Episode Summary
Companies often use different channels to promote their podcasts. But have you seen a company take a successful approach with YouTube? In the newest episode of Recorded Content, Justin Brown connects with Matteo Duò, the Head of Content at Kinsta. Matteo leads us through his YouTube journey, all the challenges around podcasting on YouTube channels, and how consistency helped him and his content team enhance the podcasting experience in the long run.
Justin and Matteo believe that a combination of different aspects determines an episode’s quality, but consistency is the biggest thing that impacts podcast success and overall growth. In addition, Matteo shares some valuable tips for those starting YouTube podcasts, suggesting the video format as one of the best ways to take the podcasting experience to new heights.
Guest Profile
Name: Matteo Duò
What he does: Matteo is the Head of Content at Kinsta
Company: Kinsta
Noteworthy: Matteo didn’t have any YouTube experience when he started working on Kinsta’s YouTube channel. Now the channel has 6000 subscribers and their latest video has over 45000 views.
Key Insights
- Customer experience is a combination of 3 elements: Matteo believes that customer experience depends on various factors, especially content quality. As Head of Content, he makes sure the audience gets to enjoy a full experience. “Customer experience is a combination of three elements: the product, support, and content. As Head of Content, I’m on a daily quest to make sure we’re always delivering the right type of content to the right audience to make their life easier when using our product.”
- YouTube is the second biggest search engine: One of the reasons Matteo chose YouTube for his company’s podcasts is that audiences are increasingly using YouTube to find answers to their questions and discover content on a daily basis. “YouTube is truly the second biggest search engine and that’s why it became a focus point for us. There are millions of people who search for answers, tips, and information on YouTube every day; it’s an additional way for them on top of Google.”
- Consistency is the currency of growth: According to Matteo, consistency is the only way to foster success and growth in podcasting. “You can’t have growth—sustainable growth or ongoing growth—without being consistent, regardless of whether that consistency is publishing one video or episode per week or per month. You have to nail down your future path so that you understand whether you’re able to stick with it and have the resources to draw on.”
Episode Highlights
Video content: A new way to provide information to users
“We launched our Kinsta YouTube channel at the end of 2020. We saw a huge opportunity there but needed to incorporate the new video format into our content strategy. And that’s what we did. We launched our YouTube channel with almost no subscribers and in a little more than a year and a half, we grew it to more than 5600 subscribers.”
“I remember how thrilled I was knowing that all the work that we had put in the previous month had finally resulted in actual videos attracting new potential customers and helping our current customers find their answers. So the most challenging aspect was translating our approach and making it richer for our content strategy, which now has video, written, and audio content.”
Kinsta’s YouTube channel is a key component of our content strategy
“Our YouTube channel is a crucial component of our content strategy as a whole. Since one of our main goals as a company is to provide helpful content, the vast majority of video content we produce gravitates around providing helpful tips on how to fix this with this plugin, that platform, or that browser, and how to use our product. We have videos that go through listicles and tutorials about our product and its features, but we also have promotional videos. And this is something we started doing after we started noticing some traction on our YouTube channel.”
Managing YouTube channels entails a lot of responsibility
“It’s always a matter of improving it, trying to remove barriers, decreasing the amount of friction, and coming up with new ideas. Maybe someone gets sick or something is broken right before you were about to hit the hundredth published video. So you always need to be aware that things can happen and that your strategy should help you make the right decisions. Another thing is to research and provide topic ideas for videos. One thing that some people neglect is deciding which angle of video or podcast episode they need to feature—what’s the perspective from which you can create a video that might resonate with the audience you’re trying to attract.”
“But even before publishing your first video or your podcast episode, you should make a decision on how frequently you would like to publish. It’s just a matter of picking a schedule. You need to stick with your publishing schedule. It’s your way to assess whether your video production plans or your future plans fit within your world. If yes, that’s awesome—you’ve made a great call right from the beginning. If not, you’ll need to reevaluate all pieces here.”
Is my podcast episode successful?
“Success comes in different shapes and forms. And so does every business. What we look at when it comes to saying whether our episode was successful is a combination of things. There is quantitative data—the data that we have access to. For example, the number of downloads, number of views, the number of times that listeners have been on a podcast episode, how far viewers went to engage with our video content, and the number of visitors and readers on the podcast page of our website. On top of that, we also have some sort of qualitative data, which is the feedback that we hear. There’s been a sales chat with a prospect saying, ‘Hey, I’m checking with you because I heard you in one of your Reverse Engineered podcast episodes and I wanted to know more about this.'”
“They reach out to us even though they’re not our customers. This is another way that tells me that the content worked because sometimes it brought us people that didn’t even know we existed. So it’s a combination of different aspects.”
Tips for YouTube podcast newbies
“If you’re thinking about launching your own podcast, the first thing you think about is audio. And that’s not 100% true as more businesses and podcast producers are turning to the video format. If you’re obsessed with optimizing your output and would like to launch a podcast, having it in video as well is a great option. You’re investing your time, resources, and experience into producing a podcast. You set time aside for recording it and anything that’s required to have it finalized. So why not make it available on YouTube to make the best use of your time?”
“Although the resources involved in producing a podcast in both audio and video formats would likely be a little bit more than if you stick to audio-only, there are several ways to keep costs lower than expected without compromising on quality. Outsource time-consuming yet critical tasks related to the production of your plan to agencies or freelancers who have the experience to do that for clients. Create documentation to share either internally or with third-party providers on your preferred processes to even further streamline your podcast workflows. Think strategically about whether a task could be split into smaller tasks and delegate some of those to other colleagues or freelancers. At the end of the day, the more work you do before launching your podcast, the lower your chances of having to deal with issues while your podcast is running.”
