So What? Launching a podcast – podcast marketing tactics

Welcome to another week of uh the so what the marketing analytics and insights live show. Uh Katie is off hunting unicorns this week. And uh as a result, like uh John, you were just saying before, we forgot to hit the go live button. It's just I was just saying like how we screw everything up when she's not around, and it's a total disaster. And then you're like, oh, wait a minute, I gotta hit the I gotta hit the button.

Exactly, gotta hit the little button. So this week is part three of our series on how to market your podcast and or how to launch a podcast. So the first week we covered should you be doing a podcast. Second week we talk 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 gonna talk about. We're not gonna talk about how to actually make your show. That's your job. Uh, we will be talking about how to market the show once you've already made it. So um, before we tackle that, John, some basic suggestions.

What should you have in terms of content available so that you have something to market? Yeah, right. Like, you know, the first thing is don't do a podcast. You know, you shouldn't be doing the podcast. We don't want to see you in this neighborhood.

Get off my lawn, right? Um, but it's funny, actually, I'll give a plug right out of the gate for the Analytics for Marketers community, um, 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 in YouTube talking about like what makes great content. And there were some fantastic points in that.

Uh just I like the 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 gonna be bad, but keep moving forward and you know, keep just trying to do a better show. Um, but yeah, there was a bunch of great feedback in there that's right on the mark for what we're doing today. Um, and yeah, it's you know, tell a unique story. I think that's the 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 uh 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 that may be a tiny audience, but you can be something interesting to them because only you can do whatever you're giving them. You could have been somebody, Charlie. You could have been a contender. Could have been a contender.

All right. So let's talk about the first the the collateral and pieces you're going to need to have to market your show, and then talk about the specific marketing tactics. So the first thing that um you would want to have, and and obviously you need to have some shows under your belt to create this content, is ad content. So this is going to be things like bumpers, uh, your video lower thirds, your pre-roll for in-show uh marketing to market your show. So uh to remind people, hey, recommend this show.

So for example, if we were recommending this show here, uh, we would be saying make sure that you are subscribed uh to our YouTube channel, right? So hit the the like button, uh the follower, subscribe to us, hit the bell button, and so on and so forth. Um interstitial advertising. So if you're gonna 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 uh easy subscription plugins of some kind that remind people to subscribe to not only your show, but also ideally your email list, and you want stuff um some kind of system that allows you to programmatically change the advertising in every blog post. Um, because in the beginning, you're probably not going to have sponsors in those slots, but you want to have spaces set aside for advertising and you'll fill it up with house ads. So, like, you know, reminding people, subscribe to the show. You will want to create promos, um, audio and video. Uh, run of site advertising, so have you might want to consider advertising systems of some kind.

Um, 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 admissions, you get all the ads too. And then have on hand a tool like Adobe Express or Canva. Uh, it will dramatically help you accelerate the amount of ad content you can create because it will help you resize and reformat your content.

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. Exactly. Um, other things you will want to have on site uh or available to you.

Um you may want a text line and or a voicemail line if you want people to be submitting uh audio content to your show for that. Um, having a way to track comments so that you can comment on other people's stuff, uh, as well as uh having people come on to your stuff, so social media management software, um, some kind of online community. Again, John mentioned at the top of the show, uh, the analytics for marker Slack group. Uh, but there's also you know a gazillion and a half different Discord servers that are great for that sort of thing. Um, for the media side of things, you want to have things that have handles.

So uh generally speaking, stuff like publications, ebooks, giveaways, downloadable content, uh, audio, uh, 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 uh chat GPT prompt sheet uh that you know, it's just a single page PDF. It's branded, it's got links on it and stuff, but there's no registration required for it. And that kind of content is the kind of thing that you want um to create for your podcast.

Um, not uh not about your show, but some useful, you know, maybe uh a chart or something from one of your episodes so that people can download it. What have we done for marketing over coffee for downloadable content? Yeah, you know, we haven't done anything in years really, because it's been we've got the newsletter has links to resources and other things. But yeah, actually, we should do the other thing was we just did the straight up book, you know, did the marketing over coffee playbook um like two years ago. And so yeah, people need to cough up and buy stuff.

Enough of this free stuff. It's not a charity. Um, but yeah, I in fact I should probably just steal the prompt uh thing that you've got and 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 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.

Um, because like when you're talking about spots for ads too. 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 I'll I'll put ebook on the list. We need to get a some of the resources out there because we've been l lacking on that front. One of the things to 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, uh yeah, I know with marketing over coffee, one of the guaranteed top performers is a Seth Godin interview.

Like it's it's like handing out candy at the playground. Um, when we do one of those, just the 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 you know the key points down to a one pager, and then that's that's the handout. You know, maybe that's the the month's handout. Just again, just to help people share the show.

Yeah, easy pass along. Like that's the thing because PDFs like that do tend to work. Just ask uh uh Scott and his 85,000 marketing vendor BDF that he fires around every year. It just has legs of its own. Exactly.

Um, other stuff. Uh one of the big things to pay attention to uh for your own site, obviously SEO, uh off site and on site. So on site's the easy stuff. You should have a blog. You should 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 rank math on WordPress are excellent plugins. Um, you should have an internal uh linking system. So uh we use SEO smart links. We give it a list of keywords, and then you give it 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, it automatically links back to the show.

So it helps people you know move traffic around. And then of course, uh, Google Sitekit is is one of those easy ones. You should be using Sitekit. It's 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. Um 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? Most horrible PR pitches. Well, yeah, the 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 gonna do any work with us, so it's nice to know you. Um, 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 know, you've got people that are making well thought out pitches as far as like, hey, my you know, client here is 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 show should be, that's your pitch.

You know, it's like, hey, you 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 pitches, you know, like this morning was one 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 could care less what you think about what shows you should be on. That means nothing to me. So yeah, it is uh it's an ongoing battle to find quality people to pitch you and to get the right um, 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? Um, and and it, you know, I have to say you 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 him on, you know, we've gotten around to them. 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. Um, and the other one too, that's insane. I the I really cannot believe are the 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 or worse yet, they mail you the book and they still don't follow up. So, you know, whatever.

If they want to keep sending me free books, I'm all for that. But yeah, as the client, that's probably not doing you too much good. Exactly. So if you are pitching your show, what advice do you give to someone who is going to be pitching their show to others? 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.

Well, I just mean like marking your show itself. Um, yeah, it's you know, finding the right community, getting the right story. I mean, for us, it's always uh, 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, it always fits in.

It's not this, you know, two hour long screeds that some of these people do, these talking heads. Um, and that's really the pitch. I guess the other great thing is it's all about the clips. You know, if you can get 15, 20 second 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 stuff going. John McGinley says, tight byline. Yes. Uh John is well aware of uh the sales lifestyle and be on load pitch quickly.

So uh good to see Canada represented it on board today. Um yeah, it's it's kind of you know, always be promoting, right? It's uh part of the mix. You have to keep uh 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.

Um yeah, I don't know. That's that's the basic line. I remember in the early days, and it's probably something they should make a comeback. There were pitch clips and stuff. So you instead of being a full-fledged guest 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 would say, Hey, this is the, you know, uh, I remember I remember doing this uh way back when um, you know, 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 it's not a commercial, but it's it's a marketing spot. Of course, you end it with, and 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 they're they vanish along with promos. Um, and in terms of things that work well for other podcasts, you really can't you can't be handing somebody else up the the clip and saying, here, I did all the work for you. 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 I 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 and what happens, you know.

I the the big question is are you aligned with the right people or are you just cannibalizing the audience? You know, that's the the real question. And I like I said, the verdict's not in on it yet. Exactly. Um, and then of course you have syndication, and this is how where you can put your show everywhere.

Um, so if you have if your show is big enough and it warrants it and you know your audience wants it, um, put it together as an Alexa skill, but it is a Google home action in your podcast uh service like Libson, set up feeds to push it to every network that is available. Um, submit it to podcast directories. There are plenty of those. Make sure that you have RSS to email set up on your site 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 would you think would be kind of obvious, but it 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 shows. You want to dig into that a bit?

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. Um 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 list. 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 the way it works. Um, yeah, on 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. Um, but yeah, back you know, 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 Libston and click the boxes and you're good to go. So take advantage of that with your hosting. 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. Um, if you can buy uh Spotify, for example, offers self-serve.

I mean, there's no easier, more obvious audio audience to target than Spotify, right? Um, a, it's got podcasts on there already, B, the self-service advertising system has relatively low minimums. I believe it's like $500 is their minimum. So it's not like they're asking you for you know $50,000 to do a major campaign. If you can scrape together $500 to market your show, um, it's a great place to do that.

There's uh DSP based advertising systems. So these are essentially big ad networks. Uh, we use one called Stack Adapt. Um, but there's there's you know, there's a gazillion and a half different ones. Look for uh 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 advertising apps that match your audience.

So if you are an industrial, you know, concrete uh company, look for you know, construction apps that you can have your ads appear in. If you're a marketing podcast, you want to look for you know any kind of uh task management or office software that you can advertise in, super straightforward. Sponsored emails, getting into other people's newsletters. You know, that's that's a no brainer. Umsletters are are like the hot new thing again.

Uh oh, look, all of social media is a flaming garbage dumpster. So let's uh let's try this email thing. Get in my inbox. Um social networks and and make regular ad networks, so Facebook ads, Google ads, Instagram, LinkedIn, uh all those different ad services, Twitter ads, TikTok ads, YouTube ads, any any place like that. Um, 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 uh 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? Yeah, there's a a lot of fronts. I mean, the ones that really grab 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 ad and for interface and coming up with copy and doing promotions. But yeah, the goal for us has always been to you know be running these kind of uh Dennis U 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 percent of it is garbage traffic to reach the numbers.

It's much better to have okay, here's a really low bid, and we're just gonna burn that whole budget every day or every week. And yeah, you know, we could be dumping more money until 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 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 it and it's funny too, like I don't want to spill the tactics, you know, because there's a lot of things that we do that um is has been harder to experience. But one tip that I got um from AJ Wilcox, who is the man for LinkedIn advertising, is having the marketing over coffee group. Like I used to really present the fact that the marketing over coffee group had over 7,000 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 look-alike. 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 uh helping that spend be a lot more effective. So yeah, that's yeah, it's definitely one of those things that we can always do more with this.

And at some point I should just outsource it to somebody, but you know, it 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 money, and by money I mean you're willing to spend them a thousand bucks or more a month. Um, Google's performance max campaigns and Google ads are are fantastic.

They require decent, you know, four-digit budget because the machine learning that powers it needs traffic to tune itself. So it's not one of those you can't do a dollar a day on that one. But um, if you've got the cash and you and you're willing to let it ride for 90 days, so you know, budgeting three grand, it will tune, it will dial in. Um, and obviously the more money you have to throw at it, the faster it dials in because it's all again machine learning based. Um, but that's a a good way to get targeted traffic.

The other thing is like you said, the magic order is look alikes. If you have the ability to uh imp if you have already got some traffic and some listeners to your website, um, 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. Yeah, that's you know, again, it's like you're getting pre-qualified folks. You can't beat that. Exactly.

And and you're you're doing it behaviorally rather than demographically, uh, which tends to work better because you don't know um who your audience is, not really easily. Yeah, isn't that like audio people are every way, shape, and form. You know, there's no demographic um angle that where you can find those. It's just gotta be who's what's the behavior who downloads audio. Exactly.

Okay, next up, email marketing. You need to have email marketing, you need to have a newsletter. Um, so this is a couple different things. One, you need to have a sign up that fires an autoresponder so that again reminds people to where to find stuff. Ideally, it's a system that is set up that can fire uh an email every time you drop a new episode.

Again, to keep engagement high. And then have a wrap-up newsletter that summarizes, you know, maybe it's a maybe that's a monthly newsletter. Um depends on how many shows you're producing that summarizes you know what's been happening on the show that that month, you know, the the highlights. Having those those three is your your general campaigns typically is good. Um, you will want some kind of marketing automation system.

Um, if you have budget, HubSpot, if you don't have budget, Modic, the open source system, is really good. You want something uh you want a sign-up management system on your website like Gravity Forms that allows you to um do advanced caching, uh progressive profiling, et cetera. And then you need some kind of CRM to store that data for small shows, HubSpot sales CRM is really good. It's zero dollars to start, and then you know, the first paid features that are useful are at the $50 a month mark, so it's you know it's very reasonable. Um, other options would be Salesforce.com and Zoho.

I'm not a fan necessarily of either one for managing your podcast audience, um, but those are those are decent ones. And those are things that you can use to also uh acquire data that you can later on use in your ad kit when you're selling advertising yourself. But for marketing your podcast, uh, this is the way uh I have seen uh things be successful. What are we doing, John? Yeah, the email has been the key to everything.

I still give that advice to everybody, uh, 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, whatever, 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 mailworks are supporting the show, bringing 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 it, 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 it the right fit? Like you can't do anything about that. If you send a hundred people and nobody goes there and buys, you know, that's there's nothing you can do about that.

But you can show the advertiser that, hey, when you uh, you know, advertise in episodes, we're gonna get eyeballs on that and checking out the offer and passing it along. So it's huge. Yeah, the biggest challenge for me is cadence, right? Like I would love to do it weekly. I end 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. Um, and and it's tough too, because I, you know, I could do it 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 sum up the stuff that I like and I feature the episodes that I think are the best for the month. You know, it's a lot of hands-on. Um, and we're I'm using Ghost.

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. Um, but yeah, it's just it's a critical part to the come to the marketing component. And this is nothing, 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. Exactly. And for sharing the show, for marketing your podcast, email is easier to forward than someone telling their friend, oh, you should go, you know, go listen to marketing overcoffee.com, which is good advice. I mean, we're not going to say no, don't tell people about the show.

But if you're at the water cooler, the chances of the person of having forgotten that by the time they get back to the desk is pretty high. Uh, if you are sending out emails that can be forwarded, it's an easy win. All right, let's talk about events. Events are um a a very, very strong way to promote a podcast. So uh this is everything from you know attending conferences to having maybe even a booth at a conference, uh, a podcast uh speaking tour.

Uh a number of have shows have done this. Welcome to Night Vale, which is granted a fiction podcast. Um, does performances of their show, live performances, they move around as a as a traveling tour. There are private dinners, there's speaking on stage about your podcast. There's the you know, trade show booths, uh being at other people's booths, especially.

Um, I have seen a lot of companies do be very successful having sort of a podcast sort of setup at another company's trade show booth. And you you can they interview people live, and of course, all the virtual events. So, what of the event stuff do you like, John? And what are the stuff that is is just people absolutely have to do? 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 it we're pretty much a fixture at inbound. You know, we usually pick a night, and same thing with Marketing Cross B2B, where it's like, okay, Thursday night, this is if you're a friend of the show, come, we're gonna grab, 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. Um, yeah, we actually have many times have reversed it too with sponsors.

You know, if you sponsor the show and you have an event coming up this quarter, like we've got uh 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've got more content too. And the whole time you're promoting the fact that, hey, you're at this sponsor's event. So that's you know, huge too. And then yeah, I've, you know, we've always we have tried maybe three or four times now to do our own thing and try and get it off the ground.

And I just, you know, 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. Um, and so yeah, I can see I don't know, I've worked around in 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 Milman, Seth Godin, David Merman Scott in one shot, you could do that kind of thing. And it's, you know, just a matter of making that work and 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 Q3 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 far as the fact that you're affiliated with these kinds of shows. 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 that 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 Dream Force, you you know, reserve your Airbnb eight months in advance and stuff. Travel out there the month before that to your Airbnb and things, and and you camp out and you get and you do um your evenings of of you know post-show stuff with the with the crowd you want to impress.

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 way better way to uh get as much content done in a short period of time for the easy money. Exactly. And you may actually get to the point where that is your business.

Um John Furrier and the Cube. I mean, that's that's the thing that they do is they just record all the time at all these different tech conferences, and they you know, they post these, you know, it's it's all pro grade audio and video and stuff. They look great, it looks very official as the official media partner for all these shows. I don't know if anyone after ever actually watches those videos, um, but it looks good. Well, isn't it it's amazing?

We talk about this all the time. So many of these events, they go and they film everything, and then the day after the show's over, the stuff never goes anywhere. It's like 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 and I 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.

They just don't do anything with it. And it's like 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'll become the official uh media partner of the show. We'll produce the audio from the sessions and drop them, but we'll drop them on our show uh as well.

And uh and and then you get to to uh work very closely with the event and its registration list. Yeah, right. Exactly. Get access to that audience. And uh yeah, you know, you'd think it was a no-brainer, but again, it's I guess 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.

Exactly. So I mean the easy win there is if you can take things off the event planners list, they will they will do whatever you want. Yes, that's a quick way to earn a friend, definitely. Exactly. Um, and then finally, social media.

So uh you've your your social media for one thing you need a content distribution strategy, which is a framework and a schedule. Uh to use good social media management software, right? So we did uh a live stream a few weeks ago on the the bake off. Um, go check that out over on the Trust Insights YouTube channel because we talked through what is it, Sprout Social Sprinkler, Hoot Suite. I I don't even remember what what all of them were, but um 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 the show exists. Um, you want uh you know landing pages set up in places, and then based on the social network, um put up content. Um, so there's all these different places Facebook, you know, groups, face uh your stories, Instagram reels and stories, LinkedIn. Uh if you have a mobile app uh or there's a mobile app you can integrate with, put that out there, put stuff on Twitter. Um you want to have stuff on your YouTube channel, you want to have YouTube shorts, TikTok uh stuff.

Again, this is where that we mentioned earlier, Adobe Express is super helpful because it can do uh uh content transformation into a variety of different things. And this is one where particularly if you work at a 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 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, change the speed of this video, make an Instagram story, and you know 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. Um, but that's you know, for social media, this is the stuff to do.

And I cannot emphasize enough, you would need some kind of community mechanism, ideally something that has no AI in the way. So that means Slack or Discord would be uh the two suggestions. And if I was starting over from scratch today, I would pick Discord. Um right now, our community is uh analytics for marketers is on Slack. Um it's gonna stay there probably for the foreseeable future because it's a well-established community, it's really hard to move people around.

But if I was starting from scratch, I would start with Discord today. Yeah, isn't it? To have a social network where you're not worried about the algorithm choice choking you or chasing you is ridiculous. Um, I'm gonna give out a plug for Adobe Express 2 on iOS. The phone app is also good.

If you're on site and doing stuff, you can get a lot of things done. Um, and yeah, as far as regular social and their garbage algorithms, uh, Chris and I are going to be doing tag team match against Zuckerberg and Musk. I don't know if you know they're gonna fight. So we're gonna jump in on that. Um come buy your tickets now.

I have so much to say about it, but this live stream is not the place for that. Uh maybe we can cover that on the next episode of marketing over coffee. Excellent. Watching billionaires fight. Um so that is the map of all the tactics and stuff.

And you know, it's funny. Uh 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. Um, because you want to talk through real quick the bullseye framework about what to do with the ridiculous list of tactics. Yeah, and it's a 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. Um, yeah, bullseye is interesting.

There's a whole bunch of stuff. We can have a link to past interviews with um uh uh Weinberg and Mayors, 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 spend all their time on the content and they just never end up getting noticed. And then the other part of the bullseye framework is uh 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. Yeah, 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 uh 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 gonna 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, um, and 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 um, you know, you'll reach a point where you'll give up on one or two of them and you just rotate a new one in to test, but just keep that cadence of you know, do what's working, evolve, and then rotate out the crummy ones. And that at least will give you a map to go forward. 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. Um I can't count the number of podcasts that I listened to that I found on YouTube first, like Huberman Lab, for example.

Um, the YouTube is the place. I would absolutely 100% uh build an email list. Second, right? That is non-negotiable to me. If you're not doing email, I I think you're doing it wrong.

And then 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 would be my three things. What are your three things? If you were starting out, you use just only three, which three would you go with? Yeah, well, for you know, we have to go with existing infrastructure, like email newsletter.

That's I agree with you. That's 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. Um, and then you know, I don't know, advertising is one that it's worth trying just to get access to fresh um content, you know, 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 short list for me uh as far as what we got. Yep. So we covered a lot of tactics today.

Um, and as John has mentioned several times, um, you know, you want to have some data to back stuff up. So on the next episode in this series, we're gonna talk about measuring your podcast marketing, not measuring your podcast, but measuring the marketing of your podcast to see what's working. We're gonna cover um things like Google Analytics, your podcast analytics and stuff like that to get a sense of are you are you getting the job done? Because I believe Katie's got another week of chasing after unicorns in the the enchanted forest. All right, yeah, we'll see if we can make it another week without burning the place down.

Uh we'll see. All right, so uh 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 trustInsights.ai/slash T I podcast and our 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.