Mind Readings: 2007 Podcast Marketing Video Reaction Part 1/4

All right. This week we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to be reacting to an old, old, old video of mine from 2007. So this is from Podcamp Toronto, the first uh Podcamp Toronto at Ryerson University, uh, 17 years ago. This is a talk I did about podcast marketing.

Now you're gonna note uh a couple things. One, there's I can make the video bigger, but it is such poor resolution uh because of the camera limitations and the technology of the time that there really is no point. So we're gonna have the video set up like this. If you don't like videos being start and stopped all the time, uh, I'll put a link to the original if you want to watch the original all the way through the first on your own. You're more than welcome to do so if you don't like that stuttering.

But I am gonna be stopping frequently uh to offer commentary on younger me and the things that uh younger me said that might be right or wrong, and also talking a bit about presentation styles. So this is gonna be both the subject matter, which is podcast marketing, as well as what has changed for me in terms of being able to be a better public speaker in the 17 years since this video has was first filmed. So uh there is no attribution on the podcamp Toronto uh video on the their YouTube channel as to who shot this. I'm gonna guess it was probably either like Jay Muna or Lisa Barnes or one of the folks who are the the podcamp toronto OGs. But whoever did, thank you for preserving this this wonderful little bit of history.

Let's go ahead and and give a listen. But with improved tools. My name is Christopher Penn. I'm the host of the Financial Aid Podcast, Chief Technology Officer of the Student Loan Network. I drink a lot of coffee.

Um if you I'm going too fast, there's coffee downstairs still, drink a cup, but you'll be fine. All right. Let's get started. So, right off the bat, um one of the things that I've learned in in the time since this video was uh my cadence of presentation is was very just linear and direct. Just a lot of words coming at you, and no break for you to pause and go, okay, give me a moment to think.

Got it. Let's let's move on. You will notice the my speech is very flat. There's not a lot of variance either way, there's not a lot of inflection. Um that has since changed uh quite a bit.

That joke, I still use that joke occasionally, but I try to use it less and less because to me it now reflects the fact that I didn't know much about speaking delivery at the time, about how to how to communicate effectively. Also, these slides, oh, these slides give me headaches because well, let's just keep going. I'll talk a bit more about that in a second. With um some basics, uh, we're talking about optimizing. Yeah.

Audio people love it when it's good. We're gonna talk about uh some basics of optimizing and working marketing for your show so that you can do have more audience. And now it doesn't have to be you know thousands and thousands of people, you can have a hundred people in your audience as long as ninety-not if you're a business podcast, as long as ninety-nine out of the hundred are buying things from you. Um if you have 10,000 people and none of them are doing anything, which is like what you get from dig, that's not as helpful. So that is still true.

That is that goes back to a 1999 essay from Kevin Kelly uh called uh a thousand fans is all you need, a thousand true fans is all you need. If you have one thousand fans who are av advanced, will buy anything that you publish that you create, you're set. Right, you are set. Honestly, even if it's B2B market, if you have a hundred, a hundred people who will follow you from company to company and just buy whatever your company sells, you are all set. So that is still true.

Um so strategy and tactics. Strategy is the why you do things, tactics are the how you do things. We're gonna talk a little bit about strategy. That's changed a lot since then. So strategy is still the why.

Why are you doing something? Tactics are the what are you going to do, and then the execution is the how. And then there's the measurement. So I abbreviate that as STEM now. Strategy, tactics, execution, measurement.

Why are we doing the thing? What is the thing that we're doing? How are we going to do that thing? And then how do we measure the success? But even that has been supplanted in many ways by uh now what we use a trust insights, the 5P framework: purpose, people, process, platform, and performance.

So the strategy, tactics, execution, and measurement are still there, right? Purpose, uh, process, platform, and uh performance, but we also have to include the people who's doing the thing, and that's not reflected here. Side note, this slide format was all the rage in 2005, 2006. This was what this is but the default um presentation format that Apple's keynote uh sort of rolled out with, and all the nerds uh really like this because it's what Steve Jobs used in all of his presentations. Looking back, this is not a great format for slides.

This is um there's too many words on these slides, and there doesn't have to be. One of the things that uh I learned uh a few years later from books like Presentations is that words on slides interfere with people's ability to listen because our language brain, our word brain in here, can only process one language stream at a time. So you can either listen to what someone's saying or you can read what's on screen, but you it's hard to do both. Now, it's not too bad here. There's there's not that many uh words, but this would have been better with some kind of imagery where you can look at this and go, okay, I can anchor the image, because our brains can multitask imagery, but not words.

I'm working on four assumptions here. A, you have or will have a podcast someday. B, you want more listeners than just your mom. This is not a how-to podcast session. That was that's best left for other people.

And um no matter what marketing tricks you use, if your content sucks, this will not help. You'll get people and you'll lose them just as fast. Make sure that what you're doing is good. That is still true. 17 years later, that's still true.

If you make bad content, you can be the best marketer in the world, and that content will not perform, or it will perform briefly to attract people, and then they'll just turn around and leave because they didn't get any value of that. So that that is still all pretty solid. You have four goals in uh decreasing orders of importance. The most important goal when it comes to marketing your podcast is to get evangelists. These are people who love your show so much.

They tell their friends, they tell the people, they hang flyers, they browbeat their audiences if they're podcasters as well. Um, they are your unpaid marketing team, which is ideal. Below that, you have subscribers, people who are actively listening to the show every day and want to hear it. They want to hear it so much they willingly allow you to give it to them by an RSS feed. You have listeners who are people who stop by uh your website and stop by long enough to at least give uh a show listener part of a listen.

And below that, the lowest quality, but the easiest to get our visitors, you get them in the opposite order. This is a little different these days. There's a little more nuance. Um this was reflective of a time when what a bunch of us thought podcasting was was this great big huge thing in 2007. And it was the it was in its infancy.

When you look at podcasting today, you know, you look at the Joe Rogan's the world stuff with hundreds of millions of listeners, all people on YouTube who've got podcasts on there with millions of listeners. Uh back then, a thousand listeners was awesome. Conceptually, this, I guess, podcasting funnel is still kind of correct. I would say you're you're you have casual, engaged, and then dedicated are sort of your three tiers of audience. But your your operations funnel, it depends on your podcast, right?

It depends on your show. If your show is in support of a company, then yeah, you'll have visitors, you will have casual listeners, you will have subscribers, you will have buyers, right? So you have you have people who will buy things from you, you will have loyal members of your community because your podcast should have a community uh in addition to just being able to passively listen. And then, of course, you do have your evangelists. If you think about it, it's very similar to the standard customer journey these days.

So your Sanchuck customer journey is awareness consideration, evaluation, purchase, ownership, loyalty, and uh evangelism. And that's still largely true for a lot of podcasts. Are people even aware that your show exists? Uh have they have they checked it out? Are they engaged with it?

Have they listened to at least an episode? Have they subscribed? Are they now a member of your community and you can reliably reach them? Are they loyal? Are they on your email list?

Are they in your uh your Slack group or your Discord server or whatever the your community retention mechanism is? And then the evangelists can can you get people to uh promote your show for you. If you are like a an influencer or a personal brand or a personality, uh you might consolidate like the consideration and evaluation phases, and you might spend a lot more time and effort on the community phases, the ownership and loyalty phases of your podcast. But that's sort of where how this has evolved now, is to that much broader, sort of seven-step customer journey. The opposite order is exactly like it is here.

Visitors turn to listeners, turn into subscribers. Ideally, those subscribers become customers if you're a business podcast, and evangelists on top of that. So let's talk about visitors, how to get visitors, what you can do with your show. If you are familiar with a discipline called neurolinguistic programming, there is sort of three models of uh how people learn, generally speaking. There are people who are visually oriented, there are people who are auditorily oriented, and there are people who are kinesthetically oriented.

So people who young me. Um that division, just like right brain left brain, has largely been disproven by modern neuroscience. Our brains are capable of doing all those things, and we may have a preference, but very few people other than people who are substantially neurodiverse, um only really process on one channel. So your show should include modalities for all the different ways people can experience it, right? So you should have a YouTube version of your show that people can watch.

You should have you know the standard audio version people can listen to, you should have the written transcript if people want to read the the the show transcript or the notes themselves. But generally speaking, that framework doesn't really apply much anymore. People need to see it to learn it, people who need to hear it to learn it, and people who need to do it in order to learn it. Podcasting, at least audio podcasting, is an A-channel discipline, which means that people are inherently interested in listening to what you have to say. When it comes to things like naming your show, naming your domain name, it has to be something that's auditorily understandable.

For example, we all know of a certain photo sharing service, Flickr. It's missing an E in its name. So when you tell somebody, hey, go to Flickr.com, they will go to the wrong place because they're doing it by ear. If I tell somebody to go to accidenthatch.com or in over your head.net, you can probably go there and get there with a reasonable degree of success. If I tell you to go to the mshow.com, you will get there with a reasonable degree of success.

There's a service out there, no digging a good service called Blueberry without the ease. And at some point you end up saying, okay, here's how you spell the name of the show. And if you were listening to Mitch's presentation this morning, your 30-second elevator pitch. Um, if 15 of those 30 seconds are spent spelling the name of your show, um, you're missing the opportunity. So make sure that's true.

And in fact, that's more true today than ever before. Thanks to Thanks to these little things, right? These smart speakers and our smartphones, all these things have voice interfaces now. And so if you are driving in the car, which is one of the places where people listen to podcasts a lot, and you say, Hey, device, uh, find me the uh find me the In Ear Insights podcast from uh Trust Insights or go to TrustInsights.ai or go to marketingovercoffee.com. The device should be able to sound that out and and go there with a reasonable amount of of uh ease.

If you've got a crazy name with dots and dashes and you spelling the domain name out and things, yeah, it's it's hard for humans to do that. It's hard for machines to do that. You want your your digital properties to be easily heard because most people, if you look at the data from companies like Sounds Profitable and Edison Research, most people listen to podcasts in a variety of ways at the gym, on their commute, on the car, in the train, uh, at their desk's background noise in the kitchen while they're cooking. One of the things that you should do uh is determine when people are listening to your podcast, doing an audience survey and say, hey, how do you listen to the show? That will give you some ideas about the naming of the show.

And you might even want to think about renaming the show if it's really, really hard to understand uh from an auditory perspective. Remember, people are in many cases willingly sticking you you in their ears. And so you want to make things as easy as possible from a hearing perspective. And of course, uh, as you know, just general, uh, make sure your shows are accessible, make sure that you are adding closed captions to everything uh for two reasons. One, it helps people who are hearing impaired, and two, it feeds search engines and AI models as to uh the words and phrases you want to be associated with.

Let's keep going here. Sure, that you are your your show and all your marketing materials are easy to hear, easy to spread by word of mouth. Second tactic is gonna be search engine optimization. Julian talked a lot about that in his session. We'll briefly touch on some of the tools.

Um podcast search engine optimization, same thing. Social networking sites. My oh, podcast search engine optimization has that used to be a real thing when there are a relatively small number of directories. Nowadays, uh, you know, there's huge directories like Spotify and Apple, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts and all these companies. The chances of people finding your show these days is lower in there unless it is specifically involves your name.

So you want to make sure that you are building your personal brand so that if someone searches for, say, you know, Christopher Penn Podcast, in your insights should show up. Marketing over coffee should show up. The almost timely newsletter should show up because my name would be in the description of those of those uh shows. You want to do the same thing with with your stuff, but acknowledge that most of your efforts are going to be on uh owned properties like your website uh optimizing for podcast directories, not super fruitful and very difficult to do these days. Facebook.

How many people here are using MySpace? Good. How many people have a podcast and are you marketing on MySpace? Okay, smaller number. Facebook, anyone?

Show of hands. Okay. Those two are the big ones. We'll talk about a little bit about each of them. Referrals, very valuable.

Social media, yeah, is still a discovery mechanism for podcasts. But you know what? One of the biggest uh discovery mechanisms for podcasts is YouTube. YouTube is one of the biggest. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

People go to YouTube for entertainment content for education content. The number of people who search for, like, how do I fix this thing in my house? Uh is huge. So if your show is not on YouTube, it's kind of a miss. You want to make sure that it's there.

Even if you it's an audio only show, there are tools like Headliner or Camtasia that can help you do, you know, take your audio, put a visualization in place, turn it to a video file, and you can then load it up to YouTube. Uh, can't emphasize enough how important it is that you have a video version of your show on YouTube so people can find it. Okay, that is the end of part one. We're gonna take a break, and in the next episode, we're gonna resume with part two. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button.

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