When looking to grow and scale your podcast, one of the most important things you can do is implement a workflow. Why? A well designed workflow makes the execution of a project more seamless for you and everyone involved.
And once you have created a detailed workflow, it’s time to look for areas of opportunity where you can automate it.
Automating your podcast workflow offers countless benefits. It helps reduce the number of tasks you would otherwise do manually, freeing up time for you and the team to tackle more urgent line items. Automated operations also ensure efficiency, consistency, productivity and overall, less mistakes.
Keep reading to discover the benefits of automating your workflow along with our burning tips and tools for implementation!
1. Create efficiency and streamline your processes
There are multiple reasons to consider using a workflow in your podcasting process, and one of the main ones is that it creates efficiency. Workflows can help streamline and automate your podcast production, minimizing room for error and increasing overall efficiency.
By understanding exactly what each step entails and the purpose behind it, you can identify unnecessary steps in your podcasting process that can be removed to make it more efficient.
Laying out your podcast production process in parts from scripting to promotion and analysis can help you to find the most efficient order of these steps, and what can be taken over by a software or tool.
Ideas for automation: Use AI tools like ChatGPT for any copy-related work. This AI software can help to automate tasks like coming up with questions for interviews, episode titles, episode descriptions, social media posts, and more. The opportunities with this software are truly endless and the creators who take advantage of these kinds of tools will be able to save time and resources.
2. Save time (time is money!)
Once you have insight into your workflow, determine what activities are critical.
Identifying and eliminating superfluous tasks has several benefits. Instead of wasting time on a low impact task, focus on what’s truly important. This is where the power of automation truly comes into play.
As processes become more efficient, you’ll create more time for yourself and new opportunities. Each minute saved is a minute to work on growing your podcast and reaching your goals.
Ideas for automation: Use Notion to keep your team on the same page. Notion is great to organize your content since the application provides components such as notes, calendars and reminders to make your life easier. You can even integrate Notion with other tools in your podcast process such as Slack, Asana, or Dropbox.
3. Increase productivity
Overall, saving time leads to increased productivity. If you spend less time doing repetitive work, you can use that time elsewhere.
With a seamless process in place, it allows you to get more done, resulting in an increased production output.
A laid out workflow also allows you to see the critical processes at every point, identifying bottlenecks and issues as they occur so that you can tweak and improve the workflow with each cycle, monitoring end-to-end performance throughout.
Ideas for automation: Use Process Street to create lifesaving checklists that help increase productivity. Those of us who are detail-oriented like to write all of our tasks down and check them off as we go. But wouldn’t it be easier if everyone on your team could see each other’s checklist and how they’re coming along? That’s essentially what Process Street does and is one of several checklist platforms that can be used to help your team not only check on each other’s progress but make important decisions along the way.
4. Avoid mistakes and pitfalls
One of the most crucial aspects of a successful workflow is that it answers important questions like what actually needs to be done, what is the goal of each specific step, how long should it take to perform each task, who else is involved in the process, and what will happen after each step is finished?
Your podcast workflow follows a sequential order, ensuring that all steps have been completed correctly, especially in those areas that are typically prone to human error. It also helps to ensure that checkpoints are met before moving forward to the next step.
A workflow provides a transparency of your process, allowing you to identify and course correct ahead of time, preventing mistakes from occurring in the first place.
Ideas for automation: CoHost’s Automatic Transcriptions tool takes away the risk of human error when it comes to transcribing and also saves someone on your team a large amount of time. Within your CoHost account, your episode will be added to your transcription library and from there simply hit transcribe to receive an AI-powered transcript. Publish your transcript directly on your CoHost website or download it to publish elsewhere!
5. Stay consistent and dependable
As you incorporate automation into your workflow, it also helps to generate a more consistent end product. Consistency allows your fanbase to keep growing as your audience knows they can expect a quality show that is released on schedule and as promised.
When the production process runs smoothly, it can guarantee that you’ll have episodes produced on time for publication and any mistakes will be caught early on. The more efficient your workflow becomes, the more consistent your podcast episodes will be, accurately and faithfully serving your audience with the content they want and have come to love.
Ideas for automation: Use CoHost’s podcast hosting software to easily upload and schedule future episodes so you don’t have to think twice. Scheduling your episodes in advance will ensure that you’re staying consistent when releasing content and always ahead of schedule. With just one click get your podcast on all major listening apps including Apple, Spotify, Google, and Amazon.
6. Bring in help (you don’t have to do it all!)
One of the biggest reasons why building an efficient workflow is important is that it gives you greater insight into your podcasting process. As each step is broken down within your workflow, you can start to identify tasks that would be best assigned to other team members with appropriate skills or hand off to a software to handle.
Delegating repetitive tasks speeds up your process and creates a domino effect that allows each step to flow into the next. When every person in the workflow is assigned to their specific task, they become specialized in doing just that job, making the process even more efficient overall. But remember as you grow, outsourcing parts of your production can really help!
Ideas for automation: Automate your audio post-production process and bring in some outside support. We all know that the last thing you want to do after recording an episode is take days to edit it.
So why not let a software take a first stab at the editing process for you? This is where tools like Auphonic come in. It’s an automatic audio post-production web service – it develops intelligent audio algorithms using a combination of AI and signal processing to make your life smoother. In essence, Auphonic helps you create clear, consistent and understandable audio (by leaning on it for help!) without compromising quality.
The benefits of automating your podcasting workflow
This article only scratches the surface on how a brand can benefit from automating their podcast workflow. If you begin by implementing some of the tools and recommendations throughout this article, we guarantee that you’ll start saving your team time and money.
If you want to learn more about how CoHost can automate your podcast workflow, get in touch with our team, who are happy to answer questions!!