Today’s guest is Justin Jackson, Co-Founder of Transistor, our favorite podcast hosting platform. In this episode, we talk about ways companies can use podcasting to build a community of supporters.

You’ll learn more about the number one metric businesses should be measuring when it comes to their podcast ROI, how critical it is for shows and brands to be transparent, and the different use cases of internal or private podcasting.

Name: Justin Jackson

What he does: Co-founder of Transistor and co-host of Build Your SaaS

Connect with him: Twitter | LinkedIn | Website | YouTube | Instagram 

Justin and his business partner, Jon, were able to build a community of supporters for Transistor right from the start through their podcast, Build Your SaaS. They weren’t afraid to address real problems and have hard conversations on the show. Not only did this help them build an authentic community, but it helped them grow as partners.

They want the hero’s journey. They want to see someone struggle and not be there yet because it’s more relatable than a typical corporate podcast where everything is cleaned up and they have it all together. Your audience wants transparency from you. They want to follow along as the hero faces different obstacles and overcomes them.

Does anyone actually respond to your show? Are you compelling your audience to take an action? Did anyone care enough to reach out and give you feedback or a review? Did anyone write you an email to tell you how much your podcast helped them? Did anyone tweet about an episode and recommend it to their followers? That’s the best way to measure success, not downloads.

There’s a spectrum of how transparent you can be about certain situations. You need to be judicious about what you choose to share in a way that serves your audience. For Justin, sharing Transistor’s revenue from the inception of the company worked until they reached about $30K in monthly revenue. After that, the arc of the story passed. They made it from $0 to $30K, and it was no longer advantageous to them or their audience to see their revenue numbers.

The reality behind marketing and podcast ROI is most attribution is dirty, meaning it’s incredibly difficult to get right. There’s usually a lot of noise surrounding the tools that track people and their activity, particularly in podcasting where metrics and attribution have challenging history. That’s why Justin prefers measuring success through a simple metric, like response rate. There’s no need to put it in a spreadsheet or track every comment. It’s a simple feeling of the general momentum of your show.

During an episode, use prompts and questions to get your audience to engage with you. You can ask them what they think about a certain portion of the episode and have them email you their thoughts or even tweet them. You can’t expect the audience to act without giving them a reason or asking them to.

The only way to turn qualitative data into quantitative is to actually have conversations with your listeners. If you talk to 100 listeners and 85 of them say, “I loved the episode you did on X,” now you have a quantitative metric to show that that particular episode was important. You can then take it a step further and figure out why they thought it was important so you can replicate the success in future episodes.

Justin suggests companies take advantage of internal podcasting by using the platform for training and onboarding. Create a compelling 6-episode series that explains your company, how you got here, what to expect, etc., and share that with every new hire. You can even drip feed the episodes where the employee only gets one episode at a time to really help maintain the storyline.

You can use them for customers too. If you could give your best, most important customers an inside look into things you’re working on, what you’re thinking about, what you’re wrestling with, etc., you’re making them feel like they’re an exclusive part of your brand. 

Rather than having to manually download your episodes, edit them to add a special announcement (e.g. you’re hosting a conference and want to share with your audience), and reupload the episodes, you can now use Transistor’s dynamic ad insertions to set up campaigns. Your announcements/ads will run on all live episodes for whatever specified time you set in the backend, and once it’s done, the ads are automatically removed from all episodes.