Engaging Listeners with Creative Audio Strategies: A Conversation with Traci DeForge - Part 1

“I really believe in developing the power of an audio brand as the Nike swoosh, as the Amazon arrow smile. Your audio brand should be as recognizable to your personal brand, to your business brand, however you’re leveraging your audio platform. It should be as good a quality, and people should invest in, and not have it be an afterthought. If you think about what people invest in personal branding and visual branding aesthetics, website branding and then, oh, ‘I want to start a podcast.’ And they never even consider that that’s an extension of all of that other investment that you’ve made.” – Traci DeForge

This episode’s guest is the founder of Produce Your Podcast, an award-winning full-service production and marketing agency, and is recognized as an international podcast expert, sought-after speaker, and media contributor. She’s the creator of the Podcast Management Academy, the industry’s only certified podcast manager training program, and co-founder of the Podcast Professionals Association. She’s also the co-host of the Ask Brien radio show on KHTS AM & FM in Los Angeles and has been featured on all three major networks along with CNN, CTV, American Express OPEN, and Radio INK, and is a member of the Rolling Stone Culture Council. Her name is Traci DeForge, and if you’re looking to take your podcast to the next level, you’ll want to hear what she has to say about it.

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(0:00:01) – The Love of Audio

We start things off with a look back at Traci’s childhood memories of sound, from calling Dial-a-Prayer to hear stories over the phone to listening to to the radio under the covers at night. “I used to sleep with an AM transmitter radio under my pillow listening to ghost stories,” she recalls, “and when my friends would come over for slumber parties. I would create these elaborate radio shows.” She tells us about how developing her first podcast in 2015 helped inspire her to create Produce Your Podcast. “There are going to be some other busy consultants and business owners,” she explains, “who are going to want to have podcasts, but they’re not going to want to do everything it takes to have it be a broadcast that represents the quality of their brand. And so that’s when Produce Your Podcast was born.”

(0:11:01) - The Power of Audio Branding

Our conversation turns to the differences between audio and video productions, and why just ripping the audio from a video production might not cut it in podcasting.“If you don’t really understand the true power of audio and audio branding,” Traci notes, “then you could get lost in thinking that ‘I’m just going to do a video podcast or video recording,’ or even a video webinar to a degree, ‘and I’m just going to grab the audio off of that.’” We discuss how the audio production works to bring the imagery to life for listeners, and how a podcast lacking that connection can leave its listeners cold. “That can be the point where an audience could fracture from you,” she adds, “because they don’t feel connected to the conversation. So they may stay through that conversation but they may not come back.”