February 20, 2024 • 38 mins
Imagine if you could interview 500 podcasters, separate out the ones that doubled their audience over the previous year, and ask them point blank what they did to get that result.
Well, that's exactly what we did, and in this episode, we're sharing what we found.
Specifically, we looked into the Podcast Marketing Survey submissions of the 15 highest-growth shows, shows that had grown anywhere from 100%–400% over the previous year, and dug into their response to the question:
"What's the thing that has had the single biggest impact on growth in the past year."
They're answers, and the trend they hint at, might surprise you.
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Topics Covered
1:15 What is the average month-over-month growth rate for podcasts?
6:11 The most-impactful tactics employed by high-growth shows
10:49 Finding Podcast-Market Fit for your show
14:30 The Content-Art Spectrum
19:32 Why reducing listener churn is just as important as attracting new listeners
22:01 Practical takeaways to increase your monthly growth rate
⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️
Resources
Podcast Audience Survey Template
How to Run a Podcast Audience Survey
Linkfire
Chartable
How Acquired Grew Their Podcast
Acquired Podcast
Wait But Why
The Smash or Pass Test
The Content-Art Spectrum: How to Identify, Find & Research Your Ideal Listeners
Complete the Podcast Marketing Trends 2024 Survey
Subscribe to Podcast Marketing Trends Explained
Check out the Podcast Marketing Trends 2023 Report
Subscribe to the Scrappy Podcasting Newsletter
Try Transistor.fm for free for 14 days
✍️ Leave your feedback for the show: http://podcastmarketingtrends.com/feedback
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Justin (00:02):
This is where all the bad podcast memes come from. You
know? Like, ask me about mypodcast or I'm sorry your
boyfriend has a podcast. Peopleare just pushing their show on
people that don't care. Or whatyou want is an audience that
really cares that's searchingfor a show like yours.
Jeremy (00:23):
Welcome to Podcast Marketing Trends Explained. I'm
Jeremy Enns from PodcastMarketing Academy.
Justin (00:28):
And I'm Justin Jackson from transistor.fm. And
together, we're digging into thedata behind the podcast
marketing trends 2023 report tohelp you understand what it
means for you and your show.
Jeremy (00:41):
Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions
about the way you create andmarket your show so you can
spend more time on what actuallymatters for growth and are my
Justin (00:57):
downloads good? Like, I got this many downloads are my
downloads good? Like I got thismany downloads last month. I got
this many downloads this month.Is that good?
And you asked that question inyour survey, the Podcast
Marketing Trends 2023. What didyou find out?
Jeremy (01:15):
Yeah. So first off, I'll say I have received this
question, too many times tocount, and I've heard it asked
by everyone with, you know, 15downloads an episode to 15 1,000
downloads an episode, and Ithink everybody thinks that
everybody else is getting muchmore downloads than them.
Everybody's a little bitembarrassed about their own
numbers. So you can imagineanybody who starts a podcast,
this is one of the questions ontheir mind. And, of course, this
(01:36):
was one of the questions on mymind as well.
How fast does it take to grow ashow, and what does good
actually look like? And so themonth over month growth rate
that we found, the median forall shows we surveyed, was 1.62%
growth per month. So for somecontext here, essentially that
means that if you were getting500 downloads a month across
(01:59):
your show, you can expect everymonth to get about 10 new
downloads, which, you know, ifyou release a weekly show,
that's maybe 4 new listeners. Sonot a lot of growth there. I
don't know what your reaction isto that number.
Justin (02:12):
I I mean, I when I saw these numbers, I think what's
interesting is one reactioncould be, oh, well, if I'm
getting more than 2% month overmonth growth, then I'm better
than the average podcast in thissurvey. But I think most people
aren't satisfied with that. Ithink most people are like, no.
(02:36):
I want more than that. I I thinkeven if you were exactly hitting
1.62%, I think you might bethinking, yeah.
No. I wanna grow the show morethan what the average is
showing. And I think that's whatwe wanna get into is, yes, most
podcasts do not grow that muchmonth over month. But what are
(02:56):
the tactics people can use toachieve that above average
growth. And you also actually,let's dig in a little bit more
because you found some outliersand some other interesting
context.
Like, some people are growingway more than the average.
Right?
Jeremy (03:13):
Yeah. So a little bit digging deeper. And, of course,
like, when we're looking ataverages and medians and things
like that, we're looking at, youknow, kind of the middle of the
road podcast here. And so as inany kind of, you know, dataset,
there's gonna be shows that didway better and way worse. And
so, before we get into some ofthose, kind of nuances there,
the one thing I'll say is thatthe month over month, that 1.62%
month over month growth ratetranslates to about 21% growth
(03:36):
per year.
And so you're growing by about a5th per year. So, you know, that
makes it a little bit you know,it's a really small number on
the month to month basis. Youcan kinda see, like, okay. If
I'm getting a 1,000 downloads,per month this time, you know,
this year, maybe I'd be gettinga 1,200 this time next year. So
that's, you know, puts it in alittle bit of a a different
light there, but still, youknow, not as much growth as
(03:56):
people would probably like tosee.
So you did mention that thereare some some outliers here on
actually both ends of thespectrum. And so Okay. What we
found here was that actuallyhalf of all of the respondents
outperformed the median, which,you would expect. So half of
shows did better than that1.62%. I suppose by nature of
(04:17):
that being the median, that isstatistically necessary.
Yeah. But some good news thereregardless. And we actually
found that a 5th, so I think itwas 21% of shows actually
doubled their downloads. And soa pretty significant percentage
of shows actually grew quite abit. And this was not just shows
that were small.
They had 10 downloads an episodeand went up to 20. There were
also many shows that actuallydoubled their download size with
(04:39):
multiple tens of thousands ofdownloads as a starting point
and went up to, you know, doublethat number. So that was some of
the outliers we saw on thepositive side of things. I think
the top show grew by almost400%, and this was actually one
of the shows that had thousandsof downloads. I think it was,
like, 33 100 downloads perepisode starting and was now
quite a bit bigger on the otherside.
It was in the the 10 to 20000download range per episode. And
(05:03):
then on the other side, we had,32% of shows actually shrunk,
and so they were had negativegrowth on a, downloads per
episode basis. And so this issomething that we're gonna look
into in a future episode andlook at. You know, I think we
often assume that, like, oh, theonly place to go is up, and what
we saw here was that actually athird of all shows actually
shrunk in downloads. And sowe're gonna dedicate an episode
(05:23):
to kind of dig into why thatmight be.
So Mhmm.
Justin (05:27):
I I
Jeremy (05:27):
would be curious to hear your reaction here now knowing
that it wasn't just like almostevery show is around this kind
of 2% range. Like, we've gotthis whole range. What what are
the thoughts that come to yourmind?
Justin (05:36):
If there's anyone listening that wants to grow
their show, I think I wouldwanna know what did that 1 fifth
of respondents who doubled theirdownloads do? What kind of
factors led to that growth? It'sone thing to look at the
numbers, but what causes a showto grow by that much?
Jeremy (05:55):
And you know what? I'm glad you you brought that up
because I think that my gutreaction and my my one of my
hopes, I think a lot of people'shopes who filled out this survey
was that we're gonna get thisbig data set and we're gonna see
these shows and we're gonna see,like, okay. These shows grew
quite a bit. Like, what were thetactics that they used? What
social media platform were theyon?
What category were they in? Howlong were their episodes? All of
these kinda tactical details.
Justin (06:17):
How many TikToks did they publish?
Jeremy (06:19):
And, yeah, were they all on YouTube or anything like
that? And, so I, of course, gotcurious. And before we started
recording here, I actually wentthrough I sorted, the data by
all of the highest growth shows.So I I just did about 15 of the
top growth shows here.
Justin (06:34):
Okay. These are the winners.
Jeremy (06:35):
These are the winners. So it's these are the shows that
grew by, you know, over a 100,many of these, a 100, 200, 300,
almost 400% growth, so a lot ofgrowth. And I was curious. Well,
one of the questions that we hadin the survey was what has been
the single most effective thingthat you've done in the past
year to grow your show? So thiswas very much like personal
attribution.
You know what you did. What doyou think had the biggest impact
(06:57):
on moving the needle? And thesewere all shows that grew very
successfully. I'm just gonnaread off a couple of these
responses that people had here,and we're just kinda starting at
the top, the highest growthshows, and working down the list
here. So we got the first one.
Create a Facebook group. Socialmedia. Created my short email
newsletter via LinkedIn, whichincludes a link to the new
episode and a link to theprevious one. It's the perfect
companion to my short 5 minutepodcast.
Justin (07:17):
Okay.
Jeremy (07:18):
Networking. Bought bought an ad on Castbox, brought
on a guest cohost, served mylisteners well, gained guests
who are semi famous in theirspace, rebranded the show,
created high quality SEO shownotes for each episode and share
them on social platforms, gotbooked to speak at Yale by one
random tweet. That's one I thinkthat we would all love to
replicate perhaps. We've gotincreasing the inherent value of
(07:40):
our content, contentrepurposing, posting material,
whatever that means, advertisingon other podcasts, learning
about Pinterest, defining ourlistener persona, and then
creatively going out to find andengage with them, and finally
focusing on the quality ofcontent. So listening to this
kind of, like, collection oftactics, do you spot any trends
here, any overwhelming, like,directive of this is what you
(08:01):
should do?
Justin (08:02):
No. There's no silver bullet in that list. There's no,
like, one thing. And maybe thisis actually what's frustrating
when people talk about podcastmarketing is they're like
they'll get advice. You know?
They'll go out on Reddit orforums or whatever, and they'll
say, how do I grow my show? Andsomeone will say, oh, the way to
grow your show is you just gottaget a speaking gig at Yale.
(08:24):
That's what worked for me. Andpeople are like, that's not very
helpful.
Jeremy (08:29):
I would be curious from your experience, as a marketer,
as a podcaster, working inpodcasting, talking with a lot
of successful shows, and andalso shows that might not be as
successful yet. If you were toventure a guess as to what these
shows are doing, if it's not,like, outwardly tactical that
has allowed them to grow, whatwould you say the the common
denominator is?
Justin (08:50):
There's one attribute that every single high growth
show has.
Jeremy (08:54):
Okay.
Justin (08:55):
And that attribute is podcast market fit.
Jeremy (08:59):
Okay.
Justin (09:00):
This is something you've talked about a lot. Why is it so
important?
Jeremy (09:04):
I'm actually gonna lead with, we're gonna bring in our
mutual friend, fellow Canadianin the podcast marketing space,
and I'm gonna key it up with aquote from Dan Meisner that I
think begins to get at whatpodcast market fit is. And he
said, don't start by asking howto build an audience for your
podcast. Instead, ask how tobuild a podcast for your
audience. And so I think, youknow, what Dan is getting at
(09:25):
here is that there are peopleout there in the world who are
looking for stuff, andeverybody's looking for
something different. And theyall have these things that
they're already interested in,and they're looking for things
similar to that.
A lot of times withentertainment style shows, if
you like one type of show, youyou listen to true crime, for
example, you're always lookingfor the next true crime show.
And so if you're creating inthat space, you know that people
(09:46):
like this category of shows.They're looking for more stuff
like that all the time. So onthe entertainment side of
things, that's how I often thinkabout it. On the more, like,
educational side of things, ifyou're maybe, like, starting a
show to build your business orsomething like that, what you're
looking for here is to create ashow that addresses a problem or
a challenge that people arelooking to solve.
And And so this is more of aclassic kind of content
(10:06):
marketing strategy where peoplehave some kind of problem. They
are looking to achieve some kindof goal. There's some kind of
obstacles in the way, and youare creating a show that
satisfies. It kind of forms thebridge between those two things.
And there's we can get into alot more of the nuances of it,
but that's kind of how I thinkabout it is, like, are you
creating a show that people arealready actively looking for,
(10:27):
you know, at least something inthe vicinity of what you're
creating so that you know thatthere's some interest and demand
in it.
Justin (10:32):
What I love about Dan's quote is that it illustrates
that people think you start withthe idea, the concept for the
show. But in reality, you shouldstart with the audience. Who is
this show for? And that audiencethat you choose will kind of
determine what product you givethem, what podcast you're going
(10:56):
to produce for these people. Italso assumes that you know
something about your audience,that you know how to reach them,
that you know what kinds ofthings they like, that you know
how long their commute is, thatyou know, you know, what context
they're listening, that you knowwhat other shows they're
listening to.
(11:16):
And once you have thatinformation, once you know who
is this show for, then you canproduce the podcast. Then you
can come up with some ideas thatmight resonate with that
audience. This is very differentthan making something and then
just trying to push it out topeople. Like, please take take
(11:38):
my podcast. Take my podcast.
And this is where all the badpodcast memes come from. You
know? Like, ask me about mypodcast or I'm sorry your
boyfriend has a podcast. Youknow? It's the idea that people
are just pushing their show onpeople that don't care, where
what you want is an audiencethat really cares that's
searching for a show like yours.
(12:00):
So instead of having toconstantly push, push, push,
you're gonna be connecting withpeople who are already looking
for a show like yours. That'sYeah. Podcast market fit. It's
producing something that peoplealready want, And it takes some
experimentation. It might take acouple different iterations.
(12:21):
It might take years for you tofinally get that podcast market
fit. But once you get it, yourshow should be able to grow
reliably month after month. Why?Because, to quote Seth Godin,
people like us do things likethis. So a show I love is
Acquired, which tells thestories and strategies of great
(12:44):
companies.
So people like me, startupfounders, tech executives,
people in Silicon Valley, peoplein business, people like us
listen to Acquired and peoplelike us recommend Acquired.
That's the key. You get both.I'm listening, and this show is
(13:07):
so good. It resonates with me sostrongly that I'm also going to
share it with other people likeme.
That's how you grow a show. AndI interviewed David Rosenthal,
one of the hosts. We can link toit in the show notes. And that
show, it's been around for 8years. They've doubled their
audience every single year.
(13:28):
So these aren't their exactnumbers, but let's say they
started out with a 1000downloads per month in year 1.
By year 8, just by doublingevery year, they'd be at a
128,000 downloads per episode.And when I asked David, like,
what's your secret? Like, whatwas the secret growth lever that
unlocked all of this growth? Hejust said, we're just focused on
(13:52):
consistently putting out a greatproduct, great episodes, and
people told their friends aboutit.
That's it. Word-of-mouth is howmost podcasts grow. And if you
can nail this podcast marketfit, you have a path towards
reliable double digit month overmonth growth. Now I know there's
(14:16):
people listening that they mightbe thinking, well, I I don't
know if I have podcast marketfit. I just started this show
because I had a good idea.
This is the show I wanted to seein the world. Are there some
steps they can take to get thereor get closer to that goal?
Jeremy (14:32):
I see you're, throwing over the hard question to me.
You just had your grandmonologue dropping the mic with
the the podcast market fit, andnow it's over to me for the the
hard stuff. And, this isactually a question that I do
get a lot. And, you know, a lotof people do create shows that
they just wanna do, and there'snothing wrong with that. And,
you know, creating, like, a artfocused podcast where it's like,
this is I'm not making it foranyone.
(14:53):
I'm making it for myself. Andyou actually do see a lot of
successful creators. I the firstperson who comes to mind is Tim
Urban of the blog Wait But Why,and he's got this great kind of
anecdote about how when he sitsdown to write, he pictures a
stadium of 10,000 little tinyTims that are all cheering him
on, and he writes the stuff thathe wants to exist in the world.
Yeah. And so I think that thisis a viable way you can build an
(15:15):
audience by doing this.
There's some luck involved withthis for sure. And I think
there's also it often worksbetter when you are plugged into
an existing community, and soyou're kind of a representative
of that community. And don'treally consume that much content
(15:36):
or anything like that relatedto, you know, other, people in a
specific field, what you createmight be, you know, crazy. And
maybe it has some kind ofartistic value, but it might not
really, you know, overlap withthat many other people. So Mhmm.
I wanna lay out that kind ofcaveat first.
Justin (15:50):
Yeah.
Jeremy (15:51):
Now I think that there is still a path to finding
product market fit when youstart off without a defined
audience. And I think of this asthe content art spectrum. And so
we think about there is pure arton one side of the spectrum and
pure content on the other. Andso on the content side of
things, this is like a show thatyou create. It's a 100% a means
to an end.
And so this might be for abusiness. You're like, I need to
(16:12):
attract these people so thatthey will buy my product, and
I'm creating content to be thatbridge.
Justin (16:17):
Mhmm.
Jeremy (16:17):
And on the art side of things, you're thinking, I'm
creating this show a 100% forme, and I don't care about
anybody else. And, like, I'mjust creating this thing. And
people can listen if they want,and they if they don't,
whatever. That's fine. I'm doingthis for me, and that's enough.
And so I think understandingwhere your show fits on the
spectrum will illuminate thepath forward for marketing. And
so I think if you're more on thecontent side, you're really
(16:40):
relying on the audience. Youkind of have a sense of, like,
okay, I know I'm creating thisthing for this audience. So you
can kind of take the approachthat Justin just mentioned,
going through this process oflike, okay, what do these people
want? Where are theyunderserved?
What kinds of questions are theyasking? And how can I create a
show for that?
Justin (16:54):
Mhmm.
Jeremy (16:54):
If you're on the art side, however, and and I will
say like most shows aresomewhere in the middle. There's
very few shows that are pure artor pure content, and so you're
probably somewhere in themiddle. And so you might have
some vague sense of, like, okay.I think these types of people
might be interested in thisbecause my show is somewhat
similar to other shows, andthese types of people seem to
like these other shows. Mhmm.
I think what you're doing hereis you're testing audiences out.
(17:15):
And so you're creating yourshow, and you're gonna go show
up in different communities. Andyou're gonna, you know,
integrate yourself in thosecommunities. You're gonna
occasionally talk about yourshow. You're not, like, just
plastering it around theInternet sharing links.
You're, like, actually gettingto know people, getting to talk
with people, and following yourhunches around. Like, I think
this might be an audience thatmight like my show. And you're
just trying to look for wheredid you get a positive reaction.
(17:36):
And so if you find your wayinto, you know, a group of
listeners, whether that's 25people or 250 people or 25100
people, you wanna then get toknow everything that you can
about those people, which willoften you'll be able to draw
some conclusions, say, like, oh,the people who like my show are
all like this, and they all likeother shows like this, and they
all hang out in thesecommunities. And now you've
(17:57):
actually found your way.
You've kind of gone the reverseway into finding that community
that you can then kind ofproceed the normal direction and
say, like, okay. These people, II've already attracted them, and
now I know how to find more ofthem. And now I can kind of do
some more research and say,like, is there a way to make my
show even more aligned with whatthese people are looking for? So
Yeah. That would be the kind ofprocess that I would, recommend
for somebody who's going morefrom the art side of things than
(18:19):
the content.
Justin (18:19):
Yeah. I'm not saying we should ignore our gut. Like, a
great reason to create a show isthat you listen to shows like
the kind of show you want tocreate. Like, if you're really
into, pop music and you'relistening to all those shows or
you're really into startups andyou're listening to all the
startup shows or you're whateverit is. If you are listening to
(18:41):
all the shows in your categoryand there are things that you
consistently think could bebetter, If you're like, ah, why
did they have it like this?
Why are they organizing it likethis? I could do this better.
Here's a cool idea that no onenobody's doing. I'm gonna try
that. That's a great reason tostart a show and to test things
out.
And, so your gut can be a partof it. Even if you're on the
(19:03):
content side, your instincts canstill be a part of it. The key
is that you want to test outwhether these things actually
resonate with the audience.Yeah. And I think we wanna get
into some takeaways right nowabout what are some practical
things folks can do if theywanna achieve above average
(19:24):
month over month growth?
How can they start that processof actually, you know, getting
to grow their
Jeremy (19:32):
show? So I think the the one thing that I want to to
bring up, related to this andthe the kind of monthly growth
rate. There's actually kind of 2parts to it, and most people
only think about 1. But the ideaof podcast market come back to
(19:53):
the show. And now I've got newsubscribers.
So if I do some kind ofpromotion, I get 50 new people
in the show. Now I've boosted mylistenership by 50 people. Mhmm.
And what most people don'trealize, and it's really hard to
see in the podcasting ecosystem,it's easier to see in other
places, is that there's aconstant kind of, like, leaky
bucket where we've got somelisteners. They might have been
with us for a week or they mighthave been with us for 5 years,
(20:15):
but there's a constant stream ofpeople who are no longer
listening to the podcast on aregular basis.
And so this would be what wewould call churn in, like,
software is is typically wherethat that term would be used.
But it does exist in podcasting,and so I think what we want to
realize is that it's entirelypossible that you have a 100
downloads a month, and that'swhat you see in your your
(20:36):
podcast hosting dashboard, say,in transistor dot fm perhaps.
Yeah. Yeah. And that could meana couple of different things
depending on your show.
And so maybe you have a 100downloads every single episode.
That could mean that those are a100 people who listen for the
first time. You went out and yougot those 100 new people. Your
promotion is working. You gotthem in, and they listen to the
(20:57):
show, and they never came back.
And then next week, it's a 100new people who are in the show
now. And to you, it looks like,oh, I've got a 100 subscribers.
I got a 100 people listen toevery single episode. Whereas it
could also mean that you do havethose 100 listeners who come
back every episode, and nothingthat you're doing to promote is
working. And so I think what weneed to realize is that there's
constant inflow and also aconstant outflow.
(21:18):
And I think where the podcastmarket fit really comes into
play is that the better fit youhave, the more people who come
into the show for the first timeend up sticking around. The more
you can reduce that churn andincrease retention, the faster
you're actually gonna grow. Andso I think that that's one of
these pieces that as you'rethinking about, like, you know,
whether it comes to promotionversus making the show better,
(21:39):
finding fit, this is kind of,like, the dynamics that are at
play. And so improving the showpatches some of the holes in the
bucket, and then bringing in andgetting in front of new people
also increases the growth. Sothese two kind of things to keep
in mind.
Justin (21:50):
Mhmm. Totally. The the leaky bucket of podcasting that
nobody's talking about. So,yeah, do you wanna jump into
some practical, ways to explorethis area?
Jeremy (22:01):
This this episode is kinda centered around this,
like, monthly and annual growthrates. And for me, I think that
the the month over month growthrate feels like a long enough
time span that I can kind of dosome experiments and then see
what impact that had. And so,when we're talking about finding
podcast market fit, whetherwe're talking about promotion or
anything else, I think it allcomes down to experiments. And
(22:22):
so we we take some action thatwe maybe haven't done before. We
try something different, andthen we see, you know, on that
episode or on, you know, after amonth, what impact did that
have.
Maybe I increased the quality ofmy hooks that I started off each
episode. And so I, like, spend alot of time really focusing on
those first three minutes and,like, really capturing up and
(22:46):
maybe that's resulting in aincrease in listenership and now
I can kind of assume, like, oh,probably I've just reduced my
churn a little bit by keepingpeople listening and coming back
for more episodes and so thatthat experiment was successful.
And of course there's many otherexperiments you might run that
are not successful and so youcan kind of use your your
personal historic growth rate asthis benchmark. And so you can
say, if I have been growing at7% month over month, I do an
(23:09):
experiment, I test out somethingwith my titles, I change up my
show concept or format,something like that, and all of
a sudden, it tanks in the nextmonth. I can say, okay.
That was not the, the answer tomy growth problems. Like, let's
try something else, going aheadnext month. So Yeah. Really for
me, it all comes down to, like,doing experiments and then
measuring the results.
Justin (23:27):
Yeah. And that's a quantitative side, like, okay,
I'm gonna do things and then seewhat's reflected in the data.
There's also the qualitativeside. And I think podcasters,
especially new podcasters,should get in the habit of
soliciting feedback from theirlisteners. So you get 5
downloads.
Make sure in that episode, atsome point you say, hey, folks,
(23:49):
I am trying to get better atthis podcasting thing. Right
now, I'm at 5 downloads permonth. I wanna get to 10, and I
need your help. Please reach outto me by email, by DMs, whatever
channels, and let me know howcan I make this show better? In
fact, I'm gonna ask you aspecific question.
(24:09):
Would you recommend the show toa friend? If not, if your answer
is no, I want you to stopeverything you're doing right
now, pull over to the side ofthe road, and I want you to
write me an email about what isstopping you from recommending
the show to a friend. And youand I have talked about this so
many times, Jeremy. Sometimes,it's like, I don't wanna share
this episode because the showart is embarrassing or the
(24:33):
episode title wouldn't resonatewith me and my friends or your
audio audio quality is bad Oryour episodes are an hour and a
half long and, you know, 5minutes of that is you breathing
heavily. You know, whateverreason it is, like, I wanna hear
from you.
What could I do that would makethis the kind of show that you
(24:55):
recommend to your friends? Youcan also accomplish this with,
listener surveys. We'll put alink to a sample in the show
notes, but get in the habit ofgetting that qualitative data as
well. And as you improve things,you'll be able to notice
hopefully that those responsesbecome more and more positive.
More and more people are sayingthat they would recommend a show
(25:17):
to a friend.
Jeremy (25:18):
Yeah. And I think the other thing that I often
recommend people doing, and thisworks even better almost when
you are small, and you need tokind of lead the engagement a
lot of times. A lot of timespeople wanna put out the podcast
and have people come to themwith the engagement. But one of
the things that I recommend topeople is if you know 3 people
who listen to the show, maybeyou've had just the briefest of
interactions on social mediawhere they said, like, oh, I I
(25:40):
really like that episode, Iwould personally reach out to
those people and start engagingwith them and their content more
regularly and actually take thelead in building the
relationship. And, you know, youwanna start out just by, like,
some some back and forth, andthey're gonna appreciate that if
they've listened to the show.
And especially early on, you canactually then start getting into
DM conversations and startgetting onto Zoom calls and you
can actually get to know themand they can really become kind
(26:03):
of the behind the scenes, like,listener advisory board of the
show. And you can get so muchgood information because, like,
they're part of this early few,and it only takes, like you can
do this with 1 person. And theone thing that I'll say is you
wanna be a little bit selectiveabout these people. Mhmm. And so
what you wanna do is make surethat you are creating the show
and talking with people who youwant more of.
(26:24):
And so there might be somebodywho's, like, really cranky, and
they listen to every episode andyou're like, oh, I do not want a
1,000 of that person in mysocial media feed, in my email
inbox. And so I'm not gonnalisten to what they say they
want the show to be, but there'ssomebody else who you're like,
oh, if I could have a stadiumfull of this person listening to
the show, like, that's who Iwant to attract more of. And so
that's who you wanna find outeverything that you can about
and listen to their kind ofguidance and feedback. Mhmm.
Justin (26:45):
And don't ask, like, would you listen more if I did
more of this? Ask more questionslike, what other podcasts have
you listened to in the past onthis how many of those podcasts
are you not listening toanymore? Why did you stop
listening? What initially drewyou to my show? What stopped you
from recommending the show to afriend?
(27:07):
What other content are youconsuming on this topic?
Newsletters or blogs or YouTubechannels? Get a sense of what
other things they're already inmotion doing and why they like
or don't like that content. AndI think you'll get so many good
answers. You you were actuallytelling me, Jeremy, about ways
you can, like, promote yourpodcast and do some tests there.
(27:30):
What kind of podcast promotionthings have you seen work when
people are trying to either doexperiments or increase the
growth rate for their show?
Jeremy (27:41):
Yeah. So there's a number of ways. I think that
that, for me, it all starts withthose one to one conversations.
And I think what you wanna beable to get to is this kind of,
like, eyes light up moment, andI actually, wrote a newsletter
just last week. I kind ofcheekily called it the Smasher
Pass test.
And so, essentially, what you'relooking for here is you give
somebody the, you know, 1 or 2sentence description of your
show, and the best possiblereaction and the one that you
(28:02):
are aiming for is that beforeyou've even finished giving the
description, they're alreadyreaching for their phone and
looking to subscribe to it. AndI think that people will tell
you in these conversations,like, oh, that sounds really
interesting. I'll check that outlater. And of course, we all
know this. We've all done this.
And they're being polite andthey're like, okay, like, I'm
not gonna listen that show, butthis person seems nice, so I
don't wanna hurt their feelings.
Justin (28:22):
Yeah.
Jeremy (28:22):
I think people's actions will always tell you more than
what they will tell you to yourface. And getting that feedback
of, like, actually being able tosee somebody's reaction over
Zoom in person when you describeyour show, that is kind of the
ultimate marker of where yourshow lies in terms of podcast
market fit. And so you wanna begetting to the point where you
are talking to 10 of your ideallisteners, and almost all of
(28:43):
them are, like, reaching for thephones and, like, wow. This show
sounds amazing. How have I notheard about this before?
Mhmm. So that is is kind of thegold standard for me is having
these actual conversations. Buta couple of, like, hackier
tacticky type things you can doto kind of refine your your kind
of pitch and your premise at alarger scale. There's one this
is getting a little bittechnical. This is a bit more
advanced, but if you have any,experience with either Google or
(29:05):
Facebook advertising, you canrun some really, really cheap
tests for just a few dollarswhere you can just do a bunch of
AB testing through it's, like,one image of your show cover
art, or it could even be just a,like, kind of plain graphic
that's somewhat generic, andjust the wording is different.
And it's, like, this show title,a show where we do this, and
you, like, change that's whatyou're changing, and you just
measure that. And you can getthat in front of a few 100 or a
(29:27):
few 1,000 people even for just,like, a few dollars, $10,
something like that. And you canquickly see, like, what did
people click on more? And thatcan then you can take that, and
that's your new benchmark, andyou can test out other versions.
And, of course, you might get toa point where you're like, oh,
okay.
This is the show most people areinterested in. This does not
align at all with the contentI'm currently creating, but
maybe that sounds like a prettyinteresting show. I would be
(29:47):
interested in making that, andyou can make the decision to
say, like, okay. There's a greathook here. Now I'm gonna fulfill
it with the content.
And so that's a kind of, like,tactical way that you can start
to back your way into podcastmarket fit and test out some
different things without, like,putting a ton of money or energy
into reaching a large number ofpeople. So, that's something
that I you can use that test forso many different things, and
(30:08):
testing out your premise anddescription is is just one of
them.
Justin (30:10):
I love it. Another tactic people can use is to
start using some tools to tracktheir marketing experiments. So
as you're doing if you're ifyou're gonna do an ad or if
you're gonna post in a communityor if you're gonna do a
newsletter sponsorship orsomething, use one of these link
tracking tools, for podcasts.There's 2, that we would
(30:31):
recommend. Linkfire, whichactually has a deep integration
with Apple Podcasts now, andit'll show you, did people click
from Twitter and actually becomea follower in Apple Podcasts, or
how many downloads did thatparticular promotion lead to?
This will allow you to testdifferent things out. As I
(30:52):
promoted on Twitter, here's mylink for Twitter. As I promote
it in this newslettersponsorship, here's the link for
that. And does that result inpeople actually clicking through
onto Spotify, Apple, etcetera?And you'll be able to track the
effectiveness of yourexperiments.
That's what you want. You wannabe able to say, is this having a
(31:14):
difference? So, yeah, I if youhaven't checked those out yet, I
recommend they both have freeversions so you can get started
for free. Yeah. And wheneveryou're sharing a link, have
that.
You could even have a shortlink, you know, like, if you
have a domain, you could say,you know, your podcast.com/share
and then you could have Linkfireor Chartable track that link as
(31:36):
well. So there's a variety ofways you can start to see which
you know, what's working here?What experiments are working?
What are people, you know, morelikely to click through on? The
people who are really into thisare doing split tests where
they'll, like, create oneepisode and they'll have the
hook for it.
And then they'll publish anotherepisode that maybe is a
(31:57):
different take on that orwhatever. And then they're gonna
test them right next to eachother to see which resonated
more with the audience.
Jeremy (32:06):
Yeah. I've been waiting for this to become a, inbuilt
feature in podcast hostingplatforms. Nudge, nudge, wink,
wink. Although, I believe it asI've been thinking through this,
I haven't done it myself, but Ithink you could get crafty with
some dynamic ads and dosomething very similar and
achieve a, kind of similarresult. It the data is not gonna
be as, granular as you look atsplit testing for website type
(32:26):
of stuff.
But Yeah. Yeah. You can getreally technical if you want to.
And the one thing I wanna, like,say on that note is that so much
of marketing, I think we oftenthink about it as what we do,
the, like, the activities thatwe're doing. And I think a lot
of it is about what we don't do,and we don't really know what we
should stop doing until we starttesting.
And so a lot of people, ifyou're not tracking your
promotions, maybe you'respending 5 hours a week
(32:48):
promoting your podcast onTwitter. And once you start
tracking, you realize that 0listeners ever come from that.
And you realize, oh, maybe that5 hours a week would be better
spent on another platform, say,that you're on somebody
mentioned Pinterest in in thereport and say you're, like,
start testing that and you're,like, woah. I'm getting tons of
new listeners from Pinterest.Like, I'm gonna stop Twitter,
and I'm gonna go all in onPinterest.
And so I think the only way thatyou can get to that point is
(33:10):
actually having some kind ofdata, and these tools, Linkfire
and Chartable, allow you tocollect some of that so that you
can, you know, allocate yourtime more effectively going
forward.
Justin (33:19):
Totally.
Jeremy (33:20):
Alright. So, Justin, as we wrap up this episode here,
I'm curious. What are some ofyour kind of takeaways from this
conversation regarding the kindof monthly and annual growth
rates and what people can do toincrease those?
Justin (33:32):
Mhmm. Again, the one factor that distinguishes
whether or not you're gonna growis if you have this podcast
market fit. And we're gonna betalking about this all season.
The the whole season, this isnot just a one episode topic.
We're gonna be talking about itmore.
And, actually, if you havequestions about this, if you
have feedback about this, get ahold of us. We've got links in
(33:54):
the show notes. We wanna hearwhat questions you have around
this topic of Podcast MarketFit. But just start thinking
about it. Start thinking aboutshows you like and start
thinking, how do they havepodcast market fit?
How did that play out for them?And I will say that it sometimes
takes a while. Right? So theacquired show started out as a
show about tech acquisitions.And they evolved over time, over
(34:17):
8 years, to be a show about thehistory of great companies.
Right? And that evolution helpedthem get more podcast market
fit. I think the second thing isstart experimenting. I'm gonna
try this and see what response Iget. That could be as simple as
changing your show art.
That could be I'm gonna reducethe length of my episode from an
(34:40):
hour to 20 minutes. Startexperiments. And then 3rd is
look at the data, and the datacould be what you're seeing in
your analytics. But the datashould also be connecting
directly with your listeners.How about yourself?
Anything that comes to mind?
Jeremy (34:57):
The two things that I would end on is the first just
this idea that these numbersthat we discussed here are
pretty depressing if we'relooking at the median and the
averages. But keep in mind that,you know, your goal is probably
not to fall into that averagecategory. You certainly can. We
looked at some of these thesenumbers, the distribution of
growth, and it is certainlypossible to grow much bigger
(35:18):
than and much faster than that1.62% month over month, 21% year
over year. And so looking atthose numbers, you can say,
like, okay.
Well, I'm right in the averagerange, and you can either view
that as, like, okay. Well, I'mI'm doing, you know, an average
job. Or you can say, like, okay.I know that it's possible to do
more, and I'm not gonna settlefor for just being in this
average, growth group. And so Ithink if you have higher
(35:39):
aspirations, it's possible, butyou're going to to need to find
that podcast market fit thatJustin mentioned.
And then, the last thing thelast takeaway, was was really
this fantastic question that youcame up with, which I'm going to
now, pose to everybody listeningto this, which is if you're
enjoying the show so far, wewould love it if you would
recommend it to a friend. And,if this is not a show that you
would recommend to a friend, letus know. What can we do that
(36:02):
would make this showrecommendable worthy
recommendation worthy? Whatwould make the show
recommendation worthy? Maybethere's the wording.
Let us know. You can get at bothof us on Twitter and LinkedIn
and email. Got the links in theshow notes, and, we would both
really love to hear, what wouldmake this one of your favorite
shows on podcasting?
Justin (36:22):
Yes. We wanna hear your feedback. Don't hold back. You
don't have to be gentle with us.We wanna hear your feedback.
And yes, please recommend theshow if you love it.
Jeremy (36:30):
As always, you can check out the full report where all of
the data that this episode andall of the episodes, are based
on atpodcastmarketingtrends.com/2023.
This is where all the bad podcast memes come from. You
know? Like, ask me about mypodcast or I'm sorry your
boyfriend has a podcast. Peopleare just pushing their show on
people that don't care. Or whatyou want is an audience that
really cares that's searchingfor a show like yours.
Jeremy (00:23):
Welcome to Podcast Marketing Trends Explained. I'm
Jeremy Enns from PodcastMarketing Academy.
Justin (00:28):
And I'm Justin Jackson from transistor.fm. And
together, we're digging into thedata behind the podcast
marketing trends 2023 report tohelp you understand what it
means for you and your show.
Jeremy (00:41):
Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions
about the way you create andmarket your show so you can
spend more time on what actuallymatters for growth and are my
Justin (00:57):
downloads good? Like, I got this many downloads are my
downloads good? Like I got thismany downloads last month. I got
this many downloads this month.Is that good?
And you asked that question inyour survey, the Podcast
Marketing Trends 2023. What didyou find out?
Jeremy (01:15):
Yeah. So first off, I'll say I have received this
question, too many times tocount, and I've heard it asked
by everyone with, you know, 15downloads an episode to 15 1,000
downloads an episode, and Ithink everybody thinks that
everybody else is getting muchmore downloads than them.
Everybody's a little bitembarrassed about their own
numbers. So you can imagineanybody who starts a podcast,
this is one of the questions ontheir mind. And, of course, this
(01:36):
was one of the questions on mymind as well.
How fast does it take to grow ashow, and what does good
actually look like? And so themonth over month growth rate
that we found, the median forall shows we surveyed, was 1.62%
growth per month. So for somecontext here, essentially that
means that if you were getting500 downloads a month across
(01:59):
your show, you can expect everymonth to get about 10 new
downloads, which, you know, ifyou release a weekly show,
that's maybe 4 new listeners. Sonot a lot of growth there. I
don't know what your reaction isto that number.
Justin (02:12):
I I mean, I when I saw these numbers, I think what's
interesting is one reactioncould be, oh, well, if I'm
getting more than 2% month overmonth growth, then I'm better
than the average podcast in thissurvey. But I think most people
aren't satisfied with that. Ithink most people are like, no.
(02:36):
I want more than that. I I thinkeven if you were exactly hitting
1.62%, I think you might bethinking, yeah.
No. I wanna grow the show morethan what the average is
showing. And I think that's whatwe wanna get into is, yes, most
podcasts do not grow that muchmonth over month. But what are
(02:56):
the tactics people can use toachieve that above average
growth. And you also actually,let's dig in a little bit more
because you found some outliersand some other interesting
context.
Like, some people are growingway more than the average.
Right?
Jeremy (03:13):
Yeah. So a little bit digging deeper. And, of course,
like, when we're looking ataverages and medians and things
like that, we're looking at, youknow, kind of the middle of the
road podcast here. And so as inany kind of, you know, dataset,
there's gonna be shows that didway better and way worse. And
so, before we get into some ofthose, kind of nuances there,
the one thing I'll say is thatthe month over month, that 1.62%
month over month growth ratetranslates to about 21% growth
(03:36):
per year.
And so you're growing by about a5th per year. So, you know, that
makes it a little bit you know,it's a really small number on
the month to month basis. Youcan kinda see, like, okay. If
I'm getting a 1,000 downloads,per month this time, you know,
this year, maybe I'd be gettinga 1,200 this time next year. So
that's, you know, puts it in alittle bit of a a different
light there, but still, youknow, not as much growth as
(03:56):
people would probably like tosee.
So you did mention that thereare some some outliers here on
actually both ends of thespectrum. And so Okay. What we
found here was that actuallyhalf of all of the respondents
outperformed the median, which,you would expect. So half of
shows did better than that1.62%. I suppose by nature of
(04:17):
that being the median, that isstatistically necessary.
Yeah. But some good news thereregardless. And we actually
found that a 5th, so I think itwas 21% of shows actually
doubled their downloads. And soa pretty significant percentage
of shows actually grew quite abit. And this was not just shows
that were small.
They had 10 downloads an episodeand went up to 20. There were
also many shows that actuallydoubled their download size with
(04:39):
multiple tens of thousands ofdownloads as a starting point
and went up to, you know, doublethat number. So that was some of
the outliers we saw on thepositive side of things. I think
the top show grew by almost400%, and this was actually one
of the shows that had thousandsof downloads. I think it was,
like, 33 100 downloads perepisode starting and was now
quite a bit bigger on the otherside.
It was in the the 10 to 20000download range per episode. And
(05:03):
then on the other side, we had,32% of shows actually shrunk,
and so they were had negativegrowth on a, downloads per
episode basis. And so this issomething that we're gonna look
into in a future episode andlook at. You know, I think we
often assume that, like, oh, theonly place to go is up, and what
we saw here was that actually athird of all shows actually
shrunk in downloads. And sowe're gonna dedicate an episode
(05:23):
to kind of dig into why thatmight be.
So Mhmm.
Justin (05:27):
I I
Jeremy (05:27):
would be curious to hear your reaction here now knowing
that it wasn't just like almostevery show is around this kind
of 2% range. Like, we've gotthis whole range. What what are
the thoughts that come to yourmind?
Justin (05:36):
If there's anyone listening that wants to grow
their show, I think I wouldwanna know what did that 1 fifth
of respondents who doubled theirdownloads do? What kind of
factors led to that growth? It'sone thing to look at the
numbers, but what causes a showto grow by that much?
Jeremy (05:55):
And you know what? I'm glad you you brought that up
because I think that my gutreaction and my my one of my
hopes, I think a lot of people'shopes who filled out this survey
was that we're gonna get thisbig data set and we're gonna see
these shows and we're gonna see,like, okay. These shows grew
quite a bit. Like, what were thetactics that they used? What
social media platform were theyon?
What category were they in? Howlong were their episodes? All of
these kinda tactical details.
Justin (06:17):
How many TikToks did they publish?
Jeremy (06:19):
And, yeah, were they all on YouTube or anything like
that? And, so I, of course, gotcurious. And before we started
recording here, I actually wentthrough I sorted, the data by
all of the highest growth shows.So I I just did about 15 of the
top growth shows here.
Justin (06:34):
Okay. These are the winners.
Jeremy (06:35):
These are the winners. So it's these are the shows that
grew by, you know, over a 100,many of these, a 100, 200, 300,
almost 400% growth, so a lot ofgrowth. And I was curious. Well,
one of the questions that we hadin the survey was what has been
the single most effective thingthat you've done in the past
year to grow your show? So thiswas very much like personal
attribution.
You know what you did. What doyou think had the biggest impact
(06:57):
on moving the needle? And thesewere all shows that grew very
successfully. I'm just gonnaread off a couple of these
responses that people had here,and we're just kinda starting at
the top, the highest growthshows, and working down the list
here. So we got the first one.
Create a Facebook group. Socialmedia. Created my short email
newsletter via LinkedIn, whichincludes a link to the new
episode and a link to theprevious one. It's the perfect
companion to my short 5 minutepodcast.
Justin (07:17):
Okay.
Jeremy (07:18):
Networking. Bought bought an ad on Castbox, brought
on a guest cohost, served mylisteners well, gained guests
who are semi famous in theirspace, rebranded the show,
created high quality SEO shownotes for each episode and share
them on social platforms, gotbooked to speak at Yale by one
random tweet. That's one I thinkthat we would all love to
replicate perhaps. We've gotincreasing the inherent value of
(07:40):
our content, contentrepurposing, posting material,
whatever that means, advertisingon other podcasts, learning
about Pinterest, defining ourlistener persona, and then
creatively going out to find andengage with them, and finally
focusing on the quality ofcontent. So listening to this
kind of, like, collection oftactics, do you spot any trends
here, any overwhelming, like,directive of this is what you
(08:01):
should do?
Justin (08:02):
No. There's no silver bullet in that list. There's no,
like, one thing. And maybe thisis actually what's frustrating
when people talk about podcastmarketing is they're like
they'll get advice. You know?
They'll go out on Reddit orforums or whatever, and they'll
say, how do I grow my show? Andsomeone will say, oh, the way to
grow your show is you just gottaget a speaking gig at Yale.
(08:24):
That's what worked for me. Andpeople are like, that's not very
helpful.
Jeremy (08:29):
I would be curious from your experience, as a marketer,
as a podcaster, working inpodcasting, talking with a lot
of successful shows, and andalso shows that might not be as
successful yet. If you were toventure a guess as to what these
shows are doing, if it's not,like, outwardly tactical that
has allowed them to grow, whatwould you say the the common
denominator is?
Justin (08:50):
There's one attribute that every single high growth
show has.
Jeremy (08:54):
Okay.
Justin (08:55):
And that attribute is podcast market fit.
Jeremy (08:59):
Okay.
Justin (09:00):
This is something you've talked about a lot. Why is it so
important?
Jeremy (09:04):
I'm actually gonna lead with, we're gonna bring in our
mutual friend, fellow Canadianin the podcast marketing space,
and I'm gonna key it up with aquote from Dan Meisner that I
think begins to get at whatpodcast market fit is. And he
said, don't start by asking howto build an audience for your
podcast. Instead, ask how tobuild a podcast for your
audience. And so I think, youknow, what Dan is getting at
(09:25):
here is that there are peopleout there in the world who are
looking for stuff, andeverybody's looking for
something different. And theyall have these things that
they're already interested in,and they're looking for things
similar to that.
A lot of times withentertainment style shows, if
you like one type of show, youyou listen to true crime, for
example, you're always lookingfor the next true crime show.
And so if you're creating inthat space, you know that people
(09:46):
like this category of shows.They're looking for more stuff
like that all the time. So onthe entertainment side of
things, that's how I often thinkabout it. On the more, like,
educational side of things, ifyou're maybe, like, starting a
show to build your business orsomething like that, what you're
looking for here is to create ashow that addresses a problem or
a challenge that people arelooking to solve.
And And so this is more of aclassic kind of content
(10:06):
marketing strategy where peoplehave some kind of problem. They
are looking to achieve some kindof goal. There's some kind of
obstacles in the way, and youare creating a show that
satisfies. It kind of forms thebridge between those two things.
And there's we can get into alot more of the nuances of it,
but that's kind of how I thinkabout it is, like, are you
creating a show that people arealready actively looking for,
(10:27):
you know, at least something inthe vicinity of what you're
creating so that you know thatthere's some interest and demand
in it.
Justin (10:32):
What I love about Dan's quote is that it illustrates
that people think you start withthe idea, the concept for the
show. But in reality, you shouldstart with the audience. Who is
this show for? And that audiencethat you choose will kind of
determine what product you givethem, what podcast you're going
(10:56):
to produce for these people. Italso assumes that you know
something about your audience,that you know how to reach them,
that you know what kinds ofthings they like, that you know
how long their commute is, thatyou know, you know, what context
they're listening, that you knowwhat other shows they're
listening to.
(11:16):
And once you have thatinformation, once you know who
is this show for, then you canproduce the podcast. Then you
can come up with some ideas thatmight resonate with that
audience. This is very differentthan making something and then
just trying to push it out topeople. Like, please take take
(11:38):
my podcast. Take my podcast.
And this is where all the badpodcast memes come from. You
know? Like, ask me about mypodcast or I'm sorry your
boyfriend has a podcast. Youknow? It's the idea that people
are just pushing their show onpeople that don't care, where
what you want is an audiencethat really cares that's
searching for a show like yours.
(12:00):
So instead of having toconstantly push, push, push,
you're gonna be connecting withpeople who are already looking
for a show like yours. That'sYeah. Podcast market fit. It's
producing something that peoplealready want, And it takes some
experimentation. It might take acouple different iterations.
(12:21):
It might take years for you tofinally get that podcast market
fit. But once you get it, yourshow should be able to grow
reliably month after month. Why?Because, to quote Seth Godin,
people like us do things likethis. So a show I love is
Acquired, which tells thestories and strategies of great
(12:44):
companies.
So people like me, startupfounders, tech executives,
people in Silicon Valley, peoplein business, people like us
listen to Acquired and peoplelike us recommend Acquired.
That's the key. You get both.I'm listening, and this show is
(13:07):
so good. It resonates with me sostrongly that I'm also going to
share it with other people likeme.
That's how you grow a show. AndI interviewed David Rosenthal,
one of the hosts. We can link toit in the show notes. And that
show, it's been around for 8years. They've doubled their
audience every single year.
(13:28):
So these aren't their exactnumbers, but let's say they
started out with a 1000downloads per month in year 1.
By year 8, just by doublingevery year, they'd be at a
128,000 downloads per episode.And when I asked David, like,
what's your secret? Like, whatwas the secret growth lever that
unlocked all of this growth? Hejust said, we're just focused on
(13:52):
consistently putting out a greatproduct, great episodes, and
people told their friends aboutit.
That's it. Word-of-mouth is howmost podcasts grow. And if you
can nail this podcast marketfit, you have a path towards
reliable double digit month overmonth growth. Now I know there's
(14:16):
people listening that they mightbe thinking, well, I I don't
know if I have podcast marketfit. I just started this show
because I had a good idea.
This is the show I wanted to seein the world. Are there some
steps they can take to get thereor get closer to that goal?
Jeremy (14:32):
I see you're, throwing over the hard question to me.
You just had your grandmonologue dropping the mic with
the the podcast market fit, andnow it's over to me for the the
hard stuff. And, this isactually a question that I do
get a lot. And, you know, a lotof people do create shows that
they just wanna do, and there'snothing wrong with that. And,
you know, creating, like, a artfocused podcast where it's like,
this is I'm not making it foranyone.
(14:53):
I'm making it for myself. Andyou actually do see a lot of
successful creators. I the firstperson who comes to mind is Tim
Urban of the blog Wait But Why,and he's got this great kind of
anecdote about how when he sitsdown to write, he pictures a
stadium of 10,000 little tinyTims that are all cheering him
on, and he writes the stuff thathe wants to exist in the world.
Yeah. And so I think that thisis a viable way you can build an
(15:15):
audience by doing this.
There's some luck involved withthis for sure. And I think
there's also it often worksbetter when you are plugged into
an existing community, and soyou're kind of a representative
of that community. And don'treally consume that much content
(15:36):
or anything like that relatedto, you know, other, people in a
specific field, what you createmight be, you know, crazy. And
maybe it has some kind ofartistic value, but it might not
really, you know, overlap withthat many other people. So Mhmm.
I wanna lay out that kind ofcaveat first.
Justin (15:50):
Yeah.
Jeremy (15:51):
Now I think that there is still a path to finding
product market fit when youstart off without a defined
audience. And I think of this asthe content art spectrum. And so
we think about there is pure arton one side of the spectrum and
pure content on the other. Andso on the content side of
things, this is like a show thatyou create. It's a 100% a means
to an end.
And so this might be for abusiness. You're like, I need to
(16:12):
attract these people so thatthey will buy my product, and
I'm creating content to be thatbridge.
Justin (16:17):
Mhmm.
Jeremy (16:17):
And on the art side of things, you're thinking, I'm
creating this show a 100% forme, and I don't care about
anybody else. And, like, I'mjust creating this thing. And
people can listen if they want,and they if they don't,
whatever. That's fine. I'm doingthis for me, and that's enough.
And so I think understandingwhere your show fits on the
spectrum will illuminate thepath forward for marketing. And
so I think if you're more on thecontent side, you're really
(16:40):
relying on the audience. Youkind of have a sense of, like,
okay, I know I'm creating thisthing for this audience. So you
can kind of take the approachthat Justin just mentioned,
going through this process oflike, okay, what do these people
want? Where are theyunderserved?
What kinds of questions are theyasking? And how can I create a
show for that?
Justin (16:54):
Mhmm.
Jeremy (16:54):
If you're on the art side, however, and and I will
say like most shows aresomewhere in the middle. There's
very few shows that are pure artor pure content, and so you're
probably somewhere in themiddle. And so you might have
some vague sense of, like, okay.I think these types of people
might be interested in thisbecause my show is somewhat
similar to other shows, andthese types of people seem to
like these other shows. Mhmm.
I think what you're doing hereis you're testing audiences out.
(17:15):
And so you're creating yourshow, and you're gonna go show
up in different communities. Andyou're gonna, you know,
integrate yourself in thosecommunities. You're gonna
occasionally talk about yourshow. You're not, like, just
plastering it around theInternet sharing links.
You're, like, actually gettingto know people, getting to talk
with people, and following yourhunches around. Like, I think
this might be an audience thatmight like my show. And you're
just trying to look for wheredid you get a positive reaction.
(17:36):
And so if you find your wayinto, you know, a group of
listeners, whether that's 25people or 250 people or 25100
people, you wanna then get toknow everything that you can
about those people, which willoften you'll be able to draw
some conclusions, say, like, oh,the people who like my show are
all like this, and they all likeother shows like this, and they
all hang out in thesecommunities. And now you've
(17:57):
actually found your way.
You've kind of gone the reverseway into finding that community
that you can then kind ofproceed the normal direction and
say, like, okay. These people, II've already attracted them, and
now I know how to find more ofthem. And now I can kind of do
some more research and say,like, is there a way to make my
show even more aligned with whatthese people are looking for? So
Yeah. That would be the kind ofprocess that I would, recommend
for somebody who's going morefrom the art side of things than
(18:19):
the content.
Justin (18:19):
Yeah. I'm not saying we should ignore our gut. Like, a
great reason to create a show isthat you listen to shows like
the kind of show you want tocreate. Like, if you're really
into, pop music and you'relistening to all those shows or
you're really into startups andyou're listening to all the
startup shows or you're whateverit is. If you are listening to
(18:41):
all the shows in your categoryand there are things that you
consistently think could bebetter, If you're like, ah, why
did they have it like this?
Why are they organizing it likethis? I could do this better.
Here's a cool idea that no onenobody's doing. I'm gonna try
that. That's a great reason tostart a show and to test things
out.
And, so your gut can be a partof it. Even if you're on the
(19:03):
content side, your instincts canstill be a part of it. The key
is that you want to test outwhether these things actually
resonate with the audience.Yeah. And I think we wanna get
into some takeaways right nowabout what are some practical
things folks can do if theywanna achieve above average
(19:24):
month over month growth?
How can they start that processof actually, you know, getting
to grow their
Jeremy (19:32):
show? So I think the the one thing that I want to to
bring up, related to this andthe the kind of monthly growth
rate. There's actually kind of 2parts to it, and most people
only think about 1. But the ideaof podcast market come back to
(19:53):
the show. And now I've got newsubscribers.
So if I do some kind ofpromotion, I get 50 new people
in the show. Now I've boosted mylistenership by 50 people. Mhmm.
And what most people don'trealize, and it's really hard to
see in the podcasting ecosystem,it's easier to see in other
places, is that there's aconstant kind of, like, leaky
bucket where we've got somelisteners. They might have been
with us for a week or they mighthave been with us for 5 years,
(20:15):
but there's a constant stream ofpeople who are no longer
listening to the podcast on aregular basis.
And so this would be what wewould call churn in, like,
software is is typically wherethat that term would be used.
But it does exist in podcasting,and so I think what we want to
realize is that it's entirelypossible that you have a 100
downloads a month, and that'swhat you see in your your
(20:36):
podcast hosting dashboard, say,in transistor dot fm perhaps.
Yeah. Yeah. And that could meana couple of different things
depending on your show.
And so maybe you have a 100downloads every single episode.
That could mean that those are a100 people who listen for the
first time. You went out and yougot those 100 new people. Your
promotion is working. You gotthem in, and they listen to the
(20:57):
show, and they never came back.
And then next week, it's a 100new people who are in the show
now. And to you, it looks like,oh, I've got a 100 subscribers.
I got a 100 people listen toevery single episode. Whereas it
could also mean that you do havethose 100 listeners who come
back every episode, and nothingthat you're doing to promote is
working. And so I think what weneed to realize is that there's
constant inflow and also aconstant outflow.
(21:18):
And I think where the podcastmarket fit really comes into
play is that the better fit youhave, the more people who come
into the show for the first timeend up sticking around. The more
you can reduce that churn andincrease retention, the faster
you're actually gonna grow. Andso I think that that's one of
these pieces that as you'rethinking about, like, you know,
whether it comes to promotionversus making the show better,
(21:39):
finding fit, this is kind of,like, the dynamics that are at
play. And so improving the showpatches some of the holes in the
bucket, and then bringing in andgetting in front of new people
also increases the growth. Sothese two kind of things to keep
in mind.
Justin (21:50):
Mhmm. Totally. The the leaky bucket of podcasting that
nobody's talking about. So,yeah, do you wanna jump into
some practical, ways to explorethis area?
Jeremy (22:01):
This this episode is kinda centered around this,
like, monthly and annual growthrates. And for me, I think that
the the month over month growthrate feels like a long enough
time span that I can kind of dosome experiments and then see
what impact that had. And so,when we're talking about finding
podcast market fit, whetherwe're talking about promotion or
anything else, I think it allcomes down to experiments. And
(22:22):
so we we take some action thatwe maybe haven't done before. We
try something different, andthen we see, you know, on that
episode or on, you know, after amonth, what impact did that
have.
Maybe I increased the quality ofmy hooks that I started off each
episode. And so I, like, spend alot of time really focusing on
those first three minutes and,like, really capturing up and
(22:46):
maybe that's resulting in aincrease in listenership and now
I can kind of assume, like, oh,probably I've just reduced my
churn a little bit by keepingpeople listening and coming back
for more episodes and so thatthat experiment was successful.
And of course there's many otherexperiments you might run that
are not successful and so youcan kind of use your your
personal historic growth rate asthis benchmark. And so you can
say, if I have been growing at7% month over month, I do an
(23:09):
experiment, I test out somethingwith my titles, I change up my
show concept or format,something like that, and all of
a sudden, it tanks in the nextmonth. I can say, okay.
That was not the, the answer tomy growth problems. Like, let's
try something else, going aheadnext month. So Yeah. Really for
me, it all comes down to, like,doing experiments and then
measuring the results.
Justin (23:27):
Yeah. And that's a quantitative side, like, okay,
I'm gonna do things and then seewhat's reflected in the data.
There's also the qualitativeside. And I think podcasters,
especially new podcasters,should get in the habit of
soliciting feedback from theirlisteners. So you get 5
downloads.
Make sure in that episode, atsome point you say, hey, folks,
(23:49):
I am trying to get better atthis podcasting thing. Right
now, I'm at 5 downloads permonth. I wanna get to 10, and I
need your help. Please reach outto me by email, by DMs, whatever
channels, and let me know howcan I make this show better? In
fact, I'm gonna ask you aspecific question.
(24:09):
Would you recommend the show toa friend? If not, if your answer
is no, I want you to stopeverything you're doing right
now, pull over to the side ofthe road, and I want you to
write me an email about what isstopping you from recommending
the show to a friend. And youand I have talked about this so
many times, Jeremy. Sometimes,it's like, I don't wanna share
this episode because the showart is embarrassing or the
(24:33):
episode title wouldn't resonatewith me and my friends or your
audio audio quality is bad Oryour episodes are an hour and a
half long and, you know, 5minutes of that is you breathing
heavily. You know, whateverreason it is, like, I wanna hear
from you.
What could I do that would makethis the kind of show that you
(24:55):
recommend to your friends? Youcan also accomplish this with,
listener surveys. We'll put alink to a sample in the show
notes, but get in the habit ofgetting that qualitative data as
well. And as you improve things,you'll be able to notice
hopefully that those responsesbecome more and more positive.
More and more people are sayingthat they would recommend a show
(25:17):
to a friend.
Jeremy (25:18):
Yeah. And I think the other thing that I often
recommend people doing, and thisworks even better almost when
you are small, and you need tokind of lead the engagement a
lot of times. A lot of timespeople wanna put out the podcast
and have people come to themwith the engagement. But one of
the things that I recommend topeople is if you know 3 people
who listen to the show, maybeyou've had just the briefest of
interactions on social mediawhere they said, like, oh, I I
(25:40):
really like that episode, Iwould personally reach out to
those people and start engagingwith them and their content more
regularly and actually take thelead in building the
relationship. And, you know, youwanna start out just by, like,
some some back and forth, andthey're gonna appreciate that if
they've listened to the show.
And especially early on, you canactually then start getting into
DM conversations and startgetting onto Zoom calls and you
can actually get to know themand they can really become kind
(26:03):
of the behind the scenes, like,listener advisory board of the
show. And you can get so muchgood information because, like,
they're part of this early few,and it only takes, like you can
do this with 1 person. And theone thing that I'll say is you
wanna be a little bit selectiveabout these people. Mhmm. And so
what you wanna do is make surethat you are creating the show
and talking with people who youwant more of.
(26:24):
And so there might be somebodywho's, like, really cranky, and
they listen to every episode andyou're like, oh, I do not want a
1,000 of that person in mysocial media feed, in my email
inbox. And so I'm not gonnalisten to what they say they
want the show to be, but there'ssomebody else who you're like,
oh, if I could have a stadiumfull of this person listening to
the show, like, that's who Iwant to attract more of. And so
that's who you wanna find outeverything that you can about
and listen to their kind ofguidance and feedback. Mhmm.
Justin (26:45):
And don't ask, like, would you listen more if I did
more of this? Ask more questionslike, what other podcasts have
you listened to in the past onthis how many of those podcasts
are you not listening toanymore? Why did you stop
listening? What initially drewyou to my show? What stopped you
from recommending the show to afriend?
(27:07):
What other content are youconsuming on this topic?
Newsletters or blogs or YouTubechannels? Get a sense of what
other things they're already inmotion doing and why they like
or don't like that content. AndI think you'll get so many good
answers. You you were actuallytelling me, Jeremy, about ways
you can, like, promote yourpodcast and do some tests there.
(27:30):
What kind of podcast promotionthings have you seen work when
people are trying to either doexperiments or increase the
growth rate for their show?
Jeremy (27:41):
Yeah. So there's a number of ways. I think that
that, for me, it all starts withthose one to one conversations.
And I think what you wanna beable to get to is this kind of,
like, eyes light up moment, andI actually, wrote a newsletter
just last week. I kind ofcheekily called it the Smasher
Pass test.
And so, essentially, what you'relooking for here is you give
somebody the, you know, 1 or 2sentence description of your
show, and the best possiblereaction and the one that you
(28:02):
are aiming for is that beforeyou've even finished giving the
description, they're alreadyreaching for their phone and
looking to subscribe to it. AndI think that people will tell
you in these conversations,like, oh, that sounds really
interesting. I'll check that outlater. And of course, we all
know this. We've all done this.
And they're being polite andthey're like, okay, like, I'm
not gonna listen that show, butthis person seems nice, so I
don't wanna hurt their feelings.
Justin (28:22):
Yeah.
Jeremy (28:22):
I think people's actions will always tell you more than
what they will tell you to yourface. And getting that feedback
of, like, actually being able tosee somebody's reaction over
Zoom in person when you describeyour show, that is kind of the
ultimate marker of where yourshow lies in terms of podcast
market fit. And so you wanna begetting to the point where you
are talking to 10 of your ideallisteners, and almost all of
(28:43):
them are, like, reaching for thephones and, like, wow. This show
sounds amazing. How have I notheard about this before?
Mhmm. So that is is kind of thegold standard for me is having
these actual conversations. Buta couple of, like, hackier
tacticky type things you can doto kind of refine your your kind
of pitch and your premise at alarger scale. There's one this
is getting a little bittechnical. This is a bit more
advanced, but if you have any,experience with either Google or
(29:05):
Facebook advertising, you canrun some really, really cheap
tests for just a few dollarswhere you can just do a bunch of
AB testing through it's, like,one image of your show cover
art, or it could even be just a,like, kind of plain graphic
that's somewhat generic, andjust the wording is different.
And it's, like, this show title,a show where we do this, and
you, like, change that's whatyou're changing, and you just
measure that. And you can getthat in front of a few 100 or a
(29:27):
few 1,000 people even for just,like, a few dollars, $10,
something like that. And you canquickly see, like, what did
people click on more? And thatcan then you can take that, and
that's your new benchmark, andyou can test out other versions.
And, of course, you might get toa point where you're like, oh,
okay.
This is the show most people areinterested in. This does not
align at all with the contentI'm currently creating, but
maybe that sounds like a prettyinteresting show. I would be
(29:47):
interested in making that, andyou can make the decision to
say, like, okay. There's a greathook here. Now I'm gonna fulfill
it with the content.
And so that's a kind of, like,tactical way that you can start
to back your way into podcastmarket fit and test out some
different things without, like,putting a ton of money or energy
into reaching a large number ofpeople. So, that's something
that I you can use that test forso many different things, and
(30:08):
testing out your premise anddescription is is just one of
them.
Justin (30:10):
I love it. Another tactic people can use is to
start using some tools to tracktheir marketing experiments. So
as you're doing if you're ifyou're gonna do an ad or if
you're gonna post in a communityor if you're gonna do a
newsletter sponsorship orsomething, use one of these link
tracking tools, for podcasts.There's 2, that we would
(30:31):
recommend. Linkfire, whichactually has a deep integration
with Apple Podcasts now, andit'll show you, did people click
from Twitter and actually becomea follower in Apple Podcasts, or
how many downloads did thatparticular promotion lead to?
This will allow you to testdifferent things out. As I
(30:52):
promoted on Twitter, here's mylink for Twitter. As I promote
it in this newslettersponsorship, here's the link for
that. And does that result inpeople actually clicking through
onto Spotify, Apple, etcetera?And you'll be able to track the
effectiveness of yourexperiments.
That's what you want. You wannabe able to say, is this having a
(31:14):
difference? So, yeah, I if youhaven't checked those out yet, I
recommend they both have freeversions so you can get started
for free. Yeah. And wheneveryou're sharing a link, have
that.
You could even have a shortlink, you know, like, if you
have a domain, you could say,you know, your podcast.com/share
and then you could have Linkfireor Chartable track that link as
(31:36):
well. So there's a variety ofways you can start to see which
you know, what's working here?What experiments are working?
What are people, you know, morelikely to click through on? The
people who are really into thisare doing split tests where
they'll, like, create oneepisode and they'll have the
hook for it.
And then they'll publish anotherepisode that maybe is a
(31:57):
different take on that orwhatever. And then they're gonna
test them right next to eachother to see which resonated
more with the audience.
Jeremy (32:06):
Yeah. I've been waiting for this to become a, inbuilt
feature in podcast hostingplatforms. Nudge, nudge, wink,
wink. Although, I believe it asI've been thinking through this,
I haven't done it myself, but Ithink you could get crafty with
some dynamic ads and dosomething very similar and
achieve a, kind of similarresult. It the data is not gonna
be as, granular as you look atsplit testing for website type
(32:26):
of stuff.
But Yeah. Yeah. You can getreally technical if you want to.
And the one thing I wanna, like,say on that note is that so much
of marketing, I think we oftenthink about it as what we do,
the, like, the activities thatwe're doing. And I think a lot
of it is about what we don't do,and we don't really know what we
should stop doing until we starttesting.
And so a lot of people, ifyou're not tracking your
promotions, maybe you'respending 5 hours a week
(32:48):
promoting your podcast onTwitter. And once you start
tracking, you realize that 0listeners ever come from that.
And you realize, oh, maybe that5 hours a week would be better
spent on another platform, say,that you're on somebody
mentioned Pinterest in in thereport and say you're, like,
start testing that and you're,like, woah. I'm getting tons of
new listeners from Pinterest.Like, I'm gonna stop Twitter,
and I'm gonna go all in onPinterest.
And so I think the only way thatyou can get to that point is
(33:10):
actually having some kind ofdata, and these tools, Linkfire
and Chartable, allow you tocollect some of that so that you
can, you know, allocate yourtime more effectively going
forward.
Justin (33:19):
Totally.
Jeremy (33:20):
Alright. So, Justin, as we wrap up this episode here,
I'm curious. What are some ofyour kind of takeaways from this
conversation regarding the kindof monthly and annual growth
rates and what people can do toincrease those?
Justin (33:32):
Mhmm. Again, the one factor that distinguishes
whether or not you're gonna growis if you have this podcast
market fit. And we're gonna betalking about this all season.
The the whole season, this isnot just a one episode topic.
We're gonna be talking about itmore.
And, actually, if you havequestions about this, if you
have feedback about this, get ahold of us. We've got links in
(33:54):
the show notes. We wanna hearwhat questions you have around
this topic of Podcast MarketFit. But just start thinking
about it. Start thinking aboutshows you like and start
thinking, how do they havepodcast market fit?
How did that play out for them?And I will say that it sometimes
takes a while. Right? So theacquired show started out as a
show about tech acquisitions.And they evolved over time, over
(34:17):
8 years, to be a show about thehistory of great companies.
Right? And that evolution helpedthem get more podcast market
fit. I think the second thing isstart experimenting. I'm gonna
try this and see what response Iget. That could be as simple as
changing your show art.
That could be I'm gonna reducethe length of my episode from an
(34:40):
hour to 20 minutes. Startexperiments. And then 3rd is
look at the data, and the datacould be what you're seeing in
your analytics. But the datashould also be connecting
directly with your listeners.How about yourself?
Anything that comes to mind?
Jeremy (34:57):
The two things that I would end on is the first just
this idea that these numbersthat we discussed here are
pretty depressing if we'relooking at the median and the
averages. But keep in mind that,you know, your goal is probably
not to fall into that averagecategory. You certainly can. We
looked at some of these thesenumbers, the distribution of
growth, and it is certainlypossible to grow much bigger
(35:18):
than and much faster than that1.62% month over month, 21% year
over year. And so looking atthose numbers, you can say,
like, okay.
Well, I'm right in the averagerange, and you can either view
that as, like, okay. Well, I'mI'm doing, you know, an average
job. Or you can say, like, okay.I know that it's possible to do
more, and I'm not gonna settlefor for just being in this
average, growth group. And so Ithink if you have higher
(35:39):
aspirations, it's possible, butyou're going to to need to find
that podcast market fit thatJustin mentioned.
And then, the last thing thelast takeaway, was was really
this fantastic question that youcame up with, which I'm going to
now, pose to everybody listeningto this, which is if you're
enjoying the show so far, wewould love it if you would
recommend it to a friend. And,if this is not a show that you
would recommend to a friend, letus know. What can we do that
(36:02):
would make this showrecommendable worthy
recommendation worthy? Whatwould make the show
recommendation worthy? Maybethere's the wording.
Let us know. You can get at bothof us on Twitter and LinkedIn
and email. Got the links in theshow notes, and, we would both
really love to hear, what wouldmake this one of your favorite
shows on podcasting?
Justin (36:22):
Yes. We wanna hear your feedback. Don't hold back. You
don't have to be gentle with us.We wanna hear your feedback.
And yes, please recommend theshow if you love it.
Jeremy (36:30):
As always, you can check out the full report where all of
the data that this episode andall of the episodes, are based
on atpodcastmarketingtrends.com/2023.
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The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!