One of the most common questions I hear from my clients is about AI. Specifically, what are my thoughts on using AI to help repurpose podcast content? And it’s easy to see why - the marketing space has been dominated by conversations on AI.
Those conversations come in all sorts of flavours, from the “AI is rubbish and it’ll never replace humans” to the “Why bother with humans if we have AI?”.
I’m by no means an expert in AI, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about, planning out and executing strategies to repurpose podcast content in a meaningful way. And I use AI.
Over time, I've refined a sort of ‘AI Code of Conduct’ to make the best of AI all while getting real results for my clients.
It’ll probably change in the future as technology moves on but here’s where I stand right now:
One of the best ways to use AI to repurpose your podcast content is to make it your go-to summary tool. Claude AI’s ability to synthesise and summarise a large amount of information is almost unparalleled. It can pick out salient points with almost none of AI’s usual problems of ‘hallucinating’ (more on that in a minute).
How this helps to repurpose your podcast content:
It’ll help you to hone in on repurposing important information from your podcast episode rather than the entire episode, which is a key difference between good and bad content repurposing.
How to do it:
Use a transcription tool (like Otter AI) to get a complete transcript of your episode. Then, feed that transcript into your AI tool of choice and request a summary of it. You’ll get a better result if you use a prompt like “You’re an expert content marketer; read the following transcript and summarise it into key points that would be interesting for an audience of (insert information about your ideal audience here) to read”. Then use these points as the basis for your repurposed content.
This is where my views on AI become a little more nuanced. It can write very well… but it can also run into issues like ignoring your brief or not knowing your target audience as well as you do. It can also make up statements that sound convincing but are totally untrue - which is known as hallucinating. So I would treat AI-generated text with caution and use it as a basis for your repurposed podcast content rather than copy-pasting exactly what it says.
How this helps to repurpose your podcast content:
Given a good prompt, AI can generate you a lot of relevant content about your podcast very quickly.
How to do it:
Simply ask your AI tool to turn your list of podcast bullet points into an email, blog post, series of Tweets (or are they X's now?) or whichever other kind of content works for you and your platform. Bear in mind that the more tailored your prompt is, the better your AI output should be so include as much information about your audience and your expectations as possible.
At this point, I would go through the content with a tooth comb, checking in particular that the basic facts are accurate and also that the AI tool uses vocabulary in the way that you do, that it’s linking in other relevant content from your archives wherever possible and that it’s stuck to your usual tone of voice.
AI is a good way to get a second opinion on your content marketing, both in terms of strategy and quality. It can be the sounding board that you bounce ideas off or the always-available editor that polishes up your work into a gem.
How this helps to repurpose your podcast content:
AI can point out blindspots in your content and content marketing strategy and act as a filter to catch redundancies in your work.
How to do it:
Use an extension tool like Hemingway or Grammarly as you’re writing to make sure that your work is well written and easy to read. Once you’ve finished writing, paste your work into Claude AI and ask what it would change to make the piece more interesting/funny/thought-provoking etc. Or, ask it to examine and optimise specific elements such as the title or subject line.
Throughout the process of repurposing podcast content, I also apply one Golden Rule to strike a balance between my thoughts and AI’s output and it’s this: I keep asking myself “Where’s my value-add?”
The whole point of repurposing content is to grow your podcast’s presence but that’ll only work if the content is repurposed in a way that genuinely delivers value. And if AI’s taking the reins, the chances are that the repurposed content is just a regurgitated form of the podcast episode with nothing added that can’t be found in the original episode. This is the opposite of a targeted, relevant message that’s reaching your ideal audience where they are.
So at every stage, make sure to include something extra in your content repurposing, even if it’s just a small tweak. That could be an insight about you as the host and how you feel about that podcast episode, a reference to an inside joke, a link to something else that you know your audience would be interested in, or an anecdote about you or your podcast. This helps to keep your content fresh and interesting for people who know your podcast and people who don’t.
And this is something that AI can’t do for you - yet.