Breaking Down The Breakdown: A Grand Experiment in Branded Podcasts

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Aaron Eckhart’s version of Harvey Dent said that in Christopher Nolan’s penultimate Batman film, The Dark Knight.

Since its release in 2008, that quote has been referenced and misappropriated to fit situations because, let’s be honest, it’s a cool quote.

Well, you can add another reference to the pile because it’s the first quote that came to mind when I thought about prolific podcaster Matt Medeiros: “You either podfade, or you podcast long enough to try every format.”

Matt has certainly been around the block. He had perhaps the first popular WordPress business podcast, The Matt Report. He has a short form news podcast called The WP Minute. Finally, he has a locally focused podcast, We Are Here, celebrating businesses from South Coast, MA.

And now he hosts Breakdown, a podcast by the popular forms plugin, Gravity Forms, for Gravity Forms users and web builders.

Even though podcasting has been around for a while, most brands are just now coming around to their importance as part of a greater content strategy.

I wanted to capture Breakdown’s story as it’s starting. It’s easy to say after it’s worked that it was a right decision. We’re still at the point where Matt and the Gravity Forms team are experimenting. And that’s a great thing for brands and podcasters alike to see.

What’s Breakdown About?

The official description of Breakdown is, “Discover new WordPress opportunities through stories told using Gravity Forms. WordPress developers and agency owners rely on Gravity Forms to solve complex problems for their clients. Breakdown explores their stories to extract the most useful lessons for our listeners.”

It’s a super clear mission that states their target audience and how the podcast serves that audience. But when I spoke to Matt, he also gave the “hopeful” description:

This is a problem Matt has thought about a lot, in-fact, as someone with multiple podcasts in the business niche. You used to be able to publish a straight interview and people would listen. But podcasting has evolved — there are plenty of great podcasts out there, and if you want to compete, you need to tell a good story.

Matt’s also aware of another difficulty: the push and pull between Matt’s goal above, the goal of every branded podcast: ROI.

Why Brands Should Have a Podcast

Matt was hired as the WordPress Evangelist/Community leader for Gravity Forms. This can mean a lot to a lot of different people, so here’s how he puts it in his bio:

Audio content to help WordPress power users understand Gravity Forms more deeply.

Measuring ROI, however, is super hard for a branded podcast. If you sell sponsorship, it’s pretty easy. If you sell a membership, likewise.

Selling your products or services is a little harder, but doable. But with a branded podcast, there needs to be balance. You cannot spend the entire time hawking your product.

No one wants to listen to an informercial.

At the same time, you need to weave your brand, or your brand’s mission, into the content.

Gravity Forms had a previous podcast called Input, and while I enjoyed it (they interviewed the lead singer of one of my favorite bands), it was sometimes hard to see the connection to the brand.

That’s why I’m always preaching the importance of a good podcast mission statement. So, we must go back to Matt’s mission with the show: educate and entertain.

The entertain part is to keep people listening. The educate part is to keep people informed. We’ll get into their format later, but first I want to lay out how Matt believes Gravity Forms can benefit from a branded podcast.

Matt believes that Gravity Forms can benefit from having a podcast so much, that he’s essentially made it a part of his job. Here’s why:

1. Brand Awareness and Recognition. Matt knows that having a branded podcast will help more people discover Gravity Forms, and recognize the company and the mission.
2. Long Form Content. It gives the Gravity Forms team even more long form content, as well as the ability to repurpose other long form content they have.
3. Retention. Related to long form content, this helps people stay on Gravity Forms’ content longer.

Let’s take a look at each one.

Branded Podcasts Create Awareness and Recognition

This is an important point: they aren’t using the podcast to grow their podcast audience…if that makes sense.

They’re using the podcast as a single part of an overall strategy to make people understand who Gravity Forms is for. Remember: the goal is to educate and entertain. So, they create a podcast that is informative and shareable.

This helps elevate their brand.

Long Form Content

Remember that overall strategy? That’s where the long form content comes in. They’re already making blog posts about their releases. Matt is doing more live streams too.

A podcast allows them to repurpose those pieces of content into an audio format that will be more consumable for more people.

But they’re also creating a new piece of content: an interview with someone from their community. They can take that interview, and turn it into a long form blog post.

We’ll talk about that more later.

User Retention

On that same token, long form content retains users. They have a strong presence on short form platforms like TikTok. But platforms like that, as well as YouTube, are more concerned with keeping users there.

With a branded podcast and other long form content like blog posts, you can retain users by keeping them on your own content longer, and potentially capturing them better by getting them on your mailing list.

Your Takeaway: No matter how many downloads your podcast gets, it can be an integral part of your overall content strategy.

How Their Format Contributes to Their Mission

The podcast has several segments:

1. Some banter between Matt and Dustin.
2. Updates from Gravity Forms and what’s coming down the pike.
3. An interview with a Gravity Forms user, developer, or partner
4. What content to look for next from Gravity Forms.
5. “What’s new with WordPress” — a segment to keep listeners informed on the latest news in the greater WordPress ecosystem¹.
6. Closing comments from Matt and Dustin

First, let’s talk about the host/co-host format. I think this is essential because it means that Matt isn’t just coldly reading a change log. He gets to talk to one of his coworkers (Dustin is a video producer at Gravity Forms) about the stuff they’re working on.

This banter helps the audience feel more of a connection with the co-hosts. For example, in an episode from June, Matt talked about his Fourth of July plans. That’s a little personal insight to help forge a relationship between brand and listener.

Since Dustin’s main job appears to be creating video tutorials, he also knows the software really well.

That means on top of updates, there’s more context around why they decided to push those updates, and how to use them. In the same episode, they talked not only about a new “Turnstile” feature, but why it’s better than the current alternative (CAPTCHA).

Educate, and entertain.

Subsequently, they move into an interview between Matt and someone from their community. I want to dive deeper into this in a minute, but for now, I’ll say, it’s always good for brands to highlight the people using their products for cool stuff.

They close out with more news and updates: what to look for next from the Gravity Forms content team, and updates from the greater WordPress ecosystem.

The latter is super helpful for this podcast’s audience in particular, because if they’re creating WordPress sites, they’ll want to know how changes to WordPress will affect them.

Each of these segments serve a purpose that relates back to their mission statement, to help, “WordPress developers and agency owners [that] rely on Gravity Forms,” as well as the show’s goals.

Brand awareness and recognition with the updates to the platform and content they’re making, long form content by creating a 30-minute audio show, and retention by keeping listeners engaged with their content (instead of relying on an algorithm).

But there’s another strong argument for brands to format their shows the way Brekadown does, especially when it comes to interviews.

Interviews can Serve a Case Studies for Branded Podcasts

Pat Flynn often says, “people love hearing the sound of their name.” Public interviews with customers allow your users to hear their name in your content.

On that same token, you want to find more customers by looking for similar users…you want that lookalike audience.

By highlighting your customers on your podcast, and teaching a bigger audience how they’re using your products, you’re doing two things:

1. Saying, “hey, look at how this person just like you uses our stuff.”
2. Helping listeners generate ideas.

Maybe the customer being interviewed does something that doesn’t exactly apply to you, but they might spark an idea to help solve a problem you encounter.

That makes these interviews prime content for case studies. Gravity Forms can take the audio, transcribe it, and turn it into a narrative for their blog.

Case Studies are great content, and you’re basically getting that content for free when you interview customers on your podcast.

Leverage that as a way to:

1. Create social proof.
2. Demonstrate your expertise.
3. Teach your potential customers about your produce.

Your Takeaway: Create case studies from interviews you publish on your podcast — whether you’re a brand or a solopreneur.

Early Days are Experimental

Because they’re in their early days of the podcast, they’re still finding their sea legs…or, I guess, they’re still making their gravitational adjustments.

Matt knows this and is using it as a time to experiment. It’s part of the reason they’re a fortnightly podcast. The “every two weeks” cadence allows them to spend time on each episode without it feeling like an informational firehose…or a week or boring updates.

“Bug fixes and improvements” neither educates nor entertains².

It also allows him to drop a bonus episode on off weeks if he’d like to. And he’s already done it a couple of times: once with a webinar, and once with their 101 live stream.

By making these events available in the feed, Gravity Forms is making Breakdown the source for all of their helpful content.

It also allows them to see if weekly is a format they should explore, and if there’s an opportunity for similar, audio-first content in the future.

By creating segments, there’s another opportunity: break those up into separate, dedicated shows.

Matt mentioned he created segments in the first place because he knows his audience might be interested in different things. Many will likely want to know what’s new, but won’t care about the interviews.

Some will be searching for new ideas, so the interviews are important.

He also mentioned that he’s working with a podcast producer now to make the transitions between segments even better. By creating the narrative and moving the listener along from segment to segment, it will ensure more people stick around for more of the show.

The audio engineering for certain shows can be the difference maker. If the segments work together to create the 3-Act story, it can take the podcast to the next level.

The last bit he’s experimenting with is dynamic CTAs. Presently, the primary CTA is subscribing to the podcast.

But the team also travels to various WordPress-related events. When that happens, they add a dynamic preroll clip to each episode using Transistor, telling people to find them and say hello.

Your Takeaway: Be open to experiments. You never know what will resonate with your audience.

A Mostly Manual Process

Before we get into how you can leverage these lessons, I want to point out something else: this is a mostly manual process for Matt at the moment.

I’m a big proponent of understanding your process before you try to automate, and it looks like Matt feels the same way. Even though he’s been podcasting for over 10 years, he knows that this endeavor is different.

It’s for a brand, there are more stakeholders, and the landscape has changed since he started.

As a result, he’s been doing most of the production himself. He edits in Descript before moving it to Hindenburg for sound design.

The show notes are in a Google Doc he and Dustin share, and he does the description himself.

He publishes the episodes. And he creates audiograms in Descript for sharing on social media (note: he does not record video at all, so these are simple static images with moving text and waveform).

As they move forward with the show, Matt has two goals:

1. Improve the quality (which is why he’s starting to work with a producer now).
2. Get feedback from listeners.

The experiments are the small bets that will improve the manual process over time, and hopefully increase the ROI for the brand.

Getting feedback from listeners will help him discern which experiments are working, and how he can make a truly entertaining, educational show.

Using Breakdown to Improve Your Podcast Workflow

When you’re starting a podcast for a brand, the whole thing can feel like a bit of a scary experiment. You don’t know how it’s going to be received, you’re investing money into a relatively new marketing channel, and you need to strike the right balance.

You don’t want it to sound like an infomercial, but you do want it to measurably improve the bottom line in your business.

I think you can learn a lot from what Matt and the Gravity Forms team are doing with Breakdown.

Make a Branded Podcast an Integral Part of Your Overall Content Strategy

You don’t need a lot of downloads or direct sales to start getting ROI from your podcast.

By repurposing current content, you can reimagine it in a different format that might resonate with a different set of listeners.

There is also the opportunity to resurface helpful educational content to give it a second life, FAQs you get from customer support, and better customer stories.

You can form a stronger bond with your customers by highlighting them. And you can create more long form content from it: namely, with case studies.

Create Case Studies From Interviews

This is definitely my biggest takeaway. You’re already spending the time asking customers (or other folks in your ecosystem) about how they’re using your product, the problems your service solves, and more.

Leverage that insight by turning into a case study on your website. This will attract new users to your site, improve your SEO³ , and by including the episode on the case study, you can attract new listeners to the show too.

It’s a customer case study flywheel!

Be Open to Experiments

Breakdown is still in the early days, so they’re trying new things to see what resonates with their listeners.

No matter how long you’ve had your podcast, it’s worth mixing up the type of content you create. Maybe your audience would love to hear other voices in your company or from your team. For example, Jay Clouse recently interviewed his video editor.

Perhaps they want quick tips. Or perhaps they want to hear from more customers.

You’ll never know until you try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks.

And if you’re a brand considering a podcast, the show in and of itself can be an experiment. Take some of that Facebook ad money and throw it at a podcast for 6 months.

You may find that it’s a much better lead generator for you, at a much better price.

1. Gravity Forms is a plugin for WordPress. ↩
2. I’m looking at you, App developers. ↩
3. Not that I’m an SEO expert ↩