So What? Launching a podcast – podcast marketing tactics

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on podcast marketing tactics. We walk through how to turn your strategy into podcast marketing tactics, how to choose which tactics to use in your podcast marketing strategy and when to outsource your podcast marketing tactics. Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• how to turn your strategy into podcast marketing tactics
• how to choose which tactics to use in your podcast marketing strategy
• when to outsource your podcast marketing tactics

Upcoming Episodes:

• 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:

Christopher Penn 0:02
Welcome to another week of SWOT the marketing analytics and insights live show. Katie is off hunting unicorns this week. And as a result, like, John, you were just saying before we forgot to hit the Go Live button.

John Wall 0:16
I was just saying, like, how we screw everything up when she’s not around, and it’s a total disaster. And then you like, oh, wait a minute, I gotta hit the button.

Christopher Penn 0:24
I gotta hit the button. So this week is part three of our series on how to market your podcast and or how to launch your podcast. So the first week we covered should you be doing a podcast second week, we’re talking about what your podcast strategy is, this week, we’re gonna get into the blood and guts of the tactics of marketing your podcast. Now, some things we’re not going to talk about, we’re not going to talk about how to actually make your show that’s your job, if we’re really talking about how to market the show once you’ve already made it. So before we tackle that, John, some basic suggestions, what should you have in terms of content available? So that you have something to market?

John Wall 1:06
Yeah, right. You know, first thing is don’t do a podcast, you shouldn’t be doing a podcast, we don’t want to see you in this neighborhood. Get off my lawn, right. But it’s funny, actually, I’ll give a plug right out of the gate for the analytics for marketers community, where we talk over, it’s free, over on Slack, you posted a killer thing of an interview with Mr. Beast and one of the big guys over on YouTube, talking about, like, what makes great content. And there were some fantastic points in that. I like to, you know, tell a compelling story, it has to be compelling. And this idea of just keep putting the shows out and improving dump money back into it, to keep trying to make it better, and just know that yeah, the early ones are going to be bad, but keep moving forward. And you know, keep just trying to do a better show. But yeah, there was a bunch of great feedback in there. That’s right on the mark for what we’re doing today. And yeah, it’s you know, tell a unique story, I think that’s the biggest thing is, you know, maybe you are see a niche that you work in, where there’s other shows, and you can see what they’re doing and working. But you need to have something that’s unique to you, you know, you you cannot go head to head against Conan O’Brien, especially if you haven’t had your own talk show. So you know, figure out what you can do that only you can do and get find your own voice. And that will at least get you an audience. It may be a tiny audience, but you can be something interesting to them, because only you can do whatever you’re giving them.

Christopher Penn 2:25
You could have been somebody Charlie could have been a content. Alright, so let’s talk about the first, the collateral and pieces, you’re going to need to have to market your show, and then talk about the specific marketing tactics. And so the first thing that you would want to have and obviously, you need to have some shows under your belt to create this content is add content. So this is going to be things like bumpers, your video, lower thirds, your pre roll for in show emarketing to market your show. So to remind people, Hey, recommend this show. So for example, if we were recommending this show here, we’d be saying make sure that you are subscribed to our YouTube channel, right, so I hit the the like button, the follow us subscribe to us hit the bell button, and so on so forth. Interstitial advertising. So if you’re going to be doing any kind of advertising with interstitial ads, you want to have those designs for your website, because your podcast should have a website, you want a couple things you want easy subscription plugins of some kind that remind people to to subscribe to, not only your show, but also ideally your email lists. And you want stuff, some kind of system that allows you to programmatically change the advertising in every blog post. Because in the beginning, you’re probably not going to have sponsors in those slots. But you want to have spaces set aside for for advertising. And you’ll fill it up with House ads. So like minded people subscribe to the show, you will want to create promos, audio and video run advertising. So have you might want to consider advertising systems of some kind. You want to have ad content making its way into the text of your posts. So because what tends to happen is people scrape your blog. And if they’re going to scrape the blog, the price of admission is you get all the ads to and then have on hand a tool like Adobe Express or Canva it will dramatically help you accelerate the amount of ad content you can create because it will help you resize and reformat your content.

John Wall 4:29
Oh man Yeah, isn’t it that’s that’s kind of the new wave of stuff, these tools that you can take your one ad because there’s nothing worse than when you put something together and then you put it over on some social channel and it cuts off the title or you know, looks horrible. So yeah, having a workflow where you can get that stuff in the right format, right size, right? number of words in the copy all that kind of stuff makes your life much easier.

Christopher Penn 4:53
Exactly. Other things you will want to have on site or available to you may want to text line So Pandora voicemail line, if you want people to be submitting audio contribution for that, having a way to track comments so that you can comment on other people’s stuff, as well as having people come on to your stuff. So social media management software, some kind of online community, again, John mentioned at the top of the show, the analytics freemarker, Slack group. But there’s also a gazillion that have different Discord servers that are great for that sort of thing. For the media side of things, you want to have things that have handles, so generally speaking, stuff like publications, ebooks, giveaways, downloadable content, audio, some kind of Download Center, something that people can share. So it’s content that people can can share on your behalf. So, for example, one of the things we just published not too long ago was a ChatGPT prompt sheet that uses a single page PDF, it’s branded, it’s got links on and stuff, but there’s no registration required for it. And that kind of content is kind of thing that you want to create for your podcast, not not about your show, but some useful, you know, maybe a chart or something from one of your episodes, so that people can download. What have we done up for marketing of accomplishment? Downloadable content?

John Wall 6:16
Yeah, you know, we haven’t done anything in year. Really, this has been, we’ve got newsletter has links to resources and other things. But yeah, actually, we should do that. The other thing was, we just did the straight up book, you know, did the marketing over coffee playbook, like two years ago, and so yeah, people need to cough up and buy stuff and offer this free stuff. It’s not a charity. But yeah, in fact, I should probably just steal the prompt thing that you’ve gotten, just put marketing over coffee logo on it on top of that somewhere and send that out. Because there’s no point in you know, doing a lot of extra work. And it’s a, it’s a different audience. And that’s just a great point to make with that is when you have multiple properties like that you can use the same stuff in different channels, have it cross promote, because like, when you’re talking about spots for ads to it, if you don’t have sponsors, pair up with other shows, and you know, do spots for each other, you know, use those spots, but get the listeners trained to that being in there. But yeah, yeah, we need to put the book on the list, we need to get some of the resources out there, because we’ve been lacking on that front. One of

Christopher Penn 7:18
the things to do that is super easy to do on that front is if you’ve got if you’ve done like an interview, say, you know, I know with marketing over coffee, one of the guaranteed top performers is a Seth Godin interview, I guess it’s like handing out candy at the playground. When we do one of those, just the downloads are off the charts, what the simplest thing to do would be to feed that interview to a couple of different AI services to have it distill. The key points down to a one pager. And then that’s that’s the handout. You know, maybe that’s the month handout, just again, just to help people share the show.

John Wall 7:53
Yeah, easy pass along. Like that’s the thing because PDFs like that do tend to work just ask Scott and his ad 5000 marketing vendor PDF that he fires around every year, it just has legs of its own.

Christopher Penn 8:06
Exactly. Other stuff. One of the big things to pay attention to, for your own site, obviously, SEO, off site knots. And so on sites, the easy stuff, you should have a blog, you should have your shows should be on your blog, your show notes should be on your blog, you should do all the basic best practices have a good SEO plugin for your blog, Yoast or rankmath. on WordPress, or excellent plugins, you should have an internal linking system. So we use SEO Smart Links, we’ve given us a list of keywords. And then you get a list of links that those keywords match to their other episodes of your show other blog posts. And anytime you use those keywords in future shows automatically links back to a show. So it helps people you know, move traffic around. And then of course, Google Site kit is is one of those easy ones you shouldn’t be using site kid, it’s stupid easy. For off site. This is all PR pitching link finding earning links. Again, having those downloads having that you know those pieces of content that have handles that people can pick up and run with, you definitely want that. With PR. You need to work either with a trusted contractor or a trusted agency that knows what it’s doing. John, you want to talk about the Hall of shame for PR pitches that we get

John Wall 9:23
the most horrible PR pitches. Well, yeah, the winner this week was the Hey, John, I love the work you’re doing on the duct tape Marketing podcast. I was like, well, you’re never going to do any work with us. So just nice to know. Yeah. Yeah, it’s really you know, there’s all different levels of that, right? You have some big houses that just spam the whole world. And then at the other end, you’ve got people that are making well thought out pitches as far as like, hey, my client hears in marketing and tech and we know that you guys talk specifically to this. And the big one with that is you’ve got to have the big story pitch right up front. It’s like whatever you think the title of that should be that’s your pitch, you know, it’s like, Hey, I see you guys haven’t done a show on, you know, SEO for mobile devices, you know, or something like that something that grabs, you know, our eye right away. Because yeah, there’s just so many horrible pitches, and God forbid I get pitched, you know, like this morning was when I would really love to be on your show, you know, I am a CMO. And here’s what I do. And I just like, I couldn’t care less what you think about what shows you should be? And that means nothing to me. So, yeah, it is. It’s an ongoing battle to find quality people to pitch you and to get the right, you know, combination of, have they got the right network? Are they able to put together the pitch for you? Can they follow up and make it happen? And, you know, I have to say, like, we are a nightmare for PR companies, like I’m always going back three months later to people saying, hey, is this guy still your client? Because I do want them on? You know, we’ve gotten around to this. And half the time, they’re like, yeah, no, they’re not here, I’ll pass it on, or whatever, you know, stuff falls through the floor. And the other one, too, that’s insane. I really cannot believe are the huge giant firms that are spamming the whole list? And you’ll say, Yes, I do want to talk to them, and then you never hear from them again, or worship, they mail you the book, and they still don’t follow up. So, you know, whatever, if they want to keep sending any free books, I’m all for that. But yeah, as the client, that’s probably not doing you too much. Good.

Christopher Penn 11:17
Exactly. So if you are pitching your show, what advice do you give someone who is going to be pitching their show to others?

John Wall 11:25
Yeah, if you’re pitching, you know, if you’re pitching to advertisers, I mean, it’s just a matter of talking about your unique audience. You know, what you’ve got that other people don’t have so much for pitching. I just mean, like marketing your show itself. Like, audiences? You mean just the regular? Yeah, it’s, you know, finding the right community getting the right story. I mean, for us, it’s always, you know, we educate and entertain at the intersection of marketing and technology, right, like, that’s specifically what we do. And it’s always around 22 minutes that always fits in, it’s not this, you know, two hour long screens that some of these people do these talking heads. And that’s really the pitch I used. The other great thing is it’s all about the clips, you know, if you can get 15/22 clips on a topic that people love and push those around. That’s a great gateway to get people on board. You know, hopefully, with every show you do, you should be tagging a sizzle, quote, you know, whatever that hot driveway moment is where somebody says something amazing, you know, that’s the kind of stuff that you can then share on all other channels. So that’s a great way to get something. John McGinley says tight byline. Yes. John is well aware of the sales lifestyle and the unload pitch quickly. So good to see Canada represented on board today. Yeah, it’s kind of you know, always be promoting, right. It’s part of the mix, you have to keep getting it in front of audiences. And yeah, even paying to do it, too. You know, paid campaigns are a part of the mix, too, just to get access to new audiences and get in front of new people. Yeah, that’s the basic line.

Christopher Penn 12:59
I remember the early days, and it’s probably something that should make a comeback. There were pitch clips and stuff. So you instead of being a full fledged guests on a show, you would make a one minute clip for somebody else’s show like you would you would negotiate maybe with that, that show person and you’d say, Hey, this is the you know, I remember I remember doing this way back when this is the one minute financial aid podcast tip for the listeners of the daily source code. Here’s how to save money on X, Y, or Z. And you would just hand off this one minute produced. It’s not a commercial, but it’s a marketing spot. Of course, you end it with ads, for more great tips follow, you know, go to Marketing over coffee.com. But those, those one minute mini pitches, they disappeared like they’re there. They vanished along with promos. And in terms of things that work well, for other podcasts. You really can’t. You can’t be handing somebody else up the clip and saying here, I did all the work for you.

John Wall 13:53
Yes. Right. They don’t have to do a read. They don’t have to figure out what the copy is. They just play it and be done. Yeah, that’s, yeah, it’s I don’t know, the space has been really weird, because we have seen Finally, there used to be a lot of networks and people kind of banding together. And now you see it over like with Spotify putting teams together. And there is there’s the Hubspot podcast Network, and there’s a Marketing podcast Network. So we see those guys doing cross promotion and working but yeah, I don’t know, the jury’s still out, like is that stuff worth doing? And what happens? You know, the big question is, are you aligned with the right people or are you just cannibalizing the audience? You know, that’s the real question. And I like I said the verdicts not in on it yet.

Christopher Penn 14:33
Exactly. And then of course, you have syndication and this is where you can put your show everywhere. So if you have if your show is big enough and it warrants it and your know your audience wants it, put it together as an Alexa skill, but it is a Google Home action in your podcast service like Libsyn set up feeds to push it to every network that is available, submitted to podcast directories there are plenty of those. Make sure that you have RSS to email setup on your To cite so that people can subscribe to the show. And every time you put up a new episode, they get an email, put the social sharing buttons on your site, make sure an RSS feed itself is available. I mean that we would think it’d be kind of obvious, but it’s not always. And the other thing is, And, John, I want your take on this. A Yes. have guests on your show, but then you also should be a guest on other people’s show. Do you want to dig into that a bit?

John Wall 15:26
Yeah, that’s, you know, always part we, I mean, we pretty much take all comers when it comes to pitches, if your show is even somewhat legit, you know, we’re more than happy to jump on and talk. Yeah, because the big thing is, you know, you’re getting in front of other podcast listeners, even if it’s only 40 or 50 people in some weird, small niche, if they’re the kind of people that download podcasts, you’re not gonna get any better qualified leads, as far as getting them in your own pipeline and getting them on your own show. And, yeah, I hate to say it, but you know, there’s a lot of corporate podcasts that only survive, like 10 to 40 episodes. And so getting in front of those people, you know, they’re promoting it to their house lists. So you’re getting, you know, a decent audience in front of them. And, yeah, odds are 12 months from now, they’ll be listening to you. And there’ll be no new episodes for the corporate podcast. But you know, that’s the way it works. Yeah. And the syndication thing there, too, I have to just give a plug for Libsyn that we’ve used for decades now. And they just have all those things set up, like you just literally go in and click on the ones you want to activate. And, of course, you activate all of them. There’s no reason not to. But yeah, back back to pull the old men from the Muppets, you know, it used to be all kinds of legwork to get all that stuff to work. And now it’s just go to Lipson and click the boxes, and you’re good to go. So take advantage of that with your hosting.

Christopher Penn 16:43
Exactly. So that’s the content that you would need. Let’s now dig into the some of the tactics. So advertising, where should you advertise your podcast? Obviously, on other shows, if you can, if you can buy Spotify, for example, offers self serve. I mean, there’s no easier more obvious audio audience to target than Spotify. Right? A it’s got podcasts on there already. Be the self service advertising system has relatively little minimums, I believe it’s like $500, is there a minimum so it’s not like they’re asking you for 50 grand to do a major campaign, if you can scrape together 500 bucks to market your show, it’s a great place to do that. There’s DSP based advertising systems. So these are essentially big ad networks, we use one called StackAdapt. But there’s, there’s, you know, there’s a gazillion and a half different ones, look for advertising systems DSPs that have in app ads, and then look at the apps that are available because you want to have app you want to advertise in apps that match your audience. So if you are an industrial, concrete company, look for construction apps that you can have your ads appear and if you’re a marketing podcast, you want to look for you know, any kind of task management or office software that you can advertise and super straightforward sponsored emails getting into other people’s newsletters, you know, that’s that’s a no brainer. Newsletters are are like the hot new thing again. Oh, look, all social media is a flaming garbage dumpster. Let’s try this email

John Wall 18:18
thing in my inbox.

Christopher Penn 18:21
Social networks and make regular ad networks. So Facebook ads, Google ads, Instagram, LinkedIn, all those different ad services, Twitter ads, tick tock ads, YouTube ads, any any place like that. You want to be running advertising, and based on the kind of show you have, will dictate which of these services you offer, and also what kind of budget you have, because some of the ad networks, they even if they say they have like a no minimum or low minimum, you don’t see performance until you spend a certain amount. What have we done so far with paid ads?

John Wall 18:53
Yeah, there’s a lot of fronts. I mean, the ones that really grabbed quickly, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, all those have the options where you can post sizzle reel, or whatever. And then you can just boost the posts. And that’s a lot easier to do than going through the whole full admin interface and coming up with copy and doing promotions. But yeah, the goal for us is always been to, you know, be running these kind of dentists, you dollar a day kind of things, you know, just budgeting anywhere from 20 to 100 bucks a month, and just getting the most relevant clicks. You know, you don’t have to spend all this money and get, you know, 60% of his garbage traffic to reach the numbers. It’s much better to have, okay, here’s a really low bid. And we’re just going to burn that whole budget every day or every week. And yeah, you know, we could be dumping more money into it. We’re leaving some on the table, but everyone we get is highly qualified and decent. And so that’s the strategy that I’ve you know, have always worked with and it’s been great as far as traffic. It’s weird that it does move around a lot. I don’t know whether it’s because of the type of content Shouldn’t we use or whatever, but it’s like some months, you know, LinkedIn just tears it up. Every once in a while something will light up on Facebook. Twitter just seems to be in the trash can for the past year now. But you know, yeah, doing this kind of stuff and getting it in front of the right groups, I guess. And it’s fun to like, I don’t want to spill the tactics, you know, because there’s a lot of things that we do that we have been harder to experience. But one tip that I got from AJ Wilcox, who is the man for LinkedIn advertising, is having the marketing over coffee group, like I used to really resent the fact that the marketing over coffee group had over 7000 members. And it used to be this dynamic group where we had all kinds of discussions. And then they changed their strategy with groups groups basically just fell off the radar completely, like you have to work hard even to find them. But ads can be targeted against that. So we can use that as a lookalike. So now we know, you know, we still get people that sign up for the group all the time, even though it’s so hard to get to and find new people come in. And that helps focus the ad spend so that we’re getting really qualified links, and it’s helping that spend a lot more effective. So yeah, that’s, it’s definitely one of the things that we can always do more with this. And at some point, I should just outsource it to somebody that does work. And it’s a great way to generate traffic. I mean, you can basically just dial in traffic, if you’re willing to put the money towards it. Yeah, if you’ve got

Christopher Penn 21:22
money, and by money, I mean, you’re willing to spend them 1000 bucks or more a month, Google’s performance Max campaigns and Google ads are are fantastic. They require decent your four digit budget, because the machine learning that powers it needs traffic to tune itself. So it’s not what you can’t do dollar day on that one. But if you’ve got the cash in you, and you’re willing to let it ride for 90 days, so you know, budgeting three grand will tune it will dial in. And obviously, the more money you have to throw at it, the faster it dials in because it’s all again, machine learning based. But that’s a good way to get targeted traffic. The other thing is, like you said, the magic word is look alikes, if you have the ability to if you’ve already got some traffic and some listeners to your website, you can put in the tracking tags to track those people, build them into an audience, and then use that data to build a look alike audience of people who have similar behavioral and demographic attributes, but are not in your audience and show ads to them.

John Wall 22:23
Yeah, that’s it. It’s like you’re getting pre qualified folks. You can’t beat that.

Christopher Penn 22:27
Exactly. And and you’re you’re doing it behaviorally rather than demographically. Which tends to work better because you don’t know who your audience is not really easily.

John Wall 22:39
Yeah, it’s not like audio people are every way shape and form you know, there’s no demographic angle that where you can find those. It’s just got to be what’s the behavior who downloads audio?

Christopher Penn 22:49
Exactly. Okay, next up email marketing, you need to have email marketing, you need to have a newsletter. So this is a couple different things. One, you need to have a sign up the fires and autoresponders so that again reminds people to where to find stuff. Ideally, it’s a system that is set up that can fire an email every time you drop a new episode. Again to keep engagement high. And then I have a wrap up newsletter that summarizes you know, maybe it’s maybe that’s a monthly newsletter depends on how many shows you’re producing. That summarizes what’s been happening on the show that that month and you know, the the highlights having those those three as your your general campaigns typically as good, you will want some kind of marketing automation system. If you have budget Hubspot, if you don’t have budget modoch, the open source system is really good. You want something you want a sign up management system on your website, like Gravity Forms that allows you to do advanced caching, progressive profiling, etc. And then use some kind of CRM to store that data. For small shows Hubspot sales CRM is really good. It’s $0 To start, and then, you know, the first paid features that are useful are $50 a month mark, so it’s, you know, it’s very reasonable. Other options would be salesforce.com, and Zoho. I’m not a fan necessarily the one for managing your podcast audience. But those are those are decent ones. And those are things you can use to also acquire data that you can later on use in your ad kit when you’re selling advertising is up but for marketing, your podcast, this is where I have seen things be successful. What are we doing, John?

John Wall 24:28
Yeah, the email is been the key to everything. I still give that advice to everybody you know, whether it’s in the network or whatever you’re doing, because the big one is, you know, when people hear a spot on the podcast, maybe they’re out exercising or they’re in their car, like they can’t just hop over and go check out a vendor wedding even if the offer is fantastic. So having the newsletter drive those offers home again, saying hey, remember on the show, we talked about this, click here to get it. And even I go so far as in the you know, editor’s notes, I’m like, hey, you know, this week LinkedIn and the male works are supporting the show, bro. bring it to you for free, please give these guys a click like just go check this link out. And yeah, that’s where it all comes from. I mean, we can guarantee 30 to 50 clicks a month, they can get, you know, five to 10 leads a month guaranteed, because we’re pushing it and getting it in front of the right people. And yeah, it’s you know, and then after that you’re proving to the advertisers that you can drive the traffic. So it’s all about their offer is that the right fit, like, you can’t do anything about that. If you send 100 people and nobody goes there and buys. That’s, there’s nothing you can do about that. But you can show the advertiser that, hey, when you advertise in episodes, we’re going to get eyeballs on that and checking out the offer, and passing it along. So it’s huge. The biggest challenge for me is cadence, right, like, I would love to do it weekly, I ended up doing it monthly, usually. And it just, you know, finding the time to do it. Again, it’s just cranking out content and getting it done. And, and it’s tough too, because you know, I could do in just an automated every week when the show drops just have the show notes. But I like to do a lot of personal commentary and some of the stuff that I like, and I feature the episodes that I think are the best for them. It’s a lot of hands on. And I’m using ghost and we’ve used a bunch of different solutions over the year. Right now I’ve been playing with ghost, I’ve been pretty impressed with the way that can get stuff out and follow stuff up. But yeah, it’s just it’s a critical part to the to the marketing component. And this is not that we you know, we preach this on every front that if you’re looking for ongoing organic evergreen email is just the way to go. You own the list, you own the content, it builds up over time, it really can’t be beat.

Christopher Penn 26:32
Exactly. And for sharing the show from marketing your podcast, email is easier to forward than someone telling their friend Oh, you should go go listen to marketing over coffee.com, which is good advice. I mean, we’re not gonna say no, don’t tell people about the show. But if you’re at the watercooler the chances the person’s having forgotten that by the time they get back to their desk is pretty high. If you are sending out emails that can be forwarded, it’s an easy win. Alright, let’s talk about events. Events are a very, very strong way to promote a podcast. So this is everything from you know, attending conferences to having maybe even a booth at a conference, a podcast, speaking tour, a number of other shows have done this Welcome to Night Vale, which is granted a fiction podcast does performances of their show live performances, they move around as travel tour, their private dinners, there’s speaking on stage about your podcast, there’s tradeshow booths, being at other people’s booths, especially I have seen a lot of companies do be very successful having sort of a podcast sort of setup at another company’s tradeshow booth. And you can interview people live, of course, all the virtual events. So one of the events stuff do you like John and one of the stuff that is just people absolutely have to do?

John Wall 27:49
Yeah, the stuff for us has always been hijacking other shows, you know, that’s worked perfectly for us, unfortunately, COVID derailed a bunch of that stuff. But we’re pretty much a fixture. At inbound, you know, we usually pick a night. And same thing with marketing, press B2B, where it’s like, okay, Thursday night, this is if you’re a friend of the show come, we’re going to drive, grab drinks over here and come hang out, meet everybody and network and have a good time. So that’s an easy one to jump on. Yeah, we actually have many times have reversed it to his sponsors. You know, if you sponsor the show, and you have an event coming up this quarter, like we’ve got bloom, reach out in Napa, California at the end of August, you know, we can go out there. And not only are you You know, they’re sponsoring the show to drive traffic to the event. But then actually on site, you can record a bunch of the keynotes or meet up with other, you know, folks and record episodes. So now you got more content to and the whole time you’re promoting the fact that hey, you’re at the sponsors event. So that’s, you know, huge too. And yeah, I’ve you know, we’ve always, we’ve tried maybe three or four times now to do our own thing and try and get it off the ground. And I just, you kind of have to get over the fact that the first few are going to be sparsely attended. You know, like, it’s so difficult to ask for somebody for time out of their calendar to actually travel somewhere and do a show. And so yeah, I can see I know, I’ve worked around the fall, having, you know, do three episodes over a day and have people they can come in and watch. So if you want to come, you know, meet Debbie Millman, Seth Godin, David Meerman. Scott in one shot, you could do that kind of thing. And it’s, you know, just a matter of making that work in lining up schedules. You know, the problem is it just takes, it takes event planning, it takes cash, and then you need to work around the calendar, like the problem that we’ve had is, you know, the three best weeks to do it. We’ve got eight other marketing conferences going on in queue, three and four this year. So yeah, it’s always a challenge. But yeah, anytime you can get in front of people at events, and another easy one is for a lot of events, they’ll have a website and they’ll have media partners. So you don’t have to pony up cash. If you’re willing to just give another event exposure. They usually will put your logo on their show site and you know, give you some plugs in their email newsletter and their agenda leading up to the show. So that’s an easy way to get access to an audience. and just get your name out there as the Fars the fact that you’re affiliated with these kinds of shows.

Christopher Penn 30:06
And the the private dinners thing. I mean, that is the easiest thing to do with the show that’s happening because all the people that are in that audience you want, they’re in town anyway. So wherever the show is, I mean, if you want a certain group of people, like if you if you like the crowd that attends Dreamforce, you reserve your Airbnb eight months in advance. Travel out there the month before that, do your Airbnb and things and you camp out and you get and you do your evenings have of post show stuff with with the crowd you want to impress?

John Wall 30:42
Yeah, isn’t it that’s just such a great way to get a lot of content in one shot. It’s, you know, if you’ve got the network and got the people that there’s no what better way to get as much content done in a short period of time for easy money.

Christopher Penn 30:55
Exactly. And you may actually get to the point where that is your business. John Ferrier in the cube, I mean, that’s, that’s the thing that they do is they just record all the time, and all these different tech conferences, and they, you know, they post these, you know, it’s all pro grade audio, and video and stuff. They look great looks very official, as the official media partner for all these shows, I don’t know if anyone ever actually watches those videos. But it looks good.

John Wall 31:19
Well, is it it’s amazing. We talked about this all the time. So many of these events, they go in, they film everything. And then the day after the show’s over, this stuff never goes anywhere. So if if digital was part of your mix, it would be like every month until the next show, you’d be dropping all this stuff like hey, check out this recession, like the people who have paid don’t care, they got to see it first and live. So everybody else could watch this content as it goes. But yeah, it gets. And I’d love to say that it’s just being paid while they’re hidden. But you know that with a lot of these events, like everybody’s done working on the show, and they’re just like, Yeah, whatever, forget about it, just don’t do anything with it. And exactly.

Christopher Penn 31:54
So if you’re a podcaster, and you have a show or something like that, and you want to make inroads find a conference that’s struggling with content production, say, hey, you know, if you outsource it to us, we will become the official media partner of the show, will produce the audio from the sessions and drop them but will drop them on our show, as well. And in the end, then you get to work very closely with the event and its registration list.

John Wall 32:19
Yeah, right. Exactly. Get access to that audience. And yeah, you know, you’d think it was a no brainer, but again, it’s just one of those people things that event planners have so much on their plate, there’s only so much they can do.

Christopher Penn 32:29
Exactly so and the Easy win there is if you can take things off the event planners list, they will they will do whatever.

John Wall 32:37
Yes, that’s a quick way to earn a friend definitely.

Christopher Penn 32:39
Exactly. And then finally, social media so your your, your social media for one thing, you need a content distribution strategy, which is a framework and a schedule to use good social media management software, right? We did a live stream a few weeks ago on the Bake Off go check that out over on the on the Trust Insights YouTube channel because we talked through was Sprout Social sprinkler, Hootsuite, I don’t really remember what what all of them were, but Agora Pulse and all those things. But you need to have some kind of, of distribution mechanism that works really well. You should have some kind of daily posting to remind people to show exists, want landing pages set up in places and then based on the social network, put up content. So there’s all these places Facebook groups face, your stories, Instagram reels and stories. LinkedIn. If you have a mobile app, or this mobile app, you can integrate with put that out there put stuff on Twitter, you want to have stuff on your YouTube channel, you want to have YouTube shorts, Tiktok stuff. Again, this is where that we mentioned earlier, Adobe Express is super helpful, because it can do content transformation into a variety of things. And this is one where, particularly if you work at a corporation, you want to you almost certainly have an Adobe Creative Cloud license somewhere in your company. And if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud license, you get the access to the full premium version of Adobe Express. And you get things like resize this video, merge these videos together, crop this video chain to speed this video, make an Instagram story and you have all this stuff that is just comes baked in. It is so easy to move content from one position to another and get it ready for all these different social networks. It will save you an enormous amount of time and headache doing that. But that’s you know, for social media, this is the stuff to do and I cannot emphasize enough you need some kind of community mechanism ideally something that has no AI in the way so that means slack or Discord would be the two suggestions and if I was starting over from scratch today, I would pick Discord. Right now our communities and what’s the market is on Slack. It’s gonna stay there probably for the foreseeable future because it’s is a well established community, it’s really hard to move people around. But if I were starting from scratch, I would start with Discord today.

John Wall 35:06
Yeah, isn’t it to have a social network where you’re not worried about the algorithm? Choking, you’re chasing us is ridiculous. I’m going to give it a plug for Adobe express to on iOS, the phone app is also good. If you’re on site and doing stuff, you can get a lot of things done. And yeah, as far as regular social and their garbage algorithms, Chris and I are going to be doing tag team match against Zuckerberg and musk and I’m gonna fight. So we’re gonna jump in on that. Come buy your tickets now.

Christopher Penn 35:38
I have so much to say about it. But this live stream is not the place for that. Maybe we can cover that in the next episode of excellent. Watching billionaires fight. So that is the map of all the tactics and stuff. And you know, it’s funny, a lot of the tactical stuff, this stuff changes all the time. So one of the things to keep in mind is that you’ve got to get your strategy right first, and then you can pick and choose the tactics you want. Because I want to talk to you real quick the bullseye framework about what to do with this ridiculous list of tactics.

John Wall 36:12
Yeah, and as fact, it’s so stupid, we’ll get the latest version of the mind map that will be the marketing over coffee PDF giveaway, we’ll just put this thing out there, this is ready to go. Yeah, Bullseye is interesting. There’s a whole bunch of stuff, we can have a link to past interviews with Weinberg and mares, their book, traction is just a classic. And we’ve updated it with a bunch of our stuff. But the idea is that there’s two key components. One is that you want to spend half your time on the content and half your time promoting. Like, that’s the big deal. There’s too many people that spent all their time on the content, and they just never ended up getting noticed. And then the other part of the bullseye framework is pick three tactics, you know, we’ve got this laundry list of 180 things you can do, just and as you start out, just use your gut, I mean, eventually, you get to the point, hopefully, where you have some data to tell you which ones you should be doing. But pick three, do them and iterate monthly. And just figure out what works and what doesn’t work. And the big part of that is to keep that list tight, because the mistake people make is they start sprinkling the money around, especially when you start doing ads, too, you know, you end up getting eight or 12 things going. And the reality is in any of these channels, they’ve proven over and over again, by watching how VCs work, that there’s a learning curve, and there’s economies of scale to this stuff. So you know, as you after six months of running Google ads, you’re going to be 15 to 20 times better at getting results with those ads than you would be if you were just spending an hour a week and working on 18. Other campaigns, you know, you’re much better off spending all your time refining your ads of whatever sort they are. And use that. So yeah, we’ve got past links to traction discussions. But you know, the short version is like pick three and get good at them, and give them enough time to get some data. And then you’ll reach a point where you’ll give up on one or two of them, you just rotate a new one into test. But just keep that cadence of do what’s working, evolve, and then rotate out the crummy ones. And that at least will give you a map to go forward.

Christopher Penn 38:09
Yeah, if I had to pick only three, I would pick YouTube as the discovery engine, right, because it is the second largest search engine in the world. And it is where shows go to get discovered. I can’t count the number of podcasts that I listened to, that I found on YouTube first, like human lab, for example. YouTube is the place I would absolutely 100% build an email list second, right? That is non negotiable to me. If you’re not doing email, I think you’re doing it wrong. And the third is I would have a Discord community to retain people and keep their attention. So if I had to pick just three things, those be my three things. What are your three things? If you were starting out? You’re just only three? Which three? Would you go with?

John Wall 38:51
Yeah, well, you know, we have to go with existing infrastructure like email newsletter, that’s I agree with you that you actually have to be doing, you know, the website itself, being able to do more content on there, like having the greatest hits page and sign up for the newsletter. That one’s on there. And then, you know, advertising is one that it’s worth trying just to get access to fresh content, you know, do promoting the posts on LinkedIn has been huge for us. And that, and this is the thing you find, like we say pick three, but you find out that these things always overlap and intermingle. You know, it’s like, okay, the stuff we do on LinkedIn, not only is it advertising, but it’s also evergreen content, and it drives traffic to the newsletter subscriptions. And so that stuff is worth doing. But yeah, that’s the shortlist for me as far as what we get. Yep.

Christopher Penn 39:34
So we’ve covered a lot of tactics today. And as John has mentioned several times, you want to have some data to back stuff up. So on the next episode, in this series, we’re going to talk about measuring your podcast marketing, not measuring your podcast, but measuring the marketing of your podcast to see what’s working on a cover. Things like Google Analytics, your podcast analytics and stuff like that to get a sense of it. Are you? Are you getting the job done? Because I believe Katie’s got another week of chasing after unicorns in the Enchanted Forest.

John Wall 40:07
All right, yeah, we’ll see if we can make it another week without burning the place down.

Christopher Penn 40:11
We’ll see. Alright, so thank you for tuning in, and we’ll talk to 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.

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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.