Is there an SEO of Podcasting?
OK, so you’ve got your idea, format, recording set up, scripts, and first episodes put together. Now what? What’s the best way to get your podcast launched? How do you make sure that people can find it and that the systems that make podcast accessible to listeners pay attention to you, too?
In this episode of Expert Marketing Matters, Chris and Mark go on a deep dive about podcasting with Marcus dePaula, who produces their podcast, covering more details on the process of launching a podcast, music choice, feed hosting, promotion, metrics, and more.
You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.
Episode Transcript
Chris Butler: Welcome to expert marketing matters. I’m Chris Butler .
Mark O’Brien: and I’m Mark O’Brien and today we’re joined by Marcus dePaula from meonlylouder.com Hey Marcus.
Marcus dePaula : Hey guys.
Chris Butler: what’s going on?
Marcus dePaula : Just podcasting with you guys. Funny to be on this end of it. I’m used to just hearing you and not actually being part of the discussion
Mark O’Brien: Yes, welcome.
Mark O’Brien: So we’ve mentioned Marcus a number of times in our podcast, so all the faithful listeners might be a familiar already, but as I mentioned, Marcus owns and runs meonlylouder.com and what that is, is basically a a podcast consultancy and optimization service for businesses. So Marcus will help you from the very scratch start of this. He’ll tell you what equipment to get. He’ll tell you how to use that equipment, and he’ll sit on the phone with you for hours while you like noodle with the equipment. I’m speaking from experience here. He’ll give you the guides you need to do interviews with remote guests and the things you need to send to them in order for their stuff to sound good.
Mark O’Brien: I mean he’ll do the editing of the podcast to help with podcast promotion. Basically, if it has to do with a podcast in any way, shape or form, Marcus can help you get the absolute most out of it, and he’s just got a ridiculous depth of knowledge on this topic. Lifelong sound engineer. You just really understand how to deal with audio, professionally and digitally ,and so all of that background you’ve had over, seemed like decades of experience including doing some tours and things like that, on the road.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Mark O’Brien: You really understand how digital audio works, so we just thought it’d be really smart to have you on the show to talk about some of the ins and outs of podcasting, particularly around making the most of a launch. There’s a lot we could talk about, we’ll probably meander a little bit here, but we really want to focus on the launch of the podcast specifically
Marcus dePaula : Sounds good.
Chris Butler: In our recent episode, we talked a little bit about things that we had observed had gone well with our own launches, with client launches, and then some things we’ve learned, after the fact, that would cause us to do it differently. And for background for the audience, we ended up in a pretty nice email string with Marcus about this where Marcus, you brought a bunch of different ideas to the table from your own experience. You’ve launched several new podcasts with different people, and of course you’ve helped lots of other people bring them to the market. So could we begin with you sort of summarizing? Imagine we had never launched this podcast
Marcus dePaula : Okay.
Chris Butler: Or any podcasts for our clients and we said, “Hey Marcus, we’ve got this idea. We want to launch a podcast, we’ve got the equipment down, we’re starting to record what should we do next?” What’s your game plan? What’s the playbook look like?
Mark O’Brien: Okay, well the first conversation I have is about how the podcast fits into the positioning, which is something you guys talk about all the time and thinking about the type of listener you’re going for. You know obviously what you’re going to be talking about and the branding elements, you know, all of that, how it fits together and works together to help reinforce the branding identity. Just getting in the right mindset of what it is that I want this podcast to do for me. And from then actually one of the hardest things that I’ve found to do in launch process is finding the right music to help reinforce that personality of the brand, which is really, really important because it really, you know, becomes like an audio brand element that they hear at the beginning and the end of the show. And then once all the elements are in place, setting the tone through doing a few recordings, and most of my clients have usually recorded a few episodes and gotten them to me. And then we’ll decide together which one is the strongest ones that lead with.
Mark O’Brien: And you guys mentioned, a few episodes ago, about launching with multiple episodes and I hear that advice a lot, and I think that can work for a lot of people, but it really depends on your audience. And I find that with the business audience, there tends to be less binge listening. So in my experience and the podcast where we’ve launched three episodes or more on the first day, the episodes in the middle don’t get listened to. So for business podcasts, I personally recommend trying to do a trailer episode and then either one or two episodes right at launch if you want to give people some extra things to listen to at launch.
Chris Butler: I think that makes a lot of sense. When I had mentioned in the previous episode that I had received advice externally about launching with more episodes, I think two to three was sort of the maximum that I had heard of.
Mark O’Brien: Yeah.
Chris Butler: You know, just more than one. But I think a trailer makes a lot of sense in terms of expressing intent, what you’re going to get out of this experience, et cetera. And what I’m interested in, from you also, your perspective is when somebody lands on that podcast for the first time, right? Perhaps they’ve discovered it, perhaps somebody sent them via email and they see that trailer and two to three episodes. What am I not thinking of properly? I have something in mind and I’ll bring it up in a minute, but I’m kind of interested in your perspective, what is going to govern whether or not somebody listens to an episode or which episode they listened to. Do you actually expect that if they land there and see a trailer and two episodes that they’ll mostly listened to the trailer? Does that actually happen?
Mark O’Brien: Yeah, it typically… What happens is when somebody lands on a podcast feed page or you know within the distribution platform, whether it’s iTunes or Google or whatever, they’ll listen to whatever at at the top. So if you are running it, and I’m not even sure if Google has the differences between a serialized podcast and just to quote unquote normal podcast where everything just kind of runs, but you guys do a serialized podcast where there’s a set number of episodes per season and then you have another season that you release. On Apple, the first episode always shows at the top of a serialized designated feed, but on hosts services and in most of the other distribution platforms, the most recent episode shows at the top. So in my experience with the launches that I’ve done, that latest episode of the bundle that’s released is the one that has the highest download count in the launch itself. And then going back, what people do is as they discovered the show, they’ll listen to the most recent episode and then they’ll go back and listen to the first episode and if they’re hooked, they’ll continue to listen. But a lot of times the first episode and whatever the most recent episode is the most listened to. So that can be the trailer obviously, which I do like because it helps introduce the host and also kind of set the expectations and all that sort of thing.
Chris Butler: That totally maps to my own experience for sure. In terms of whenever I discover a new podcast, I always listened to at least some, if not all of the most recent episode. And then I always go back to the first because I want to get a measure of what’s changed. You know, how much in flux is the show, how stable is it as a piece of media? And that goes for ones that I listened to for professional purposes as well as personal interest. But something I wanted to kind of get into because I think that you’ve already mentioned it several times, is the amount of influence that the platform has and the design decisions they’ve made in terms of how they manage the user experience, what information is exposed and what’s not, controls your own strategy for reaching an audience. And I actually think that something I wanted to mention was titles.
Mark O’Brien: Yes.
Chris Butler: Because if you’re in Apple, if you’re in iTunes or Apple podcasts, looking at the details in the show notes, it’s actually quite difficult.
Mark O’Brien: Right.
Chris Butler: They make it very difficult to access that. So if you’re relying on that to give somebody a good sense of what the episode’s about, that’s probably not going to work out. Whereas it works quite well on things like Pocketcasts or like Overcast where it’s just designed differently. And so I’m wondering the degree of influence that the title alone has on whether or not people will listen. I’ve noticed with my own podcasts that when I go back over and look at the titles, the titles that I know were weaker are the ones that were listened to less compared to other episodes.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah, and the titles obviously come back to understanding your listener and knowing what’s gonna appeal to them and that, you know, the keywords factor into that as well, obviously.
Chris Butler: Yep.
Marcus dePaula : But it plays into the overall content marketing strategy that you guys are so good at it all, all the same stuff applies to podcasts.
Chris Butler: Yeah. Well, but also possibly general psychology.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Chris Butler: I’ve noticed that the same types of titling tricks that work in the Britain format, like for instance saying “how to x” or you know, those kinds of propositions that map to peoples desires or interests or the questions they might ask those tend to work out pretty well because it kind of states an intent right there and it matches somebody’s inner monologue, but then the more abstract or clever you try and get in the title, it could be a real hit or miss. It depends on whether or not it triggers somebody’s emotions.
Marcus dePaula : Right. Yes, absolutely. Especially when it comes to informational podcast that businesses tend to do.
Mark O’Brien: Yeah. Marcus, are there patterns that you see of bad behavior? And so something that we observe quite often is that even for marketing firms, their instincts as to how to market themselves oftentimes are logical but ultimately incorrect, and we serve to correct a lot of those things, but there are definitely patterns that we see there. Do you see typical and commonly accepted podcast practices that you would like to eliminate if you could?
Marcus dePaula : The biggest problem that I actually see is that there are so many podcasts out there that when they share a link on social media, they will share the Apple podcast link or the iTunes link, and there’s a missed opportunity because A) you miss out on the SEO benefits of the traffic linking to your website. You should obviously have your podcast embedded on your website so that it drives people there, not just for the SEO benefits but also to get them into your system and the hope is that they will, from the podcast episode, actually dig in more to the other content you have on your website. If you’re sending them to iTunes, that doesn’t do anything for getting them into the rest of your world. There’s a lot of actual other distractions, and they’ll end up somewhere else. You want to link to the episode page on your website and not on the distribution platform, whether it’s iTunes or Spotify or wherever else it might be.
Marcus dePaula : The second aspect of the promotional mistakes that I see is the fact that most shows tend to only announce the episode as soon as it’s released, and they’ll, you know, push that to social media and shared on their email list and then that’s all they do. You know, like with any evergreen content, which podcast episodes should be for businesses, there are opportunities to reshare that content, just like you would a blog post, by pulling different key concepts out of it that you know will appear to your target audience. You can even go back revisit old episodes. And obviously that takes extra work, and so especially if your time budget is limited on marketing, you know, you don’t have the time to go back and relisten to the episodes and pull out soundbites.
Chris Butler: That has come up so many times on this podcast. We’re constantly producing content, as experts, as marketers, whatever word you want to use, and because we are constantly producing it, we forget that it needs to be promoted more than once. We have this internal discussion constantly about, “Oh, that article is really strong and all we ever did was send one email about it and that’s it.”
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Chris Butler: And I think there’s something to be said for that, but also, and I’m curious if you see this too, but can we talk a little bit about like a monkey see monkey do attitude when it comes to people who create new podcasts. In that they hear a podcast and it has worked for them, and so they think that their job is to replicate that experience just within their own context. And that may actually not be the best format for them or the best aesthetic choices or sensibility, you know, what do, what are your thoughts on that?
Marcus dePaula : Yeah, just like with any website or any form of communication piece, trying to copy somebody else’s process and what works for them may not work for your own business. So again, it all comes back to your personal audience that you’re trying to reach. Nobody wants to hear the same thing over and over again, just done a different way by a different person.
Chris Butler: Right.
Marcus dePaula : It actually reflects really poorly, especially if you’re trying to establish yourself as leader, by copying somebody else.
Chris Butler: Well, even if it’s with the best of intentions, for instance, you know we all listened to a podcast that you helped to produce.
Marcus dePaula : Mm-hmm.
Chris Butler: And that podcast features two people who are not in the same room together.
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Chris Butler: So that’s going to govern some elements of how they structure their discussions. The whole format of the podcast is probably determined by their geographical location and how they would otherwise operate as friends and colleagues. And because that podcast is so good and so effective, it’s setting a bar for almost everybody in our space, which I think is great.
Marcus dePaula : Sure.
Chris Butler: But what I think is not so great about that, is that there are some clients of ours that are trying to replicate that, and they’re doing it in a way that probably isn’t making the best sense for them. For instance, I’ll listen to it and I’ll say, “Well, wait a minute. You can be in the same room together. Take advantage of that.”
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Chris Butler: “You know, you don’t need to do it this way just because that’s what you’ve heard. You know, you could do a completely different thing because you actually are in the same room. The way you typically interact is different than these two people. Let’s take full advantage of what you have at your disposal and make sure that what ends up getting recorded is as true to you as it can be. And that might look completely different than the very example that inspired you in the first place.” And that’s a good thing. But it takes that extra little bit of work.
Marcus dePaula : Yes, and it also depends a lot on the personalities and really taking advantage of those personalities that are, are making up the show. So that’s where a lot of the uniqueness comes in.
Chris Butler: It’s got to feel natural. We were actually talking, emailing back and forth about this episode. It’s funny because I have a podcast on the side that I interact with completely differently to this and that. I script everything. Everything’s extremely hyper detailed and planned and that’s the approach that makes the most sense for me in that context. In this context, we kind of wing it a lot…
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Chris Butler: …and that’s sort of the joke. I made a joke to Lauren, whose not on this episode, about how this is going to be a special episode of winging it with Mark and Chris. Because that is kind of true to how we operate internally, and I think that does tend to draw out our best vibe.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Chris Butler: It may not always draw the best, most accurate information.
Marcus dePaula : Sure.
Chris Butler: But I’d rather have a better conversation, that’s going to be interesting to the listener, then something that is so governed by accuracy that it kind of rips the guts out of it. And that’s such a subtle balance and it works for me, but you know, it’s not gonna work for everybody.
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Chris Butler: And that’s where someone like you, I think, could bring a huge amount of influence to a team sorting that through, if you could have a conversation with them and draw out from them what their natural instincts are for communication and what format might lend itself better to drawing them out. That’s a really hard thing to do.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah, and like you said, like I love your podcast, by the way, the ones that I do feel like that work that are like your format of your other podcast where it’s just you are the ones that are really, really produced and scripted and that takes a lot of time.
Chris Butler: Yeah, tons of time.
Marcus dePaula : And usually when people come to me, it’s because they don’t have time to produce their own podcasts. So the more productive thing is to format it in a pleasant conversation that really brings out the personality of the leaders within the firm.
Speaker 1: You’re listening to expert marketing matters, a podcast about generating ideal new business opportunities by creating and nurturing digital marketing systems and habits that have a measurable impact on your bottom line.
Speaker 1: This podcast is brought to you by Newfangled, a digital marketing consultancy focused on empowering experts to do better digital marketing. You can learn more about Newfangled’s digital marketing method at newfangled.com
Mark O’Brien: I’ve been to this on the show a few times previously, but it’s our belief that if someone’s going to do a business podcast, a podcast of the nature that we do here, that they should just hire you.
Marcus dePaula : I appreciate that.
Mark O’Brien: And there’s really no reason at all not to. Well recently I was speaking with a firm and they were talking about how they’re getting to a podcast. I was like, “Oh, you got to talk to Marcus.” They’re like, “Oh well yeah.” The partner’s wife is an audio. It’s like, “Okay.”
Marcus dePaula : Yeah
Mark O’Brien: “Fine.” And then in that case…
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Mark O’Brien: …I’ll let it go, but that’s the only person I’ve ever heard who had a good excuse to not hire you. So that being said, when should somebody hire you? At what stage in the podcast creation process should they bring you on?
Marcus dePaula : Ideally before there’s even equipment purchased.
Mark O’Brien: Right.
Marcus dePaula : Because that’s actually one of the things, I mean, cause you guys already had a system and then I recommended some new gear and fortunately you guys could invest in it, but I’m working with another new client that they have a space that has terrible acoustics and they have equipment that was recommended to them that is not a good fit for their space and we’re going to make it work, but the earlier in the process, the better obviously. And it usually does take minimum a month, usually more, to get things rolling because of all of the moving pieces because not only is there the music and the branding and the cover art and all that stuff that you have to deal with, but there’s this process of submitting the feed to all the different distribution platforms. You know, getting the hosting set up for the podcast, which in my opinion should be different from the actual website hosting.
Marcus dePaula : And then figuring out a process for once the episodes are done, how do I deliver them to you and then get your team to publish them on… You know, do I publish them to the hosting platform and then you guys publish them to your website, you know, all that stuff. There’s all these details that have to be worked out. And a lot of it is process and it’s different for every client depending on the team you guys have.
Mark O’Brien: Mm-hmm.
Marcus dePaula : All except for one of my podcasts, my clients are actually taking care of the publishing aspect and I’m just serving mostly as the audio engineering consultant for getting the episodes formatted and to you guys, and then you guys actually publish them yourselves.
Chris Butler: You know, something that occurs to me while you were talking ,and Mark’s point about the special case where the principal’s wife is an audio engineer, you know, the reality is that both Mark and I have a lot of experience with music production and recording. We both have gear-head tendencies.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Chris Butler: But we still need to hire you, and there’s a million reasons for that, time being one of them, but also, you have a very specific lens focused on this that we did not have. And so I would say that even given the expertise that I think we both brought to the table when it comes to, compared to the average person, when it comes to microphones and recording setups and pre-amps and all that stuff, I still think that we would not have gotten where we wanted to go without your intervention, so that’s important.
Chris Butler: Let me ask you about one of the thing though. You mentioned earlier music for podcasts.
Marcus dePaula : Mm-hmm(affirmative)
Chris Butler: And you know, most podcasts need some kind of wrapper. It’s kind of like the audio chrome, like an intro or a midpoint and a close out, you know, and having some music for that or narration. When you work with a client, do you ideally like to include that in your work? Do you like to be a part of that creative process and/or do it yourself or what’s ideal for you and what should people be thinking about when it comes to that stuff?
Marcus dePaula : Yeah, I mean I come from a music background. You know, my audio engineering experience is in music, so I love music. I definitely have helped clients find the right music track, but it always seems to work best when the client is involved in choosing their own audio. And what I usually ask them to do is to provide us Spotify or Apple music playlist for me to kind of set the tone and I can kind of help find some tracks that are in the same feel and then they can make the decision as to which one works. Cause you know there’s obviously licensing issues and stuff like that. And you guys looked out in front a really great track that, that you don’t actually have to pay for to use for your purposes, but there’s a lot of actually terrible free music out there.
Chris Butler: It’s true.
Marcus dePaula : And it’s really tough, it takes a lot of time to dig through. And I’ve already spent a lot of time digging through, so I know where to go, you know, if someone not knowing where to find licensed music, were to start searching for it for themselves, it would just eat up a lot of time.
Mark O’Brien: Well, you know something about music, that’s been my experience with podcasting specifically, is it’s basically the same thing as stock imagery when it comes to writing articles and publishing to the web in that the same things that would govern how you choose and what you choose and what your expectations should be of originality, it’s the same with licensing for music and royalty free stuff or attribution licenses.
Marcus dePaula : Yes.
Mark O’Brien: And you’re right, there’s a huge amount available out there, where you can do very inexpensive licensing. You can do basically free with attribution, all that stuff.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Mark O’Brien: But I think what you have to know is that if you pick something, and you don’t spend a long time choosing, if you pick something quickly, you’re going to hear that again.
Marcus dePaula : Absolutely.
Mark O’Brien: And I’ll give you two specific examples. We used to have different music on this podcast than we do now. The reason why I swapped it out is because one, I felt like we chose it too quickly and it wasn’t great, but number two, I heard it on another podcast and that bothered me.
Marcus dePaula : Ah, I didn’t realize that.
Mark O’Brien: Yeah, the very first version of this actually was produced by a former employee, so it was totally original and we just decided to change it up. I ended up sourcing something. Haste makes waste, and I didn’t like that I heard it somewhere else where I knew the somewhere else was likely to be heard by everyone before us, and that’s not a good setup.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Mark O’Brien: Similarly, with another podcast I did on the side, I spent a long time looking and I found a guy, with whom I built a personal relationship. He ended up putting his music on a platform that can be sourced by anyone, and lo and behold, I heard the same piece I used in an episode on Hidden Brain, and at that point I felt like I actually had to go back and change mine because everybody in the world’s going to hear Hidden Brain before they hear my podcast.
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Mark O’Brien: And I don’t want to look like I cribbed from somebody else, even though that’s not what’s going on.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Mark O’Brien: So I think when you source this kind of stuff, you really need to think about building personal relationships. And I’ve learned now that I would much rather find somebody work out some kind of licensing, deal with them, pay for it, in a fair way, and know that I’m going to have an original sound.
Marcus dePaula : Yep.
Mark O’Brien: To whatever extent I can.
Marcus dePaula : Absolutely. And I actually have a lot of musician friends here in town that, in a previous life, we’re touring musicians and now they actually make a lot of money doing just that, making unique licensed music, not just for podcasts but for TV shows and you know, music is an important factor and so much of what we listen to.
Mark O’Brien: Well for these episodes, it’s really critical. It sets the tone for the whole thing.
Marcus dePaula : Absolutely.
Mark O’Brien: Anyone who listens to more than one episodes, going to hear that piece over and over again. And aside from originality, there’s some other things to think about, I’ll just throw one out. I was listening to a client’s podcast the other day and listening to a variety of different options for music, and one of them had this like really shrill thing going on over and over again. It was rhythmic and it kind of hurt to hear because I listened to it on my really good headphones where it didn’t hurt, then I put it on my ear buds and it hurt.
Marcus dePaula : Yes.
Mark O’Brien: And I pointed out to them, I would not choose this one because the majority of your audience is going to listen to it through ear buds and this hurts.
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Mark O’Brien: And they’re going to find this annoying and eventually they will stop listening to your podcast. But again, you know, that’s something you have to really… you have to vet stuff and it takes that extra time.
Marcus dePaula : Yes.
Mark O’Brien: And it takes objectivity too.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah, and the other thing is, so much of the music has a lot of this stereo imaging stuff going on and for spoken word podcasts, like most business podcasts tend to be where music is not a featured element. I tend to actually mix them down and upload them as mono-files to speed up download and also save space on people’s mobile devices.
Chris Butler: That’s interesting.
Marcus dePaula : So listening to the music and mono is really important and there’s actually good mix engineers, that I know that mixed music, they have a button on their system where they can toggle back and forth between mono and stereo and if you don’t know what that is, it’s one of the many details in audio engineering that go into making choices like this. So.
Mark O’Brien: Hmm. You obviously have a real wealth of knowledge that I hope people listening will realize, man, I just need to cut to the chase and get with an expert.
Marcus dePaula : I am a huge nerd, for sure.
Mark O’Brien: Well you’re in good company.
Mark O’Brien: Let me ask you one other question. This is something that came up when we were batting ideas around before we hit record, and I think it’s going to be really relevant to people listening. So we’ve gotten a podcast set up, we’re starting to see people listen and download. When it comes to metrics, I guess I have two questions for you.
Marcus dePaula : Mm-hmm.
Mark O’Brien: When people are thinking about the platform, you mentioned ideally choose a different hosting provider than your website.
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Mark O’Brien: Are there platforms that you recommend because they provide better analysis? And then the second question is what analysis is actually relevant? What should people be thinking about? Is it downloads? Is it subscribers? Is it something more nuanced than that? What’s your perspective on that?
Marcus dePaula : Right. I personally use one of two hosting platforms and there are so many good ones out there, but these are just the ones that I use and I’ll tell you why. The first one is Libsyn, which is one that you guys use. They’ve been around forever. They’re a reliable, trustworthy company that offers a very clear service. You get what you pay for. Their analytics, they just actually revamped ,it a little over a year ago, and they provide a lot of great granular detail. And their system just works, you know, they provide everything you need, so you can’t go wrong with Libsyn. The other one I use is fireside.fm and it’s a newer service, but it’s actually done by a friend of mine who is a podcast for himself, and he actually created it because he didn’t like a lot of the user interface elements of Libsyn, which they have been improving on. But his process, and he’s a small boutique, you know, firm down in Austin, Texas, but he really cares a lot and he does a lot of great customer support and he keeps adding new features every day.
Marcus dePaula : But to get to your question about analytics, the main thing I look at is the number of downloads per episode and then just the overall average downloads for a certain time period. Subscribers. It’s really like you alluded to earlier, it’s kind of hard because depending on how people listen to your podcast. Especially, I find that for a lot of these business podcasts, most people are listening in web browsers, actually, instead of actually subscribing on a device, or not most but a good percentage of the people.
Mark O’Brien: That’s interesting.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Mark O’Brien: I wouldn’t have anticipated that, but that’s interesting to hear.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah, it seems to be at least for these really good, high quality business podcasts that I’ve had the fortune of working with, like yours, a lot of your target audience will sit at their desk, you know, during work and listen to it as opposed to listening to it during the commute or you know, while you’re washing dishes, which is what I do a lot of times.
Marcus dePaula : So I look at the overall downloads per episode while also, if I have access to it, looking at what was posted on social media and also what other elements are pushing people to the episode. Because sometimes just a good promotion on a solid email campaign will get a lot of downloads for an episode that topically isn’t necessarily as strong as some of the other ones that might just get more downloads because of the topic itself.
Marcus dePaula : So it’s all really relative and you can’t just look at one thing. You have to look at all of it. And I’m sure you guys deal with this all the time, especially, you know, same thing with SEO stuff and looking at Google analytics, which I am definitely no expert at that. In Apple’s analytics, which are separate from these hosting platforms, and they only apply to listens that happen either in iTunes, an iTunes app, or in the Apple podcasts app. The analytics and podcast connect, which is where you submit your feed to, and I know this is getting really technical, they actually provide listener behavior, so when people stop listening ,so you can see a chart of when your listenership drops off.
Chris Butler: Right.
Marcus dePaula : But again, that’s only unique to people listening in the Apple apps.
Mark O’Brien: That’s all really great. I think the upshot of what you’re explaining is that the analytic reality of podcasts is still pretty murky.
Marcus dePaula : Yes.
Mark O’Brien: And I’m glad that you pointed out that sometimes you just have to subjectively analyze it because you know what your purpose is in doing this, especially if it’s a business podcast. Something that Mark has had access to, quite a bit, that I have not is, you know, he’ll be talking to a prospect and the podcast will come up and conversation. And from my vantage point that’s so much better than numeric analytics that we’ll look at because that’s where we know that the connection has actually been a value to us.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah.
Mark O’Brien: Because if I see like, “Oh, okay, there’s been x percentage of growth in downloads per episode or over month to month,” that’s so abstract and so disconnected from any tangible reality, but as soon as I hear that one prospect cited the podcast in their interest in getting in touch with us, then none of that matters to me at that point. None of the numbers matter.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah. Yeah. There are different interests of leaders out there talking about, “Well how many downloads you need to get to make it worthwhile, et Cetera.” And I’m not sure you could put a number on it.
Mark O’Brien: No.
Marcus dePaula : Just like both of you guys were saying earlier about, “Well, all that really matters in terms of the content and the style is the truth of the organization and what’s appropriate to them.” Same with the results. It depends.
Mark O’Brien: Yes.
Marcus dePaula : It depends on what’s appropriate. Do five of your best prospects listen to it, you know, and then maybe that’s good enough,
Mark O’Brien: Right.
Chris Butler: Yeah. How much effort are you putting in? I think you make a dogmatic statement about the growth of a podcast and your reach based on baseline numbers and if you’re not at a certain level, then you’re not reaching. But again, that’s totally irrelevant to whether or not it could be having a measurable and positive impact on your marketing. And again, for us, that’s why we do this.
Marcus dePaula : Right
Chris Butler: We enjoy it, but we’re not doing it for the same reasons that like I might do a podcast on my own time, which I do. Like that’s a hobby of mine, it’s based on interest and passions that I have, but that’s not a marketing engine for me.
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Chris Butler: Whereas this is a marketing engine for Newfangled, it’s not worth doing if it doesn’t open the door to somebody that, beforehand, didn’t realize that we could help them with something. That’s the whole point is that they might say, “Wow, I listened to that thing and realized that there’s something I need help with and you all can make that happen.” That’s the purpose of this podcast and that’s a good purpose. It’s a very good purpose.
Marcus dePaula : And if you think in terms of ROI ,as far as podcast, as part of your overall content marketing strategy and budget. Lauren, actually when I saw you guys here at Day Baker’s conference, earlier this year, she asked me if it was worthwhile to include the transcript text in the podcast episodes because based on her analytics, a lot of times the blog posts end up getting more organic Google search traffic than the actual podcast too, but that’s just because it’s the nature of the podcast. The value of the podcast itself is in expressing your voice as a leader and having it as a way to get in somebodies head with your actual human voice.
Mark O’Brien: Yeah.
Marcus dePaula : There’s so much power in that compared to the written word and it’s like a whole other level of connection to me. You can’t really put a price on that.
Chris Butler: That’s a great ending point, I think for anyone listening, is giving them a good reason to do this. There is probably no better way than to increase the intimacy between you and your prospect, without actually being with them in a room.
Marcus dePaula : Right.
Chris Butler: This gives somebody a little bit of a taste of what are you like and what does it like to talk with you and how do you express the ideas that you have that you bring into the market and how passionate are you about them and how to use your sound when you’re passionate. You’re right. I had never really thought about it that way, but all of those things that are so critical to building that relationship and trust, such that it can become a client relationship. You could get done in this context in it really unique way. That’s an excellent point.
Marcus dePaula : Yeah. You feel like you know the person, even though you’ve never actually spoken with them, you feel like you’ve been a part of those conversations that they’ve had.
Chris Butler: Hmm. That’s great.
Mark O’Brien: Well, thanks for your time, Marcus. We really appreciate it. And again, it’s Marcus dePaula at meonlylauder.com. And thanks again for all the great work you’ve done for us, and for a lot of our clients.
Marcus dePaula : It’s my pleasure and I’m really enjoying being a part of your podcast as well, so thank you.
Mark O’Brien: All right, sounds good.
Chris Butler: Thank you Marcus. Take care.
Marcus dePaula : Thanks.