The major image representing the episode should be unique. Every time people scroll through their feed or even through your own blog on your website, they will see the thumbnail images of every episode and their title and description.
The episode art graphic for your blog post represents your podcast. It is probably the most viewed graphic associated with each episode. That is why it is incredibly important. It is shared on social media, especially when the blog post’s web address or URL is shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any social media platform. That platform goes to look at the blog post and pulls this episode art graphic and uses it to display for the social media posts, so it is the most visible and most important visual element.
It is very important to ensure that every episode's art graphic is different and does not look the same from one episode to another. We've learned this over six years of experience of not only producing episodes but promoting them on social media and seeing the engagement they get.
The old-school way was you had an episode art that was a graphic template. It was all about you as the host and your brand. It was the same every time. Perhaps some texts on the title changed, or a guest's name was written, but it was very much the same graphically every time.
What happened over weeks and months of posting those on social media is that the people scrolling through those social media feeds don't read as quickly as their eyes make a judgment based on the shapes, the colors, and what they see visually. And so they scroll and say, “Oh, I've seen that,” and keep scrolling and stop paying attention to it.
We have found that it works much better to have a unique image that aligns with the major topic or subject being discussed in the episode. If you're interviewing somebody about creating a sales funnel on your podcast, there might be an image related to ClickFunnels, or something related to that sales process. If you're interviewing a patient about a certain type of chiropractic care, there may be an image of somebody's X-ray of a spine or anything related to a discussion about chiropractic care.
Where we’re going here is to have the major image be unique. Every time people scroll through their feed or even through your own blog on your website, they will see the thumbnail images of every episode and their title and description.
It's not the title and description or reading those first couple of sentences that stops them and gets them to click. It's what they see visually in that image as they're scrolling. It’s very important to have it unique every time.
For every episode, we would love it if every customer, including you, had unique images to provide that are related to the subject being discussed. We will use and incorporate them with your episode art template that has your colors, fonts, and show logo within it as an ingredient of that image.
We belong to every photo service on earth, including Shutterstock, where we get images from. They are technically a stock photo that somebody else could also buy and use on their website. But we make them uniquely yours by adding your show brand, colors, fonts, and the titles of the episodes with the guest names. That will make people stop and find out what it’s about, so they’ll check out the podcast. They're going to click to listen or watch the video, to read, and to find out more. That image is very important.
However, most clients don't take the time to provide this relevant image. That's why we use a stock image. We prefer if we didn't have to. Still, if clients don’t provide a more original or relevant image, we choose a stock image because that is still in your best interest to show the listener or viewer what's in it for them to listen to your episode.
We hope this has been helpful.