Launching a podcast – podcast marketing strategy

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on podcast marketing strategy. We walk through how to build a podcast marketing strategy, what goals to consider in your podcast marketing strategy and how to set up KPI maps for your podcast marketing strategy. Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• how to build a podcast marketing strategy
• what goals to consider in your podcast marketing strategy
• setting up KPI maps for your podcast marketing strategy

Upcoming Episodes:

• podcast marketing tactics – 6/22/2023
• podcast marketing measurement – 6/29/2023

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:24
Well, hi there happy Third Thursday in June. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show it is the third Thursday in June, Chris, I can see I can see you mentally trying to figure out if I was right or not. Welcome this week. So last week we covered pot like the overview of podcasting this week. We’re talking about podcast marketing strategy. And who better to talk about podcast marketing strategy than the world’s oldest podcasters. Chris Hinshaw. I apologize, I probably shouldn’t keep saying that. Chris, and John has had marketing over coffee for 15 years, which in is like 100 years in marketing, because podcasts tend to come and go. And you guys have figured out a formula for your podcast strategy where it’s stuck around for 15 years, and still has a really strong subscribership. So all of that being said, Where would you like to start with podcast marketing strategy?

Christopher Penn 1:29
So last week, we covered about why bother with podcasting, right and covered and talked about funnels the customer journey, we talked about your podcast concept overall, and what goals you should set. This week, we’re going to talk about three pieces of podcast marketing strategy, audience strategy, content, strategy, and channel strategy. So the pullet, the first place to start really is the content strategy. And this is starting with your brand, like what do you want your podcast brand to be? Now there’s a couple of different ways of tackling this one is to come up with something that is inherently unique, that clearly communicates what it’s, you know, the something that is distinct. And the other is what John calls cup of soup marketing, which is where you get the product is so obviously named that there’s, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind what it’s about, even if it’s not the most original name.

Katie Robbert 2:21
I’m always a fan of just calling something what it is, instead of I mean, and this is, you know, I’m an n of one. amongst us. I’m just I’m I like to call things exactly what it is versus coming up with like a clever, catchy name that you then have to go into, you know, lots of content to explain, so I would lean more towards the cup of soup marketing.

Christopher Penn 2:43
Well, so how did you come up with our podcast name? In-Ear Insights?

Katie Robbert 2:48
I didn’t come up with that you did? You I came up with inbox insights based on In-Ear Insights. Oh, okay. So In-Ear Insights, your, what you came up with, so we are Trust Insights. And so the idea was that you’re listening to a podcast theoretically through your headphones in your ear. So the insights are in ear, so in your insights, and therefore, our newsletter is then inbox insight. So you’re getting the same insights in your inbox. So it is a little bit marketing and clever, but still tells you exactly what it is.

Christopher Penn 3:25
Right? Well, like marketing over coffee, very much was literal. It’s two guys talking marketing in a coffee shop.

Katie Robbert 3:34
Well, and if you miss that, Shawn and Chris went over that origin story last week, you can catch last week’s episode at trust insights.ai/youtube, where John actually told I wasn’t aware of this. I’ve never heard the origin story of marketing over coffee, which I found to be really interesting.

John Wall 3:52
The amazing secret origin.

Christopher Penn 3:57
The other thing, and this is something that drives me up a wall with a lot of podcasts is naming your show in in a way that is audio friendly, and by audio friendly. One of the things we recommend is doing the Siri test or the Alexa test, depending on which smart assistant you prefer. If I tell my smartphone, hey, go to Marketing over coffee.com You know, 95 98% of the time was talking about slurring my words. It will successfully open up a browser and go there. If you have to spell out go to Five Guys dot two dash one that’s something they’ll some long, crazy tongue twisting RL no one’s gonna remember that no one’s got no one’s going to to mentally be able to hear that and then transmit it to someone else.

Katie Robbert 4:48
Where those things that you consider John when coming up with marketing over coffee. Yeah, I guess Alexa didn’t exist then.

John Wall 4:56
We didn’t have to worry about her causing trouble. Yeah, at that point. Again, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, so there wasn’t much tech in our way at that point. But the, you know, a big thing with and this goes even to copywriting and other marketing stuff is cognitive load. Tamsin Webster has some great stuff on this when talking about with presentations, it’s kind of like, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you’re always given like, say attention as a penny, you’re usually only given about five or 10 cents. And so if you’re going to have to burn, you know, three cents explaining how Super Spring podcast is actually about marketing, analytics, and whatever, you know, so those are two pennies that you’re not going to get back. And now you need to tell your story with the remaining change. And so anytime you can make something that’s just so blindingly obvious that any idiot can get it without having to do any work. It’s you know, you’re earning some trust, and you’re saving that powder for when you do have actually have something, you know, tough to explain, like, either the concepts you’re teaching or you know, why you should subscribe or, you know, go to the next step and sales and in marketing stuff. So yeah, but it’s, it’s a challenge. It’s like, that’s what separates the great copywriters from the hacks. You know, it’s like a great copywriter will be able to write something that we’re all just seems so obvious. And, you know, in some situations that hacks just aren’t as good. But in terrible situations, the hacks go out of their way to make it sound more complicated and create an aura of exclusivity around something that they just make it even more difficult to understand. It just burns your results.

Christopher Penn 6:27
The other thing, and this is what this was super important back in the early days of podcasting is that, in the early days marketing, your show, a good chunk of it was promos, which is essentially audio spots that you would do on other people’s shows. And again, if you had a complicated domain name, that, you know, was it was difficult to pronounce, or difficult to remember, when somebody heard you on, you know, Don, and drew or daily source code, whoever they would not remember. But you know, somebody’s saying in your promo, hey, go to Marketing over coffee.com. That’s easy to remember, no one has to struggle to remember that. Okay, so that’s your, your, your branding section. Again, podcasting still is an audio format in a lot of ways. So having something that is audio friendly for your brand is really important. Again, do the do the Siri test, do the Alexa test, when you’re coming up with show names, try pronouncing it, particularly with the domain name and see if the smartest system can get you to the website as with minimal difficulty. And if, if a machine can understand you, humans definitely not gonna understand because machines are not great at that.

Katie Robbert 7:34
So I have a question. Sorry, when it comes to branding, how important is the art for a podcast? So obviously, a lot of podcasts are now published on YouTube, which is a visual medium. And so, you know, if people are still strictly listening to podcasts, on audio players, Stitcher or Spotify, whatever, how important is it when you’re constructing your brand and thinking about it like to have, you know, opening credits and a sequence and a logo. And you know, all of that if it’s a podcast, and you don’t plan on including video, like, doesn’t matter.

Christopher Penn 8:13
There’s a huge subfield in marketing of audio branding, right of distinctive sounds like there are distinctive sounds. You know, this from music, if you can identify a song, sometimes by the first two notes, like you know, I know exactly the sound, you hear those first two notes, you know, that’s Welcome to The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, you’ve got it immediately. If you listen to marketing over coffee, that the first two notes of metallurgy by funk masters, that we’ve used that for 16 years now. And if you’re running, for example, if you’re out for a jog and you’ve just got your podcast player opening, the moment you hear those notes, you know exactly what show you’re about to listen to, there’s no question whatsoever.

Katie Robbert 8:56
For the record, I my best is identifying a song with the first inhale that a singer has before the Muse even starts. So atop that music nerds,

John Wall 9:09
you’ve got the breath, there is a whole bunch of stuff, too. And we really have not tested any of this stuff. But as far as your image for your podcast, like for a while there were it was urban legend that like you had to have pictures of the hosts on the logo, you wanted to do that. And this is actually coming up with iOS 17. I guess now, they’re going to allow custom images for each episode. You know, in the past on the podcast player, you just had your show logo, but now they’re going to be for each specific show, you’ll have a unique logo. So we’re already doing that for the blog. So we have some unique images. The question is, do you know where do you want to go? And that’s the kind of stuff that yeah, if I was an Entrepreneur on Fire, where we had a million listeners, you know, we’d be testing all kinds of crazy stuff, but with us down in the, you know, 14 15,000 listener range. It’s kind of is it really worth it to do that kind of AV testing.

Christopher Penn 9:58
I think and this This has the potential to go off track. So we’ll just mention very quickly, I think there are some very good generative tools that are being developed that can essentially do some of that work for us. But this the second part of Content Strategy is the form of content. So you so with any publication, but particularly a podcast, you’re going to want to generate two sets of contact, long form and short form. The long form obviously, is the show itself, which is the audio, there’s probably going to be video, long form video that like a YouTube video like exactly what we’re doing right now, there is probably going to be text as well, or there should be text, one of the things that most shows do most wrong, is they failed to provide either a transcript or show notes. And that is that is like 101 of podcasting. If you’re not including detailed show notes or transcript, you missed the boat.

Katie Robbert 10:51
How did you start? What did you start with for marketing over coffee? Because obviously, you know, at that time, 15 years ago, AI generated transcripts didn’t exist. I’m sure there were transcript services. Did you have your transcripts outsourced? Or do you? Did you include show notes? did it evolve? What was how did you set the strategy?

John Wall 11:13
Yeah, you know, it used to be that there were just services, you would buy three or four or five hours of transcripts, services. And so when the show dropped, it would go to somebody and we’d get a file back and text. So things have really, yeah, and if people want to dig into that, Katie, and I did the whole generative AI showdown and put otter and two other tools head to head to kind of see what works. And there’s a bunch of different ways to do it now. But yeah, it’s so much faster and easier now to get that done.

Christopher Penn 11:42
Yep, yeah, with In-Ear Insights, we use automated transcription. And we’ve started using automated summarization as well, so that you get a nice short summary up front. And then if you really want the transcript, or the search engine wants the transcript, it’s available. So those your long form components and then your short form components or text, image, audio and video, so are the images that you’ll be using for certain image based social networks, video short, video clips, and things that you know Instagram, Tik Tok. Snapchat is anything that contains stories, you always have short form text in the form of social media posts. And, of course, short audio snippets as well, little promo reels, zingers things like that. So the brand, the and the two forms of content really formed the pillars of the content strategy for the podcast. And those are all things you need to work out before you start recording.

Katie Robbert 12:37
So we have a quick question from Bob. Is there a podcast player that lets the listener save those golden moments in a podcast? So let’s take a step back. What’s the golden moment?

John Wall 12:53
Well, every podcast has a sizzle point, you know, there’s like one quote from the author. That’s way better and something you’d want to share this somebody else? Yeah, as far as I know, there’s no players that can clip like that, you know, in YouTube, you can, when you check the share, you can click and put a timecode on it. But yeah, and again, it’s the same deal. I don’t play it. You know, there’s literally dozens of these podcast players that all do different stuff. But yeah, I don’t have anything I know, Chris, is there anything that you’ve seen that can do that YouTube was

Christopher Penn 13:22
was gonna go with that. So YouTube allows you to clip as long as the show as long as the upload or permits clips. Which by the way, if you are running a podcast on YouTube, and you’re not letting people clip your episode, you should probably change that.

Katie Robbert 13:35
Got it? All right.

Christopher Penn 13:38
Okay, so that’s content strategy. Next is audience strategy, which is, Who are these people? We want to be talking to? And there’s, there’s three considerations for this. It’s what do you want to talk about? Right? There is what is it? What are people want to listen to? And then what is not being talked about? And so there’s a variety of different ways to get at this. In the beginning, like for marketing of a coffee was pretty straightforward. We wanted to talk about marketing. There were like two other marketing podcasts, the space was pretty empty. And people were definitely willing to listen to it. These days, it’s a bit harder to do that.

Katie Robbert 14:15
Why wouldn’t that be the first thing you do in a Head of Content Strategy?

Christopher Penn 14:22
I would say that you would put content strategy first so that you understand just how much work you’re about to get into. Because then at that point, you may decide I don’t even want to do this forget about noise. I don’t even want to do this much work.

Katie Robbert 14:34
Which makes sense. But wouldn’t you want to first see if the audience even exists?

Christopher Penn 14:42
Presumably and again, this goes back to the goals from last week, right? If the goal is for you to just entertain yourself making a show then doesn’t matter what the audience is, if the goal is lead generation for your company, then yes, you you need to figure out is there an audience in your in your in your company’s audience segment? That is receptive to podcast.

Katie Robbert 15:03
So obviously, when marketing over coffee started, there wasn’t a lot of competition. But if you were to start a marketing podcast today, you would be drowning in marketing podcasts. So how would one get started with figuring out? Where is my audience? What do they want to listen to? What do I want to say? Like, how does that? How do you get started with that?

Christopher Penn 15:27
My suggestion for that would be to start doing some market research. And there are a variety of excellent tools that can help you do some of the market research to even just understand the basics of Who are these people, because there’s so much competition, a lot of today’s tools can actually help understand that. So this is a tool, one that is a favorite of mine called Talkwalker. Which, by the way, they do have a free version as well, we have we use the enterprise version. So what have I put in marketing over coffee here? And I said, just said, Show me the word cloud of this thing. Like, okay, what are the what is marketing over coffee about as a show, right, you see special offers and listeners and stuff like that. But search engine marketing is in there, we see Michael Stelzner, we see analytics, we see Trust Insights, obviously, artificial intelligence, the advertising industry, so you can get a pretty immediate, quick glance at sort of what the show is about. And then if you pop on over to the demographics tab, you get a very, very skinny high level look at the audience. So the this panel looks at traditional gender data from social networks, this panel looks at biographical stuff. So like in your Twitter bio, or your Instagram bio, if you put in your pronouns, for example, you will, you will split this up. So you can see in both cases, marketing over coffee has a very, very strong bias towards towards people who identify as male, as the as the core audience. And age range, you see sort of that mid professional 25 to 34. Although you do see some other folks there. Again, this is what you would be able to see for any show. So if I were to put in, say, like the Joe Rogan podcast, or to get a chance to see the demographic of graphics of that show. So this is this is one of the tools I would start with.

Katie Robbert 17:20
So it sounds like you would first need to know who your competition is.

Christopher Penn 17:24
Yep. And a great way to do that is actually with our friends, the large language models, right? So let’s go ahead over to good old ChatGPT. Say, what are the top marketing podcasts to listen to? Now, again, this is going to be a snapshot in time, because the knowledge base your answer, September 2021. But you see a bunch of different shows here.

Katie Robbert 17:57
Coming up number one,

Christopher Penn 17:58
within ChatGPT. Now, again, use use multiple services, right, go to Google Bard say, That’s fabulous. Add exact question. We’ll see. But this is this is a relatively quick way to look at, you know, what they think so there’s Social Pros, there’s John Jancis, show and stuff like that as marketing companions. So there’s this bar gives you a different set of of competitors, but these will all be competitors that you would start with and then you start feeding them into a social analytics tool to say, Okay, who is who is their audience?

Katie Robbert 18:37
John, do you have reactions,

John Wall 18:39
barred, obviously still a moron from that list.

Christopher Penn 18:49
There are other tools tools, like, for example, in the tool called Brand 24, which is a Polish analytics company, you can do very similar things where let’s go ahead and go into topic analysis. So this is going to use for Trust Insights, because I didn’t set marketing or marketing or coffee up in time for the Today Show. We see here sort of ChatGPT is marketing impact Trust Insights birthday. So this is going to cluster together different topics and themes. The This tool also you can dig and look at who are the individual influencers for a given show. And you know, try and understand who those audiences and who those people are. Look at the different sources. So I would use social and digital analytics tools to kind of zero in on the competitors, the basic demographics, the behaviors in the interests, and what other shows talk about

Katie Robbert 19:46
are there so this isn’t the type of analysis that we do. So I don’t know that I’ve ever asked this question but are there third party tools where you can get Spotify stats or podcast download stats listener stat You know, Apple Music stats, you know, similar to like, the social listening tools where you can get some level of data around Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and so on and so forth. Is there something comparable that does that for YouTube and Spotify and all the major podcast publishers,

Christopher Penn 20:18
there are so for podcasts, there’s a there’s indexes and things I believe pod chaser is is one that a lot of PR agencies use to, to identify podcasts to pitch and then send wildly off topic pitches to them. I’m looking at you, Brazilian PR agency, I keep sending me crazy stuff like I do analytics, I don’t do fashion. It for YouTube to Buddy is a fantastic tool that is not only a good for optimization of your own YouTube channel, but also can give you some insights competitively there. Yeah, there’s for as we’ve talked about on on the Trust Insights podcast with the MAR tech 11,000. If it exists, there’s probably a tool for it.

John Wall 21:02
Yeah, charitable is one where we get a lot of stuff from notice that we are number 102. And Apple podcasts Ukraine business. So we’re on the edge of top 100 in the Ukraine. Nice.

Christopher Penn 21:15
Well, we’ll take it. So that’s your audience digging in? Who is who are the people that likely would listen to? And the nice thing about the topic analysis and these tools is it does help you answer the question of what isn’t being talked about. If you have subject matter expertise in a space, you can say like, Yep, this is, you know, this, this is a what, over the top shows, we’re all talking about ChatGPT This week, right? So what are they not talking about? Oh, hey, Google Analytics is going to shut off in 15 days. Maybe we should talk about that. Instead, if you wanted to carve out a niche for yourself. The third branch is channel strategy. And this is partly dependent on your audience strategy, partly depending on your content strategy. Like if you don’t know who your audience is, and you don’t know what content you’re capable of making, then going to channel strategy is a bad idea. So you want to get those two things down first, and channel strategy is? Where are we going to put stuff? So it took talking about things like your mailing list? Are you going to have one? Where’s it going to live? is going to be on a server hosted service? Like substack? Are you going to roll your own? What social media channels you’re gonna promote? On? Right? Which channels makes sense? For marketing over coffee? Should we be on Tiktok? Maybe, maybe not. Should we be on YouTube? Uh huh. Should we be on LinkedIn? Definitely. video channels, where are you going to post your videos? So obviously, YouTube, which is the largest podcast discovery engine, in the world, among other things, is important. For audio, where are you going? Where are you going to distribute your podcast, or the channels that are very important to your podcast or to your audience, specifically, really good platform. So we use a platform called Libsyn. And we use it both for marketing over coffee and for, for Trust Insights. And Libsyn gives you can see here, a gazillion different places that you could publish. And every now and again, they add something new. So you have to go in and decide, okay, where do I want to try and send my podcast? And then, and we’ll talk about this in two weeks, we talked about measurement, you’ll also want to figure out, we’re out of all these places we’re sending the show are people going to tune in? And then the last flip thing on the channel distribution is where’s your website going to live? And what are you gonna put on it?

Katie Robbert 23:38
Do you have to have a website, if you have a podcast?

Christopher Penn 23:44
You don’t have to have one, just like your car does not have to have a heater. in it. When you live in New England, it’s technically you can live without it. But it makes it much more difficult. If you plan on taking sponsorships, if you plan on doing any advertising. If you want to be able to to understand your audience in greater depth, you should definitely have a website running some kind of analytics tool so that you can get a good look at who your audience is.

John Wall 24:14
Yeah, that’s actually it’s a great question. Because there’s so many different ways that you can go that it’s actually pretty complicated. You think it would be a simple question, but it’s really not. Because, you know, one thing you can do so Lipson that we use as our service there for hosting the audio files, they actually when you sign up will build a website under their own domain. So you can have a website on their service, and they host your podcasts. So yeah, that, you know, one thing is the audio file needs to be stored digitally someplace. So that’s either going to be on a website that you run or that the service itself holds. And then all of the major providers allow you to you could host the audio with them but then point them to your own website. And then in that case, you control the domain and you can have an email address set up so people can email to that domain. In, but, and definitely if you’re just getting started and you’re trying to figure out if this is a viable topic, then just go to Lipson and have them run the website and just upload the audio files to them and don’t get involved with any of that. But if in the long run, you’re building a brand, and you could control the property, then eventually you’re gonna want to have your own domain.

Katie Robbert 25:18
When you both started marketing over coffee, did you put together this kind of podcast marketing strategy? Or did it evolve over time?

John Wall 25:29
Yeah, no, it was just like, let’s make this up. The one thing is, you know, all the tools were garbage then. So we had to have our own website, and we had to have our own email. And even you kind of miss the joy that we feel of like, when you see that Libsyn page, it’s like those 35 different services, and you just check the boxes. Oh, yes. And the Spotify send to iTunes. Like, we would have to spend hours going through the backend code of the website, you know, manually typing code to like, make it go to Spotify or make it go somewhere else. Like all that used to be a huge headache. And people were like, manually tweaking these files. And you know, as Techmount as markdown, like all that stuff goes away. Nobody cares that we had to suffer 10 years ago, they’re just like, Yeah, whatever. You guys are stupid. You should have waited until the tools were good.

Katie Robbert 26:14
Or you were ahead of the game and have a 15 year old podcast with a huge subscriber lifts

John Wall 26:20
good Yeah, first mover advantage does pay off the suffering does get you to a higher place. Exactly.

Christopher Penn 26:27
But to also dig into question a bit more if you’re using if you have a website, and you’re funneling traffic to it, you can get sort of another checkpoint for demographics that you can’t normally get from a podcast and services, podcasting services. And even the really the best ones really only still give you download based data, right? Here’s how many downloads, they don’t have any audience information. When you go into a Google Analytics, you can see very clearly who are the who are the different people like what here’s the interests category, right technic, technophiles, Shutterbugs, avid Investor’s Business Professionals, these are this syncs very well with a, who listens to the show and be the kind of content that we tend to put out. So they’re kind of synchronous in that respect. What’s interesting, though, is that there is a disparity, when you look at the gender, it’s it’s not as sharply here. So it’s 60%, male 40% female on the website. So it’s, it is slightly different. But you do see the same number for age group, you do see more in the older brackets that here than you do in other places. And of course, you can see globally, where your show has has reached. So again, this is part of you, we talked about last week about your goals. For your podcast, if you are using it as a form of income, then having this information is going to be super important for your media kit to be able to say like, Hey, here’s us who listens to our show. Here’s the demographics about them, the countries that they’re from the languages they speak. And even today, there’s still it’s very difficult to beat Google Analytics for the sort of thing

Katie Robbert 28:10
I would think to you know, so you know, for a site like marketing over coffee, the podcast, so if I were smart, and I wanted to sponsor a podcast, my first thought would be to go to Marketing over coffee, and see, okay, do they have a media kit that I can immediately just look at? So I can say, you know, what, they have a really great subscriber base. They’ve been doing this a long time, I would be stupid not to be, you know, sponsoring at least, you know, one month worth of marketing over coffee episodes, because it’s published, it’s still weekly. Is that correct?

John Wall 28:47
Yeah, yeah, we run it weekly. And we do have a rate card. I don’t have it up on the website. Because, you know, unfortunately, it’s completely wild west auction for the space, you know, there’s some quarters where we can charge over rack rate and there’s others were crazy Johns fire sale is you know, I keep a real tight leash on that. And it’s also really weird for shoppers to because our cost per 1000 Like, looks insane, right? I mean, we charged well over $100 per 1000. And people that are, you know, spreadsheet shopping for spreadsheets are looking to buy for 10 to $30 1000. But you know, the fact is, it’s like okay, so you buy Joe Rogan. Now I’m in trouble. I already mentioned a name because I was gonna say, okay, so you look at that audience and you pay $30 per 1000. But then you’re like, Okay, well, only half that audience can read. So you’re 60 1000 and then, you know, only 10% of them are employed, so you’re really paying 1000 And so it goes from there. So the end result with marketing over coffee is, you know, we said look, it’s all about leads and that’s where we go, you know, if you get you know, what are three? Well, what are 10 leads? Do you and if one or two of those close every month, how much is that worth to you? And there’s a lot of mahr tech firms that are like that. We don’t care about CPM, that means nothing to us, like we need to get two or three leads in every month. And that’s worth you know, that’s why we have companies that have stayed on for years because it’s just, you know, they see the return and they get the leads, as opposed to just kind of like the, okay, we’re gonna buy 65 podcasts and we don’t care. You know what language they speak. That’s, that’s a different thing.

Christopher Penn 30:25
Yeah, there’s definitely tonnage versus versus targeted quality. When you see this in the YouTube space a lot, a lot of folks shopping for YouTube channels that just looking at subscriber numbers got a million subscribers. We want to be on your show. We don’t care what it is. I’ve seen some hilariously bad sponsorships. On shows. I’ve saw one on a cooking channel. That was like industrial freight shipping. I’m like, Okay, I mean, that seems like an interesting by not the channel, I would have gone on for that sponsorship. But we see that for sure. within, within marketing over coffee to some of the pitches we get are just wildly off topic.

John Wall 31:02
Yeah, you think that people would be smart enough to not advertise things that make marketing jobs go away? You know, like that? That would be unless but they’re, you know, there’s these tools like, hey, you know, this automated system will write all your content for you fire all your copywriters and I’m like, Well, you know, a big chunk of our audience are copywriters, but I’ll take your money. So here we go.

Katie Robbert 31:24
I feel like you’re giving a lot of credit to the ad buyers. And that’s not to say they’re not thinking it through. But if their goal is awareness, then they’re just trying to get it out there. Because they’re being told awareness, awareness, awareness, versus if their goal is leads and conversions, then you’re going to look at more targeted, more focused podcasts to meet, you know, your needs. But like, if someone’s breathing down my neck saying, awareness, then yeah, I’m just going to look for whatever podcasts have the biggest number of subscribers, and, you know, worry about who those people are later, because that’s not my problem. I just got to get him in the door.

John Wall 32:08
Yeah, that you’re right on the market that because we totally see that we see some people that, you know, they throw us a 62nd spot, and that’s the last we hear of them until the next quarter. And then there’s other people that like, every week, I want to change the offer, and we’re gonna have targeted links every week. And at least for us as a marketing podcast, we’re actually like, Yeah, that’s cool. Let’s do that, you know, let’s test all this damn stuff. Whereas other podcasts are like, Dude, you need to go away like this is way too annoying to work with you.

Christopher Penn 32:33
Yep. One of the things that the other the other big mistakes we see podcasts make when it comes to content strategy is not having a mailing list, not having some way to reliably get back in touch with your audience. Now, yes, some platforms do have your email list stuff sort of built in. But it really is. It’s one of those things so foundational, because not only does it give you the ability to reach out to your audience when a new episode drops or something like that, if he wants to be that frequent, but it also gives you the ability to do analysis of your audience to say Who are these people, right, so this is a service called Clearbit. They they’ve been in the B2B space for a while and you up. This is particularly good for podcasts, you upload your mailing list by email addresses, you can hash it so that it’s protected. And then it tells you, your from your your mailing list, the technologies, the industries, the company sizes, employee things, what percentage list is personal email versus company email, but this is a fantastic tool again, especially if you’re in B2B. This is This is essential for being able to put together a good media kit to showcase your podcast. So that’s in terms of podcast marketing strategy. Those are the big three audience content and channels.

Katie Robbert 33:53
How many of those do you have nailed down yet? John?

John Wall 33:57
Oh, none of them got. It was fine. I was just laughing actually by newsletter like newsletter, that, Chris hit that that is like the number one I tell every podcaster like, you have to have a newsletter if you don’t have a newsletter. And so our newsletter is basically monthly, because I’ve scheduled to do it weekly. And you know, how it ends up working, which

Katie Robbert 34:17
is the chief statistician of Trust Insights, you know, we keep you pretty busy.

John Wall 34:21
Right? That is yeah, that’s the problem is that you know, there are other higher competing priorities that yeah, I basically like every morning look at like, Okay, what’s the dollar sign of stuff? Okay, that’s we worked down a descending value. And so yeah, newsletter is always number 37 on the list. Until it so yeah, I need to have a sliding scale for that, like with each week at ages, I need to double the number on the newsletter. So it climbed to the top at some point, but yeah, it’s the never ending battle. It’s just like any other startup. You know, it’s like how much because you want to be pouring time into the content, right, ultimately, right. If you have great organic content, then people will find the show Sooner or later, no amount of marketing will save you from a crappy show. So, but you know, at the same time to you’d like, you’ve got to get the name out there, if you want to grow otherwise, it’s you’re gonna do the drip growth strategy, which, God forbid, you’re still podcasting 15 years later.

Katie Robbert 35:20
So with that, you know, your podcast marketing strategy, you know, so you have those three pillars, and within each of those three pillars, I would recommend that you go through the five P process, because what you want to be able to do for each of those things is know what it is you’re measuring. And in two episodes next week is tactics. And then the week after that is going to be measurement. So you want to know what the heck you’re measuring. And so go through the five piece for each of those three strategy pillars, and then you’ll have a good understanding of, you know, why are we doing this? Who’s involved? What’s the process? What are the tools that we need? And how are we going to measure success?

Christopher Penn 36:02
Exactly. So, yeah, next week, we’re going to talk tactics. So a lot of the stuff we talked through this week, we’re going to talk about at a very granular level, promotional tactics in particular, so we’re going to cover everything from the advertising systems that are available to you to some of the real world things you can do because we’ve done some really interesting stuff over the years with marketing over coffee, and particularly for for in real world promotion, dinners and other interesting things. We’ll talk about accompanying publications, the use of giveaways SEO, when it comes to podcast syndication. So gotta next week is going to be an overstuffed week.

Katie Robbert 36:39
I’m looking forward to hearing specifically around because John, I know one of the tactics, and this is a teaser. I know one of the tactics you use is SMS messaging. And so I’m really interested to hear how that’s working out for how you’re using it and how successful it’s been for marketing over coffee. So, you know, that’s one of the things that I’m most looking forward to with next week’s episode.

John Wall 37:01
Tune in next week for adventures in those demos.

Christopher Penn 37:08
Yeah, that’s gonna be it’s gonna be a fun show. Next week, Katie will be off hunting unicorns. She is on a safari to hunt down the elusive Unicorns of Massachusetts. Yeah.

John Wall 37:22
A unicorn with the Boston baseball.

Katie Robbert 37:26
Well, that’s the only kind we make. Yeah.

John Wall 37:31
Dramatic good. Let’s go to get some cigs, lottery tickets and some dunks again.

Christopher Penn 37:38
All right, I think that’s enough for this week. Hope to see you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers See you next time.

Unknown Speaker 38:10
Anonymity

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.