So What? Launching a podcast – podcast marketing measurement

Welcome back to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. Remember to hit go live this week. Katie is still off uh hunting down Unicorn Tears or uh I don't I'm not sure what uh what crazy things are going on there. But uh this week we are going to finish up the fourth part in our series on launching a podcast. We're gonna talk about podcast marketing metrics analytics and figuring out whether anything worked or not.

So, John, uh to start off, when you're looking at measuring a podcast, what is it that you want to see? 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 if we're seeing the show shared and people saying, hey, this was a great interview, that's great.

Um, and then just raw stats, you know, how many downloads of the episode did we get and were we able to push it? Um pretty much I try to have some kind of campaign going every week so that we can experiment and see what works and what doesn't work. Gotcha. Um 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 need to obviously have it be 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 you know, when you look at something like marketing over coffee, um, obviously we have the revenue we collect from sponsors, but do you measure the podcast effectiveness on whether the sponsor got in love or on the number of inquiries you get from new sponsors?

Yeah, you know, and inquiries from new sponsors is good at really kind of measuring what's the health of the industry and what are marketing budgets like. Um, because like we saw a complete nuclear meltdown, you know, back in Q3 of last year when Martech 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 um, you know, not affected by the show really much at all.

Um, the good thing is tracking show notes 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. So when 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 itself, 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, um, also number of subscribers within all the different podcasting apps, because they do have uh individual apps have the ability to tell you like how many people are following you on uh Apple Podcasts or uh or on Spotify. Uh 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. Uh like I said, you have 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 uh sorts, then you the next stage is brand awareness for the show. Uh the number of people who are searching for your podcast by name.

So going into something like Google Search Console and saying, uh how many people searched for marketing over coffee this week, this month, this year, uh, as a good metric. Uh the number of people who subscribe and follow to you follow you on social media, so how many Twitter followers or LinkedIn followers and things like that. And one I think is is really useful as a measure of your show, um, is the number of inbound pitches you get for people who want to be guests on your podcast. Oh, don't tell me that I need to get more. Uh 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 to usually they're just terrible and awful, but offensive is like the next level. It is, but you know, if 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 had doesn't have that level of brand awareness. Yeah, that's uh that's true. It's true.

So let's dig into the podcast analytics first. Uh there's a very good chance that your show will be uh is hosted on some kind of platform. Um we talked about platforms last week. And every platform gives you some data, it gives you the uh some stats. So I'm gonna go ahead into a this is for in ear insights, the the Trust Insights podcast.

And you'll notice here you get things like the number of all-time downloads hunt lasts seven days, last 30 days this year, um, you know, 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 Libson does, for example, is they have the ability to switch between unique downloads and IAB certified downloads. And the big differentiator there is IEB disqualifies any kind of mechanical download. Um, so if so if a server caches your your audio content or CDN interacts with uh IEB does not count that, whereas Libson does.

And s IAB 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. Yeah, I um, you know, if it was a partial download and they're turning it down, that would make sense. But I don't know. The only other one would be if it's they're only allowing stuff from certain players, you know, if there's 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 cached, it could be getting cached and then listened to 15 or 20 times, you know, and it because I don't know you we always hear stories about what does Apple cache and not cash. And yeah, I mean, if I was Apple, I'd be like, yeah, I want to cache 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 it's um there's a lot of voodoo in there still. There is.

And if you look at the difference here, if I toggle back and forth, um, you have all time 28,000 IEB downloads. If I switch back to unique, it is almost double that, right? So there's a big gap between these two. Yeah, no, I've noticed the same thing on every other show that we've done and been involved with is that the IAB number is lower. Now, on the other side of the fence, if advertisers are all just like, yes, okay, we will live and die by IAB 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 know, you can just be like, hey, they're IAB. Let's move on to the next thing. So that is worth something, but yeah, the fact that it makes it look like your show is not doing what it used to be doing, too. That's disappointing.

It is. Um, so that's your your basic podcast stats. The next thing you'll want to look at, of course, is uh your channel analytics. So, for example, trust insights. Uh uh, we should we should we need a party sound of some kind um because we just crossed a thousand subscribers to our YouTube channel.

Oh, nice, YouTube, that's huge. Exactly. And so we obviously push out a lot of our content, you know, like this episode onto 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, uh, the the number of subscribers you're getting, all those things. Um, 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 these systems are different. So one of the things you're gonna want to do is you'll want to go into each of the systems and start doing things like you know, downloads um and just starting to export all of your data in a single format. So let's do like last 90 days in the CSV. Then we go into YouTube, go into our our content here, views by uh content, and then for again last 90 days, and you can download here into a CSV file. And one of the things you'll probably want to do is go looking at our chart of metrics, maybe put together a single spreadsheet that incorporates you know podcast downloads, unique downloads, IEB downloads, YouTube uh views per day and stuff, so that you have it all in one place.

Yeah, that's a great way to, you know, you've got kind of a real dashboard, and it's always interesting to see when things go up in one channel and down on another, you know, trying to figure out what's going on there that can really give you some um ideas as to where the best place to put your effort is. Exactly. For your stuff with when it comes to um social media, uh again, the the tools to use there. If you're not already using some kind of social listening system, you probably should be. Um, so for example, Agora Pulse is the system that we currently use.

Uh, we'll go into the analytics system here for audience. Uh, I can look at the different uh services, the different networks, and take a look at the audience. Let's see, for five of your Twitter profiles. Okay, I'll have to talk to them about this later. But you can see with Instagram, for example, I can see how many followers, how is that audience growing over time?

Um this is again where 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. Yeah, it's interesting too. I know I grow up also and a bunch of other tools are having issues with Twitter data as the API changes. And it's the same thing with the weirdness over at Reddit too, with them not allowing API calls. There's a lot of movement in this 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. Exactly. Um organic searches. Again, if you are not familiar with Google Search Console, uh you probably want to go to search.google.com, which is the Search Console thing with a quick and shameless plug.

If you have not already uh enrolled in the Trust Insights Search Console course, you probably should go and do that. Um because that that will teach you all sorts of uh stuff about Search Console effectively in a good whole gazillion different ways. Let's go ahead and pop into um marketing over coffee search console. The thing that we're looking for here is going to 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 use the last 16 months just to get a sort of a bird's eye view. You can see we're we're holding pretty steady state um with 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 market 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 uh map of exactly how many uh clicks you're getting and how many impressions. For measuring your podcast, the number I would suggest that you use is impressions. Um, 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 the search's intent. Um and that's a good metric for volume for the number of just raw number people, how many people are searching for this thing.

So I'll just turn off clicks here, and you can see um at middle last year, we something really changed, and we were doing like really, really well, and then you know, sort of back to normal after that. 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 uh exactly interesting. Yeah, this is the classic thing of it's just opening more questions as we dig.

Um for your inbound pitches, that is going to be handled within your uh your website software, however it is that you you do this. I would recommend uh having some kind of of contact form on your website as opposed to just a straight email address because straight email addresses are really easy to spam. Um if you go to if we go to marketing overcoffee.com as an example, uh, there is a talk to us where you can contact us, and obviously, you know, we get a lot of uh a lot of inquiries on this page, always moving, yeah. Um 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, um, 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 do. Oh, what do you what's on your mind, John? Well, I was just, you know, look, it's always, you know, there's always stuff with the contact form, you're like, oh, 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 again, it's a never-ending battle.

And I've kind of just taken for granted that PR folks already have us on their scission lists and all the other lists. Like they don't even come through the contact form, they just have our email and spam us. So exactly. Um 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 uh Google Analytics.

If you're using Google Analytics with your website, uh, you absolutely should be uh doing some correlation analysis. One of the reasons we're saying put all of your data into as a into uh a single big spreadsheet is that you can take things like your Google Analytics for conversions or your marketing automation systems leads, uh 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 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 of podcast downloads and the number of lead form inquiries, then you know podcasts might not be having quite the impact that we want. Okay.

Um and then other stuff is um your sales CRM numbers, your outcome, your your KPIs, whatever the KPIs were that you sat down with uh 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 from marketing over coffee, John, how do you process it? How do you, you know, do you have a dashboard? Do you have a spreadsheet? What do you what do you use to track?

Yeah, we've got HubSpot running, you know, that makes it easier for me to manage all of the the folks. Because the big thing is um, 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. Do 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 2,000 contacts in there or whatever. And so it's just, and it's the same way I 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. Um, and then after that, yeah, it's because you know it's closed deals that ultimately move the thing. So it's a you know 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 uh, you know, and then that uh, you know, 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 gonna charge on it? 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. Um, but you know, if you had come to me um, you know, January or December 31st of 2022, the crazy fire sale would be on, and you'd be able to buy, you know, a month or two for what you'd now pay for a week.

So um, yeah, it's always moving based on the demand. And then from a marketing perspective, what do you what do you measure to measure the popularity of the show itself? Yeah, that it's it's been downloads. I it's I should be doing more with Search Console. I'm I'm glad that you saw that because that immediately made me dig in too.

I'm like, okay, what was July? We had said, okay, so Chris was in Montenegro. We had Seth Godan and Debbie Milman who are both huge and have huge followings. And yeah, I should be doing more on that front instead of just looking because I'm looking at the raw 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 Milman and advertise against Debbie Milman fans. And I'm gonna get in front of like 5,000 people that I know already love Debbie. And so though that's pretty much a slam dunk for getting downloads generated there.

Um, but yeah, you know, it's 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. Do you do do you know of or do people do NPS scores for podcasts? No, I've never seen anybody go that far. You know, I think every a lot of people hang their hat on ratings, you know, they're just looking for, you know, and like it 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's doing. And I think I don't know, I don't think the cement has set as far as format too 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. Um, and it doesn't help that it ends up being so time shifted. But um, yeah, I don't know. That is an interesting uh idea for NPS. I think if you've got enough of an audience where you can guarantee yourself a thousand responses to a survey, it's definitely worth doing.

Yeah, and if you're not familiar, NPS scoring works basically like this. This is an example that runs in the Trust Insights newsletter every month. Uh at the beginning of every month, we ask 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, uh the click through sends you to the Trust Insights website.

And what we're doing is we're actually logging the anonymous URL data, right? You can see right there the NPS poll is is right in the URL. And then there's uh Mocha, which is Katie's dog. And then after that, um, that data goes into Google Analytics 4 because it's just a page URL. And then we can run an analysis of that uh from Google Analytics data and say, okay, well, this is what our our NPS score looks like.

You know, if it's above the green line, things are great. If it's below the red line, we're you know having some issues uh 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 paid different page views, different clicks will send you to the same page, but with a different uh uh URL parameter in the URL, and then you can track those page views 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, the percentage of promoters versus percentage of detractors.

So if you have this question here, uh, if I go back to our survey, uh, it is neither likely or unlikely is the category you ignore, right? These are the people who are are are neither good nor bad. And you want to what's the percentage of uh people who likely to recommend uh minus the percentage of people who are unlikely recommend, and that that tells you how you're doing. Yeah, so really you've got like it's either plus one or negative one, and you and you're watching the uh the spread there. So that's interesting to get a quarter where and 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 0.6.7-ish, but of course, you know, depends on the month. Yep. And because this is tied to your email list, if you go into your email marketing system, uh 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 you know, individually email them, survey them, say, hey, what's going on? Like, did we do something wrong?

Um, do you just not like the show? Like, you know, um, you know, do you are you not a Seth Godin fan? Uh why did you say you don't want to listen to the podcast this month? Yeah, and well, it could be huge too. You do you once you drill through and see who they are, you know, you check your CRM notes, you may know exactly what what's going on already.

You're like, oh yeah, they were the one that we didn't mean to burn that building down, but you know, it just happened. Um so though, so that feedback uh is essential, and and getting feedback as a way to measure your podcast is super important. Uh informally and formally. Um, how does the text line perform for us in terms of feedback? 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 uh under a hundred 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 ten responses from people. And of course, you know, it's the a classic one too of 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 um, 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.

Um, I think I need to do some SaaS work on that because I think I'm probably paying 60 bucks a month to hit these hundred 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. Um, you know, cut my price in half, and I won't go anywhere for another year, that kind of thing. I like I probably can get that deal.

It's just a matter of, you know, again, another thing that I should be working on. 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, for 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 the 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 die hard 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. Um I definitely am not gonna 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 too, do you have you uh 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. See, for me, um I would I would say park it 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, it's the one I know the all the best practices for. Yeah, and that is a great point in that I'm need to be doing more consistent cadence on the 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 of 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 of the list.

And I think if I had a more predictable cadence to the email, I think we'd 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. Exactly. I mean, that's there's stuff there, and this is probably they you know, this could have gone in last week's show, but uh I've been experimenting with OpenAI's whisper uh transcription technology, which is an open source model that you can run on your laptop. Um, it will occupy your laptop's processors for a little while.

But um if you were used to do using transcription, but you uh you know what transcription is AI-based transcription, but um maybe you're on a plan that only has like a hundred minutes a month or something like that. You can download the software running your laptop and run it as much as you're as much as your laptop can manage without choking to death that you can run on it. And in the case of a show like Marketing Over Coffee, where we have what 700 episodes? Um, it is somewhat cost prohibitive to put 700 episodes through a uh a transcription service. But I could download all 700 MP3s, put them through the so the service uh locally, the uh 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 audiograms for YouTube, uh that would have the closed captions files all all set there. So that's a uh 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 chat GPT, 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 if you're sitting there writing the newsletter, like, oh, what have I got to write this week? Well, you take the last three shows, their transcripts, you put them through chat GPT 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 can look they can tune into them. Yeah, because that's always even been a challenge for me as I'm writing the newsletter. I'm 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 to 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? Um, you know, that the email doesn't need to be a freestanding 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. Yeah. So I mean there's there's plenty of different ways to to, I would say, for 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 gotta do something, the the numbers are going the wrong direction? What what tells you that and when do when do you know that? Yeah, that's a good, you know. I 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, five percent still happens. You know, I I think in 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 um, you know, it's still there. So yeah, you know, really I've always just fallen back on the ch challenge is 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 have, you know, 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 absolute meat grinder, you know, of insanity for 10 years. And with the rate of tech, it's only gonna get worse. Like, you know, so there's just never any shortage of stuff to you know, for people to talk about.

I guess I 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 it has its own audience built in, thankfully. Um, yeah, I guess so if so if yeah, if I saw somebody and they were losing like to even 10% over a six-month period, you know, they kind of you get that down to the right thing.

I 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? Um, because yeah, there's there's a couple 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 gonna clean up their cue. And if you're uh if you're the one that misses that chair when the music stops, you're out of luck. Exactly. Yeah, I we listen to folks, I listen to folks like Andrew Huberman over Huberman Lab. His podcast episodes are like three hours long.

I and and but they're so filled with valuable information that you're like, you know what? I'm just gonna look this is gonna be the show I listened to for like the next three workouts because I I just want to get through and and hear everything he has to say about X. So you're right. If the content is good, uh 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 uh from it. It's when it doesn't benefit them anymore that attention span becomes an issue because there's always something better. There's always alternative. And so Andrew Huberman, is he does he release monthly or weekly, or what's his cadence with weekly? Weekly with three hours.

So he's like 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, these NPR, they 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 it, you know, they'll spend three weeks working on a show and then just be like, yeah, this doesn't have the juice, it vanishes.

So we yeah, wow, three hours weekly. That's the he's definitely putting in the work there. And he's and same deal. If it's a specialized niche and he's the expert there, I you know, he's got a lot to talk about. Exactly.

Well, he's he's uh uh Stanford uh doctor of neuroscience. Um and uh every episode is just about like, hey, here's how you can uh optimize you know this or that part of your health, and something obviously you know, people care about, you know, what but what's this it's health, money, and relationships. Those are the three things that every fortune teller you ever known will say every inquiry is bucketed into one of those three categories um predictably. So if you can serve one of those three niches, um, you will do fine. Yeah, that's uh it's the from the dawn of time.

The tarot card readers know where to touch to make sure that they're getting uh feedback and getting people excited. Exactly. So we have covered this gigantic map, which is barely visible in 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 to today, measuring your podcast. Um, you can catch the past episodes. If you if you missed a previous episode, you can uh always catch it on our YouTube channel, uh, which is where you have these episodes.

And for those folks who want a copy of that ridiculous map, uh, we're gonna put the PDF of it in the analytics for market Slack group. So go to trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. We will put this newly updated map, which yeah, I as you may have seen, we're editing it as we're looking. Um, so it is as fresh as you can possibly get. Yes, always moving.

Get the hurricane report. This is it. We've got the hurricane reports. Um any final thoughts, John, about marketing your podcast, whether it's new show or an existing show on all the stuff we talked about. Yeah, I'd put out to every, you know, if if the series has been interested, interesting to you, definitely go over to the Slack group, join up 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 it. 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 is like every podcasting 101 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. Well, I know we agreed early on. We were not talking about how to make the show. Making the show is a totally different uh set of topics that is outside the purview of marketing your show.

Because uh, 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 gonna develop the legs that you want it to have. Yes, I agree with that 100%. That's a good note to close.

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 TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast at a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.