Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

**Jeff Umbro:** Hey, everyone! Lot of familiar faces.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah, it’s so good to see you all! Ow. I think we’ll just give everyone, , another minute to trail in before we get started. Alrighty. Yes, and today’s session is going to be recorded, and we will be circulating the recording, so don’t worry about having to take notes. We will make sure to get that over to you. And I think… Jeff, we’re probably good to get started. I just want to make sure that we, , are able to cover all of our content in time, and then also Q&A, so I think anyone trailing in a little bit later can likely just tune into the recording.

**Jeff Umbro:** Sure.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining us today. We have been doing these webinars for a while, and I was so thrilled to see how much traction today’s topic on audience growth had received.

**Jeff Umbro:** I do likely know most of you, but as a quick refresher, I’m Fatima Zaidi, I’m the founder and CEO of Quill, which is our production agency. We work with branded podcasts, or branded organizations to create their branded shows, and I’m also the CEO of CoHost, which is our SaaS product that we’ve created. It’s a hosting platform and prefix for those who are looking for.

**Fatima Zaidi:** better analytics around their show. We have been at the center of a lot of podcast growth and marketing discussions, so I was really glad that our team, in partnership with the team at Podglomerate, decided that this was going to be our area of focus for today’s webinar. And over the next hour, we’re really going to be covering a lot of the pain points, such as the actionable promotional strategies from launch tactics to ongoing marketing that really keep listeners coming back and keeping your listeners loyal, how to measure the impact of your promotion strategies to see which channels and tactics are working and moving the needle, and then Jeff and I are going to give you real-world examples of what’s working. And what’s not working for this year. As for my co-presenter today, Jeff has been an agency friend for a very long time. We love the folks over at Pomglomerate, and there’s such a mutual respect for the way our agencies operate, and how both of us feel that marketing is arguably half of the scope. Gone are the days where the existence of your show is enough, and Really just excited to walk you all through the key, key the messaging that we’ve prepared for today. So, Jeff, over to you for a quick intro.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, thanks, Fatima. Honored to be here, and thanks for the partnership and the friendship and all of the things, and thanks to everyone for joining the webinar today. I’m hoping that we are providing you all with some of the tips and tricks that you all can use in your day-to-day moving forward. I’m Jeff Umber, I’m the founder and CEO of the Pogglomerate. We are a podcast agency that produces, markets, and monetizes podcasts. We work with folks Netflix, PBS, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and many, many, many others. You can find out more at Pogglomerate.com. I won’t bore you with any of the details. But today, we are here to talk about the podcast marketing landscape. There’s been a lot of shifts in the last few years of, , how people are considering what podcast marketing is. There is the idea of… , finding an audience for your show, of retaining an audience for your show, of bringing in people who are going to engage with your show. There’s the whole idea of the death of the download. Thank you to Dan Meisner and Jonas Wust, and And there’s been, , a whole slew of, , new engagement metrics that people have been paying attention to over the last few years. So, we’re gonna talk about all of that, and, , what you need to pay attention to when you’re looking at, , . how your podcast is performing. Understanding that, , there’s a lot of things that people can do and can’t do based on the resource constraints that they do and don’t have. And hopefully we’re gonna be able to give you some tips and tricks to pay more attention to those things, and to execute something that’ll bring value to you, your podcast, and your organization. So… The goal here is to, , have you guys walk away with some insights. So we have a Q&A at the end, so anything that, , gives you pause throughout this, , take a note and make sure to ask a question when we’re ready. So, today we’re going to talk about 3 key areas of podcast growth. So before that, I just wanted to say, whenever I’m talking to, , a new podcast client or customer, or just having a conversation with somebody who’s making a show, there are 3 questions that I ask them. The first is, what do you want this podcast to do for you? The second is, what will your listener get from this show? And the third is, how are you measuring, , both of those questions? So how are you, , proving whether or not this worked effectively for you? So, there are 3 key areas here, that we’re gonna spend a minute talking about. So, are we reaching the right people? How engaged are they, and are they sticking around? So, in my opinion, these three areas are key in determining if you’re working in service to the questions that I always ask the clients. So. it’s really… I don’t know if this is popular or unpopular opinion, but, , it truly is not that difficult to drive downloads to a show. If you really only care about downloads, you can buy them, there are ways to go find, , , ways to… Essentially, , , maximize the exposure of your show on certain platforms that will grow your audience. But at a certain point, you’re just kind of exposing your show to volume, as opposed to actual listenership, and I… I am willing to bet that most of the folks on this call don’t want that. , they’re… there’s a whole conversation around that that we’re not gonna have today, but I’m just gonna assume, for the sake of this conversation that you all care a lot more about listeners than you do about downloads. So… One of the reasons that, , we really care about actual engagement and listenership is that you really want to use your podcast, or at least a lot of people do. to, , build kind of a feedback loop, and you want to hear from your listeners, whether that’s through email, through social media, through comments, likes. A lot of people, and I can’t speak for each one of you, are making their podcast as a vehicle for content marketing, thought leadership, lead generation. Or just because they’re having fun with it. And so you want to be making something that is , , engaging with the people who are listening to it. And we’re gonna talk about different ways to measure that shortly, but, , in order to figure that out, you want to, , really determine, are you reaching the right people? And Fatima’s gonna talk a little bit about how you can help determine, , who those people are. So I’ll pause on that for a little bit. But ultimately, it’s, , you want to think about, . , where do those people exist? What platforms are they? Are they on? What other podcasts are they listening to? What media are they consuming? When it comes to, , how engaged are they? there is some different consumption metrics that you can look at, such as, , are they returning for future episodes? What kind of consumption are you seeing on specific episodes? And you can see that on platforms , Apple Podcasts Connect, Spotify for podcasters, your YouTube Studio. Beyond just the download metric that you get from your hosting platform, and There… you can start to understand better, kind of , . Are there things within your episode, whether it’s editorial or marketing, that are turning off your listeners? Are you overproducing the number of episodes that you’re publishing? Are you making your episodes too long? Do you have too many ads? Are you bringing on guests that people aren’t interested in? And as you publish more episodes and start building more of a strategy around your show, you can start to understand how people are engaging with the show using these metrics, and that should help to inform the different ways in which you are producing future episodes of the show. So, it’s… it’s really using the data in a smart way to inform what you’re going to be doing in the future. So once you have, , a really good understanding of what your audience is doing, how they’re behaving, it should really influence your future direction for your marketing strategy, your editorial, and how you’re operating in the space. So, I’ll pause there for a minute to see if Fatima has anything that she’d to add, but, on a very broad level, . one of the things we look at is just, , how are people engaging with the existing show? Should that inform how you’re producing and marketing the show? And then, , once you’ve made those changes and made those shifts, you can look back to see if you’re seeing a positive or a negative response to those changes in those same metrics that you’ve been tracking.

**Fatima Zaidi:** It’s interesting, Jeff, the three questions that you asked. Love those. We asked something similar, which is, what is the business objective of the podcast? And I think when we’re chatting with our clients, I think that it’s really important for us to get across that it’s better to be something to someone, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. And we really have found in our experience that when exactly who your target audience is, you can do a much better job of trying to reach them, and it sometimes is an education during the pitch process and helping brands also understand the importance of very targeted marketing. A lot of brands for us feel their agency of records or their in-house marketing teams. can sort of handle their generalized marketing tactics that they’re used to day-to-day, whether that be Google or Instagram ads. But generally, in our experience, we have found that they don’t necessarily convert podcast listeners. They can be great for engagement, likes, and sometimes really important to build a community, but a lot of our clients are looking for the conversion to listeners, and I think… really identifying who your target audience is so that you can effectively market to them is really the first step, and then making sure that you’re not just focused on paid, or not just focused on organic, owned and earned, but a combination of all of them, so that you’re diversifying not only where you’re reaching your listeners, but so that you’re building an authentic community around your show. I would say that’s really the first step in terms of really targeting the right audience. And then the other, which we’ll talk about extensively today, is focusing on the right metrics. to ensure that your content is working, and Jeff, you really alluded to a lot of this. The download, , the vanity metric, I have a lot to say about that, but we can’t even agree as an industry on the definition of a download. So, it’s quite baffling to me that we’ve put so much emphasis on that one metric. and oftentimes ignore a lot of the engagement metrics, consumption data that you just talked about, or listening time. That really speaks to whether or not you’re reaching the right audiences, and if those audiences are engaged with your content. So, I really do want to spend some time today, paying attention to, well, how do we, A, ensure that we’re reaching the right audiences, and where do we find the data to figure out whether or not we’re reaching the right audiences, and if they’re engaged with the content?

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah. And so, I wanted to, , spend a minute, How do you, at Quill, , try to determine, , who your, kind of, ideal listener persona is?

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah, so it’s very much in partnership with the podcasters that we’re working with to determine, , we do a little bit of a competitive analysis, so we take a look at what other shows are on the market? And really, here, the priority is to make sure that we’re not just creating another podcast that already exists, but that we’re trying to be the first, the best, or different. And then once you’re figuring that out, typically, I would say a lot of the podcasters that we work with know who it is that they’re trying to reach. I think the beauty of working in the branded podcasting space is our clients do know exactly who their target audience is.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah.

**Fatima Zaidi:** We to say, , the more specific that you can get, the better. And I would say for the vast majority of the shows we work on, we always say that narrowing down your audience to a specific target audience is not just more impactful, but easier to grow. So, if you were to do a Martech podcast. You could try to appeal to all marketers, or it could, , focus specifically on senior-level marketing managers at medium-sized tech brands. The niche version makes it easier to choose guests, share episode topics, write clear episode titles, and target promotion effectively, whether that’s LinkedIn or Slack communities or newsletters. I think the broader version sounds it would be more relevant relevant to people in theory, but gives people gives fewer people a clear reason to press play, and so I think the bigger question for us is. How do you gather insights about who your audience is, and ensure that they’re engaged with your content? And I would say that’s where you really want to lean on your podcast hosting attribution, and analytics platforms to understand, are you, A, , hitting your intended audience, but how do you continue to tailor your content further to make sure that you’re hitting your audience’s interests, and what they , and what they don’t , and the feedback that they’re providing.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, there’s a saying, if your audience is everyone, then your audience is no one.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah.

**Jeff Umbro:** And, that applies to most media, but definitely podcasting. Which is funny, I always had a problem with that, because, , there are some shows that are truly for everyone, that have massive.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Jeff Umbro:** But for the most part, especially if it’s, , a branded show, it is not the case.

**Fatima Zaidi:** It also just is… it’s quite interesting to me that so many people, so many people who are podcasting make decisions around their show without looking into their data. So we, for example, a very popular question that we get asked, and I’m sure you get asked this every day, Jeff, is should we do video along with audio? And, well, what is the data telling you? And so we, , get asked this question all the time, and the first thing that we take a look at is, well, how much… of… out of your audience that you currently have curated, how much… how many of them are consuming content on YouTube and TikTok? How many of them are consuming video content? And that is how we decide whether or not you should be focusing on a video podcast, or maybe an audio first with video assets for promotion is enough. We also use the data that we’re collecting to level up editorially. So, for example, one of our clients recently has been focused on increasing their consumption rate for their show, and very important metric, I would argue, the most important one, and so they typically interview founders on their podcast. But we, through the data, noticed that a large part of their audience are interested in health and fitness and exercise content, and so for this season, we changed it up, and we invited founders of health and fitness companies to join as guest speakers, and very quickly, over a few episodes, we got to see, an increase in their average consumption rate for the entire show. So, that’s the other thing, it’s not just, . Looking at the download count, but using the data to level up more on the editorial side.

**Jeff Umbro:** That’s fascinating. I’ll give another example of that. We… we work with a show that publishes daily. It is a, general news politics show, and, has a… a large audience. And we were able to see a few trends that kind of inferred that maybe they were publishing too frequently. And they were able to reduce the frequency in which they published their show to increase the. , repeat customers of the number of times that people were coming back to the show to listen, which also increased the engagement and the consumption for each episode that people did, , spend time with. And while we haven’t been able to convince anybody to begin over-producing on a show, or producing more episodes, we do have some evidence to show that, , we have one weekly show, and the average listener is consuming more than one episode of that show per week. Which tells me they should be producing more episodes, for example.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah, definitely.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, so, , there’s some, , devil in the details when it comes to all this stuff, where you can get, , really creative with this, and I love that example with the fitness, companies. I think that’s very creative.

**Fatima Zaidi:** I do have a few people in the chat, I think, asking where you can access data. Oh, sure. That could show you, how many of your audiences are tuning in to YouTube or consuming video content. It really depends on the hosting provider that you’re with. So, for example, CoHost, which is our platform, we provide you with psychographic and demographic data, and one of the features that we really hone in on is interests, hobbies, and social media behaviors. So, are they on LinkedIn? Are they on YouTube? Are they on TikTok? So again, that’s typically where you would go to look for that data, is your hosting provider or an attribution, provider as well, of the content. I think there was another person that mentioned my audio is a little bit echoey. Jeff, can you hear me okay?

**Jeff Umbro:** I can, yeah.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Okay, great.

**Jeff Umbro:** So, I… and just to… Co-host is amazing, you all should check it out, and genuinely, it is an amazing platform. We have several clients that use it. If it is too expensive or, , you can’t access it for any number of reasons, , you can also find that data by doing, , surveys with your listeners or something.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah.

**Jeff Umbro:** But, but Cohost is not too expensive, so you should check it out.

**Fatima Zaidi:** I appreciate the shameless sales plugin that I didn’t have to be the one that did it.

**Jeff Umbro:** It is genuinely the best. It’s, , I… there are… there really aren’t any other platforms that will give you the kinds of data that you get on CoHost, so…

**Fatima Zaidi:** Chartable used to do it in the past, but unfortunately, Chartable did have to shut down in recent years. It got shelved, so we are one of the few that are providing the attribution data.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, and there are ways to get it, but, , the easiest is to use CoHost. So.

**Fatima Zaidi:** So that brings us, , to which channels and tactics bring in loyal fans, and I know, Jeff, you’re going to dive into specific launch and ongoing marketing strategies. But before we get there, I really just wanted to chat about, well, how do we use data to see which channels and tactics will work best for you, essentially, and I think that so many podcasters that come to us have their.

**Tara Connaghan:** podcasts living in isolation on the listening apps, Apple and Spotify, but we really…

**Fatima Zaidi:** We really do believe that the best parts of podcast content is that it’s evergreen and it can fuel your entire content ecosystem. And so, typically, this is where we recommend, . Transcripts should be converted into SEO-formatted recap blogs. You should be using them as a base to turn a podcast episode into social content, newsletters, blogs. And even sales or internal enablement materials, and I don’t know if you notice that when you’re chatting with clients in the early days, and they already have a podcast, they’re not really thinking about repurposing any of it, and it just sort of is a podcast that they have, and it lives on Apple, but that’s sort of the extent of it, and I think that’s a really big missed opportunity and low-hanging fruit for anyone who is producing consistent content, is to make sure that you’re thinking about it From a content ecosystem perspective, rather than just, we’re just gonna push out episodes on repeat.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah. Yeah, and I think it’s, I don’t recommend everybody does this, but we had a client years ago who would interview a potential sales lead. They would then take that interview, turn it into a transcript, publish that on their blog, they would clip that interview, put it onto LinkedIn and whatever social platforms they wanted to. they would turn it into a white paper that people could download by giving them their email on their website. They would send that white paper to the guest of the show, , a month later as a way to follow up with that potential lead for their net new business, and then, , they, in theory, have built a new relationship with somebody who could later become a customer. So, your strategy with this should, in theory, be in service to that first question that Quill or Pogglomerate or whomever is asking, , what are your goals with this podcast? And there’s a different answer to all of those questions, so…

**Fatima Zaidi:** And then, , if you’re not already, you should be utilizing tracking links. Tracking links really just make it possible to move beyond assumptions and see exactly which channels, campaigns, and messages are driving real engagement. You can see where your listeners are coming from, which tactics perform the best, which look good on paper, but don’t necessarily convert. And then once what’s working, you can really optimize top-performing channels over time. I am a firm believer of you cannot be everywhere you cannot do everything, at least you cannot do everything well, and so tracking links have, over time, really helped us narrow down which marketing efforts provide and yield the most results so that we can really double down on those. And if you are wondering, well, where can you access tracking links, I know we do it on our product, but I’m sure that there are other products out there. I know Chartable used to before they shut down. I think there’s, Is it PodScribe that used to do?

**Jeff Umbro:** So, Podscribe, Magellan, Swap FM, Megaphone has a native service, And in fact, , we just published a blog on our website that has 19 alternatives to Chartable, so anybody who’s interested can go and check it out, and we can throw it in the chat as well.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah.

**Jeff Umbro:** But the 5 big ones would be Swap FM, Megaphone, Podscribe, Magellan, and.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Provost.

**Jeff Umbro:** And co-host. And there may be one addition… anyway, point is, there are plenty of options. So… And, and it is really… essentially, you can track, audio to web, audio to audio, and And audio to, , whatever other platform you’re hoping to track using these links and, these attribution services.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah, it’s just a really good use of your time. I just find that instead of trying to force discovery inside the crowded podcast directories, looking at all of this data allows you to meet your audiences in environments that they already trust, and that means you can choose the right channels, formats. And languages for promotion, whether that’s, , short-form content, whether that’s paid social, community placements. What we’re really just trying to do is align each tactic to how our audiences prefer to consume that content, and providing them with just a bit more of a tailored approach.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, and I think it’s, everything Fatima is saying is, , really important, too, as well, because it goes back to the idea of, , if you’re producing for everyone, you’re producing for no one.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Definitely. So, Jeff, give it to us. What are the tactics and strategies that have worked well for your team? And I’m happy to also provide some of our perspective and experience as well, in terms of what’s worked. I feel it’s a very crowded and noisy marketplace in terms of marketing tactics. There’s some that work on paper, but when you look behind the hood and you’re , are these legitimate downloads? I think it can get a little bit, dicey, so I’m curious to hear your perspective.

**Jeff Umbro:** Sure, So, I… we have what we call, , our six-tier approach at Pglomerate, and I’m gonna walk through all of that. And I see some familiar names in the chat, so there are some people here who have heard me say this before, so forgive me if this is, , repeating myself. And I will do my best to point out, . where you should and shouldn’t pay attention based on, , your specific goals. And keep in mind, everything I’m about to say is based on, , your own resource constraints, so everything that we’re about to say is based on, , our organizations that do this professionally, that have teams of people who do this all day, every day, and so you may need to cherry-pick the things that you want to focus on. And or, , hire an organization to assist you with this, and or reprioritize what you’re working on in order to do this. And I’ll say very broadly, whatever we’re talking about moving forward on the marketing strategy, You should make sure that you’re really happy with the product that you’re producing, and that all of these metrics that you’re paying attention to are, , effectively working on your behalf before you put a lot of energy into the growth side of things. Because you don’t want to be pushing a lot of traffic to a vehicle that, , is not really doing what you want it to. Or at least I would rather wait until it’s something that is going to be really effective for the, , fan base that you’re trying to reach. So, So, we’ll get into it, but, , it’s a lot of caveats to that. So the first of these buckets is publicity. Most of you are probably very familiar with this, but it’s the idea of… Creating a list of targets, we call them a media pipeline. It’s a fancy spreadsheet with, literally, , first name, last name, email address, outlet, of all the folks that we’re trying to reach. , if you are, , making a Martech podcast, then you want to include trade publications in the marketing space, technology publications, podcast publications, Reddit, Substacks, etc. People who might be interested in that particular topic that you’re trying to, , pitch. You might want to, , create a list of outlets that cover, , a particular guest that has been on the show, or a particular, , topic, or a trend piece. And then we’ll create a press kit. Which could include a press release, a pitch letter, talking points, a host bio, , talking points of, , why this is relevant today to the people that you’re pitching. There’s a lot more that goes into publicity, , , relationship building, , , really trying to facilitate, , conversation around what’s happening in the news that day, , building these scenarios where you, , are having a conversation with a reporter as opposed to just asking for things all the time. But the general idea here is that you want to, try to unlock opportunities for features, reviews, lists of shows surrounding certain topics, interviews, etc. I will say that, for the most part, getting all of these placements are not necessarily going to drive, , thousands and thousands of downloads to your podcast. They might, it depends on, , where this placement is occurring, who is writing about it. What the size of the audience is, what the topic is, but more realistically. you are going to build trust in, , the space that has, , the listeners that you’re targeting, you are going to build the ability for you to create more of a snowball effect, where, , if AdAge writes about your podcast. you can take that link and send it to Apple or something and say, listen, Ad Age is talking about my podcast, it must be relevant for X, Y, and Z. So anyway, try to unlock those opportunities via publicity. The second bucket is owned marketing strategy. So, how do you utilize your website, your social media, your email newsletters, your partnerships, your other podcasts, your live events, in order to promote your podcast? I won’t spend time talking about the specifics of this. We have a bunch of blogs about this, you can Google ways to do this, but the short version is, you want to, , be intelligent about how you’re promoting the different content that you’re putting out in the podcast in each of these vehicles. You want to pay attention to how you’re tracking success here, and this can include a lot of the, , tracking links and the attribution that Fatima was talking about, and you want to pay attention to, , the tech stack surrounding your podcast. So, , once you are tracking the attribution and running all of these different, , promotional abilities, or opportunities, , how are you seeing, , , if you have success in doing this? The third bucket is cross-promotion, so this includes audio swaps with other podcasts, feed drops on other podcasts, interviews on other shows, collaborative episodes with other shows, there are different ways to pitch this stuff, but the short version is, , you want to find, another podcast that talks about similar things, has similar guests, has similar, ideas and interests as to, , the people who are listening to your show. For example. it might make sense that you’re promoting a true crime show on another true crime show. It may also make sense that you’re promoting, , a reality television show on a true crime show, because both of them may have, , a mainly female audience or something. So you can look…

**Fatima Zaidi:** Just a quick question there for anyone who may not be sure how to get started on that, because I do find placements on other shows is such a great way to reach a dedicated audience. Are you… is your team reaching out to these podcasts one-on-one, or are you using some sort of a network to, , be able to reach a bunch of shows, sort of in, , a more automated way?

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, so we do both. So we have relationships where we’re emailing individuals and networks across the whole ecosystem. And anybody who’s listening to this can find, those shows and the data around it, and the contact info at places Podscribe, which we’ve talked about, or Podchaser, or Muck Rack. There are a lot of tools in which you can do this, and frankly, , if you don’t have a budget, most of these podcast hosts, you could just Google their names, and they’ll have their email addresses, or producers, will either have their email addresses on, , their X account, or on their website, or something that. And just shoot them an email saying, , hey, I’d love to do a collaboration. I was thinking about, , trading a thousand impressions on your show versus my show. Would you be interested in doing this? Thank you very much. And then, if you do have a more sophisticated setup, there are a lot of automated ways in which you can do this. , cross-promo marketplaces, such as Swap FM, or, , Chartable used to have one. So there’s a lot of opportunities to do it on, , a more, at-scale way, but what we have found historically doing this is that, scale is great. It doesn’t really matter unless you’re, , doing the curation piece of this. Because you can do 10 times as many impressions, but without the curation, your conversion rate is gonna go down 10 times. So, so you, you really want to just focus on, , the right fit when it comes to audience, demographics, timing, , if you have, , a women’s sports podcast, maybe you want to promote it around, , the, , Olympics or the World Cup or something. And a lot of people are going to be really interested in an idea that. So there’s a lot of ways to do it. app pitches, there are two ways to do this. One is, what we call editorial. And just cognizant of time, folks, I… I have a lot more to say about all of these things, and and Lauren, yes, we do a deeper dive. I encourage everyone to just check out our blog. We have, , 20 articles about all of this stuff. And I’m also happy to chat with anybody if y’all want to reach out to set up, , a consultation, and I imagine Fatima would be as well. But, just cognizant of time, I’ll kind of skip over some of the things here, but, for app pitches, there’s editorial pitches to places Apple, SiriusXM, Spotify, iHeart. There are public-facing links to, all of these outlets, and I hate to be a broken record, but we also published a blog post that has those links in it. And, you can pitch your show, or an episode of your show for , a new and noteworthy opportunity, or a carousel feature, or a feature around a certain opportunity. So, , we use the World Cup example. If you have, , a soccer podcast or something, Apple will probably do a collection around that, so you should let them know that you have that podcast. And then there’s the… and, , just for your awareness, if you publish video on Spotify, then Spotify is gonna be… much more, open to featuring your show in, , their collections on the platform, because they really want to promote video on pod… on, Spotify podcasts right now. And then there’s the second side of app pitches, which we call algorithmic pitching. It’s a silly term we made up, but it’s the idea of SEOing your podcast for the more algorithmic podcast apps, such as Spotify and YouTube. So your title, your description, your thumbnails, the first 60 seconds, YouTube especially is really paying attention to, , these engagement metrics that we talked about before. So if you have great engagement, then YouTube is gonna show your podcast to more people, which will then in turn drive more engagement, which will then in turn drive more, , discovery. So there’s a lot of ways to do it. There is… it’s more art than science, but there is a science there.

**Fatima Zaidi:** It’s definitely a science.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Especially with, Apple rankings, I mean, we get asked all the time, , how do we rank on charts, and I would say it’s a bit of a art, for sure, but it’s also a science. So, with the Apple placement form that Jeff was talking about. If you did want to give yourself a bit of a leg up, typically we have noticed, just historical patterns, that if you get an influx of Apple ratings and reviews, generally you do have a higher chance of getting picked up by new and noteworthy. And so, typically, we do recommend, if you’re able to do some sort of a giveaway, or a contest, or some sort of an experiential, experience for your listeners, where you can crowdsource reviews and ratings, and then simultaneously to that, if you fill out the Apple placement form, you generally have a higher chance of getting picked up than if you were to just fill out the form in isolation. So, just a quick tip if you are wondering how you can increase your chances of getting ranked.

**Jeff Umbro:** That’s so smart. So it is… what Fatima is getting at is , , Apple has, an algorithm in which they show… they’ll prioritize, , how, , hot a show is, or how much it’s trending in terms of determining, , where it’ll rank in that chart. The new and noteworthy feature is an editorial decision.

**Fatima Zaidi:** But they’ll pay more attention to the show if it is, , a more trending vehicle for them, so that’s a really smart way to do it. I’ve never thought of that.

**Jeff Umbro:** So.

**Fatima Zaidi:** And you’re happy to, yeah, you’re absolutely, you’re happy to borrow that, from us. And I will say, the other thing that really helps is using tracking pixels if you can. Not, not every podcaster can use tracking pixels, but when you can, you’re able to measure activity beyond just someone listening to your podcast. Are they engaging with your website? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Are they… listening to additional episodes? Are they, visiting a particular landing page that you’ve, , shouted, , called out on your episode? I just find the more data that you can point to, the more you can justify ROI, and so tracking pixels are just a really great way to do that.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. And we’re talking to all of our clients about, , the data side, frankly, too much. A lot of them just want to show their CMO that the numbers are going up.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Sure. I mean, we’re honestly just… We’re really grateful that a lot of our clients do care a lot about the engagement. It’s not across the board, and I think that that’s just a conversation and narrative that needs to shift over time, is really focusing on building the right community, rather than just Any download that could be a bot, that could be a 16-year-old, but, , isn’t qualified to be tracked with your show.

**Jeff Umbro:** And that leads us to paid. So, we… we love… we love tiers at conglomerates. We’ve broken paid into 5 different tiers. So, there is audio ad buys, there’s in-app discover sections in podcast apps, there is Display, there is social, there is email newsletter, and then a 6 would be what we call miscellaneous. So, for, the audio buys, it’s everything that we talked about with cross-promos, or with marketing or PR, but you’re paying for those positions. And it’s all a big math problem. You can, , by X number of impressions, you track your conversion rate, so then you can say, I spent X dollars in order to get Y number of conversions back to my show. I assume that half of those people are going to stick around for future episodes of the show, so then I can presume that there’s X value in me doing this in the future. Audio apps, same deal. You can buy a banner in the Discover section of various podcast apps. I won’t spend time on social, display, or email, because you all know what that is, I hope. And if not, it’s Google-able. And then miscellaneous is… I’m not gonna name any companies today, but, there are plenty of companies that… are essentially finding ways to buy, low-quality internet traffic that incentivizes people to drive downloads to your podcast that are qualified as an IAB-certified download on your podcast. Which will then do things , trigger chart rankings on certain platforms, trigger, , subscriptions and follows on certain platforms, And that’s why, when we started this conversation, we were saying, downloads are not always… that’s one of the reasons why we were saying downloads are not always the best thing to pay attention to, and all of the rest of the engagement metrics are very important to pay attention to.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yep. So that nicely ties into, , how can we start thinking about whether or not your listeners are sticking through? And I think we’ll get to that in a bit, but, , I think I just really want to call attention to what Jeff said, which is we really need to focus on the engagement metrics piece as well. I definitely think downloads are a data point that we should pay attention to, but, , really definitely not the most important one. I think some of the metrics that we really need to be paying attention to are listen times, so that tells you whether or not people are committing a few minutes or finishing full episodes, which is really similar to consumption rate, which shows you how much of each episode is being heard and not just downloaded. And Jeff, this is more of a question to you, but are your clients asking you for consumption data and listening time as a part of your reporting, or is that just something that’s typically glossed over?

**Jeff Umbro:** So we… we do provide it, proactively. In terms of what people are… are requesting, we do get asked about consumption time a lot. We very rarely get asked about listen time.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Right. Well, I mean, this is the thing, right? If someone listens to the first 5 minutes of your show and then drops off, it counts as a download, but it doesn’t speak to the success of your content.

**Jeff Umbro:** Exactly. Yeah. So, we provide it retroactively, and we have a couple dashboards that we give people real-time access to, but, It’s… we pay attention to, listen time, verified listenership, net new versus returning listeners, total downloads over different windows of time. Share of ear per platform, consumption per episode, and then for various clients, they all want to know, , specific things, And… and this shifts based on platform that they prioritize. , some people want to know really specific things about YouTube, for all the reasons that you’re talking about. , some people are really prioritized about, , making sure they get a bunch of emails based on their show. Some people want to make sure that they’re delivering more advertisements or ad impressions, so… but I’m sorry, I cut you off.

**Fatima Zaidi:** No, no, no, honestly, this is really helpful context. So, to recap, listen time and consumption rate are two metrics you should be paying attention to, should be a part of your regular, I know you’re checking your download count every day, and that’s something that you should be looking at, and typically, I would say for consumption rate. The 70th percentile is typically really good, I would say, is, , we try to aim for the 80th percentile, but if you can get into the 70th, that’s great. Paying attention to drop-off points. So, those would reveal exactly where attention is lost, which helps you identify which introductions or segments or formats aren’t landing with your target audience, so you can make changes editorially to really help people stick through to the end. The other metric that we really pay attention to is new versus returning listeners, which helps us understand whether we’re building loyalty or we’re just cycling through one-time samplers. Again, if you’re gonna ask, , where can you get access to a lot of this data, you should be able to get it from your hosting provider. So really try to pick someone that is providing a lot of this data and has an engagement dashboard built out. I think it’s also really important to understand the cost per loyal listener, and not just total reach. That shift really helped our team prioritize quality over vanity metrics. So we’ve written an article about how to cover how to measure the cost of listener attention, and I think it’s a really important resource, so I’ll make sure that our team sends it out to, anyone who registered for this webinar, but it really just breaks out how to pay attention to the right metrics, and how you can really use those metrics to think about whether or not your content is working.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah. And one big, broad note there, is… Most people, when they’re thinking about audience growth and audience development, are thinking about bringing in new audience. When the reality is that the majority of shows are churning listeners week over week, so a big piece of what people can and should pay attention to in order to grow their audience is how do you retain the audience that you have? So, a lot of what we work on is, in addition to the audience growth tactics that we talked about, , what are things that you can do to keep the audience that you have? So, some really simple things that we do that are very effective are… If we have an episode where we interview LeBron James and an episode where we interview Steph Curry, we will run an ad in the LeBron James episode promoting the Steph Curry episode. And vice versa. Or we will, , mention it in the show notes. Or we’ll do a post-roll ad, which we’re not really selling for ads anyway. We will, , retroactively publish a blog post, or I’m sorry, an email newsletter or something promoting an episode that we recorded a year ago. If there’s something that’s relevant in the news today. Anyway, there’s a lot of, , somewhat simple ways in which to do this that a lot of people don’t pay much attention to, because they’re constantly worried about, , how they can promote the new shiny thing, as opposed to paying attention to their backlist.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah, and Jeff, you also mentioned earlier, listener surveys. Great way for collecting feedback from your audience. Spotify polls is another way that you can utilize that… another tactic that you can utilize to really just get more of that one-on-one engagement with your listener to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah. Yeah, I think there’s, the surveys are honestly, . I find them very difficult to, , really get… a, A meaningful amount of responses on many shows. which goes back to the whole idea of, , the level of engagement. Because, , you… when you think about it, you really need, , a super listener who’s gonna fill out a survey because they love you so much. And if you imagine that, , 0.1% of your audience is a super listener. then to get 1,000 survey listeners, you need an audience that’s, , , six figures strong. So, , I love it, and it’s just, I wish more shows could do it with, , meaningful numbers.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Definitely.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah. So, we will spend… I’ll spend 2 seconds on this. We’ve already talked about most of it. I just wanna, , underline, the best way to grow your audience is to make an amazing show. Full stop.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah.

**Jeff Umbro:** If you have a great show, the rest of it is easy. And there’s a lot of notes here in terms of different ways that you can do this, and I chose 4 things here, 3 in addition to the corny line about making a good show, that I find to be, , , very helpful. But, everything that we’ve talked about today is really useful. But, , going back to all of the stats that Fatima was talking about, , you want to… you want your show to have, , an above 70% consumption rate. You want to have, , more than half of your audience returning for future episodes. You want to have, , meaningful traction in the links that you share, and meaningful conversions in, , the audio spots that you’re buying or doing organically. and you want to be getting emails about your show, and social media posts about it, or whatever. And if you… and again, this goes back to the question about, , what are your goals? If you’re getting engagement metrics that, , are performing for the goals that you have set for yourself. Then do the rest of this stuff. And if you’re not, , perhaps revisit your show and keep tinkering with it until you get to the point where you’re happy with it. So… an unpopular opinion. A lot of people… there is no real silver bullet to audience growth.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah, no. I mean, this is the thing, right? If you’re trying to do anything good, it takes time. , nothing… there’s no shortcut to success, and it’s building a business, or building your brand, building a show is no different. You look at, , the best podcasts out there, consistency has been… the common denominator, and sticking with it, and slowly, organically growing over time, and I think if anyone can come in and promise you overnight success, and that you’ll have , your audience scaled overnight, then they’re likely not bringing in genuine listeners and a genuine community.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah. So, that said, it’s, , the best industry in the world, and it’s so fun, and , as long as you’re having fun, then you’re doing something right. So, We can talk about some, , real-world lessons, or we can take listener questions, or we can do 5 minutes for each.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Let’s do both.

**Jeff Umbro:** Okay, so let’s start with lessons from the field. Do you want to go first, or would you me to?

**Fatima Zaidi:** I, , no, I can give you a couple that we’ve been dabbling with the… over the last quarter, and I would say, , these have just, , worked really well for us, but, there’s just so many different ways, I would say, , having your podcast. live in your email signature is such a great way to, , organically get the word out. Recently just had a client reach out to us and also ask if they can… if we can create a back screen for Zoom meetings. where that promotes their podcast, which is, , so unique. I’ve never seen that. I’ve never had a meeting with someone where their back screen is promoting a podcast.

**Jeff Umbro:** Brilliant.

**Fatima Zaidi:** But it’s… if you’re on meetings all day, it’s just such a smart way of organically telling people about your show without having to tell people about your show. So I just thought that that was really, really interesting.

**Jeff Umbro:** Especially if it’s, , relevant to the meetings that they’re on.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Of course, yes, of course. I think, we talked a little bit about, , how to hack the Apple’s noteworthy form and placement form, but really also just, , meeting your audiences and integrating them into your tech. So, , if you are a part of an organization that seems to have a tech. Really factoring that… factoring your podcast into that, so whether it’s a push notification or some way to have, , a header that promotes your… your podcast, I would say we work with a lot of brands that think of the podcast in isolation, rather than thinking about all of the amazing existing channels they have, or they already have an existing community built up, whether that’s an email list or a newsletter, whether that’s their YouTube audience or their social audience, so making sure that you’re really repurposing content for a lot of the existing channels where you may already have a built-in audience.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Paid RSS feeds, really, really great way of reaching a dedicated audience. I mean, we slightly touched on this earlier, but having the trailer of your show live in the feed of a podcast that would have a similar audience or similar content to yours is such a great way of reaching a dedicated audience, and I find that people really shy away from RSS feed rentals, because it is a lot of work and can be very expensive. But… it really does bring in the results. Every time we’ve done it, we’ve always, brought in a really, , great community, targeted community.

**Jeff Umbro:** And for anybody who’s listening, you can do that, , one by one organically, or there are two platforms where you can do it at scale. One is called Introcast, and one is called PodRoll.

**Fatima Zaidi:** We love the folks at PodRoll.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, they’re great.

**Fatima Zaidi:** But I think.

**Jeff Umbro:** love all of those, really, really amazing examples. We have a friend, who made a branded podcast for an organization with, , 50,000 employees. The CEO is the host of the show, and when they published the first episode. the CEO put a… or their assistant, or someone, put a calendar invite to the entire company with a link to the podcast. which I thought was, , the most brilliant thing ever. I have seen, Donald Albright from Tenderfoot TV, at all of the big podcast conferences will, rent, , a billboard truck and drive around to promote his new shows. there have been a lot of instances of, , you touched on this before, but really smart integrations, the, Calm app has a bunch of podcasts. And they’ll do push notifications, , once a quarter or something, where they’re pushing those podcasts to their users.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Channel.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, and so it’s… it’s brilliant, and , you can easily imagine a world in which, , a big medical organization or something wouldn’t want to do that, for whatever reason, but the more buy-in that you can get from the bigger organization, the better. But yeah, there’s a lot of really great ways to do this. We made a podcast years ago with A literary organization. And, , the episodes that we were making were very evergreen, and it was great, because every month, they would just send an email to their entire list. With, , 4 or 5 episodes that we had produced, and it didn’t matter if we’d produced them that month, or if they were a year old, and they would just send those out to those folks, and, , we’d get a few thousand new listens to those backlist episodes, which would then drive returning listeners to the rest of the episodes. So, you can get really creative with how you do this, and there’s a million ways to do it. And the key is really just, , , those initial 3 questions. , How is this serving you? How is it serving the listener? How are you measuring both of those things? So… And with that, Let’s get to any questions that anyone might have.

**Fatima Zaidi:** I think we may have answered all of the questions along the way, so…

**Jeff Umbro:** Right on time. I love it. Cool.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Amazing. Well, thank you all for joining us today. Such a pleasure. Jeff, thank you so much for doing this with us.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, thank you, and everyone, this was really so amazing. And Fatima, thank you. You are, the best, and truly appreciate you having us and us doing this all together. There was one question, how far advanced, should promotions begin? It depends, as far in advance as possible, but we usually say, , at least 6 to 10 weeks.

**Fatima Zaidi:** Yeah.

**Jeff Umbro:** But it really depends on, , your specific goals and how you’re gonna reach them. So… But thank you all. This was amazing. We’re always around if you have questions in the future.

**Fatima Zaidi:** And we will be sharing today’s recording, as well as some of those resources we talked about via email. Thanks everyone, have a lovely rest of your week, stay warm. If you’re on the East Coast, good luck with the snow.

**Jeff Umbro:** Yeah, thank you very much. You too.