A Process for B2B Podcasting Teams
Podcasting is becoming more and more attractive and effective to content marketers. But it’s by no means easy to do.
In this episode of Expert Marketing Matters, Chris, Mark, and Lauren discuss how to establish a podcast program within your firm, covering everything from positioning your podcast to planning episodes, choosing the right equipment, setting up your recording studio, recording, editing, and promoting your shows…
You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.
Episode Transcript
Chris: Welcome to Expert Marketing Matters. I’m Chris Butler.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Siler.
Mark: And I’m Mark O’Brien.
Chris: I was just really distracted by Mark’s clapping, which is how we do the slate now. That’s how we actually keep this thing in sync. Welcome back, you guys.
Lauren: Yeah. Happy New Year.
Chris: Happy New Year to you as well. Happy New Year to all of you out there. This is the second episode of the new year.
Lauren: Although it’s technically our first recording inside of the new year.
Chris: That’s true. That is true. We ended somewhat with a cliff hanger in our last conversation. We were talking so much about podcasts and it was obvious that the next step was to talk about how to do a podcast.
Lauren: Right.
Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris: Which is something we’ve learned quite a lot about over the last year. We started as green, totally unfamiliar with how to do this. Just knew that we liked podcasts and we wanted to do it for ourselves. So we want to at least share what we’ve learned over the last year. So you and I were talking and you had a really nice breakdown of how you thought we should frame the conversation.
Lauren: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. As we’ve grown the two podcasts here, I think the things that we’ve learned kind of fall into three main buckets. The first has to do with the overall production of a podcast and this sort of tech management and tech setup side of it. That’s probably what I ask the most questions about. So I figured we can start there. Then there’s the bucket of the content itself, the content development of it, the whole branding of it, and the formatting of the podcast. Then there’s what happens after you’ve recorded. How are you managing the feed and how are you marketing this thing, how are you measuring its authenticity. So I think those three buckets are probably the primary ways to think about this, and we can jump first into that production world.
So the whole tech management and tech setup side of it. I think what I would throw out there is even though people seem really, really curious about this because they’re curious how to pull off a podcast and how to make it accessible given their setup internally. It almost feels like it’s where I’d want to spend the least amount of time just because there’s so much more … It’s so much more important to think about the formatting, the content of itself, and there’s so many choices when it comes to the tech setup of how you do a podcast.
Chris: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right about that. We’ve evolved our setup quite a lot over the last year. But it’s interesting, I remember talking to a client a few years ago who wanted to start a podcast and was deliberating for like a year what tech to buy. At that time we hadn’t done one yet, but I remember looking at it for myself because I was interested, and what I was doing was I was trying to find out online what the setup was for every podcast I listen to. It was amazing because it was all over the map. Some of them were what you’d imagine a radio program would have. Lots of racks of stuff and a fully enclosed, sonically controlled environment. The whole deal. Some of them were a guy wearing a crummy USB headset and his laptop. What was amazing to me is that the quality variants was not as drastic as I would’ve guessed given the setup. I think what the lesson is there is you can do a lot with a little.
Mark: Right.
Chris: So let’s share what we have and what we’ve started with and what we have now.
Lauren: I think a journey of how it’s evolved really proves that point.
Chris: Yeah. What we think is essential because there are some things that I think are essential technologically. But the proviso here is I think if you’re considering doing this, don’t try and build the perfect studio first. Take our recommendation, which is we started with a setup we knew was not quite there yet, but we valued the quick start.
Mark: Right.
Chris: We knew that that wasn’t going to be it. We changed. But we didn’t wait for perfection. So what did we start with?
Mark: We start with you doing a bunch of research. It’s funny, I just a half hour ago, an hour ago now had a call with one of our clients out of Charlotte because they want to get into podcasting because now we’re podcasting evangelists because the results we’ve seen. Right?
Chris: Yep.
Mark: And given the 20 minute everything, all the stuff. What struck me as I was doing that is really how little we’ve spent. As you’ve mentioned, yes, you can get racks of gear. Any single unit inside of that rack could be $2,000 easily.
Chris: Easily.
Lauren: Easily. Yeah.
Mark: You want to get like hardware compressors and all the rest. We’ve got these three Shure SM 58 microphones, which are $100 a piece. These basic windscreens. Basic stand. XLR cords, which all together are maybe $80 total. Then we found a Tascam four channel AD converter.
Chris: Exactly.
Mark: That we plug into. That was $100, right?
Chris: Right.
Mark: Yeah. Then we got Logic, which is $200. Then we got the acoustic panels, which are pretty standard, what, 2×2 black, rigid acoustic panels. You can get them on Amazon. That was probably $100 acoustic panels that you tacked into your wall, right.
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mark: Just to get rid of the flat services.
Chris: Right.
Mark: We spent less than $500 all in.
Chris: Yeah. Although, it’s probably a little bit more than that when you factor in Logic Pro and the lights that are there.
Mark: Yeah. I was factoring Logic with that.
Chris: Oh, you were?
Mark: Yeah, it’s close. It’s around there. Lights were $100.
Lauren: I mean, the lights are an example of something that’s really optional, right? Because it has to do more with the video setup of putting this on YouTube than actually getting the audio recording in place.
Chris: Right. So the first episode we ever recorded we used a Yeti, a blue Yeti microphone, which actually if you Google ‘best podcast mic’, it comes up over and over again. We had really poor results with it.
Mark: Yeah. It wasn’t great.
Lauren: It’s a function of where we were recording too.
Chris: Yeah. It had to do with the fact that we had a million hard surfaces around that mic. So it picks up. It’s great for what we were using it for up until then, which was talking to people over the internet.
Mark: I don’t know. We’ve always been kind of unhappy with those things.
Chris: That’s fair.
Mark: We spent a lot of money on those. Each of those like $200. Just one of those. These Shures are so much better for what we’re doing.
Lauren: They can be functional for conference calls, but they were really not working for us really at all for the podcasting side of things.
Chris: What’s appealing about them is that it’s this microphone with a USB cord. You can plug it right into.
Mark: The USB.
Chris: With these, they’re cheap, but you have to get the XLR cable, you have to run it into some kind of audio converter, you have to run that into your computer. That being said, if you want to do multiple people on a podcast, you still need that interface. Most computers don’t have a way for you to run a bunch of mics into them at the same time. If it’s a USB mic, you might be able to do that.
But then the other thing I was going to mention is that we use Logic now, which has been great because prior to that we were using Garage Band, which is great too. I’ll mention this a little bit later, but I use Garage Band for my own podcast. But the reason that Logic has been good is because prior to using Logic, what would have to do is take all those channels, each individual track, which we have split between the three of us, and I would go in and edit out all the silences because we’d be picking each other up. With Logic, we have better filtering and I don’t have to do any of that. So literally we get the recording after we’re done talking here and all I have to do is put the extra sound on it, like the intro track and the break.
So I think when you’re thinking about production, there was a lot of labor involved for this type of podcast when it came to editing because of our setup, which I’m glad to not have to do anymore.
Lauren: So much of that has to with where you’re recording as well.
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lauren: I think we spent probably as much time trying to figure out where our studio was going to be and how it was going to be setup as we did researching what equipment we were goin to be using.
Chris: Absolutely.
Mark: Definitely.
Chris: That’s evolved. We’ve done pretty well with that given the acoustic paneling the seclusion of the two. We only have two offices that are secluded for this and we’ve used both of them at this point.
Lauren: But the very first one was in one of our conference rooms.
Chris: Right, which is quite bad. Sonically quite bad.
Lauren: Yeah.
Mark: We heard about it.
Lauren: We did.
Chris: Here’s the thing though, we heard about it once directly.
Mark: Thanks, Grant. Thanks a lot, Grant.
Chris: But I’m glad because it gave us an opportunity to say, “Hey, we know. This isn’t the way it’s going to end.” I think that that’s important because, again, we do value the quick start. Any client who would ask me about it or the two of you, we would say, “Look, just start now and let it get better.”
Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely.
Chris: Every podcast I’ve ever listened to has started and allowed to get better. None of them come out perfect day one.
Lauren: It’s so true. That’s a theme across content marketing generally that it’s really easy to become too precious with whatever content you’re putting together and let that be an impediment to publishing it in the first place. Podcasts are no different.
Chris: Right. So I guess just to put a cap on it, get a decent enough microphone, one that you’re comfortable with that will work well with your space. Figure out how you’re going to edit it. Garage Band is free if you have a Mac. That’s probably fine to start with. Eventually Logic might afford you some things, especially if you have this style of podcast where it’s conversational and people talking over each other and just natural. You’ll need an interface eventually. Those are cheap. Buy it used. Honestly, with that kind of equipment, you don’t need to buy it new. I probably wouldn’t buy a used mic like this because a lot of Shure’s have been used on stage. Chances of it being dropped or not so great are high, honestly, they’re $100 new. So there’s no reason to buy used.
Mark: Buy a new one. It’s pretty cheap. Put your money all in. If you do get Logic and you are just in those plug-ins it’s the compression, the expansion, and the limiter. Those three together just get rid of all the white noise on each channel like in real time, which is really nice. The plug-ins are free. It’s great. So yeah, that’s the tech setup.
Lauren: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris: But let’s move on to a more interesting subject. I think we can spend a lot about, which is like how do you figure out what this podcast is for and about.
Lauren: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We’ve had two different approaches to this because when we were putting together Expert Marketing Matters, it was sort of we had a general structure. Actually, did we at first or did we just have topics then we eventually put the structure …
Chris: Yeah. We started just with topics, just ideas, and they were shorter. They were like 15 minutes.
Lauren: Yeah. Then eventually we evolved our process and planning and kind of figured out what types of things we wanted to talk about and what the structure was going to be. When we decided to launch Consider This, the content marketing podcast, because we already had the experience of launching and sustaining Expert Marketing Matters, that process of deciding the format was a little bit more structured and sort of planned more in advance because we kind of already had some of the foundation in place, and we had the luxury of time to kind of figure that out.
So I think before you start recording, one of the things to figure out, one is the format itself of how it’s going to be and what the style of the content is going to be. Because to your point earlier, there’s what we do, which is more conversational, but there’s certainly other approaches to communicating via podcast that aren’t just a few people sitting down and kind of riffing in front of a mic.
Chris: Right. We had some experience prior to doing the podcast. We were doing these casual Friday videos where we’d just like come up with the idea five minutes before we’d sit down and talk. That’s basically the approach we took here. We’ve now gotten a little bit more serious with more prep and thinking about the topics in advance. But we always knew that the format would be as natural to what we do without the mics as it could be. So this conversation, the way that we interact, it’s not any different than we would interact if we were in a conference room talking about something in the future. But there are other podcasts in this space that are principally interview based. So every single episode you’re interviewing somebody. That could be a great format for somebody. But depending on if that person can be physically accessible to you, that might open the door to more technological issues like are you Skyping them in, how are you capturing that audio, and that’s all doable. But if you want the most control and the least amount of stress, this is probably a great format for our type of podcast.
Mark: I agree completely. The interview format can work but it adds a lot of complexity, as you mentioned. The advice I just gave the speaking with a little bit ago was just think about dropping a mic into your conference room and just try to get as close as you can to capturing what a normal conversation between those people involved in the podcast would actually look like.
Lauren: Right.
Mark: The more you can recreate that and everyone’s being themselves, the more it’s going to resonate.
Lauren: That takes practice.
Chris: It does.
Mark: Yeah. That’s what I said. It’s hard to be yourself.
Lauren: It is. Yeah. Because it’s kind of counter intuitive. It’s funny, all you’re saying is just do what you normally do. You’re just record that. But it’s funny how turning on the recording equipment can place this layer of artificiality in front of it.
Chris: Yeah. We’ve seen that internally. I think anyone who’s in this space who consultants their clients, who offers expertise, they go through that. Podcasts are not. You’re thinking, “Okay. I’m on the phone with somebody. Is this me or this my consulting personality?” Narrowing that gap between what I think the person needs to here and who I need to be for them, and who I am. That’s the gap you narrow in any aspect of this professional life.
Mark: Yeah. Right. Right.
Chris: If you’re trying to do it authentically and not carry the burden of it, same with public speaking, same with having a phone call with a client, same with talking to a colleague, same with recording it and putting it out there in the world. But I do think this has been great for our space because it does model the client’s experience and our own internal as well.
Lauren: Yeah. When you’re thinking about how to arrive at that result, I do think you have to take your own team’s communication styles into consideration.
Chris: True.
Lauren: Because I would say when we think about communication styles, the three of us are naturally inclined to be more presenter. We’re comfortable on a stage, we’re comfortable sort of improving in front of a group or not, and that’s really comfortable for us. So we don’t need to sit down and maybe map out every single point that’s going to be said. But for some people, they do. You need extra planning sessions. You need extra time just to map out how the flow of the conversation will go. Not that you need to map out every single point, but that’s going to make some people who are going to be participating in the podcast a little bit more comfortable and able to arrive at what their true self would actually sound like, as long as you’re building in that prep time in advance.
Chris: That’s right. I think in regard to other formats, many of us listen to other types of podcasts, and many of the people listening to this do as well. I think if you’re in the marketing space or in the expertise brokering space, the goal here is not to make your version of radio lab.
Mark: Right.
Chris: I think we all can intuit. You may not know factually but there is like 50 people behind that podcast and salaries and full time spent and R&D and journalism. It is a program. A lot of money gets sunk into it and that’s why it sounds great. At the beginning there were fewer people, but it still wasn’t just the two voices that you heard on the radio back in 2006. Also, they’re creating entertainment, fundamentally.
Mark: Right.
Chris: We’re not really doing that here. We have one foot in entertainment space because we know that this information is going to get consumed probably outside of business hours, for the most part. That’s the pro of doing podcasting as a piece of content marketing is that now we get to reach into somebody’s discretionary time, they’re driving to work or at the gym or on the plane. That’s great. It also relieves them to having to look at a screen and read words. So it has to be entertaining, it has to be engaging, but it also has to be true to the context. We’re not trying to impress people here with technology. We’re trying to get them the least amount of barrier between them and us. Right?
Mark: Yeah. Just disseminating expertise just like with any other content platform.
Chris: Right. So I think if you got an idea about format, I would strip it down. Whatever you’re thinking, strip it down.
Mark: That’s great advice. One of the reasons we had our format, which we started by talking about what we’re each excited about. Then we’re to get into the topic itself. Then we each recommend something at the end. One of the reasons why I started to feel uncomfortable with that was because there were some podcasts where we’re spending as much time on the intro and outro as we were the content.
Chris: Correct.
Lauren: Yeah.
Mark: That became difficult, especially as we got more comfortable and we all started having a lot more to say about the content because it just end up becoming like a normal conversation.
Chris: Right.
Lauren: Yeah. But what I think what you’re raising is an interesting point that whatever you think you’re going to do when you get involved with this, it’s going to evolve. It’s going to change. You’re going to learn things by doing it, and you’re going to change your mind. You’re going to develop new opinions, and you’re going to hear feedback from listeners, and all of those things are going to inform how you continue to record and how you continue the initiative overall. So not to be too wedded to whatever your vision for this is going to be because it’s going to evolve based on what you’ve learned. That’s just part of it.
Chris: Especially if you’re working with other people. I have my own podcast and I get to decide everything about it. It probably will change less radically as a result, but working with you two, this things I going to become something else. That’s sort of what’s great about it.
So we’ve got more to say about what happens after and how to manage it, but let’s take a short break and we’ll talk about what happens after you’ve made your podcast and recorded them.
Lauren: Sounds good.
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Expert Marketing Matters, a podcast about generating ideal new business opportunities by creating and nurturing digital marketing systems and habits that have a measurable impact on your bottom line.
This podcast is brought to you by Newfangled, a digital marketing consultancy focused on empowering experts to do better digital marketing. You can learn more about Newfangled’s digital marketing method at NewFangled.com.
Chris: Hi, welcome back. So I remember, Lauren, when you created Consider This. You had everything ready to go, and you had gotten your marketing emails ready to go, had the date, and then realized that oh, we hadn’t submitted it yet to iTunes and it takes a little while.
Lauren: Right.
Chris: Once you submit the feed to iTunes. That clued me in that oh, yeah, there’s always a gotcha. There’s always a little detail about once you’ve got the whole production down, but now in order to get it the world, somebody else is in control and you have to factor that in. So let’s talk about where do the files live, what tools are available, how do we get it so that it can be on somebody’s phone.
Lauren: I think it’d be interesting to talk about our own journey with this as well.
Chris: Yeah.
Lauren: So when we launched Expert Marketing Matters, we were not hosting the feed on Lipsum. We were hosting it where?
Chris: On our website, actually.
Lauren: Just on the site.
Chris: Yeah. Many people do that. Basically all you need for a podcast to show up on somebody’s phone is an RSS feed. It needs to be formatted particularly for iTunes. iTunes basically rules the structure of this because they were really the first to the table. Stitcher could maybe claim that, but in terms of getting that to the broader base if you want people to get it. So what you do is you figure out what the structure needs to be. You can create your own feed. You don’t need anybody else to do that, but we learned about Lipsum through David Baker. Lipsum is really attractive because they deal with all that stuff. They pre-formatted it. They make it really easy. It’s basically a CMS on top of that format. They also take care of the reporting, which is something we didn’t have any of. We had no insight.
Lauren: I think that’s really important. That was an important consideration for us because … It’s still a little tricky. There’s still metrics and analytics out there regarding reporting for podcasting that I want to know about our two shoes that we don’t get through Lipsum, but we get a little bit more information. They’re just kind of difficult to track.
Chris: They are. I think the fundamental problem has been that because you’re subscribing to an RSS feed, every time the RSS feed gets pinged is only when there’s a new thing to be offered, or when that person’s requesting something. So don’t really get a sense of, a tangible sense of the overall subscriber base. How many tools out there have hooked into that RSS feed? That’s the subscriber. What you do know is downloads and the trouble with that is that initially they weren’t very good at saying, “Well, what if Mark downloaded it six times? Is that six downloads? Is that the same as six different people downloading it?” We know qualitatively it’s not. But that’s the system though, it’s different. They’re getting better. Actually, Apple iTunes podcasts released a whole new suite in beta of reporting and one thing that’s attractive about that is that they’re showing how long someone made it through a podcast.
Lauren: That’s what I’m interested in understanding. Yeah, that’s been the biggest piece of data that I’ve been missing from our reporting so far. But in any case, when we were hosting on the site, we didn’t have any of those metrics as far as downloads or shares or anything like that. So we decided … You learned about Lipsum and then when I was creating Consider This, I just decided to start it there because we didn’t want to transfer the feed later. So we’ve been able to measure the success of each of those episodes just because we’re going into that reporting tool and being able to see downloads, which has been helpful.
Chris: Yeah. So Lipsum’s really the only one I know about. I’m sure there are other tools that do that, but I don’t know of them and Lipsum’s worked great. It’s affordable. I would recommend it.
Lauren: Yeah. On the sort of less quantitative side of how successful the podcasting has been, I mean, you’ve talked a number of times just anecdotally about how much feedback you’re getting from the podcast. So even though we’re not able to measure it as specifically as some of our other content marketing efforts, it certainly seems worth doing.
Mark: Yeah. That was my biggest issue with it when we decided to approach it was that it’s the least trackable content endeavor we’ve ever taken up.
Chris: Right.
Lauren: Yeah.
Mark: That seemed very undesirable to me. But the results, we can’t argue with. When we said last time, just as a reminder, is that we are now just getting so much more specific feedback. People quoting specific things from each podcast. They’ll say, “When Lauren said this. When Chris said this, it really resonated with me.” Previously, we’ve always gotten praise from our content but the level of specificity now is incredibly different. It’s happening all the time. Especially at this point, you have the average bus dev conversation I’m going to have, I would expect for our podcast to come up. They’re going to bring it up proactively.
Chris: That’s profound.
Mark: It is. It is. So I’m very happy to sacrifice the track ability for the impact it’s had.
Chris: Sure. To points you’ve made in many pieces of content, it’s not only the outward verification of it, but internally, this frees us up to create a really robust piece of content without having to sit down, open a text editor …
Lauren: And a fraction of the time.
Chris: Yeah. Fuss over the words, edit it, go through all that. I mean, it’s a different format. It’s not meant to be less important or more cavalier. It’s just a different thing. But fundamentally, this is easier.
Mark: It’s so much easier.
Chris: For me. I mean, I think for us this is easier. So you’ve written a lot about engagement style, this is a sweet spot.
Lauren: I found ours.
Chris: Honestly, I think you really have. This is what we do for our clients. This is how we engage with them. So this is how we engage with one another. This is how we want to engage on the content marketing side. I did want to mention one other thing though about the whole you’ve created the feed and now you have to submit it to platforms. So just a technical thing, you get the feed together, you have to create an account at Apple, it’s called iTunes connect. You create an account, you submit the feed. It takes somewhere between 24 and 36 hours for them to approve it.
Lauren: This is the step I was not aware of.
Chris: Right. There are other tools where you can either let them ping iTunes for it or you have to create it on its own. Do the same thing. Like, Stitcher, for example. Stitcher won’t look to iTunes and gather all of their feeds. So if you want your thing to appear on Stitcher, you have to go Stitcher and create an account. Google Play, on the other hand, will look at iTunes. So if it’s on iTunes, it’ll be on Google Play. PocketCast, which is the other player in the Android space, they will also look at iTunes, but you can also, if you want, create an individual account for those things.
So it gets a little fussy and busiten there. But you have to identify, kind of like when you’re doing responsive design, you have to identify where do you want this thing to show up. iTunes, obviously, but we didn’t do Stitcher initially until we got an email from someone …
Lauren: Requesting it.
Chris: Yeah. Why aren’t you on Stitcher?
Lauren: I got a question about this because podcast optimization has been on my mind lately. Thinking as podcasts are becoming more and more popular and more and more people are getting into this platform, similar to when blogging first took off with content marketing, and then the conversation became about how do I get my blog to be ranked on search results pages because everybody’s now doing this. So when we think about different feeds or different platforms that can host different feeds and how they are optimized. So when we put the feed on iTunes, we’re optimizing it a certain way. Then these other places like Google Play and PocketCast go and they’re just pulling that data, like the description, the name of the podcast, the name of the episodes, etc. are going into those platforms. Versus Stitcher, when it is pinging Lipsum to bring in its own feed, it’s just taking whatever we put inside of the Lipsum feed for the description. So does that makes sense? Inside Lipsum you can put the description for Lipsum and in the description for iTunes, which then funnels to whatever else pings iTunes. But is Stitcher just going to main feed on Lipsum and optimizing it that way, like taking that description?
Chris: Yeah. That’s a good point. Lipsum creates the feed for you, and again, there’s CMS layer in between you and the feed. So you get to fill in all those fields. Then they have a separate set of that for iTunes specifically.
Lauren: Correct.
Chris: There’s a note in there that says it’s not always the case or they’re not always sure when iTunes looks at that stuff specifically. So I actually never use it. I just have iTunes ping the original stuff, but we ran into a problem with this where the iTunes author was incorrect. So we had to go back into Lipsum and check out the feed and edit the feed directly, which you can do. It’s actually a little hard to find.
Lauren: Yeah.
Chris: When it comes to Stitcher, they’re looking at the core Lipsum feed, but they have their other … When you create an account, they have their own …
Lauren: Their own thing.
Chris: Yeah, you can put some authorship stuff in there or like tags and categories.
Lauren: I guess I ask because it seems when it comes to podcast optimization, part of what we’re going to need to wait to see is who is going to be without a doubt, without question the dominate force to where people go to get their podcasts, and what are the rules that they are setting. Like, when Google became that power, we all followed Google’s rules, as do other search engines.
Chris: Right now I’d say it’s iTunes.
Lauren: Yeah.
Chris: It’s funny, podcast optimization is a great term because it’s very much like search engine optimization before anyone really understood about search engine optimization, in the sense that you have very little control. What gets elevated is what’s popular. So the basic understanding of page rank at the beginning was how many incoming links to something exists and therefore, those things get elevated. Right now that’s true with podcasts. The more people listen to your podcast, the more likely they’re going to see them in a podcast browsing experience like in iTunes store or hear about it. So right now podcast word of mouth and popularity is how people discover podcasts.
Lauren: Well, and that brings us to the marketing of your podcast once it’s been recorded and what’s the best way to do that. I think social media plays a really big role there, but I’ll admit that we’re still trying to figure out the best way to promote our own podcast via social media. For Consider this, we created separate social accounts for that particular show. I’m not sure if we’re going to do that for Expert Marketing Matters. We’ve been using the Newfangled hub really to promote that show and it’s been working well. People have been engaging. Whenever we put out a new podcast, they’re responding to us via those channels. So I don’t know. It remains to be seen about the social approach to how we promote these things.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, we sent emails out to our subscriber base, which is in the dozens and thousands at this point. So that was a leg up that was good for us. We knew a subset of those people would be interested right off the bat. I think when you go into iTunes, in terms of like the organic growth of our audience outside of who we already have direct content with and can tell about the podcast and how that they’ll subscribe. At the bottom of any podcast, we create listeners also listen to. Right now, if you go to our podcast, you’ll see that we’re very much in a space with similar topics. That’s a good thing because if people are interested in that, they’ll find us. The only way that’s going to grow is by people rating and reviewing the podcast, unfortunately. That’s the only thing that changes that.
Mark: Just one point about the people also listen to thing.
Chris: Yeah.
Mark: We’ve gotten a good number of leads just through that. It’s odd that that’s been a lead dev source for us.
Chris: It’s a placement and in a search engine of sorts.
Mark: Yeah.
Chris: That is a search engine.
Mark: I’d say probably maybe six leads from people discovering us through other podcasts over the past six months, seven months.
Lauren: These are people who hadn’t heard of us or weren’t really in our circle at all.
Mark: They’re entry point to our marketing universe was finding us because we’re linked to in iTunes under other podcasts they were listening to.
Chris: Well, I’m glad you said that because why are we making this podcast?
Mark: Right.
Chris: It’s a piece of marketing for us. It’s a way for us to share our expertise with other people. We enjoy it. But fundamentally, we’re like, what do we expect to get out of this? We expect to create opportunity. The fact that we’re creating opportunity, number one, because people listen to it and are impacted by the things that are said, but also because there’s like a 200 square pixel image in search engine like iTunes music store, and people see that because they were maybe looking at a different podcast that’s in our space. That’s in and of itself amazing. The fact that that came up six times already since we did this.
Mark: Yeah. It’s become one of our biggest leads sources.
Lauren: Again, that’s why it’s easy to sort of shrug off the fact that we don’t have a ton of tangible data about this, but if we’re getting six opportunities in six months, then that in itself is …
Chris: So we should wrap up. I guess I would like to conclude by just saying if you’re at all interested in doing this, make the steer, you do it. It doesn’t take that much to start. Make sure you enjoy it. I think if it’s not your engagement style, you’ll find out quickly. Don’t force it. But if you’re a consultant in any way share or form that you interrupt that, it probably is going to work. So if it feels funky the first time, don’t worry about.
Mark: Yeah. It’s going to feel uncomfortable.
Chris: Yeah. But also don’t force it but also don’t force it being perfect the first time.
Lauren: Yeah.
Chris: Let it be weird.
Lauren: I think that’s really good advice. If your mind is already kind of going back up to the conversation around the text setup and everything, one thing I can do we always post the transcript to these conversations on our website Newfangled.com. I can link to some of the specific equipment that we reference just to give you a starting point for your research. That’ll probably help.
Chris: And if you have any questions about this, we didn’t address something technically, we’re happy to answer those questions. You can email any of us at Newfangled. You can reach out to Newfangled on Twitter, which is just @NewfangledWeb. Go to the website, you can ping any of us. But yeah, feel free to ask and we love to talk shop.
Mark: And just in terms of thwarting one potential objection that we hear all the time, and we hear this objection for any marketing channel really. That is well, there are already too many podcasts out there. The world doesn’t need another podcast. The world doesn’t need another agency spewing content. Social media’s already crowded. No one needs anymore email. Pick any marketing channel and the person who’s trying to not market, their excuse is going to be, “Well, it’s too crowded.” The answer to that and all the other channels is again positioning and perspective, and if you got those two things, then this will be a very strong channel for you.
Chris: Yeah. I always find it amazing that someone would bring that because I want to turn that around and say, “Well, there are already too many people in this world. But you exist, so what are you going to do with it?” That’s always true and it always does come down to positioning. Make it unique, make it have a purpose, it’ll be fine.
Mark: All right. Well, this was fun.
Chris: Yeah. All right. We’ll see you next time.
Lauren: Yeah. Thanks for listening.