Vic Elizabeth Turnbull gives a tip about reaching a wide audience

So I run my podcast production training agency, MIC media, and I get up to loads here from the day to day running of the business, like all the boring financey admin stuff, then the exciting stuff like planning, producing, recording and editing podcasts and also steering the awesome team here at MIC to create fabulous podcasts for our clients. So we specialise in working with who I like to call the good eggs.

So the people that are doing good in the world, like charities, social enterprises, folk in education or value led businesses. And because I'm not busy enough at MIC Media, I also help to run a podcasting community for podcasters from across the world. It's called MIC's Podcast Club and the premise is really simple. We help each other to make brilliant podcasts.

So we meet every month online, and It's a support group, come open Q and A, come networking session for podcasters from across the world. And we've got almost 2000 members. We started in 2018 and in fact, that's where the name of my company came from. So how did I get into podcasting? Well, I've been obsessed with audio since I was a little girl, from making my own radio shows on a Fisher Price cassette player with a plastic microphone, to recording the charts on a Sunday night as a teenager.

I went to college and uni and did really hands on media production courses. Then when I left, my career took a bit of a squiggly path into working with national charities. During that time I did a whole host of fabulous stuff including event organisation, lots of marketing, fundraising, TV production. I also founded and hosted my own live radio show for four and a half years too in Manchester.

So I was made redundant in 2017 and I had a year of 'what the bloody hell am I going to do with my life?' I launched my first podcast in 2018 and in 2019 I had a daft little idea to marry my love of working in the third sector with businesses and organisations. My huge passion of creating a level playing field for people who want to get their voice heard or learn skills they thought that were out of reach for them.

My absolute love of amplifying underheard voices and stories and my huge, huge, huge passion of making nice things for people's ears. And so that's how MIC Media was born. It's set up as a social enterprise, making it one of the only podcast agencies working this way and with the types of clients that we do. Since 2019, we've made over 50 audio projects and trained over 2,000 people with podcasting skills.

We've worked with the likes of Oxfam, the National Football Museum, Plan UK, and The Co op. We've also been recognised by the British Podcast Awards and the Audio Production Awards too. What I bloody love about podcasting, and especially with the people we work with at MIC, is its power to positively change people's lives.

You would not believe the impact podcasting has on people that have picked up a microphone for the first time, learned the ropes of audio editing, or for those that have shared their story. One person we worked with said, "podcasting has given me a new lease of life. It feels like something I can do. It's been amazing. As soon as I started to learn how to podcast with MIC, it was a light bulb moment for me, and I'm very thankful for it all.

It's not just around the confidence of learning a skill, but people are telling me... even my own children, how much I have grown in confidence as a person. I'm now showing other women in my group, how to get involved in the different roles that make up our podcast." How amazing is that? Another story is we worked with an amazing group of women, an organisation in Oldham, teaching their participants, their community, how to start a podcast.

Um, and there was one lady there who said that it's the cleverest she's ever felt since she was at school. So it's a joyful, joyful experience and one that not many people consider when it comes to podcasting is that positive impact it can have on people's lives. And that's what we're all about with MIC Media.

A lot of the podcast industry is centered around celebrities, sponsors, big names, big deals, listener numbers, and for us it's all about that genuine difference we can make to people's lives. Now this particular lady in question she used to join us for every training session every week. She bought some massive big headphones and she sat there and she lapped it up and she shared her story with us and we eventually made a podcast episode about her passion for gardening.

So my big podcasting tip for you is about reaching a wide audience. Don't even try. Look, you can't please everyone. Just imagine trying to do this. There's so many things to consider. Like, what pushes someone's buttons over another person? How does each person prefer to receive their information. What motivates each person? How do they like to be talked to? Bloody hell, it'd be exhausting, wouldn't it? Then try thinking about trying to please the people who will never be pleased.

That's going to get tiresome pretty fast. Your podcast is exactly the same. The wider your audience, the more that you're diluting your content to fit everyone's needs and wants. So focus on a specific audience, the one that's going to love your content, take some value from your content, eat it up and share it. To be frank, most people do not care about your podcast. Focus on the ones that do. Where can you have most impact with your content? Think narrow. Not wide. So thanks.

I've been Vic Elizabeth Turnbull. I'm the founder of MIC Media, a podcast production and training agency. To find out more about what we do at MIC Media, head over to micmedia.co.uk or search MIC Media on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I'm also on LinkedIn too, Vic Elizabeth Turnbull (there's a photo of me with a microphone in my face), and you can see all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to Podcasting People.