Do You Really Need a Video Podcast? Let’s Look at Your Goals

Every marketing guru on the internet insists that you must switch to a video podcasting format if you want to grow your brand. They promise that adding cameras will instantly double your views, skyrocket your social media exposure, and bring in an entirely new audience. But here is the piece of advice they leave out: adding video effectively doubles your production time and can significantly inflate your operational costs.

If you are a purpose-driven entrepreneur trying to manage a business while recording content, forcing a video setup can lead straight to creative burnout and an unsustainable workflow. In this episode of Podcasting Unlocked, I touch on the reality behind video podcasts. I talk about my own hybrid journey transitioning the show in 2025 and help you weigh your content goals, your actual weekly capacity, and your conversion goals to decide if cameras are truly the smartest business decision for your show. This week, episode 285 of Podcasting Unlocked is about whether or not a video podcast is right for you! 

In this episode of Podcasting Unlocked, I’m sharing the importance of understanding the added layers of complexity in a video podcast and actionable steps you can take right now to decide if adding video to your podcast is right for you.

I also chat about the following: 

• The Reality of Production Time: Understand the hidden labor of a video workflow. Learn why adding a visual element impacts everything from editing, color grading, and framing to lighting and finding the right software, often adding hours to your creation cycle.
• Aligning Your Format with Business Goals: Discover how to identify your true motivation. If your goal is broad brand awareness, video can help; but if your focus is deep niche conversion, an intimate, audio-only format might serve your business better.
• Calculate Your True Creative Capacity: Learn how to run an honest assessment of your weekly or bi-weekly availability. Weigh the choice between investing your own limited hours versus absorbing the financial cost increase of outsourcing video production.
• The Strategy of Hybrid Podcasting: Explore how to combine both mediums smartly. Learn why you don't have to go "all or nothing" and how to utilize a hybrid approach to test video capabilities without instantly committing to heavy video editing setups.
• Focus on the Purpose of Content: Re-center your marketing strategy around what matters. Shift away from doing what "everyone else is doing" and focus entirely on creating consistent, high-value audio or video content that speaks directly to your ideal client.

Your podcast should support your business, not feel like an overwhelming second job. Before you buy an expensive camera or change your entire workflow, map out your actual weekly availability and define your conversion targets. Consistency will always outperform a trendy format that you can't maintain. 

Be sure to tune in to all the episodes to receive tons of practical tips on turning your podcast listeners into leads and to hear even more about the points outlined above. 

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me! And don’t forget to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!

Learn more about Podcasting Unlocked at https://galatimedia.com/podcasting-unlocked/ 

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Ep 135: Setting Business Podcast Goals

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Transcript

Alesia Galati: 0:00

Every marketing expert is going to insist that you are putting your podcast as some video format on the apps, that adding video is going to help double your views, get way more exposure, and all of the things, but the reality is that video doubles your production time, and it can significantly increase the cost. Today, we're going to be talking about the reality behind video podcasting to help you make a decision on if adding cameras to your setup is the smartest business decision for you. Welcome to Podcasting Unlocked, the show for purpose-driven podcasters. I'm Alesia Galati, founder of Galati Media, and I'm here to share actionable strategies to help you amplify your message and grow your audience. Hey friends, it's Alesia. I am interested to see how this topic goes, because this is something that I've been ruminating on for years. Back in 2025 I want to say we transitioned this podcast to be from an audio only podcast to a video podcast, and I had to really do like a full thought tree question, what do I want to do, why does a video make sense, and why in the world am I going to be spending more time, effort, money, etc. to put a video on YouTube. Fast forward to 2026 and I'm happy that I did. I think that it allowed me to have more marketing capabilities, and then I ended up deciding that I didn't want to use those marketing capabilities at a later date, so give or take here. It also allowed me to get more comfortable being on camera, knowing that I had to present myself a certain way for my podcast episodes, that I had to show up a certain way for my guests, that my guests had to show up a certain way. There was a lot more elements that I had to consider as I was doing video, and right now we're seeing a big push for people to have video podcasts. We see Spotify has had the capabilities of having video podcasts, but you had to upload those natively to the back end of Spotify, the creator side of Spotify, once your podcast episode was live, you could upload the video to YouTube. YouTube made a big push for podcasts in the last year, and then now we are seeing Apple Podcasts doing the same, and so I'm getting a few people coming to me saying, Does it make sense to shift? Does it make sense to turn my audio podcast into a video podcast, and I'm also having these conversations with my clients, as well as we do audio and video production, so this is something that we offer, and I want to be able to give them the best options and the thing that makes the most sense for their podcast. Now I'm going to say right out the gate that not every single one of my clients needs a video podcast, which I know sounds wait, but you could make more money doing a video podcast, sure, but if it's not actually serving my client's goals, then it's just selfishness on my part, and that's not at all how I want to do business. So, with all of these new changes, I think it's really important to just critically think back to what are your podcast goals. We've talked about the podcast goals here before, and so I'm just going to reiterate those, or you can go back and listen to that episode on goals. The first is conversion, where you want to turn your listeners into potential clients for your business. The next is impact, that you want to increase your brand awareness and education for your audience. The next is growth, you want to grow your audience exponentially. And then the fourth is engagement, you want your audience to engage with your content in some type of way. Now, I would say the podcast goals that fit the most for video, and again, this has a lot to do with what is your capacity. Do you have the financial capabilities to add another editing tool to your repertoire? Are you using something like Riverside that is already pushing a lot of editing tools? Are you simply recording your solo episodes on Zoom? Are you recording guest interviews on Zoom? If that's the case, then the video elements of those are going to be very different, and the quality of those are going to be very different. And then you're going to need an additional editing tool for that. Or are you someone who simply wants to do video only, and so you're using maybe Zoom to record interviews with your guests, or you're just using Audacity to record your solo episodes, which is a free software and a free tool, so you have to consider that your own capabilities, your own capacity for time and effort that it takes to edit, or even the financial aspect of what you want to give up, so all of that considered, right, you. To consider all of those before even considering your goals, so think about that. What is your capacity? What do you have the capabilities to do? What do you have time to do, and effort to do, or money to do? And then getting into the goals, if your goal is conversion, where you are trying to turn your listeners into potential clients, then I do not think that video is the best aspect for you. That's it. There's so many like but-ifs here. If you are wanting to maximize your podcast for social media clips, and for getting your name out there, and for growing and converting people in that way, where you're going to be spending a lot of time on social media, engaging with your audience, and doing all of that stuff. Then, video is something that these apps are pushing a lot more. So, if you want to get seen to then turn your listeners into potential leads, you have to consider what the whole ecosystem of your marketing strategy is. If you're simply sending people to your podcast, go have a listen, and then work with me. Cool. Then you don't need video, but if you are wanting to take your podcast, repurpose it in a bunch of different ways, use it as video clips, use it as clips where you're engaging things that are going to them, pull your social media followers and dump them to your podcast. Then having some type of video element, maybe you don't have to produce the full video, or maybe you use something like Riverside, where you are recording the video, but you're not necessarily using it, and you can still grab those clips, so there's a lot of different options for you, kind of like a hybrid version of that. If your goal is impact, meaning you are trying to increase brand awareness video is probably going to be for you, if you want more of brand visibility. If you want people to understand what your brand looks like, if you are watching the video of this episode, you will see behind me I have romance books, I have a giraffe, an owl, lots of Lego, all of the flowers in my background are Lego. You'll also see a floral puzzle to my right. All of these things are things that make me me. They are part of my brand, they're part of who I am, and they reflect my interests. So, if I wanted to increase that brand visibility increase me as a speaker, as a thought leader, as someone who has something important to say, then video is going to be an important part for me. Now, if your goal is growth, where you want to increase your audience, your podcast audience specifically, this is a give or take, when it comes to video, we have to think about the consumption habits of video viewers. Someone listening to a podcast can very easily listen to an entire 45 minute episode while driving, cooking, exercising, etc. Video demands more dedicated screen time, which often means that they're going to watch less of your episodes, so either you decide you're going to shorten your episodes so they have time to watch them, or you're simply going to have it there for extra visibility. Now, with that aspect, video SEO is going to be very important, and maybe I just need to do a full workshop on this, because podcast SEO and video SEO are two completely different things, and you need to be titling them very differently. Your graphic cover needs to be different for both. There's a lot of different elements that go to this. Yep, we do a workshop on this, so be on the lookout for that. Let's go ahead and say, in July, I will do a workshop on the aspects of video that you need to consider, and video SEO, and video copy, and all of those different elements. So, let's go ahead and do that, and I'll get that on the books, and I'll have a link in the show notes, or you can simply go to Help My pod.com and I have all my workshops listed there, so you can check that out right there. So, if your goal is growth, then video might make sense for you, but again, you have to consider, do you want to put in the time and the effort that it takes in order to increase your SEO on the video platforms, do you want to put in the time and effort that it takes for the production of the video, or even shortening your podcast episode time of how long you're recording? So these are all things that you really have to consider as you're going about making this decision for yourself and for your podcast last is engagement. If your goal is engagement, where you want more engagement and interactions from your podcast listeners, then I think it depends on what engagement you're looking for. If you're looking for social media comments, if you're looking for video comments, or shares, or. Likes or any of those things, I wouldn't even really consider those podcast engagement. Those are more social engagements, but if you're looking for podcast engagements, I like to think of call to actions like send me a DM. Buzzsprout has the ability where you can actually have a text number where people can text you something. I've actually been fiddling with the idea of using this for my hobby podcast to get an idea of what my listeners are reading, the types of books that they're enjoying, and also getting some interactions from them, so that's something that would be a good call to action, but that doesn't mean that I need video for that podcast. Now I do use video because it helps with exposure and people do search for these authors on Google and I want the YouTube videos to show up faster than my podcast episodes, so there's some strategy behind that, but when it comes to podcast listener engagement or podcast viewer engagement, I don't know that having an actual podcast that is video is going to make or break that, depending on what your call to action is. So it's really getting clear on what that call to action is. Again, you can go back to our podcast goals episode. I also have a podcast goals workshop. I'll run another one later this year. I'm going to be doing a lot more workshops once this podcast sunsets, yes, this podcast is going to sunset at 300 episodes, and I'm excited because I think it's going to give me more time and more space to be able to engage with you guys on a more personal level, which I'm very, very excited about. You can always go back and listen to past episodes, there's tons and tons for you to choose from, so with all of those goals focused on and figuring out what might be the best bet for you, you can also consider if a hybrid strategy makes sense, like I said, where maybe you have an audio only podcast, but you are using clips of the video for social media promotion, and you're using something like Riverside, and we'll have a link for Riverside in the show notes as well, that is an affiliate link, and Riverside also gives you show notes, it gives you titling ideas, all of that stuff, so there's a lot of different things, you can also record your own from your phone, maybe a 62nd summary explaining your podcast episode, or explaining what happened, or what you were most excited about, to kind of give people an idea to then go check it out. Maybe you play a short clip of it underneath your face there, so it looks like, hey, this is video. There's a bunch of different ideas of ways that you could make this kind of a hybrid approach or a hybrid version, and I think that it really just depends on what your capacity is. Again, going back to that very first thought and piece of this entire puzzle, is when you're deciding if you should shift to video, consider, do I have the capacity, do I feel like I have to have a full face of makeup in order to show up. Do I have the space behind me to be visually appealing for video? Is video even something I want to do? Right, these are decisions that you, and only you, get to make, or can make on this. Do I have the capacity to add another thing to my podcast workflow. Do I have the financial capacity to hire it out if I don't have space to do it? And, of course, my team is here to support. If you are someone who is struggling with your workflow and you want to talk through that, I highly recommend booking a strategy session. We can talk through what makes sense for you, get an idea on the best way for you to move forward with your podcast without needing my team's help, or if you are someone who wants to offload these things, please reach out. You can again go to help my pod.com or go to Galati media.com If you want to work with the team, you can get lots of resources and access to a lot of freebies and things, including the workshops that I mentioned, which will be coming in the next few months. So, here's what I want you to do first. I want you to think about your weekly capacity, maybe bi weekly, if your show is every other week, and understand the specific purpose of your content, and then choose a format that helps you maintain that consistency. Calculate what it might be. What are those extra hours that you might have to put in? What kind of financial burden might you have to add on to your plate, and is that possible for you or not? And then from there, if you're still feeling frustrated, or you're not sure, definitely book a strategy session. I would love to talk through all of this with you and get you some clarity on what might be the next best thing for you. All right, until next time, happy podcasting.

Unknown: 14:58

Bye. I think I was.