Welcome to trailer park, the podcast trailer Podcast. I'm Arianism lat half of the trailer park hosting duo. Tim Vegas is my co host with the co host and he is currently hard at work on his new podcast from the Maryland Coalition for inclusive education. You heard a trailer for that podcast a few weeks ago on the show. But Tim and I are also very hard at work getting ready for season two of trailer park. This that you're listening to right now this is a bonus episode. In a few weeks, this podcast feed will begin lighting up again regularly with trailers from all over the audio world. We have an amazing season plan for you. But more on that later. For now, for this bonus episode. Let's get ready to meet Jeff large, a podcast host and producer and the founder of come alive creative. He too is a trailer head. In this conversation. You'll hear us talk about Jeff's research on podcast trailers. He's been thinking about short audio teasers for a while now and has some interesting takeaways that I think listeners of this show will find particularly useful. Spoiler alert one of our takeaways is that it's sort of dumb not to have a trailer we'll get into that I promise you'll come away with practical advice for what to do if you don't currently have a trailer. When our conversation wraps, I'll be back to share some takeaways and to tell you what to expect on the next season of our show. Let's now get to my conversation with Jeff large all about podcast trailers. Podcast trailers, we love them. Jeff, you and I have been trying to have this conversation for a long time. We are friends on LinkedIn. And you messaged me, I want to say almost a year ago when I started posting about trailer park, the podcast trailer podcast because you had been doing some thinking about podcast trailers. So I am wondering why podcast trailers? What's the reasoning behind your research into podcast trailers? Why do you place emphasis on podcast trailers?
There's a lot of reasons I think the top of mine one for me is that we're in a time like there's the you get all the arguments around podcasting, if it's too saturated and all that stuff, I'm just going to assume that if you're listening, you think no, there's still room, there's still plenty of space to go and have a podcast. But the thing that I have noticed is the details matter. And sometimes you can define that in different ways, whether it's hyper focusing on quality, or content. So you can have kind of some of those normal arguments in this space. But trailers are sort of this untouched thing that it seems like again, these are some of this is just assumptions on my part, but it seems like we all kind of follow the same rules. And then so I just forced myself to pretend that I didn't know anything. And I started to ground level zero of like, alright, let's just throw everything I understand about trailers out the window. If I had to start fresh, what would that look like? And that's what sort of started my my journey there.
I love that. Let's back up a little bit. Talk a bit about who you are. Come Alive, creative. What is it? What do you do?
Come Alive, is I've been working in audio for a long time, got a background was a musician 2012 started my first podcast was actually for a different company had a board game publishing company with my wife and my cousin. And we wanted to figure out, okay, how can we learn and give back to people at the same time, I had all the equipment, so we decided to do a podcast. And it was during that timeframe of roughly two years, 80 episodes or so we were like, Oh, wow. Okay, this does have like legitimate marketing capabilities and legitimate business development capabilities. Fast forward a little bit come alive originally started as a web dev company. And very quickly, I got sick of making websites for people, it just wasn't very fun. And so I pitched the idea of a podcast that kind of like what everybody knows, is Brandon podcasts now to one of our clients. And initially, they were like, Nah, I don't think so. And then six months later, they came back and they're like, we can't shake this idea. We want to go for it. And that was the first time that I was like, Alright, this is viable. And I ended up in 2016 off, boarded all of our web dev, and then went completely in on full service production on the podcast side for just a bunch of different clients.
Interesting, interesting. So now what does the company look like? How many podcasts are you producing? What kinds of shows? Are they all branded?
Yeah, I would say we purposely run more on the boutique side of things. So we have a smaller client base. But some of our clients we're producing for shows for them. They're kind of building their own networks like that sort of a thing. We're working mostly with kind of mid to maybe enterprise level businesses or organizations. We're definitely industry agnostic. So we have footholds and things like commercial real estate, big generic business. So one of our clients that say be EOS worldwide, and they do kind of like a business framework. And then we also have some stuff saying like public sector where we're working with the former Secretary of Defense and some people in cybersecurity and kind of national security, what I've sort of discovered the linchpin is is it's just p People who care about degrees have really customer acquisition different points of the funnel, whether it's kind of the awareness end of it, or whether it's actually converting them over into sales or leads. But anywhere in that realm, sort of the person who's charged with that task is usually who we end up connecting with, that normally looks like a business owner or say, like a marketing lead, something like that.
Do all of your clients currently have podcast trailers available to listen to?
Most of them, I believe, do have trailers. And most of them, we're usually launching a new trailer, as we do a new season to sort of update where we've been and where we're going. And you're
here today to talk about trailers. So I imagine that you push for trailers within the production process for your clients.
Yeah, they just make sense on multiple fronts. It's sort of dumb to not have a trailer in my opinion, you
Yes, I'm gonna take that out. It's sort of dumb to not have a trailer.
Let me look right at the camera, it's sort of dumb to not have a trailer kind
of dumb. Why is it sort of dumb to not have a trailer? Oh, that
that is a loaded question. There's easy ways to help reduce the friction from somebody saying yes to your show. And in the same way that a movie, if you just look at like a copy for a movie, or the poster for a movie, you might you might go, I think I might like that. Maybe I don't, you're not 100% Sure. But I don't know if you're anything like me, like watching movie trailers, sometimes I'll just like look up those, the new, it's like 14 minutes worth of movie trailers of all the new ones that are coming out just to kind of browse and see what's going on. In the same way. That's a super easy way to just give somebody a light introduction of hey, this is what the show is about. This is who it's for, you might like it if like those types of answering, and then kind of underneath that, it just shows you care. There's there is a lot of association, from what I can see from my own research that some of the top shows do have trailers. And it's just a very low hanging fruit, easy way to tell your audience like, hey, put in this tiny bit of extra effort to hopefully save you a lot of effort on the long run. And to ease that lift or lower that lift of Yeah, I want to try this thing.
Sometimes I'll be chatting with people about their podcast marketing strategy. And they'll have seen blog posts here and there about why you need a podcast trailer. And their question is something along the lines of do we really need a podcast trailer that's usually towards the middle of a season? Or maybe if they're launching a new season? And they're thinking maybe this will help us in the long run, potentially reach new listeners or nurture our existing listeners? So do you ever get that sort of pushback? Do we really need a podcast trailer,
with most of our shows, we're starting them from the beginning. And so we don't have to double back. But even if you were going to double back, it's worth it. Because there's enough platforms now that you can designate your podcast trailer. And so even right now, if you are, say Partway into a season, or you've been going on for a while, even like I said, with, it doesn't have to be the very beginning of your podcast, it could be in between seasons, it could just be a check in if one doesn't exist at all right now, to put one at the front end, it's not gonna hurt you. If anything is just gonna help, like I said, get more people in and then especially when you have platforms like Spotify, or something that's going to designate it as hey, here's the trailer and put it front and center. It's just sort of confusing. It'd be like a why not like why it was sort of dumb not to. Exactly. I heard that before somebody said, it's sort of dumb to not have one and I stand by it.
So you wrote an article called, why you should ignore most advice about podcast trailers and the advice you actually need. Why should you ignore most advice about podcast trailers? And what is most advice about podcast trailers? Alright, so
I just reviewed this in preparation for our conversation. Here's the thing that I thought was funny, these are all the little things and I get nerdy sometimes with my research with the stuff that I find. But part of the reason I think we should sort of throw this out is a couple things. One, in actually researching this from a Google standpoint, looking for things like podcasts, trailers, those types of keywords, I sort of put on my marketer SEO hat for a little bit. One, everybody's saying the same thing. You're getting a ton of advice around 30 seconds or less, cover XYZ, like all of these things that just put you in this nice, neat little box. But what happens is that it just becomes commoditized sounds like everybody else. The other thing that was almost funnier to me is that on Google, you have that people also ask section that comes up pretty close to the top, kind of above the fold in the search. In the primary thing that everyone was asking was podcast trailer examples, podcast, trailers script, podcast, trailer script, template, podcast trailer idea, they want to be told exactly what to do like Nicolas Anyone wants to take the risk? Like, nope, tell me exactly what to do. And then just for the heck of it again, this is one of those minor things. But I ran it through some SEO software just to see what would come up. And where's the stat, there was about 10 times more people, this is just subtlety. but humor me, it was about 10 times more people searching for how to make a good podcast trailer versus even how to make a great podcast trailer. And I'm like, come on, like, this is just crazy. And so it's those things that again, forced me to go Alright, hang on, like, clearly the people are gaming the system. They're trying to give this generic advice. So they can pull top rank, like on this key word set, what actually needs to happen? And so that's where I started challenging things, at least in my own head.
Where did those challenges go? What should you actually pay attention to? What device do you actually need when you're making a podcast trailer?
Okay, okay, so take this with a grain of salt, because I'm just one voice of many. Here are some things that have least proven true for me, if I go through a couple, first one, especially at the beginning, so you haven't set up your show yet. Podcast trailer is dead, simple to set up your feed, where most of us know I'm gonna get technical for a second, if you have to set up a brand new podcast trailer feed, usually you need an episode, somewhere in there, you may not want to actually put episode one in as your primary thing, because people might find it out of context. There's a variety of reasons you might not want to do that. But if you have a trailer, or even a teaser trailer, or even like a filler trailer or something to just basically be the placeholder, if somebody does stumble upon it, it's not going to be a big deal, because it's a trailer anyways. But then it from a technical standpoint, allows you to really set up and organize the whole feed before an official launch versus saying like, Hey, we're launched and then one platform taking 24 hours to populate versus another platform taking like five days to populate. So you have that sort of techie factor working for you. Another thing would be the feature aspect, like I said, is that take advantage of the platforms that allow you to designate a trailer because again, if I'm browsing, if I've never heard of or seen your show before, I might want just a taster to figure out what it's about. That's an easy thing to do there. I would recommend, however you do it, I'm not gonna tell you how to do it. But however you do it, make sure it represents the show. Well, a different industry example that I just ran into the other day was I saw this YouTube video on some like everyday carry gear, they're talking about a bag that I was checking out, I nerd out about bags once in a while. And the thumbnail was to quote the kids, it was a real banger. Like it was a great, great thumbnail and it didn't taste me. As soon as I clicked the video, though, like the video quality was like five steps down. It was like a 4k thumbnail. And then it was this like 720 style video footage. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that was a way big disconnect of what I was expecting in terms of actual quality. So if you're creating a trailer, whatever you're giving me, whether it be audio quality content, etc. Have it actually represent the show, like, don't be super goofy and funny. If your show is super serious. Don't put a ton of production value into the trailer, if you're so sure sounds like crap. Like, try to least let me walk in see what I'm walking into. Exactly. And then one more, is just that last piece of bucking the advice that I was saying at first, like you're gonna get a lot of the same advice when it comes to trailers. Just experiment, like play around with stuff. I learned a lot from looking at different movie trailers and what they've done because they've been doing it a lot longer than us. And so that's where I pulled some of my information from just to get ideas. But there isn't a right answer. In my opinion, it's just do something that works for you, for your audience for your business, however, you're setting this thing up.
Yeah, so we agree on pretty much everything. If you have listened to any of the advice that I give on trailers, it's pretty much number one, it allows you to populate your feed before you're ready to populate your feed. Number two podcast listening apps designate a space for you to mark something as a trailer. And number three, and you didn't say this one explicitly, but it allows you to start marketing before your show is actually live. I don't know it might actually be dumb not to have a podcast trailer. So I imagine that in your research, you listened to a lot of trailers to get a sense of what you like, what you don't like what works, what matches totally from trailer to the rest of the show. So give us some examples. What is a trailer that really worked for you if you don't remember it? Exactly, just sort of describe how it made you feel.
I'll give examples of ones that personally worked for me and didn't work for me and this is just objective or kind of subjective opinion. Rather, nobody take personal offense. And I think time time matters. As to because again, a lot of the advice you get is like 30 seconds or less. But to me that's it's a wash, it's not a matter of length, it's a matter of engagement. And the two that come to mind as I was doing my research is one was deep dive with Ali, I don't know how to say his last name, so I'm not gonna say it out loud. And then another person who I don't know their last name, but the mindset mile. Both of these were listed, and one of the articles that I read as quote unquote, great podcast trailer examples. The problem for me personally, is they both clocked in at about two minutes. So first gasp, oh my gosh, they went over 30 seconds. But I found myself getting bored at the 52nd mark, they followed a very traditional, unexpected, predictable format. And by the time they got there, I found that I had most of the information that I wanted, I was able to make a decision, it's less than 50% of the way through, I'm basically out. Now compare that to something different. A series that I really enjoyed was wind of change. You listen to their podcast trailer, they're almost four minutes, they were three minutes and 39 seconds long. I was engaged the entire time, like at no point did I think about hitting pause or exiting out or anything like that. And again, I bring those two examples up, because we're talking about both of the shorter ones that were listed by an article as do this thing. I as a consumer bailed, I didn't want to listen anymore. But this other one that was just from a series that I enjoyed anyways, part of it was because I listened to that trailer. And I'm like, this is fantastic. And wanted to actually get into the episode itself.
Let's go a little bit more into the wind of change trailer, because that show, really highly acclaimed, investigative show about music. And I'm always curious, we talked about this a lot on trailer park. Where's the balance between giving enough away that you want people to check out the rest of the show, but not giving too much away? How do you strike that balance? And how do you also make sure in your trailer that, you know, not everyone's going to listen to your trailer. So you don't want to give away crucial information in the trailer that people won't get when they tune into Episode One. So just how do you strike that balance? You're talking
about two tensions. And we have to learn how to function between the tension because one school of thought will say frame this up exactly what I'm gonna get, don't leave anything to chance. Tell me who you're for what you're delivering all of those kinds of things. So somebody can just make a very educated decision. And the other school of thought is more along the lines of that story narrative, that type of thing. You're not going to give away the climax at the exposition of the story, you need to figure out where to live. To me going back to the movie scene, I really, really like say, Christopher Nolan, the director, when you watch one of his movie trailers, it usually makes me enticed that there's something about it with the way that it's built and composed that I'm like, holy crap, like this is pretty interesting. But it never gives away any like really critical points of the movie itself. Probably the one that stands out to me the most of his movies, it wasn't necessarily my favorite movie that he did, but the interstellar trailer, like all of the interstellar trailers, you watch them. And if you've seen the movie, even though it's old, I won't spoil it. There's like this really critical part of the movie that sort of tells everything. There is nothing about that in the beginning, like in any of the trailers, like doesn't even allude to it. But it's still every single trailer does an extremely good job of being accurate to what like, like you were saying, matching the tone of what you're about to get into as the movie. And so to me, it's like I would look at examples like that to figure out where it is. Maybe the the other point too, though, is really thinking about what kind of show you have, because say the shows that we're doing that are more traditional b2b Business ask type of shows, I'll be a little more forthright with the type of information that we're giving. On the other hand, some of our shows that are more narrative, I may tease that a little bit more. And then part of this is just flow of consciousness. The last thing too is that you may do more than one trailer, like we've played around with, like a teaser trailer. And so there's a show that I produced personally, it's kind of like my sanity move just to get me out of the traditional b2b interview space. I'm doing a field recording show and the very first trailer that I released was like literally a line I forget even what I said but it's just one line and that was it. And then we let that sit for a couple of weeks. Yeah, forgot that. Yep. And then like the next one the next trailer that I dropped I think we dropped like three trailers on that show just to be able to like you said, market it tease it see what happens tested in general. The next one actually kind of explained what the premise was. And then the last one they'll trailer three I think was like an actual example like a shorthand version because most of the episodes Roughly, what is it 40 minutes to an hour long worth of nature recordings. But the third trailer might have been like two minutes just to give you a little taste of what's happening. And so depending on factors like those is really completely up to you on what you're telling your listener.
Yeah, and listeners of trailer park will note that when we launched season one, we started with a pre trailer that was 34 seconds long. Then we had a trailer that was about a minute little over a minute. And then we had a what we call the teaser, which was three minutes long. All of those we marked as trailers in our hosting site, OSHA. And if you look on any podcasts listening app, they will all be marked as a trailer. So you can play around with format, you can play around with real estate within your podcast listening apps as well,
when you did it that way. Which one did you see the most engagement with?
Well, we dropped the first one, we dropped the pre trailer, two weeks before the actual trailer and did not push it at all. Because again, it was really just to populate the feed, we got the most engagement on the second trailer, which was the minute long trailer.
Okay. All right, then do you have an idea why?
My guess is it's because it was the most streamlined it let people know exactly what they were going to get out of the show. And then our teaser was a little bit more banter back and forth between my co host and I less necessary to the plot of what we were doing. It's fun. If you like us, you'll like it. But it's not necessarily something that you must listen to, in order to get the gist of what we're going for right now.
Very cool to know.
So I also hate shitty advice. I hate going on the internet and asking a question and then getting SEO generated blog posts from people who are really just trying to rank for keywords, you want to make sure that you are really just keeping in mind that there are no rules when it comes to making audio pretty much because there's no gatekeepers, when it comes to making audio, you can upload a 12 second episode of your show, that is really just still an episode. You can call it a trailer, you can call that a bonus, you can call that a regular season episode. You can do whatever you want. And that's all to say, if you see somebody speaking in definitive terms about what makes a perfect podcast trailer, I would throw out that piece of advice. How do you respond to that?
I agree. I'm not giving you much controversy here. But the whole idea,
the whole idea of like a silver need controversy.
I agree with you completely. But no, no, for real, there is no silver bullet. And and I like the fact that you point that out that there is no gatekeepers, even some of the old right, like when you look at Radio, and how radios transitioned over in that crossover between podcasts, there are some, there's some different shows and some different individuals that I listened to, they may have stronger opinions about how to do a thing. But again, it's just it's just a point of reference. That's it, you can do as you see fit, you can do as you like. And even as I go back to some of the research that I did regarding like the movie industry, that there's actual rule, there's a few rules around that, like you can't go above saying, two, I think it's two minutes and 30 seconds is what every trailer has to be kept out for. I never knew that before. But there's been some that are like 11 sockets that have dropped in. So it's all over the beds all over the place in terms of those things.
And also throw people off a little bit. Right, if if you're expecting a traditional trailer, if you can subvert people's expectations, that's a really great way to get people to pay attention to you.
Yeah, you see it happening all the time, like, oh, I pull a lot of my references outside of our industry, because it's like, I'm one of those guys, I've said this before, where if I had to choose between hanging out with a bunch of podcasters, or basically never going to the podcasters. Again, I would probably go hang out everywhere else, because there's just so many interesting things going on around us. And it's like, if I look over at the lumber industry, what what in the world are they doing that I can pull from that would be interesting. If I look at the movie industry, if I look at, like we're saying earlier, cybersecurity, what weird things are going on there. And then just use it to inform what you're doing.
I'm somebody who believes that you become a better student of podcasting, by listening to other shows you become a better student of writing when you become a reader when you become more and more of a reader. So I really I am a big fan of becoming influenced and listening enough so that you can draw distinctions between what you like and don't like, and over time that will help you gain your sense on what you should do and what you feel competent and doing.
Does that fall in line then we'll say the belief of like, learn the rules in order to learn how to break them. Like that kind of mindset.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, I think so. I think you can tell when people don't learn the rules, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it really works for people when they don't learn the rules and they just go go go. Other people seem arrogant. So I think that there is there's a balance there and some people get lucky, some people don't. Yeah, and obviously, this extends beyond just creating a trailer, you know, we only applies to creating a trailer. We're speaking specifically about trailers on the show on this episode. But everything applies to creativity in general, everything applies to playing with audio. So zoom out my friends, and go and go forth. Tell us where we can learn more about the research that you've done on trailers, and what you hope folks take away from that research.
So the main thing would just be on our company page, so just come alive creative.com. And if you head over to our blog section, it's the one with the big ol long title is about trailers. And I think the primary takeaway is a lot of what we've already said, I've just to be comfortable trying things. You don't have to follow these, quote unquote, unwritten rules. You got to listen, you got to figure out what works for you. And don't be afraid to test out new things because you never know where it might take you.
Mr. Beck, thank you to Jeff large for joining me to discuss podcast trailers on the show all about podcast trailers. If you want more from Jeff, we will link to all of his various projects and articles in the show notes of this episode. Here are my three main takeaways from our conversation. Number one, you can always add a trailer in after the fact just because you've launched a show a while back does not mean that you've missed the opportunity. Create one today, too. You don't have to limit yourself to one type of trailer, you can always publish more than one. It can differ in terms of length, and in terms of style. And in terms of whatever you want. Test out a few different things and ask your audience what they like. And three, be careful what advice you hear on the internet. This is not groundbreaking. I know. But it applies to podcast creation too. Just because somebody with perceived authority speaks in a tone that makes it seem like they know what they're talking about. Doesn't mean that they actually know what they're talking about. Even me right now. Oh, this is the paradox. Anyway, thank you for tuning into this bonus episode of trailer park. We're going to be back soon with regular season episodes of the show. Season two kicks off later this year. We're currently locking in sponsors and contacting the trailer creators whose audio pieces we've selected. We've got trailers that focus on adoption, the origins of the internet, video games and feelings, fatherhood, dreams and so much more. That's just a snippet of what's to come. This show is written and produced by me and Tim Vegas. It's recorded on squad cast and edited in the script. It's hosted on OSHA, a podcast hosting site that we love. That's a you SHA if you need a new hosting provider, we will link to them in the show notes and we hope you check them out. Happy listening and as always happy trails.