Choosing a topic for your video podcast

A video podcast series is not one of those things that you start without a plan. Well, you could but in the long term, you will probably find out that you would have been better off with a solid episodic content marketing strategy. This includes everything from planning to distribution and is the ultimate guide for creating content that will stand out to your audience.

In the last post, we spoke about planning a strategy for your video series and the various elements to consider when putting together a show strategy. So today we are going to look at how to choose an appropriate topic for your video series. We will be talking about the following:

1. How to find a balance
2. Finding topics that are relevant in your market
3. How many topics per episode
   

How to find a balance

When it comes to choosing topics, we always have to keep a delicate balance between what we enjoy talking about and what the market actually needs. You may have heard this a lot before, especially if you're a startup. There’s always talk about you having to find the intersection of what you're good at, what the market needs, and what they're willing to pay you for so you definitely have to approach it with that mindset.

Finding topics that are in your market

When you think of topics, you want to think of things that are definitely in demand in your market right now. Today I am going to show some examples of how to come up with topics that are in demand in your market. So there are a few mental shortcuts that you can use and hopefully, they will give you some insights.

1. The qualitative mental shortcut 

The first one is a qualitative mental shortcut and the way to do this is by thinking of the FAQs that people usually ask you as a company or maybe on an industry level. By this we mean, what are the common or frequently asked questions that people are always asking your company? 

And note that these people have to be decision-makers or influencers so that you make sure that you can communicate the relevance of creating a project like that as well as spending time and money to pursue a show like that. You also have to make sure that the topics are relevant to your persona. If you want to know more about selecting your persona, then you should definitely check out the post on show strategy that we did before this.

To do this, you could make a list of all the different FAQs that you believe are pretty relevant in the industry. At the moment, the world is obviously going through Covid-19 so a lot of people are working remotely. This is a hot topic right now in terms of how Covid is going to affect people’s businesses or their lives so you could use that, run with it and see how you could actually embellish on that topic further and make it more relevant to your customers or your intended audience.

2. The quantitative mental shortcut

Another thing that you could do is to use some free tools that can help give you a more quantitative approach towards selecting topics. 

One of the great ones that we love is called answerthepublic.com. You can check it out by just typing “answerthepublic.com” into Google. To use the tool, simply type in one or two keywords and it would give you all the questions concerning those keywords. These are the questions that people are asking on Google which means that you can try to form topics around these since you know that there are people who are already looking for answers for these questions. The results aren’t always perfect but they are great in the sense that they give you a lot of ideas for what you could start to create content around and base your episode topics on.

So that is one tool to keep in mind. Another one to use if you want a paid tool that is even better  is ahrefs.com. This tool goes into a lot more detail as well as does SEMrush (another tool). Both of these are great for keyword research as well as other functionalities. We personally use ahrefs as it's a great tool that helps us to understand the search demand and search volume on different topics. This helps a lot in terms of just prioritizing the topics to talk about and the ones that should not be as prioritized as others.

How many topics per episode?

After you've figured out a way to select topics, you also want to start looking at the number of topics that you can fit into each episode. Are you looking to have one topic where you go all-in on an episode or you're looking to cover maybe three to five different topics and have those covered in one episode as well? Ultimately, the decision is always at the intersection of your qualitative and quantitative insight into the market. Things like FAQS as we said are important but you can also use any other common question or feedback that you get from your sales team or any internal intel that could help come up with some of the topics. Some topics could even be inspired by the challenges that customers and prospects are currently having. These are great places to get qualitative insight and once you’ve done that, you can always combine that with the quantitative side of things which as we have explained, is the use of a tool that could help you understand the search demand on different topics.

Conclusion

Based on all this, you could either cover topics that are both qualitative and quantitative or even have a medley of a bunch of topics that you just know intuitively are important to your audience as well as topics that are based on data and research.

As you know, this is an episodic series of blog posts so the next one is going to be about choosing guests for your video podcast series and selecting the right guests for your topics. Stay tuned!