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In an ever growing market just how beneficial can launching a podcast be to your business or brand? With a well thought out strategy the world is your oyster and the completion a lot less than you might think.
Help and tips for marketing professionals and brand managers considering or already creating podcasts. Learn how to create and improve podcasts for brands or products you are working on, with quality advice from expert guests who share their knowledge and experience.
For your convenience, we have included a 90% accurate machine transcript.
Dusty Rhodes 0:00
Right now on how to build a podcast for your brand, we're talking to a podcast strategist from the United States who specializes in corporate clients. He shares how long it takes for a corporate podcast to succeed, how you can use advertising to grow that podcast without blowing the bank and gives one really good secret what content to put in your podcast to make it a hit. Let's go.
Dusty Rhodes 0:49
Hello, and welcome to How to build a podcast for your brand. My name is a Dusty Rhodes. Today we're focusing on corporate podcasts we'll be looking at the value of podcasting to a business and analyzing what does and what doesn't work. Joining me today is media consultant and strategist Tanner Campbell. He is the co founder of plosive monster media and real talk podcasting. He's also the founder of the Portland pod and a host of multiple podcasts, including Real Talk podcasting and health of the podcast as well. When I was kind of looking about getting into podcasting myself, after a lifetime in radio, Tanner was possibly the only person in all the internet who spoke any sense. So when we wanted to put together this podcast to help marketing and branding people to look after podcasts for their I said, we definitely have to talk to this guy. So Tanner, lovely to have you on how are you doing wonderful. And thanks for having me dusty, I truly appreciate it. Now, as well as making podcasts for yourself. You work with a lot of corporates and brands and businesses making podcasts for them of the people that you work with, what kind of feedback are they given to you? What What do they get out of making a podcast?
Tanner Campbell 2:05
It depends on the it depends on whether or not it's corporate or individual, we can talk about individuals first, individuals mostly get a sense of expression, either that's artistic expression, or some kind of maybe advocacy, maybe they care about a particular topic. And so they want to elevate someone's voice or they want to elevate the profile of an issue that's important to them. And podcasting is great for that. Because there are no rules and podcasts you can get away with, you know, anything you want, really. And that means you can put anything out there on the airwaves, which I guess is a little bit of a double edged sword. But companies are different, they approach it as an opportunity to either a increase their own visibility, or be to build additional revenue verticals within their business that they hadn't thought of before. And that's especially true with entrepreneurial type people. I do a lot of work in corporate, we're did a lot of work in corporate I do mostly behind the scenes production for my own content now, but it's especially true for corporate people.
Dusty Rhodes 2:58
And do you feel that the response that you got from those businesses that they felt podcasting gave them a different angle,
Tanner Campbell 3:05
I think what it allowed them to do was more clearly shaped the narrative that they wanted to shape. So there's a little bit of a, you know, self serving the individuals and artists, the businesses, how can I make my brand look better, you know, warming their hands together thinking. But not, but not really. A lot of them just didn't, they didn't know how to get their true, let's say their true passion for the whole reason they have their business, whatever it is. And I mean, this even goes for Walmart, or you know, the little guys as well. There's some kind of reasoning behind why they do what they do that we don't see as the general public. And this is really, really true of like, small to midsize businesses. And they're technically, they just don't know how to, they usually have the marketing skills to do it. They don't have any production background skills to do it. They don't have the technical skills to do it. And they're like, well, podcasting seems really cool. And I think we could tell a really great story about our brand, I think we could serve our community in a really meaningful way, and encourage new business through that medium. But we have no idea how to do and so what they get out of it, I think is more exposure and more creative ways to create additional revenue verticals that they had not thought of before.
Dusty Rhodes 4:19
We did an interesting project with an accountancy firm, or an accounting magazine, I should say. And the reason they wanted to do the podcast was because you can read an interview but you don't get a sense of the person who's speaking. And they would like to do the podcast as an accompaniment to their magazine. So you could actually hear people talk and as you say, you get a real feeling for for who the people are and what what drives them what their passion is, and I think you make a much stronger connection because of that. You said that when you started doing podcasts yourself, everybody seems to hit this post. If you like after like seven or eight weeks, we realize, oh my god, this is actually not as easy as I thought it might be. And the phone is worn off. And just kind of a little bit, did you find that many of the clients that you were working with, went through that wall and found success? Or do they, a lot of them just hang up the hat. And when I'm done.
Tanner Campbell 5:19
Again, it depends on whether or not it's an individual creator or a business, if it's an individual creator, a lot of them quit. And the friction that comes up is okay, this, this is hard. I have to I for some reason, I thought this need to be 45 minutes. For some reason, I thought it needed to happen every week, I thought it should be an interview show, it's hard to find interview guests, it's hard to do this every week, I don't know how to edit, you know, they they confront the difficulty, the technical difficulty, but then they also run into the will this cost a little bit, you know, it's going to cost me 50 or so bucks a month to probably continue this hobby, whether that's in like website hosting services, or podcast, audio hosting services, or marketing, or whatever it is, they're spending their money on, people are spending like 50 to 100 bucks plus the gear, and they want to, they have the idea of recouping their expenses, and they run into the brick wall of monetization is really hard. And so they're looking at the difficulty and how frustrating it is with the audio editing and engineering, the technical aspects. And then they're looking at the marketing and growth aspects and say, You know what, I thought I could do this, but I have no resources out there that are really giving me great advice on how to do this. And I don't have the time, I've got a full time job, I've got a wife or husband or significant others, some kind of kids, I've got other responsibilities. So yeah, a lot of the independence will hang up the hat once they get, you know, three, four, or 567 episodes, and very few of them make it past seven. And I think that's actually a pretty broad statistic. Generally speaking, I think most podcasters don't make it past seven, then the businesses, they're a little bit different. Because the ones that I work with, they'll buy into a contract. And I do that intentionally. I say, you're in a 12 month contract. And I need you to be because it's going to take that long for you to begin to see the fruits of your labor, like it's gonna take you six to eight months, probably, as a corporation that's doing everything right, to really see that this podcast is paying for itself. And this is especially true with places like banks who might start a podcast that targets you know, personal home loans or Home Improvement kind of loans. Because you know, a bank gets one or two loans based off the podcast over the course of a year. And that more than pays for what they pay for me. I don't know what the bank makes specifically. But I know it's more than what they pay me. And they're very happy with it. But it can take, you know that six 812 months for that thing to happen. And so I always lock them into a contract because I don't want them in like week eight, to say this isn't working, we're not rich yet. So it kind of depends. But the corporation's usually don't drop out, they stay for the end of the contract. And in all instances that I've worked with, with the exception of one which I won't name, nor will I explained the reasons, I don't know if I'm allowed to actually do that. They did jump ship early. And I think that they just had no no faith in the process actually working, which is, you know, it's it's hard to convince them sometimes.
Dusty Rhodes 8:09
In your experience, does it actually take eight months before you you see the fruits of your labor? Does it happen quicker, or it can kind of take longer?
Tanner Campbell 8:17
It depends. There are so many factors that go into that. So with independent creators who let's say they're an independent creator, and they have a business that's like their coaching service, or they're an educator of some kind, I help people like that get to full time incomes within eight to 12 months. But but there's a something that, especially independence do not understand about making a podcast monetarily successful, whatever they define that as is that the organic, the organic, let me restart is that the organic approach to growth and success from a monetary standpoint, it takes a very long time for organic to grab traction and to work because it relies upon how much content you've created in the past, how much out there is indexable? What are you doing in addition to your podcasts or your writing blogs, I mean, notice that you did not find me through my podcast, you found me through my blog. And that's how most people find me, which is why I write so much. But if you sit down a independent podcast and you say, you know, in addition to this excellent piece of work that you are producing, I'm going to need you to write blog entries be active on Facebook. And you're probably also going to need to put some money into Facebook advertising and go from strictly organic to advancing your cause. We're speeding up what you wish to be the end result by putting some money into this. And that's when they usually say, Well, hold on. I've already bought equipment and I'm not making any money right now and I got all this other stuff and they'll drop out.
Dusty Rhodes 9:47
How much money do you have to put into Facebook advertising then?
Tanner Campbell 9:51
all the clients that I work with start at $5 a day. So it's 150 bucks a month, which is a you know, not a $0 budget, but it's also not through the roof budget either? And if, am I allowed to do a plug on this? Because it's this free information? Yes,
Dusty Rhodes 10:06
you can. Yes.
Tanner Campbell 10:07
So if you go to Real Talk podcasting, comm forward slash just the number five, there's a video tutorial there, it's about 40 minutes long. And it will walk you through how to use Facebook ads in a very basic way, five bucks a day to grow your audience, literally every every day that passes, you'll get new subscribers. And you need that I feel, especially as an independent podcaster, you need that to get through that pod fade. Because again, the number one cause of the parfait is like, there's not enough listeners. And nobody's paying me and people who pay you as a direct percentage of the number of listeners you have. So if you want to get paid, you need more listeners who know more listeners, you either gotta get real lucky. Or you've got to be doing this for a long time, like a year, two years. I mean, I'm working with a couple of podcasts now that have 12,000 13,000 subscribers. And they're three years old. Nobody wants to get told that in order to make you know, 15 $100 a month pre tax, which is not a lot of money, that they've got to work five years just to get to that. Yeah, it's defeating. But But spending money in the upfront the Facebook ads helps you push through that barrier. And you can see the growth and that can keep that can keep a lot of people motivated.
Dusty Rhodes 11:21
Yeah, and especially because you're attracting, you're always going to be hitting new people, because Facebook will expose it to X amount of people, then we'll move on to a new group, and they'll move on to new group and there. And it works like that. I absolutely, highly recommend. And I'll include that link in our show notes, to watch Tanner's video about Facebook advertising because it is absolute gold without a doubt. As well as Facebook advertising, which is really good advice. You're making a podcast, which has got a whole lot of content in it any way what kind of other pieces of content that you think you could generate that are useful to your business, and then also useful for promoting the podcast.
Tanner Campbell 12:01
Let's start with what I don't think is helpful. Because there's, that's probably easier, a lot of people will create audiograms, which I think are really only good within the context of running an ad. And I think if you create an audiogram, that they need to be text driven, not wiggly, line audiogram driven, right, the spectrogram, or whatever they call it. That is not very appealing. But when people see a bouncing ball words on the screen, it's a lot more likely that they're going to unmute that video and listen to it and watch it. But those do not do a lot to convert people from finding those things in non podcast, because think about it. You're browsing the web, you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, wherever it is you're at, you are not looking to watch a podcast, you're doing something else or you're scrolling through your Facebook feed. You see an audiogram go by. And you're like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me listen to that snippet. Oh, that's a pretty good snippet. And then either you might like the page. And that's really unlikely. You'll probably like the post. That's, that's pretty common. But you're probably not going to say, but hold on, let me go open my podcast app, because I saw this and find this podcast and subscribe to it. That doesn't happen a lot. So what I like to use audiograms for mainly is to run with ads, because it's good ad creative. Because there's a button below to that point, that's like more obvious what's going on. You can say listen. But honestly, audiograms don't don't do a lot for me or for my clients. I don't think they do a lot for anybody to be honest.
Dusty Rhodes 13:29
No, I the way I view audiograms is I look at them as kind of like the best minute of the podcast. And it's just a small little chunk that will teach the person as I absolutely agree with you. It's not going to get any listeners to the podcast. So I'm not going to jump on and listen to a whole show or subscribe or follow the show or they're not going to do any of that. But if you can give people within 60 seconds, a nice little chunk of information that helps them with their day or their life or whatever. And the company that we're making the podcast for gets the credit for that. Check us for that. That's a great, great, great, great way of looking at their their audio grounds is to use them in your advertising, because when you click learn more, you can have that bring you straight to the podcasting app.
Tanner Campbell 14:13
Yes, correct that? Well, you've probably it sounds like you've maybe watched the video I mentioned earlier. So that for those who are listening who want to know what the catch of that is, is that when you run an ad, you know how to target people, everybody probably knows how to do that. But if you limit the audience to being iOS only users, then that means the ad that appears to them if it links to Apple podcasts. When they click that link, it immediately opens the app which is a one step conversion, which is a very short funnel that works very well. Exactly secret I should be selling and I'm giving it away.
Dusty Rhodes 14:48
That's why I wanted you on the podcast because you know that literally those last four minutes of what you've been listening to is pure gold absolutely 100% of the content that you Get them out of the podcast Do you believe in graphic material that you can get out of it? photos, transcriptions, writing blog articles, that kind of stuff.
Tanner Campbell 15:12
There is a service out there that I want to say is called podcasts abbreviated, podcast, plural abbreviated.com. And I met this fella on clubhouse. And what he does is he creates audio grams. However, they've got music set to them. They've got video set to them. stock video, usually, they're very artistic pieces, right? Like, I think things like that. Like if you really elevated the audiogram, to something that was more like a cinematic experience. Those have worked very well for him. So podcast abbreviated, I think it's calm is something you guys should check out. I don't think it's a service that he actually formally publicly offers. But they're, they're beautiful. And he tells me that they do pretty well for his clients. In addition to that, I think having your transcriptions on your website. So I mean, let's talk, let's talk about what you need, in addition to the by guest, right, so you've got the podcast, but the podcast should live somewhere other than in podcast players, because Google does not do a great job, if any job of indexing podcast players. But it will find it if it's on a website, but it's not going to find it if it's just an embedded player on the website. So what I like to do is set up and you can see examples of this at sites that for my podcasts, and for many others, it's not my original idea. you land on the page, the page is titled by the podcast episode below that is an embedded player below that is maybe a one paragraph summary. And then what I like to put below that in the collapsible element, that is to say one of those toggle things where you can expand the tree or close the tree. I'd like to paste the transcript in there. Because when somebody comes to a website, if they see, you know, a one hour long transcript that's quite a lot of text on a page is a little intimidating and overwhelming. But if it's in a collapsible element that says click here to expand that view transcript, that's that's easier for them. But Google can also still see it so we can get the context of what's on that page. And then in addition to that, I would encourage people not to publish those transcripts as blogs. I don't think that works very well. I think that it doesn't nobody wants to read a transcript, people usually go through a transcript to find, first of all, I think almost nobody goes through a transcript. I think it's beneficial, because Google's going to see it and they're going to get some context about what's going on on that page. But when they publish it as a blog article doesn't read well, as one. No, there's another, I will give you the link because I never remember the name of the service. It's a little bit expensive, but it's a great service for businesses. And it will take a blog, it will take a transcript and it will turn it into a unique blog post that is completely original from the content, but based on what content is there. A lot of people use the term repurpose. I don't think repurposing works well, like people take, they'll do an interview on zoom right side by side video, and then they'll drop that on YouTube and hope it does something for them. If you look at Joe Rogan, who's arguably the most at least by numbers, popular podcast, regardless of what you think of him, he has a huge audience. If you look at how many subscribers he has to the podcast, first how many listens he gets for an episode. It's a pretty small percentage within that first month, when compared to how many people listen. If it's that percentage from hit for him, like it's probably going to be less than that percentage for you. And you probably only have 100 listeners. So it's not gonna be it's not worth that extra effort to repurpose stuff. Because people are not looking for that thing on that platform. I hate I hate it when people take a side by side put it on YouTube. And like it's not working. My people are not showing up to YouTube to see that they're showing up to YouTube to see like engaging some people do put YouTube on the background and we'll listen and Joe Rogan clips which is like a separate channel for him gets an insane amount but that those are also very short clips. Plus these Joe Rogan and he has a level of exposure that we just don't have as normal human beings.
Dusty Rhodes 19:13
He also made it through pod fade yeah?!
Tanner Campbell 19:16
Quite successfully. Right him and Dan Carlin I don't know if you guys listen to Dan Carlin hardcore history. Yeah, absolutely three hour long episodes on how he does it.
Dusty Rhodes 19:26
When you're dealing with any kind of a corporate or a business or a brand KPI are the three letters that always come up about key performance indicators. What kind of indicators do you do? Because you've given a fantastic example how a local podcast with only a few 100 listeners can be a phenomenal success locally and then you've got national podcast and they can be equally successful. But what are the indicators that you think shows if a podcast is being a success or not?
Tanner Campbell 20:00
Smaller shows the KPIs are harder, they're usually just the conversion itself and the the traction on any ads that are running to drive people towards that podcast. However, with larger podcasts that have larger audiences, there are two things that podcast hosting providers do not currently track that I wish they did track, because they're very difficult to track manually, if you don't have access to the SQL databases that all these podcasts I was having very few of them will give you that. And if they do, they will be very limited in the in the tables which are included in that data, because some of those many of those SQL structures will contain other people's information. And so it's not just that they're not giving it to you, it's that the from a privacy standpoint, they may actually not be able to give it to you. But I like something called HalfLife, which is the average amount of time that it takes a podcast to get to 50% of its lifetime listens. So the more that increases, you get an indicator of a show becoming more popular.
Dusty Rhodes 21:11
Or that's the KPI that you keep your eyes.
Tanner Campbell 21:14
That's one that I try to keep my eye on in situations where I can. And then the other is back catalogue completion, or back catalogue, listen. So we want to know when an IP address hits, you know, the latest episode, we want to flag it as being a new episode, sorry, a new IP address that we've never seen before. And then from that point, we will say this is where this IP address entered the game. And we want to go back and find out later after that one point, if they went back and listen to previous episodes. And if people are doing that, chances are that they've and usually they'll do the most recent one and jump or the most recent one. And second, I never come back. But if they usually get past the second, it's a really good indicator that the first one they liked a lot. And they wanted to go to the next one, they want to go to the next one. Now most people never get a most people are never going to go back and listen to an entire back catalogue unless it's an audio drama and they have to. But yeah, if somebody if you see that, that average, back catalogue completion rate is climbing or holding consistent around a certain percentage that I guess you have to determine on your own what was worth it to you. It's a KPI you have to define that that is one way that you can you can identify that as a performance indicator, and then you can track it, but it is hard to do I know that Zen cast.fm, not Zen caster. But Zen cast at FM is an Australian based company that does podcast hosting. And the whole reason that we have these SQL queries that do what I just described those two other things. Yes, because the guy who owns that allowed us to have that data for our podcast because of the way it was stored. So we got to work with SQL structure and figure out how to write queries that could return this information.
Dusty Rhodes 22:55
So that's a good piece of it, especially if you're going to be running your own server and not using a third party to serve your podcast that without will one thing and it's actually Genoa, it's it's a really good indicator because it resonates with anybody who watches a TV series or a boxset. You watch the first one if you like it, you watch the second one. And then if you start watching the third one, that's it, you're ready for the sunset. Same with, with podcasts as well. Let me wrap up with one final question for you for our corporate podcast. What do you think are the three areas that anyone looking to launch a corporate podcast should focus on?
Tanner Campbell 23:33
I don't know if I have three areas. But I will say one thing that I think is one thing that I think is really important, if you make, let's say a waterproof Bluetooth speaker that's rugged and intended to use be used for the outdoors. You're not going to make a podcast about Bluetooth speakers, because nobody is going to listen to that unless you want to make an industry by guests in which case I might be wrong. But you're probably not going to do that if you're talking to me you're not making an industry podcast. Instead, what you should do is you should say my product serves these communities. And these communities need my product where is the crossover between my product and these communities. So in the example of rugged Bluetooth speaker well we know that the kinds of people who are going to need that are people who spend time on the water or time outdoors is going to be outdoors the active people. So armed with that information, you should be making a podcast about outdoor adventures. You should not be making a podcast about your product because nobody's gonna listen to that. But if you can make a great offer for example, LL beans another company they make they make clothing and gear for outdoors sleeping bags, mats boots, you don't want to make a podcast about that they might have some interest is like posted on the website learn more about where we make our boots like you'll hear an interview with the manager of the boot making facility that could have some interest. But what would have more interest is they have a place called a Want to see it's called like duck pond or something. It's a paddle pond of some kind, and it's a few miles up the road. And I and it would be cool if you had you guys have access to some of the greatest like adventures in the world like your brand's. So reach out to them, bring them to the bring them to the paddle pond or the paddle camp or whatever they call it, sitting around a fire, do some binaural recording, have them tell the story of like their greatest climb, or their most exhilarating hike, people will tune in and listen to that. And through that you introduce your brand is like, Hey, welcome to the LL Bean podcast recorded in the LL Bean studios at LL Bean city calm or you know, whatever it is, so you are getting your brand in front of them very clearly. And maybe the mid roll has an offer for 10% or buy one get one or something. But the content is not a commercial, nobody wants to listen to a 45 minute commercial, right? They want to listen to compelling content. So my first advice would be make content for a community and make it nothing to do with your product. Just have it to do with the community your product serves. The second suggestion I might have is realize that it's going to take some time, it is probably going to take six to 12 months for you to see the kind of uptick in revenue that you are hoping for. And then my third might be don't feel like you have to record every week. Although this would be general advice for everybody. I have clients who record quarterly who are in the financial world. So that makes sense for them. And the people who listen to their shows love that. Give them the quarterly update, you know, quarter and review stuff like that every other week. Or you can do it every week. So be flexible with how frequently you're releasing. And also be flexible with how long the show is. It doesn't have to be an hour. It can be 20 minutes, it can be two hours, if you think that that's appropriate. but be patient, create for the community, your products serve in a way that is not a commercial. And you know, don't make your runtime too incredibly long or too incredibly short make it as long as it needs to be guys.
Dusty Rhodes 27:07
Tanner Campbell, it has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you and very educational as well. And that's what I say is you're one of the few people who actually will willingly share information you can use I use I've been going to radio conferences and they say such and such an amazing programmer. He's going to tell you how he did blah blah blah and then you go and all happens is the tells you what he did. Now how he did it. So no, I appreciate a very, very, very useful information. If you'd like to find out more about Tanner. You'll find him at Tanner helps.com Thanks, Jessie. And of course if you'd like to chat about any of the topics discussed today, you can email me directly at Hello at dust pod.ie is my email address. But for now for myself Dusty Rhodes, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. Talk to you.