How a “Simple” Podcast Can Bring a Scattered Community Together

Outline:

-        The ESCP Business School podcast experience

-        Creating a podcast for their community

-        Challenges faced during this journey

-        Summary

The ESCP Business School podcast experience

With a world that seems increasingly scattered, there’s a choice to make. Do we let our community fade by keeping things the way they are or bring it together once again and strengthen our shared identity?

Two passionate managers at the ESCP Business School, Lara, and Emily are setting an example with their podcast journey and are using this communication tool to make their community thrive. Here’s their story.

Creating a podcast for their community

As avid consumers of podcasts, Lara and Emily thought of embracing this form of communication to find a novel way for people to interact with the ESCP brand. 

The community would not only have more accessibility to the content of business leaders across different fields, but they would also give a voice to the ESCP circle by adjusting the content to their audience’s preference and nurturing the podcast with their in-house expertise as well.

Choosing the podcast format doesn’t come as a surprise:

-        There are over 2 million podcasts today across the world.

-        The global consumption of podcasts has been increasing exponentially with over 383 million listeners consuming them at least once a month in 2021. This number is expected to rise to 424 million this year.

-        There are more regular podcast listeners in the U.S. than subscribers to Netflix.

-        At least 1 in every 5 western Europeans listens to podcasts once per month or more.

-        Among the highest consumption of podcasts in the world, we have two European countries (Ireland and Sweden) with over 40% of listeners consuming at least 1 podcast in the last 12 months.

As a Paneuropean institution, ESCP has branches in 6 major European cities which makes it more challenging to maintain a cohesive identity without leaving anyone behind. The podcast allows them to connect with all these different hubs by balancing which guests come to their show and giving each hub their chance to be heard. With their two ongoing podcasts, “Her Voice” and “We All Make Mistakes”, they’ve had a very good reception throughout their community.

However, this success didn’t come so easily.

Challenges faced during this journey

Lara and Emily soon realized the amount of work behind establishing a high-quality podcast. This vast effort frequently discourages podcasters in the long run and they quickly give up. In fact, only 36% (or 720 thousand) of all podcasts have 10 or more episodes.

Some of the challenges they have faced can be summarized as follows:

-       Scheduling interviews: since most of their guests are business leaders they’re usually very busy and it can take a long time before they can set up a date for the interview.

-       Being consistent: it’s not always possible to publish one episode per week (which might also be related to the first issue).

-       Delivering high-quality content: it takes a whole team to keep all the stages of the process top-notch (finding guests, question coherence between interviewees, high-quality recordings, editing, delivery, etc.). All this raises costs significantly, especially when delivering all the audio equipment to their guests when they can’t record at their studio.

Now that we think about it, many of these issues can be solved with our asynchronous tool. Lara and Emily already gave us positive feedback on their podcast experience with us so it might be worth considering it for their future podcast seasons. We’re here to help!

Summary

ESCP Business School found through their in-house podcast a way to raise awareness about their brand and bring their community together. Their journey is still ongoing but the results so far have exceeded their expectations.

As Emily tells us, “in life as in business everything starts with choices and that it is our choices that define us”. In their case, a choice that is already bearing fruits and making their community thrive.

Don’t forget to check out our podcast interview with Lara and Emily!

In this brief 13-minute episode you’ll find helpful insights into the journey of starting a podcast from scratch. They mention struggles anyone might encounter while starting their podcast but also useful tips on how to sort them out. It’s a wealth of wisdom from our guests.

Useful links

• The Choice podcasts
• Lara Vogel LinkedIn
• Emily Olyarchuk LinkedIn
• Rumble Studio - Create your free account!