Uploading... - Ben Bradbury

Uploading... Ben Bradbury

Blaine 00:00:02 - 00:01:02

Welcome to uploading the podcast, where we take you behind the wheel with the world's best creators, marketers, and professionals who have cracked the code on how to profit through content. You'll learn the ins and outs of content strategy, creation, production, distribution, growth platforms, tools, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to join Castmagic, the all in one content workspace for professionals. We'll be sending out tips from our shows in our weekly newsletter, and we've also got a slack community of over a thousand creators, so make sure to drop in and say hello. And now get ready for the show. Welcome to this episode of Uploading and Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Ben Bradbury. Ben is the GM for audio and video production at Workweek, which is a new kind of media company focused on business content. They leverage a wide variety of relatable content formats with everything from podcasts to social media to memes to help build content that not only educates, but also inspires and entertains.

Blaine 00:01:02 - 00:01:44

Previously, Ben founded a company called Astutely that was acquired by Work Week in 2022 and astutely enabled B two B founders and execs to attract customers and retain top talent by turning their voice into a marketing channel. Ben also has a lot of experience in the space. He is the host of a podcast called Subject Matter, which is a show for aspiring creators wanting to build with audio. The show is over seven seasons so far, and he's been running it for over five years, so we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we do and learn a thing or two about building a rock solid content strategy along the way. And now our convo with Ben. So, Ben, why don't you kick us off? Why don't you start with the background? Tell us a little bit more about astutely and your personal background.

Ben Bradbury 00:01:44 - 00:02:27

For sure. I appreciate you guys having me on today. So story starts back in 2017. I got off the tube in London and put up a LinkedIn post, which was five apps you can use to be more productive. Post ended up blowing up. Little did I know I got into the content game at a good time where LinkedIn was favoring organic content and made a bit of my name for myself there and then started ghostwriting content, which led to hiring people, which led to becoming a freelancer, which led to starting a content marketing agency called astutely, where I'd pretend to be founders and ceos on the Internet, ghost writing for them, ghost writing a bunch of organic content. As you guys know, the kind of merging of organic and owned media has been converging over time. And for people who love sharing their voices online, the podcast is kind of the next natural extension of that.

Ben Bradbury 00:02:27 - 00:03:05

So in parallel, I started my own podcast, subject matter, which I've run for five years, seven seasons, 150 plus episodes, which is really how I've learned the medium. And then just over two years ago, was approached by Adam and Becker, who were at the hustle and are starting this new media company called Workweek. And they said, we're looking for a podcast advisor to help us out. Maybe you can help us there. So I started as an advisor, which led to them acquiring my content agency, astutely, and my team, and then we built out the podcast network of work week. So kind of two years later, eight shows under our belt, four, five with content market fit and a bunch of virtual events and YouTube videos in between, it's been quite the roller coaster.

Blaine 00:03:06 - 00:03:57

So we're really excited, especially to talk about a couple different things. Right. I think you've got tremendous experience working with content, producing your own shows, working with different founders. And the things that we really want to cover in this show are what it takes to make content successful and what it takes for someone who's creating content to be able to grow with it. So I think, why don't we start with if you were to launch a show, right, and you hadn't developed a show, you're going into a new show. Let's start with talking about what it actually takes to launch a new podcast, because I know it's something a lot of people do, but what's really important is going into thinking about what's my show about, how are we going to execute it, what are the concepts, how is it structured? So why don't we talk a little bit about what goes into creating a successful podcast before you even recorded the first episode?

Ben Bradbury 00:03:57 - 00:04:12

Sure. I think there's three parts to launching a successful show. Start with the audience. Number two, figure out the creator's unique strengths. And number three, package it in a positioning that's going to differentiate you in the marketing. So first of all, we start with the audience. Great media operations. Think audience first.

Ben Bradbury 00:04:12 - 00:04:41

So you need to understand their pain points. You need to understand where they live online. Is this a b, two b audience that's going to be on LinkedIn? Because you can bet you're going to be promoting your content using social clips, text graphics on that platform. Same if they live on Twitter X. If it's more consumer, perhaps you live on reels, on TikTok. But you need to meet the audience where they're at. You're never going to change their habits per se, so you get a sense of the audience. This will also potentially involve going on calls with them understanding their pain points, but getting a really good sense for who they are.