So What? Launching a podcast – podcast marketing measurement

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on podcast marketing measurement. We walk through how to create a measurement plan from your podcast marketing strategy, where your podcast marketing measurement plan can go wrong and how to turn your podcast marketing measurement plan into action. Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• how to create a measurement plan from your podcast marketing strategy
• where your podcast marketing measurement plan can go wrong
• turning your podcast marketing measurement plan into action

Upcoming Episodes:

• TBD

 

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 0:27
Welcome back to So what the marketing analytics and insights live show remember to hit Go Live This Week. Katie is still off hunting down Unicorn tears or I’m not sure what, what crazy things going on there. But this week, we are going to finish up the fourth part in our series on launching a podcast this week, we’re going to talk about podcast, marketing, metrics, analytics and figuring out whether anything worked or not. So John, to start off, when you’re looking at measuring a podcast, what is it that you want to see?

John Wall 1:03
Yeah, for us, you know, the big thing is, I want to hear from the sponsors that they got, you know, 10 leads a month, and one or two of them closed every month, like that’s the metric that I want to hear from the sponsors. And then really just social chatter from the listeners, you know, if we’re seeing the show shared, and people saying, hey, this was a great interview. That’s great. And then just raw stats, you know, how many downloads of the episode did we get? And were we able to push it? Pretty much I tried to have some kind of campaign going every week, so that we can experiment and see what works and what doesn’t work?

Christopher Penn 1:37
Gotcha. A lot of podcast metrics and analytics are contingent on your goals. Right? So what is the goal? If the goal of the podcast is brand awareness, then you obviously have been measuring for that if it’s to create leads, you want to measure that if it is to earn sponsors? So how do you do the attribution? John, when someone when you look at something like marketing over coffee? And obviously, we have the revenue we collect from sponsors? But do you measure the podcast effectiveness on with the sponsor got into love or on the number of inquiries you get from new sponsors?

John Wall 2:12
Yeah, you know, in inquiries from new sponsors is good, really kind of measuring what’s the health of the industry? And what are marketing budgets like, because like we saw a complete nuclear meltdown, you know, back in q3 of last year, when martec Just kind of completely took a hosing. And things have actually improved a lot, this quarter is probably one of the best quarters we’ve had in about a year and a half. So that’s working fine. But that’s definitely, you know, not affected by the show really much at all. The good thing is tracking shownotes links and having the newsletter and having the sponsors have trackable links. So that’s usually every month, I want to go back and look and say, Okay, we did serve up, you know, 30 to 250 clicks to a sponsor. And that’s really all we can do. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s, yeah, we can get our eyeballs to go check out your offer, whether or not they bought, you know, your new razor, that’s a whole nother question that we can’t really affect that much. But at least if we can give you the traffic that you weren’t able to get any other way, that’s, you know, we’re delivering some value. Gotcha.

Christopher Penn 3:14
So we think about your podcast, this is a sort of a basket or a collection of the different metrics and data that’s available to you. Obviously, with the podcast self, we have the basic analytics, the number of downloads you have, if you use RSS feeds, the number of subscribers you have on the feed itself. Also number of subscribers within all the different podcasting apps, because they do have individual apps have the ability to tell you like how many people are following you on Apple podcasts or, or on Spotify. If you are, as we talked about previous weeks using YouTube to distribute your show, which you absolutely should be, then you have the entire suite of YouTube analytics, as well as the of the feed, you have ratings and reviews, the number of people who are leaving ratings and reviews for your podcast itself. And of course, all the other video analytics as well. For if you think of this almost as a funnel of sorts, then the next stage is brand awareness for the show the number of people who are searching for your podcast by name. So going into something like Google Search Console, and saying, yeah, how many people searched for marketing over coffee this week, this month, this year, as a good metric, the number of people who subscribe and follow to follow you on social media, how many Twitter followers or LinkedIn followers and things like that. And what I think is, is really useful as a measure of your show is the number of inbound pitches you get for people who want to be guests on your podcast.

John Wall 4:45
Oh, don’t tell me that I need to get more. This has been a spectacularly bad week too. We’ve had some some real winners this week. But I unfortunately some even unsafe for work, which that doesn’t happen. Usually they’re just terrible. When awful, but offensive is like the next level.

Christopher Penn 5:04
It is but you know, in terms of awareness of your brand of your podcast, right? If you’re not getting spammed by by other people who want to be on your show, then your show really doesn’t have that level of brand awareness.

John Wall 5:16
Yeah, that’s is true, it’s true.

Christopher Penn 5:21
So let’s dig into the podcast analytics. First, there’s a very good chance that your show will be is hosted on some kind of platform. We talked about platforms last week. And every platform gives you some data, it gives you some stats. So I’m gonna go ahead into this is for In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast. And you’ll notice here you get things like the number of all time downloads, last seven days last 30 days this year, downloads by episode and all that stuff. One thing that’s interesting is depending on the platform you’re on, it will give you different metrics. So one thing that Libsyn does, for example, is they have the ability to switch between unique downloads and AI be certified downloads. And the big differentiator there is AB disqualifies any kind of mechanical download. So if so if a server caches your audio content, or CDN tracks with IAB does not count that, whereas Libsyn does, and I B somehow, and I don’t know how they do this, but somehow certifies that at least one minute of the data was listened to was was consumed. So which again, I’m not sure how they measured that.

John Wall 6:29
Yeah, I you know, if it was a partial download in there turning it down, that would make sense. But I don’t know, the only other one would be if they’re only allowing stuff from certain players, you know, if their stats that they’re getting from certain players, but that’s all a little sketchy. And then the other thing that I don’t know, that automated downloads thing, I understand, okay, they don’t want bots grabbing it. But if it’s something that’s getting cash today, it could be getting cashed and then listen to 15 or 20 times, you know, and because I don’t you, we always hear stories about what does Apple cash and not cash? And, yeah, I mean, if I was Apple, I’d be like, Yeah, I want to cash all this stuff and serve this because it’s ridiculous to have people running around and maybe risking downloads, whereas I could have all the stats and all the traffic. So yeah, it’s, there’s a lot of voodoo in there still.

Christopher Penn 7:17
There is. And if you look at the difference here, if I toggle back and forth, we have all time 20,000 IB downloads, if I switch back to unique, it is almost double that. Right. So there’s a big gap between these two?

John Wall 7:32
Yeah, no, I’ve noticed the same thing on every other show that we’ve done and been involved with is that the IB numbers look now. On the other side of the fence, if advertisers are all just like, yes, okay, we will live and die by the numbers. Well, then that is something because then we you know, every time a sponsor comes on board, you don’t have to do this dance of like, well, where are your stats coming from? What are those, you know, what is included? What’s not included? And you can just be like, hey, they’re IAB, let’s move on to the next thing. So that is where something but yeah, the fact that it makes it look like your show is not doing what it used to be doing to that’s disappointing.

Christopher Penn 8:06
It is. So that’s your your basic podcast stats. The next thing you want to look at, of course, is your channel analytics. So for example, Trust Insights, we need a party sound of some kind, because we just crossed 1000 subscribers to our YouTube channel. Oh, nice YouTube, that’s huge. Exactly. And so we obviously push out a lot of our content like this episode on to YouTube, our podcast is on YouTube as well. And so you can go through and slice and dice and look at the most popular content, the number of subscribers, you’re getting all those things. That is all within the YouTube interface. The one thing that I will say is that it is tricky trying to develop a cohesive picture of all this because all the systems are different. So one of the things you’re going to want to do is you want to go into each of the systems, and start doing things like downloads, and just starting to export all of your data in a single format. So let’s do like last 90 days into CSV. And we go into YouTube, go into our content, your views by content, and then again, last 90 days. And you can download here into a CSV file, and one of the things you will probably want to do is go looking at our chart of metrics, maybe put together a single spreadsheet that incorporates you know, podcast, download unique downloads, IB downloads, YouTube views per day and stuff. So you have all in one place.

John Wall 9:38
Yeah, that’s a great way to view you’ve got kind of a real dashboard. And it’s always interesting to see when things go up in one channel and down in another, you know, trying to figure out what’s going on there that can really give you some ideas as to where the best place to put your effort is.

Christopher Penn 9:53
Exactly for your stuff with when it comes to social media. via, again, the tools to use there, if you’re not already using some kind of social listing system you probably should be. So for example, Agorapulse is the system that we currently use. We’ll go into the analytics system here for audience, I can look at the different services, the different networks and take a look at the audience. Let’s see, for five of your Twitter profiles. Okay, I’ve talked about this later. But you can see with Instagram, for example, I can see how many followers how is that audience growing over time? This is, again, wait, and you have the Export button there to export your CSV files, but social audiences is is a very straightforward way to measure. Okay, how, how are how are things performing?

John Wall 10:46
Yeah, it’s interesting, too. I know Agorapulse. And a bunch of other tools are having issues with Twitter data as the API changes as the same thing with the weirdness over Reddit too, with them not allowing API calls, there’s a lot of movement in the space. But yeah, that’s usually a great place, it’s wonderful if you can just jump in on one interface and answer five or six different channels.

Christopher Penn 11:06
Exactly. organic searches. Again, if you are not familiar with Google Search Console, you probably want to go to a search that google.com, which is the Search Console thing with a a quick and shameless plug. If you have not already enrolled in the Trust Insights Search Console course, you probably should go and do that. Because that that will teach you all sorts of stuff about Search Console effectively, in a whole gazillion different ways. Let’s go ahead and pop into marketing over coffee Search Console, the thing that we’re looking for here is gonna go into search results. And we want to see things like this, we want to see the people who are searching for marketing over coffee, let’s flip this to, let’s do the last 16 months, just to get us from a bird’s eye view, and see where we’re holding pretty steady state. Here within Search Console. This allows us though, to measure our brand strength, right, how many people are searching for marketing over coffee. And you’ll notice that there are variations. So marketing over coffee marketing over coffee, podcast, and so on and so forth. So anything which is a brand name, you’d want to use the built in features to combine these queries into one. So you can get a pretty clear, easy to understand map of exactly how many clicks you’re getting and how many impressions for measuring your podcast. The number I would suggest that you use is impressions. And the reason I would say you should use impressions is because that is that’s based on the number of times Google shows your site as one of the answers to the searchers intent. And that’s good metric volume for the number of just random people, how many people are searching for this thing. So I’ll just turn off clicks here. And you can see at middle last year, something really changed. And we’re doing like really, really well, then you’re sort of back to normal after that.

John Wall 13:05
Yeah, that is really weird. I have to dig back into the last year, July and see what those shows were what was going on there. That’s exactly Interesting. Yeah, this is the classic thing of it’s just opening more questions as we dig.

Christopher Penn 13:21
For your inbound pitches, that is going to be handled within your your website software, however it is you do this, I would recommend having some kind of of contact form on your website, as opposed to just a straight email address, because street email addresses are really easy to spam. If you go to if we go to Marketing over coffee.com As an example, there is a talk to us where you can contact us. And obviously, we get a lot of a lot of inquiries on this page.

John Wall 13:53
always moving Yeah.

Christopher Penn 13:57
One thing that might help is at least putting on a drop down of what the reference is. So if it’s someone looking specifically for sponsorship versus a guest, that would certainly help disambiguate that, but you can of course, just do that with with natural language processing as well. The next thing you’re gonna want to know, what’s on your mind, John? Well, I

John Wall 14:18
was just looking at it’s always, you know, there’s always stuff with the contact formula like that should really, you know, just like you said, like a better drop down would be good. And throwing a capture in there to get some more of the garbage out of there would be good. But you know, it’s a it’s a never ending battle. And I’ve kind of just taken for granted that PR folks already have a son their decision lists and all the other lists, like they don’t even come through the contact form. They just have our email and spam lists.

Christopher Penn 14:44
Exactly. The next steps in terms of metrics are ones that are going to be based on your business, right. So a big chunk of them is going to be things like Google Analytics. If you’re using Google Analytics with your website. You absolutely should be doing some correlation analysis. One of the reasons we’re saying put all of your data into into a single big spreadsheet is that you can take things like your Google Analytics, 4 conversions, or your marketing automation systems leads, leads, lead scores, or just raw numbers of leads, and start doing correlation to say, okay, maybe we care about marketing qualified leads as a company, and we want to see what is the correlation of these podcast metrics to that outcome. And if there is a statistical relationship, because if there is a statistical relationship, you can then test it. But if there’s no correlation at all between number podcast downloads in the number of lead form, inquiries, and you know, podcast might not be having quite the impact that we want. Okay. And then other stuff is your sales, CRM numbers, your outcomes, your your KPIs, whatever the KPIs when you sat down at the very beginning of this process, and said, This is what I care about. So how do you when you go to process our data for marketing over coffee, John, how do you process it? How do you know? Do you have a dashboard? You have a spreadsheet? What do you what do you use to track?

John Wall 16:11
Yeah, we’ve got Hubspot running, you know, that makes it easier for me to manage all of the folks because the big thing is, you know, they come in through the front door, and we usually meet them. But there is a repeatable cycle of you know, people that haven’t advertised in a year and a half or two years, I want to go back and talk to those people again and find out what’s going on. Did they want to get on and do that. And so yeah, Hubspot is just it’s the right entry point for us. Because we don’t have a ton of contacts in there. You know, there’s like, 2000 contacts in there or whatever. And so it’s just and it’s the same way, do it hit with Trust Insights, you have a deal board to keep track of like, you know, active conversations and people that may be doing something? And then after that, yeah, it’s because you know, it’s closed deals that ultimately move the thing. So it’s your, when it gets passed over to accounting, that’s the other set of metrics that you want to keep track of as far as revenue per quarter. And, you know, and then that year, unfortunately, it’s still like, totally wild west, right? Like every quarter I’m looking at, Okay, how many episodes are left? How many weeks do we have left to sell those? What kind of rates are we going to charge on and, you know, like, right now, if somebody wants to buy q3, they’re paying rack rate, or there’s nothing available even because, you know, July, August is already gone. But you know, if you had come to me, you know, January or December 31 2022, the crazy fire sale would be out and you’d be able to buy, you know, a month or two for what you now pay for a week. So yeah, it’s always moving based on the demand.

Christopher Penn 17:40
And therefore a marketing perspective, what do you what do you measure to measure the popularity of the show itself?

John Wall 17:46
Yeah, that it’s been downloads. I should be doing more with Search Console. I’m glad that you saw that. Because that immediately made me dig into I’m like, Okay, what was July we had said, okay, so Chris was in Montenegro, we had Seth Godin, and Debbie Millman, who are both huge and have huge followings. And yeah, I should be doing more on that front instead of just look, because I’m looking at the right downloads. And the other one is like tweaking that with paid and organic shares, you know, because I’m always pushing on every social front. And then every once in a while, I’ll throw money against specific shows that I know can do. Like, I should really go back and see how much money did I spend on ads for that? July, August period? Because it would not surprise me if, and yeah, that’s kind of like an inside tip. Like, just it’s so simple to go into LinkedIn, and say, Okay, we’ve got an interview with Seth Godin, or Debbie Millman, and advertise against Debbie Millman fans, and I’m gonna get in front of like, 5000 people that I know already left, Debbie. And so that’s pretty much a slam dunk for getting downloads generated there. But yeah, you know, it’s always the cobblers kids have bloody stumps, right? I should be spending more time digging into what that what’s really working there. And just, you know, there’s only so many hours in the day.

Christopher Penn 18:58
Do do you know of where do people do NPS scores for podcasts?

John Wall 19:05
No, I’ve never seen anybody go that far. You know, I think ever a lot of people hang their hat on ratings, you know, they’re just looking for, you know, and then, like, it’s not as big a deal for the smaller shows like mine, like as long as we’ve got enough of an audience that advertisers are interested, that’s great. But I think if you were at the, you know, Joe Rogan, or name your celebrity who’s getting a million downloads a month, NPS would be probably huge to get a feel for how the show is doing. And I think, I don’t know, I don’t think the cement has said as far as format to for a lot of these shows, you know, I think it would be really interesting to see like, okay, should it be an hour or three hours? And should it be one guest? Or should they have like four guests over three hours? Like there’s a lot of levers to pull as far as what people want as far as content? And it doesn’t help that it ends up being so time shifted. But yeah, I don’t know if that is an interesting idea for NPS. I think if you’ve got enough of an audience where you can guarantee yourself that 1000 responses to a survey it’s definitely worth doing.

Christopher Penn 20:03
Yeah. And if you’re not familiar NPS scoring workspace like this is this an example that runs in the Trust Insights newsletter every month? At the beginning of every month, we asked a simple question, how likely are you to recommend Trust Insights as a consulting firm to someone in the next 90 days, likely, neither likely nor unlikely or unlikely. And when you click through on one of these results, the click through sends you to the Trust Insights website. And what we’re doing is we’re actually logging the the anonymous URL database, you can see right there, the NPS poll is right in the URL. And then there’s Mocha, which is Katie’s dog. And then after that, that data goes into Google Analytics 4, because it’s just a page URL. And then we can run an analysis of that from from Google Analytics data and say, Okay, well, this is what our NPS score looks like, if it’s above the green line, things are great. If it’s below the red line, we’re having some issues that we need to be tackling. But this is something that any podcaster could implement, because it’s not, it’s not super complicated. It’s just different pageviews different clicks will send you to the same page, but with a different URL parameter in the URL. And then you can track those pages as separate pages and say, Okay, well, this is how many people clicked on this versus this. And if you recall, with NPS scores, the mathematical formula is the number of promoters minus the number of detractors or the percentage of promoters versus percentage detractors. So if you have this question here, if I go back to our survey, it is neither likely or unlikely is the category you ignore, right? These are the people who are are neither good nor bad. And you want to what’s the percentage of people who are likely to recommend minus percent people who are unlikely recommend? And then that tells you how you’re doing?

John Wall 21:51
Yeah, so really, you’ve got like, it’s either plus one or negative one, and you’re watching the spread there. So that’s interesting to get a quarter where it’s funny to dig in further, like, what happened on that one month where, you know, there were more angry people than happy people, you would expect it always to be like, point 6.7 ish. But cursor, you know, depends on the month.

Christopher Penn 22:13
Yep. And because this is tied to your email list, if you go into email marketing system, you can look at the people who clicked on the each individual one, you could put together a list of, you know, maybe five people who clicked on unlikely and individually, email them survey them say, Hey, what’s going on to like, we do something wrong? Do you just not like the show like you’re doing or you’re not a Seth Godin fan? Why did you say you don’t want to listen to the podcast this month?

John Wall 22:39
Yeah. And well, I could be huge to you, once you drill through and see who they are, you know, you check your CRM notes, you may know exactly what’s going on already. Like, oh, yeah, they were the one that we didn’t mean to burn that building down. But you know, just

Christopher Penn 22:55
so that feedback is essential. And getting feedback as a way to measure your podcast is super important, informally, and formally. How does the text line perform for us in terms of feedback?

John Wall 23:10
You know, the text line? Yeah, it we’re kind of reaching a point where I want to decide what to do it, it’s not been huge, because really, there’s under 100 subscribers on that list, you know, it’s not a giant list at all, it does get fantastic engagement. Anytime I send out a text, I’ll get, you know, three to 10 responses from people. And of course, you know, it’s a classic one to have, like, what people want, you know, if I send a couple updates, or a link about a show, I don’t hear anything, if I’m giving away an $80 set of headphones, suddenly, I’m getting 80%, you know, click through on that and responses. So it is the fastest and most direct way to get in front of people, there’s no doubt about that it is the best channel to do. I think I need to do some SAS work on that, because I think I’m probably paying 60 bucks a month to hit these 100 people unlimited. Yeah, which is way too expensive. Because, you know, I bought it three or four years ago when it was kind of new. And now there’s like five different vendors. So I think this is one of those things where if I just say, Look, you know, take a look at my list, you can see my usage, you know, cut my price in half, and I won’t go anywhere for another year, that kind of thing. Like I probably can get that deal. It’s just a matter of, you know, again, not another thing that I shouldn’t be working. It’s like I’ve got more to squeeze out of the email list than the text line. But yeah, overall, the text line has been good. It is a great source of engagement. Like I said, I’ve pretty much made that the lead choice and you know, that’s one thing that I’ve been trying on the show to drive is to keep pushing this message of, hey, sign up for the text line because that’s where I give away this stuff first, to see if I can get more people to convert and it seems to have plateaued I haven’t been able to get people over the hump for some reason because the we’ve kind of got the diehard fans and haven’t been able to add to that so I’m not too sure you know where I should go next with that. I definitely am not going to buy and start spamming people via text. You know, that’s just absolute horrible behavior. So I’m not going that route. But yeah, I don’t know I even to do you have any ideas on your side as far as there’s something else that we could try with that or some way to get that, you know, to get a little more action?

Christopher Penn 25:17
See from me? I would, I would say, park and invest all the time in the email list. But you know, that’s that’s my bias because email is is the medium I know best is the one I know all the best practices for.

John Wall 25:30
Yeah, and that is a great point and that I need to be doing more consistent cadence on the email newsletter is always the thing that falls off the bottom of the list, you know, it’s like, well, I need to work on sponsors for the quarter, I need to line up, make sure that the shows are great. Like, that’s always the number one concern. And so email falls to the bottom list. And I think if I had a more predictable cadence to the email, I think we’ll probably see faster results. And then of course, the irony that too is it wouldn’t surprise me if the email list accelerates, if that then drives more traffic to the text line. Also, you know, that wouldn’t surprise me.

Christopher Penn 26:02
Exactly. I mean, that’s their stuff there. And this probably, you know, this could have gone in last week’s show, but I’ve been experimenting with OpenAI whisper transcription technology, which is an open source model that you can run on your laptop, it will occupy a laptops processes for a little while. But if you were used to do using transcription, but you are you know what transcription is AI based transcription. But maybe you’re on a plan that only has like 100 minutes a month or something like that, you can download the software running a laptop and run it as much as you as much as your laptop can manage without choking it out that you can run on it. And in the case of the show, like marketing over coffee, where we have what 700 episodes, it is somewhat cost prohibitive to put 700 episodes through a transcription service, but I could download all 700 MB threes, put them through the service locally, the open model, and then push that back those transcripts back up onto the website for SEO purposes to get those keywords. And if we wanted to convert them into audio grams for YouTube, that would have the closed captions, files all all set there. So that’s a, if I wanted to invest time in the show, that would be the approach I would take because then those transcripts, you feed that to something like a ChatGPT. And it makes you a one paragraph summary that goes in your newsletter. And that’s how we that’s how I got into the whole newsletter thing is if you’re sitting there writing the newsletter, like, Oh, what am I going to write this week? You take the last three shows their transcripts, you put it through ChatGPT and say, Okay, write me a one paragraph summary of each show, boom, boom, boom, now people know what’s in the last three episodes, and they can tune into them.

John Wall 27:43
Yeah, cuz that’s always even been a challenge for me as I’m writing the newsletter like, well, do I just want to have links to the last four shows for the month? Like that seems like it’s just plugging the shows where there’s other content. And so, yeah, right now I’m doing a cadence of two shows from the month. And then I usually have, you know, one that well, there’s usually three to five other links that are kind of show related, but stuff you can only get in that newsletter to make that unique. But yeah, I should probably do some testing. As far as you know, do we just do show summaries? Like, is that good enough? You know, the email doesn’t need to be a free standing piece of content. And maybe I’m actually, you know, hamstringing ourselves by doing that, like, all that stuff should be in every audio show. I don’t know.

Christopher Penn 28:25
Yeah, so And there’s plenty of different ways to, to, I would say to free building that stuff up for your podcast, metrics for measuring the effectiveness of the marketing of the show. How do you know when it’s time to make a change? When you’re looking at your numbers, like downloads and things? How do you know, it’s like, Oh, we got to do something, the numbers are going in the wrong direction. What? What tells you that when when do you know that?

John Wall 28:49
Yeah, that’s a good you know, I’ve we’ve I’ve never really hit that point. I mean, we’ve seen cyclical stuff. But I’ve never had any point where I’m like, Okay, it’s been, you know, this is a down year, like that has not happened, it’s still the organic growth of, you know, in a bad year, 5% still happens. You know, I think a lot of the stuff that Tom Webster talks about, you know, shows that that, like, the market still has not matured, like you have Gen X people who are living and dying by podcasts. And, you know, it’s still there. So, yeah, you know, really, I’ve always just fallen back on the chair challenges, just like always going for bigger and better guests. You know, that’s the biggest thing because they have their own audiences. And so you’re getting that additive effect of, okay, you’re finding, you know, people who read that book that are marketing tech fans that want to, you know, have some of what we want to have. So, yeah, I’ve never had any, you know, structural and, you know, as you know, we’ve been doing it for like 15 years, and really, the format has not changed at all, like we you could go back and listen to a show from 10 years ago, and it’s really no different than what we’re doing now. And yeah, I guess part of it too, is that the career we’ve chosen has just been an hour absolute meat grinder, you know of insanity for 10 years. And with the rate of tech, it’s only going to get worse, like, you know, so there’s just never any shortage of stuff to, you know, for people to talk about, I guess the analogy would be like, where the Weather Channel and the hurricanes keep getting worse, you know, like, people are always tuning in because they’re like, Oh, my God, what, you know, what’s coming next? What do I need to know? And so it has its own audience built in, thankfully. Yeah, I guess. So. If if, yeah, if I saw somebody and they were losing, like, even 10%, over a six month period, you know, they kind of do to get that down to the right thing. I think the easiest way to go would be like, find 10 listeners that are fans and ask them what they’re, you know, what they think about and where it needs to go. And I think even finding people that are podcast fans and listen to a lot of stuff, you know, somebody like a Tom Webster, and have them listen to your show and give you feedback as far as what do you think needs to be changed? And what’s wrong with the format? Like why is this not grabbing? Because yeah, there’s there’s a couple of different levers, I think the biggest one would be, always make sure that you’ve got quality content for every week, you know, it doesn’t work to put out a bad show every third or fourth show, because there’s just too many other great podcasts that never miss. And listeners, sooner or later, you know, are going to clean up their queue. And if you’re, if you’re the one that misses that chair, when the music stops, you’re out of luck.

Christopher Penn 31:28
Exactly. Yeah, I we listen to folks, I listen to folks like Andrew Huberman over human lab, his podcast episodes are like three hours long. And but there’s so filled with valuable information that you know what I’m just gonna, this is gonna be the show I listen to for like the next three workouts, because I just want to get through and hear everything he has to say about x. So you’re right, if the content is good, and this is generally true, if the content is good, there is no such thing as attention span, right? People will people will consume as much content as possible that is of any length, as long as they’re getting benefit from it, when that doesn’t benefit them anymore. That attention span becomes an issue because there’s always something better.

John Wall 32:14
There’s always alternatives. So Andrew Huberman is he does he released monthly or weekly, or what’s his cadence weekly, weekly, with three hours. So he’s doing that’s crazy. That is like the, you know, even NPR actually doesn’t do that. Like that was one thing that was amazing to me. Because I was always like, god of these NPR. They’re, like, kill it every single week. And then you find out that well, they actually sit down and they start with a dozen shows. And only three of them see the light of day like they will, as they’re going through. And you know, they’ll spend three weeks working on a show and then just be like, Yeah, this doesn’t have the juice vanishes. So we our three hours weekly, that’s the he’s definitely putting in the work there. And he’s there. And same deal. If it’s a specialized niche, and he’s the expert there. You know, he’s got a lot to talk about.

Christopher Penn 32:58
Exactly. Well, he’s, he’s a Stanford doctor of neuroscience. And every episode is just about like, Hey, here’s how you can optimize, you know, this or that part of your health and something obviously, people care about, you know, what, what’s his health, money, and relationships? Those are the three things that every fortune teller you ever known, say every inquiry is bucket into one of those three categories, predictably, so if you can serve one of those three niches, you will do fine.

John Wall 33:30
Yeah, that’s from the dawn of time, the tarot card readers know where to touch to make sure that they’re getting feedback and getting people excited.

Christopher Penn 33:40
Exactly. So we have covered this gigantic map which is barely visible. And the last four weeks on marketing and launching your podcast from your overall strategy to your podcast specific strategy to the dozens of techniques for marketing your podcast you today measuring your podcast, you can catch the past episodes if you if you missed the previous episode, you can always catch it on our YouTube channel, which is where we have these episodes. And for those folks who want a copy of that ridiculous map, we’re going to put the PDF of it in the analytics for market slack groups who go to TrustInsights.ai AI slash analytics for marketers we will put this newly updated map which as you may have seen we’re editing it as okay so it is is as fresh as you can possibly get

John Wall 34:34
yes as always moving get the hurricane report this is it.

Christopher Penn 34:40
Any final thoughts John about marketing your podcast whether it’s new show or an existing show? We talked about Yeah, I

John Wall 34:49
put out to have it you know if this series has been interested interesting to you definitely go over to the slack group join up and because we would love to hear from you as far as what you’re doing and what you’re trying to do because yeah, this is you know, even though We’ve been doing this for over 15 years. It’s still like making it up as we go. You know, there’s always new tools. There’s always new ways to do things. And yeah, I mean, think about we did a four episode series and didn’t talk once about microphones like that’s got to be a record in the history of podcasting education. Like because that’s like the joke that we always make it like every podcasting one on one or whatever spends, like, 80% of the time talking about microphones, and you’re just like, Oh, my God, I can’t listen to this anymore. Yeah,

Christopher Penn 35:26
well, we agreed early on, we’re not talking about how to make the show making the show is a totally different set of topics. That is outside the purview of marketing your show, because as with all forms of content, marketing, half your time should be spent marketing the content, you know, 90% of your time is spent making the content, it’s not going to develop the legs that you want it to have.

John Wall 35:48
Yes, I agree with that. 100%. That’s a good note to close.

Christopher Penn 35:51
All right. Thanks for tuning in. Folks. We will see you all 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.

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.