opportunities of re-sharing their episode of your podcast.
Email is not dead, and in fact, your mailing list is your gold mine. By emailing out to your subscribers when each episode is, you are gently reminding them that the episode is coming up and where they can listen to it. Making sure that you keep your messages really short and to the point will ensure that your audience follows along with that journey without getting annoyed that you are clogging up their inbox.
Podcast distribution isn't rocket science, but it is about being intentional. Get a good home for your podcast. Be where your listeners are, test where they are, spy, test again, and then go there. And then promote every episode as if it's a birthday party. And email still rules. I hope these have been useful insights.
[00:18:44] Piers Clark: Thank you very much Anna. Hopefully this short podcast has given you a taster as to what you might need to consider when you are looking to launch a podcast. Be that the content, be it in how you go about editing, or be it in what you need to do to spread the word once you've recorded your podcast. If you want to know more, do not hesitate to send an email to either myself, Piers.Clark@isleutilities.com, or to my colleagues Bradley Lusk and Anna Gunn following the same email structure that I've just described. Or we can arrange for there to be a separate session where we deal with your questions directly via a virtual training seminar. Thank you for listening.