Justin: 00:02

This is where all the bad podcast memes come from. You know? Like, ask me about my podcast or I'm sorry your boyfriend has a podcast. People are just pushing their show on people that don't care. Or what you want is an audience that really cares that's searching for a show like yours.

Jeremy: 00:23

Welcome to Podcast Marketing Trends Explained. I'm Jeremy Enns from Podcast Marketing Academy.

Justin: 00:28

And I'm Justin Jackson from transistor.fm. And together, we're digging into the data behind the podcast marketing trends 2023 report to help you understand what it means for you and your show.

Jeremy: 00:41

Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions about the way you create and market your show so you can spend more time on what actually matters for growth and are my

Justin: 00:57

downloads good? Like, I got this many downloads are my downloads good? Like I got this many downloads last month. I got this many downloads this month. Is that good?

Justin: 01:07

And you asked that question in your survey, the Podcast Marketing Trends 2023. What did you find out?

Jeremy: 01:15

Yeah. So first off, I'll say I have received this question, too many times to count, and I've heard it asked by everyone with, you know, 15 downloads an episode to 15 1,000 downloads an episode, and I think everybody thinks that everybody else is getting much more downloads than them. Everybody's a little bit embarrassed about their own numbers. So you can imagine anybody who starts a podcast, this is one of the questions on their mind. And, of course, this was one of the questions on my mind as well.

Jeremy: 01:39

How fast does it take to grow a show, and what does good actually look like? And so the month over month growth rate that we found, the median for all shows we surveyed, was 1.62% growth per month. So for some context here, essentially that means that if you were getting 500 downloads a month across your show, you can expect every month to get about 10 new downloads, which, you know, if you release a weekly show, that's maybe 4 new listeners. So not a lot of growth there. I don't know what your reaction is to that number.

Justin: 02:12

I I mean, I when I saw these numbers, I think what's interesting is one reaction could be, oh, well, if I'm getting more than 2% month over month growth, then I'm better than the average podcast in this survey. But I think most people aren't satisfied with that. I think most people are like, no. I want more than that. I I think even if you were exactly hitting 1.62%, I think you might be thinking, yeah.

Justin: 02:42

No. I wanna grow the show more than what the average is showing. And I think that's what we wanna get into is, yes, most podcasts do not grow that much month over month. But what are the tactics people can use to achieve that above average growth. And you also actually, let's dig in a little bit more because you found some outliers and some other interesting context.

Justin: 03:09

Like, some people are growing way more than the average. Right?

Jeremy: 03:13

Yeah. So a little bit digging deeper. And, of course, like, when we're looking at averages and medians and things like that, we're looking at, you know, kind of the middle of the road podcast here. And so as in any kind of, you know, dataset, there's gonna be shows that did way better and way worse. And so, before we get into some of those, kind of nuances there, the one thing I'll say is that the month over month, that 1.62% month over month growth rate translates to about 21% growth per year.

Jeremy: 03:37

And so you're growing by about a 5th per year. So, you know, that makes it a little bit you know, it's a really small number on the month to month basis. You can kinda see, like, okay. If I'm getting a 1,000 downloads, per month this time, you know, this year, maybe I'd be getting a 1,200 this time next year. So that's, you know, puts it in a little bit of a a different light there, but still, you know, not as much growth as people would probably like to see.

Jeremy: 03:59

So you did mention that there are some some outliers here on actually both ends of the spectrum. And so Okay. What we found here was that actually half of all of the respondents outperformed the median, which, you would expect. So half of shows did better than that 1.62%. I suppose by nature of that being the median, that is statistically necessary.

Jeremy: 04:20

Yeah. But some good news there regardless. And we actually found that a 5th, so I think it was 21% of shows actually doubled their downloads. And so a pretty significant percentage of shows actually grew quite a bit. And this was not just shows that were small.

Jeremy: 04:34

They had 10 downloads an episode and went up to 20. There were also many shows that actually doubled their download size with multiple tens of thousands of downloads as a starting point and went up to, you know, double that number. So that was some of the outliers we saw on the positive side of things. I think the top show grew by almost 400%, and this was actually one of the shows that had thousands of downloads. I think it was, like, 33 100 downloads per episode starting and was now quite a bit bigger on the other side.

Jeremy: 04:59

It was in the the 10 to 20000 download range per episode. And then on the other side, we had, 32% of shows actually shrunk, and so they were had negative growth on a, downloads per episode basis. And so this is something that we're gonna look into in a future episode and look at. You know, I think we often assume that, like, oh, the only place to go is up, and what we saw here was that actually a third of all shows actually shrunk in downloads. And so we're gonna dedicate an episode to kind of dig into why that might be.

Jeremy: 05:26

So Mhmm.

Justin: 05:27

I I

Jeremy: 05:27

would be curious to hear your reaction here now knowing that it wasn't just like almost every show is around this kind of 2% range. Like, we've got this whole range. What what are the thoughts that come to your mind?

Justin: 05:36

If there's anyone listening that wants to grow their show, I think I would wanna know what did that 1 fifth of respondents who doubled their downloads do? What kind of factors led to that growth? It's one thing to look at the numbers, but what causes a show to grow by that much?

Jeremy: 05:55

And you know what? I'm glad you you brought that up because I think that my gut reaction and my my one of my hopes, I think a lot of people's hopes who filled out this survey was that we're gonna get this big data set and we're gonna see these shows and we're gonna see, like, okay. These shows grew quite a bit. Like, what were the tactics that they used? What social media platform were they on?

Jeremy: 06:12

What category were they in? How long were their episodes? All of these kinda tactical details.

Justin: 06:17

How many TikToks did they publish?

Jeremy: 06:19

And, yeah, were they all on YouTube or anything like that? And, so I, of course, got curious. And before we started recording here, I actually went through I sorted, the data by all of the highest growth shows. So I I just did about 15 of the top growth shows here.

Justin: 06:34

Okay. These are the winners.

Jeremy: 06:35

These are the winners. So it's these are the shows that grew by, you know, over a 100, many of these, a 100, 200, 300, almost 400% growth, so a lot of growth. And I was curious. Well, one of the questions that we had in the survey was what has been the single most effective thing that you've done in the past year to grow your show? So this was very much like personal attribution.

Jeremy: 06:54

You know what you did. What do you think had the biggest impact on moving the needle? And these were all shows that grew very successfully. I'm just gonna read off a couple of these responses that people had here, and we're just kinda starting at the top, the highest growth shows, and working down the list here. So we got the first one.

Jeremy: 07:08

Create a Facebook group. Social media. Created my short email newsletter via LinkedIn, which includes a link to the new episode and a link to the previous one. It's the perfect companion to my short 5 minute podcast.

Justin: 07:17

Okay.

Jeremy: 07:18

Networking. Bought bought an ad on Castbox, brought on a guest cohost, served my listeners well, gained guests who are semi famous in their space, rebranded the show, created high quality SEO show notes for each episode and share them on social platforms, got booked to speak at Yale by one random tweet. That's one I think that we would all love to replicate perhaps. We've got increasing the inherent value of our content, content repurposing, posting material, whatever that means, advertising on other podcasts, learning about Pinterest, defining our listener persona, and then creatively going out to find and engage with them, and finally focusing on the quality of content. So listening to this kind of, like, collection of tactics, do you spot any trends here, any overwhelming, like, directive of this is what you should do?

Justin: 08:02

No. There's no silver bullet in that list. There's no, like, one thing. And maybe this is actually what's frustrating when people talk about podcast marketing is they're like they'll get advice. You know?

Justin: 08:15

They'll go out on Reddit or forums or whatever, and they'll say, how do I grow my show? And someone will say, oh, the way to grow your show is you just gotta get a speaking gig at Yale. That's what worked for me. And people are like, that's not very helpful.

Jeremy: 08:29

I would be curious from your experience, as a marketer, as a podcaster, working in podcasting, talking with a lot of successful shows, and and also shows that might not be as successful yet. If you were to venture a guess as to what these shows are doing, if it's not, like, outwardly tactical that has allowed them to grow, what would you say the the common denominator is?

Justin: 08:50

There's one attribute that every single high growth show has.

Jeremy: 08:54

Okay.

Justin: 08:55

And that attribute is podcast market fit.

Jeremy: 08:59

Okay.

Justin: 09:00

This is something you've talked about a lot. Why is it so important?

Jeremy: 09:04

I'm actually gonna lead with, we're gonna bring in our mutual friend, fellow Canadian in the podcast marketing space, and I'm gonna key it up with a quote from Dan Meisner that I think begins to get at what podcast market fit is. And he said, don't start by asking how to build an audience for your podcast. Instead, ask how to build a podcast for your audience. And so I think, you know, what Dan is getting at here is that there are people out there in the world who are looking for stuff, and everybody's looking for something different. And they all have these things that they're already interested in, and they're looking for things similar to that.

Jeremy: 09:36

A lot of times with entertainment style shows, if you like one type of show, you you listen to true crime, for example, you're always looking for the next true crime show. And so if you're creating in that space, you know that people like this category of shows. They're looking for more stuff like that all the time. So on the entertainment side of things, that's how I often think about it. On the more, like, educational side of things, if you're maybe, like, starting a show to build your business or something like that, what you're looking for here is to create a show that addresses a problem or a challenge that people are looking to solve.

Jeremy: 10:04

And And so this is more of a classic kind of content marketing strategy where people have some kind of problem. They are looking to achieve some kind of goal. There's some kind of obstacles in the way, and you are creating a show that satisfies. It kind of forms the bridge between those two things. And there's we can get into a lot more of the nuances of it, but that's kind of how I think about it is, like, are you creating a show that people are already actively looking for, you know, at least something in the vicinity of what you're creating so that you know that there's some interest and demand in it.

Justin: 10:32

What I love about Dan's quote is that it illustrates that people think you start with the idea, the concept for the show. But in reality, you should start with the audience. Who is this show for? And that audience that you choose will kind of determine what product you give them, what podcast you're going to produce for these people. It also assumes that you know something about your audience, that you know how to reach them, that you know what kinds of things they like, that you know how long their commute is, that you know, you know, what context they're listening, that you know what other shows they're listening to.

Justin: 11:16

And once you have that information, once you know who is this show for, then you can produce the podcast. Then you can come up with some ideas that might resonate with that audience. This is very different than making something and then just trying to push it out to people. Like, please take take my podcast. Take my podcast.

Justin: 11:39

And this is where all the bad podcast memes come from. You know? Like, ask me about my podcast or I'm sorry your boyfriend has a podcast. You know? It's the idea that people are just pushing their show on people that don't care, where what you want is an audience that really cares that's searching for a show like yours.

Justin: 12:00

So instead of having to constantly push, push, push, you're gonna be connecting with people who are already looking for a show like yours. That's Yeah. Podcast market fit. It's producing something that people already want, And it takes some experimentation. It might take a couple different iterations.

Justin: 12:21

It might take years for you to finally get that podcast market fit. But once you get it, your show should be able to grow reliably month after month. Why? Because, to quote Seth Godin, people like us do things like this. So a show I love is Acquired, which tells the stories and strategies of great companies.

Justin: 12:45

So people like me, startup founders, tech executives, people in Silicon Valley, people in business, people like us listen to Acquired and people like us recommend Acquired. That's the key. You get both. I'm listening, and this show is so good. It resonates with me so strongly that I'm also going to share it with other people like me.

Justin: 13:15

That's how you grow a show. And I interviewed David Rosenthal, one of the hosts. We can link to it in the show notes. And that show, it's been around for 8 years. They've doubled their audience every single year.

Justin: 13:28

So these aren't their exact numbers, but let's say they started out with a 1000 downloads per month in year 1. By year 8, just by doubling every year, they'd be at a 128,000 downloads per episode. And when I asked David, like, what's your secret? Like, what was the secret growth lever that unlocked all of this growth? He just said, we're just focused on consistently putting out a great product, great episodes, and people told their friends about it.

Justin: 13:59

That's it. Word-of-mouth is how most podcasts grow. And if you can nail this podcast market fit, you have a path towards reliable double digit month over month growth. Now I know there's people listening that they might be thinking, well, I I don't know if I have podcast market fit. I just started this show because I had a good idea.

Justin: 14:23

This is the show I wanted to see in the world. Are there some steps they can take to get there or get closer to that goal?

Jeremy: 14:32

I see you're, throwing over the hard question to me. You just had your grand monologue dropping the mic with the the podcast market fit, and now it's over to me for the the hard stuff. And, this is actually a question that I do get a lot. And, you know, a lot of people do create shows that they just wanna do, and there's nothing wrong with that. And, you know, creating, like, a art focused podcast where it's like, this is I'm not making it for anyone.

Jeremy: 14:53

I'm making it for myself. And you actually do see a lot of successful creators. I the first person who comes to mind is Tim Urban of the blog Wait But Why, and he's got this great kind of anecdote about how when he sits down to write, he pictures a stadium of 10,000 little tiny Tims that are all cheering him on, and he writes the stuff that he wants to exist in the world. Yeah. And so I think that this is a viable way you can build an audience by doing this.

Jeremy: 15:16

There's some luck involved with this for sure. And I think there's also it often works better when you are plugged into an existing community, and so you're kind of a representative of that community. And don't really consume that much content or anything like that related to, you know, other, people in a specific field, what you create might be, you know, crazy. And maybe it has some kind of artistic value, but it might not really, you know, overlap with that many other people. So Mhmm.

Jeremy: 15:47

I wanna lay out that kind of caveat first.

Justin: 15:50

Yeah.

Jeremy: 15:51

Now I think that there is still a path to finding product market fit when you start off without a defined audience. And I think of this as the content art spectrum. And so we think about there is pure art on one side of the spectrum and pure content on the other. And so on the content side of things, this is like a show that you create. It's a 100% a means to an end.

Jeremy: 16:10

And so this might be for a business. You're like, I need to attract these people so that they will buy my product, and I'm creating content to be that bridge.

Justin: 16:17

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 16:17

And on the art side of things, you're thinking, I'm creating this show a 100% for me, and I don't care about anybody else. And, like, I'm just creating this thing. And people can listen if they want, and they if they don't, whatever. That's fine. I'm doing this for me, and that's enough.

Jeremy: 16:30

And so I think understanding where your show fits on the spectrum will illuminate the path forward for marketing. And so I think if you're more on the content side, you're really relying on the audience. You kind of have a sense of, like, okay, I know I'm creating this thing for this audience. So you can kind of take the approach that Justin just mentioned, going through this process of like, okay, what do these people want? Where are they underserved?

Jeremy: 16:51

What kinds of questions are they asking? And how can I create a show for that?

Justin: 16:54

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 16:54

If you're on the art side, however, and and I will say like most shows are somewhere in the middle. There's very few shows that are pure art or pure content, and so you're probably somewhere in the middle. And so you might have some vague sense of, like, okay. I think these types of people might be interested in this because my show is somewhat similar to other shows, and these types of people seem to like these other shows. Mhmm.

Jeremy: 17:13

I think what you're doing here is you're testing audiences out. And so you're creating your show, and you're gonna go show up in different communities. And you're gonna, you know, integrate yourself in those communities. You're gonna occasionally talk about your show. You're not, like, just plastering it around the Internet sharing links.

Jeremy: 17:26

You're, like, actually getting to know people, getting to talk with people, and following your hunches around. Like, I think this might be an audience that might like my show. And you're just trying to look for where did you get a positive reaction. And so if you find your way into, you know, a group of listeners, whether that's 25 people or 250 people or 25100 people, you wanna then get to know everything that you can about those people, which will often you'll be able to draw some conclusions, say, like, oh, the people who like my show are all like this, and they all like other shows like this, and they all hang out in these communities. And now you've actually found your way.

Jeremy: 17:58

You've kind of gone the reverse way into finding that community that you can then kind of proceed the normal direction and say, like, okay. These people, I I've already attracted them, and now I know how to find more of them. And now I can kind of do some more research and say, like, is there a way to make my show even more aligned with what these people are looking for? So Yeah. That would be the kind of process that I would, recommend for somebody who's going more from the art side of things than the content.

Justin: 18:19

Yeah. I'm not saying we should ignore our gut. Like, a great reason to create a show is that you listen to shows like the kind of show you want to create. Like, if you're really into, pop music and you're listening to all those shows or you're really into startups and you're listening to all the startup shows or you're whatever it is. If you are listening to all the shows in your category and there are things that you consistently think could be better, If you're like, ah, why did they have it like this?

Justin: 18:49

Why are they organizing it like this? I could do this better. Here's a cool idea that no one nobody's doing. I'm gonna try that. That's a great reason to start a show and to test things out.

Justin: 19:00

And, so your gut can be a part of it. Even if you're on the content side, your instincts can still be a part of it. The key is that you want to test out whether these things actually resonate with the audience. Yeah. And I think we wanna get into some takeaways right now about what are some practical things folks can do if they wanna achieve above average month over month growth?

Justin: 19:25

How can they start that process of actually, you know, getting to grow their

Jeremy: 19:32

show? So I think the the one thing that I want to to bring up, related to this and the the kind of monthly growth rate. There's actually kind of 2 parts to it, and most people only think about 1. But the idea of podcast market come back to the show. And now I've got new subscribers.

Jeremy: 19:55

So if I do some kind of promotion, I get 50 new people in the show. Now I've boosted my listenership by 50 people. Mhmm. And what most people don't realize, and it's really hard to see in the podcasting ecosystem, it's easier to see in other places, is that there's a constant kind of, like, leaky bucket where we've got some listeners. They might have been with us for a week or they might have been with us for 5 years, but there's a constant stream of people who are no longer listening to the podcast on a regular basis.

Jeremy: 20:20

And so this would be what we would call churn in, like, software is is typically where that that term would be used. But it does exist in podcasting, and so I think what we want to realize is that it's entirely possible that you have a 100 downloads a month, and that's what you see in your your podcast hosting dashboard, say, in transistor dot fm perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. And that could mean a couple of different things depending on your show.

Jeremy: 20:45

And so maybe you have a 100 downloads every single episode. That could mean that those are a 100 people who listen for the first time. You went out and you got those 100 new people. Your promotion is working. You got them in, and they listen to the show, and they never came back.

Jeremy: 20:59

And then next week, it's a 100 new people who are in the show now. And to you, it looks like, oh, I've got a 100 subscribers. I got a 100 people listen to every single episode. Whereas it could also mean that you do have those 100 listeners who come back every episode, and nothing that you're doing to promote is working. And so I think what we need to realize is that there's constant inflow and also a constant outflow.

Jeremy: 21:18

And I think where the podcast market fit really comes into play is that the better fit you have, the more people who come into the show for the first time end up sticking around. The more you can reduce that churn and increase retention, the faster you're actually gonna grow. And so I think that that's one of these pieces that as you're thinking about, like, you know, whether it comes to promotion versus making the show better, finding fit, this is kind of, like, the dynamics that are at play. And so improving the show patches some of the holes in the bucket, and then bringing in and getting in front of new people also increases the growth. So these two kind of things to keep in mind.

Justin: 21:50

Mhmm. Totally. The the leaky bucket of podcasting that nobody's talking about. So, yeah, do you wanna jump into some practical, ways to explore this area?

Jeremy: 22:01

This this episode is kinda centered around this, like, monthly and annual growth rates. And for me, I think that the the month over month growth rate feels like a long enough time span that I can kind of do some experiments and then see what impact that had. And so, when we're talking about finding podcast market fit, whether we're talking about promotion or anything else, I think it all comes down to experiments. And so we we take some action that we maybe haven't done before. We try something different, and then we see, you know, on that episode or on, you know, after a month, what impact did that have.

Jeremy: 22:31

Maybe I increased the quality of my hooks that I started off each episode. And so I, like, spend a lot of time really focusing on those first three minutes and, like, really capturing up and maybe that's resulting in a increase in listenership and now I can kind of assume, like, oh, probably I've just reduced my churn a little bit by keeping people listening and coming back for more episodes and so that that experiment was successful. And of course there's many other experiments you might run that are not successful and so you can kind of use your your personal historic growth rate as this benchmark. And so you can say, if I have been growing at 7% month over month, I do an experiment, I test out something with my titles, I change up my show concept or format, something like that, and all of a sudden, it tanks in the next month. I can say, okay.

Jeremy: 23:18

That was not the, the answer to my growth problems. Like, let's try something else, going ahead next month. So Yeah. Really for me, it all comes down to, like, doing experiments and then measuring the results.

Justin: 23:27

Yeah. And that's a quantitative side, like, okay, I'm gonna do things and then see what's reflected in the data. There's also the qualitative side. And I think podcasters, especially new podcasters, should get in the habit of soliciting feedback from their listeners. So you get 5 downloads.

Justin: 23:45

Make sure in that episode, at some point you say, hey, folks, I am trying to get better at this podcasting thing. Right now, I'm at 5 downloads per month. I wanna get to 10, and I need your help. Please reach out to me by email, by DMs, whatever channels, and let me know how can I make this show better? In fact, I'm gonna ask you a specific question.

Justin: 24:09

Would you recommend the show to a friend? If not, if your answer is no, I want you to stop everything you're doing right now, pull over to the side of the road, and I want you to write me an email about what is stopping you from recommending the show to a friend. And you and I have talked about this so many times, Jeremy. Sometimes, it's like, I don't wanna share this episode because the show art is embarrassing or the episode title wouldn't resonate with me and my friends or your audio audio quality is bad Or your episodes are an hour and a half long and, you know, 5 minutes of that is you breathing heavily. You know, whatever reason it is, like, I wanna hear from you.

Justin: 24:52

What could I do that would make this the kind of show that you recommend to your friends? You can also accomplish this with, listener surveys. We'll put a link to a sample in the show notes, but get in the habit of getting that qualitative data as well. And as you improve things, you'll be able to notice hopefully that those responses become more and more positive. More and more people are saying that they would recommend a show to a friend.

Jeremy: 25:18

Yeah. And I think the other thing that I often recommend people doing, and this works even better almost when you are small, and you need to kind of lead the engagement a lot of times. A lot of times people wanna put out the podcast and have people come to them with the engagement. But one of the things that I recommend to people is if you know 3 people who listen to the show, maybe you've had just the briefest of interactions on social media where they said, like, oh, I I really like that episode, I would personally reach out to those people and start engaging with them and their content more regularly and actually take the lead in building the relationship. And, you know, you wanna start out just by, like, some some back and forth, and they're gonna appreciate that if they've listened to the show.

Jeremy: 25:54

And especially early on, you can actually then start getting into DM conversations and start getting onto Zoom calls and you can actually get to know them and they can really become kind of the behind the scenes, like, listener advisory board of the show. And you can get so much good information because, like, they're part of this early few, and it only takes, like you can do this with 1 person. And the one thing that I'll say is you wanna be a little bit selective about these people. Mhmm. And so what you wanna do is make sure that you are creating the show and talking with people who you want more of.

Jeremy: 26:24

And so there might be somebody who's, like, really cranky, and they listen to every episode and you're like, oh, I do not want a 1,000 of that person in my social media feed, in my email inbox. And so I'm not gonna listen to what they say they want the show to be, but there's somebody else who you're like, oh, if I could have a stadium full of this person listening to the show, like, that's who I want to attract more of. And so that's who you wanna find out everything that you can about and listen to their kind of guidance and feedback. Mhmm.

Justin: 26:45

And don't ask, like, would you listen more if I did more of this? Ask more questions like, what other podcasts have you listened to in the past on this how many of those podcasts are you not listening to anymore? Why did you stop listening? What initially drew you to my show? What stopped you from recommending the show to a friend?

Justin: 27:07

What other content are you consuming on this topic? Newsletters or blogs or YouTube channels? Get a sense of what other things they're already in motion doing and why they like or don't like that content. And I think you'll get so many good answers. You you were actually telling me, Jeremy, about ways you can, like, promote your podcast and do some tests there.

Justin: 27:30

What kind of podcast promotion things have you seen work when people are trying to either do experiments or increase the growth rate for their show?

Jeremy: 27:41

Yeah. So there's a number of ways. I think that that, for me, it all starts with those one to one conversations. And I think what you wanna be able to get to is this kind of, like, eyes light up moment, and I actually, wrote a newsletter just last week. I kind of cheekily called it the Smasher Pass test.

Jeremy: 27:54

And so, essentially, what you're looking for here is you give somebody the, you know, 1 or 2 sentence description of your show, and the best possible reaction and the one that you are aiming for is that before you've even finished giving the description, they're already reaching for their phone and looking to subscribe to it. And I think that people will tell you in these conversations, like, oh, that sounds really interesting. I'll check that out later. And of course, we all know this. We've all done this.

Jeremy: 28:16

And they're being polite and they're like, okay, like, I'm not gonna listen that show, but this person seems nice, so I don't wanna hurt their feelings.

Justin: 28:22

Yeah.

Jeremy: 28:22

I think people's actions will always tell you more than what they will tell you to your face. And getting that feedback of, like, actually being able to see somebody's reaction over Zoom in person when you describe your show, that is kind of the ultimate marker of where your show lies in terms of podcast market fit. And so you wanna be getting to the point where you are talking to 10 of your ideal listeners, and almost all of them are, like, reaching for the phones and, like, wow. This show sounds amazing. How have I not heard about this before?

Jeremy: 28:48

Mhmm. So that is is kind of the gold standard for me is having these actual conversations. But a couple of, like, hackier tacticky type things you can do to kind of refine your your kind of pitch and your premise at a larger scale. There's one this is getting a little bit technical. This is a bit more advanced, but if you have any, experience with either Google or Facebook advertising, you can run some really, really cheap tests for just a few dollars where you can just do a bunch of AB testing through it's, like, one image of your show cover art, or it could even be just a, like, kind of plain graphic that's somewhat generic, and just the wording is different.

Jeremy: 29:19

And it's, like, this show title, a show where we do this, and you, like, change that's what you're changing, and you just measure that. And you can get that in front of a few 100 or a few 1,000 people even for just, like, a few dollars, $10, something like that. And you can quickly see, like, what did people click on more? And that can then you can take that, and that's your new benchmark, and you can test out other versions. And, of course, you might get to a point where you're like, oh, okay.

Jeremy: 29:40

This is the show most people are interested in. This does not align at all with the content I'm currently creating, but maybe that sounds like a pretty interesting show. I would be interested in making that, and you can make the decision to say, like, okay. There's a great hook here. Now I'm gonna fulfill it with the content.

Jeremy: 29:54

And so that's a kind of, like, tactical way that you can start to back your way into podcast market fit and test out some different things without, like, putting a ton of money or energy into reaching a large number of people. So, that's something that I you can use that test for so many different things, and testing out your premise and description is is just one of them.

Justin: 30:10

I love it. Another tactic people can use is to start using some tools to track their marketing experiments. So as you're doing if you're if you're gonna do an ad or if you're gonna post in a community or if you're gonna do a newsletter sponsorship or something, use one of these link tracking tools, for podcasts. There's 2, that we would recommend. Linkfire, which actually has a deep integration with Apple Podcasts now, and it'll show you, did people click from Twitter and actually become a follower in Apple Podcasts, or how many downloads did that particular promotion lead to?

Justin: 30:49

This will allow you to test different things out. As I promoted on Twitter, here's my link for Twitter. As I promote it in this newsletter sponsorship, here's the link for that. And does that result in people actually clicking through onto Spotify, Apple, etcetera? And you'll be able to track the effectiveness of your experiments.

Justin: 31:11

That's what you want. You wanna be able to say, is this having a difference? So, yeah, I if you haven't checked those out yet, I recommend they both have free versions so you can get started for free. Yeah. And whenever you're sharing a link, have that.

Justin: 31:23

You could even have a short link, you know, like, if you have a domain, you could say, you know, your podcast.com/share and then you could have Linkfire or Chartable track that link as well. So there's a variety of ways you can start to see which you know, what's working here? What experiments are working? What are people, you know, more likely to click through on? The people who are really into this are doing split tests where they'll, like, create one episode and they'll have the hook for it.

Justin: 31:53

And then they'll publish another episode that maybe is a different take on that or whatever. And then they're gonna test them right next to each other to see which resonated more with the audience.

Jeremy: 32:06

Yeah. I've been waiting for this to become a, inbuilt feature in podcast hosting platforms. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Although, I believe it as I've been thinking through this, I haven't done it myself, but I think you could get crafty with some dynamic ads and do something very similar and achieve a, kind of similar result. It the data is not gonna be as, granular as you look at split testing for website type of stuff.

Jeremy: 32:27

But Yeah. Yeah. You can get really technical if you want to. And the one thing I wanna, like, say on that note is that so much of marketing, I think we often think about it as what we do, the, like, the activities that we're doing. And I think a lot of it is about what we don't do, and we don't really know what we should stop doing until we start testing.

Jeremy: 32:43

And so a lot of people, if you're not tracking your promotions, maybe you're spending 5 hours a week promoting your podcast on Twitter. And once you start tracking, you realize that 0 listeners ever come from that. And you realize, oh, maybe that 5 hours a week would be better spent on another platform, say, that you're on somebody mentioned Pinterest in in the report and say you're, like, start testing that and you're, like, woah. I'm getting tons of new listeners from Pinterest. Like, I'm gonna stop Twitter, and I'm gonna go all in on Pinterest.

Jeremy: 33:07

And so I think the only way that you can get to that point is actually having some kind of data, and these tools, Linkfire and Chartable, allow you to collect some of that so that you can, you know, allocate your time more effectively going forward.

Justin: 33:19

Totally.

Jeremy: 33:20

Alright. So, Justin, as we wrap up this episode here, I'm curious. What are some of your kind of takeaways from this conversation regarding the kind of monthly and annual growth rates and what people can do to increase those?

Justin: 33:32

Mhmm. Again, the one factor that distinguishes whether or not you're gonna grow is if you have this podcast market fit. And we're gonna be talking about this all season. The the whole season, this is not just a one episode topic. We're gonna be talking about it more.

Justin: 33:47

And, actually, if you have questions about this, if you have feedback about this, get a hold of us. We've got links in the show notes. We wanna hear what questions you have around this topic of Podcast Market Fit. But just start thinking about it. Start thinking about shows you like and start thinking, how do they have podcast market fit?

Justin: 34:06

How did that play out for them? And I will say that it sometimes takes a while. Right? So the acquired show started out as a show about tech acquisitions. And they evolved over time, over 8 years, to be a show about the history of great companies.

Justin: 34:22

Right? And that evolution helped them get more podcast market fit. I think the second thing is start experimenting. I'm gonna try this and see what response I get. That could be as simple as changing your show art.

Justin: 34:37

That could be I'm gonna reduce the length of my episode from an hour to 20 minutes. Start experiments. And then 3rd is look at the data, and the data could be what you're seeing in your analytics. But the data should also be connecting directly with your listeners. How about yourself?

Justin: 34:55

Anything that comes to mind?

Jeremy: 34:57

The two things that I would end on is the first just this idea that these numbers that we discussed here are pretty depressing if we're looking at the median and the averages. But keep in mind that, you know, your goal is probably not to fall into that average category. You certainly can. We looked at some of these these numbers, the distribution of growth, and it is certainly possible to grow much bigger than and much faster than that 1.62% month over month, 21% year over year. And so looking at those numbers, you can say, like, okay.

Jeremy: 35:26

Well, I'm right in the average range, and you can either view that as, like, okay. Well, I'm I'm doing, you know, an average job. Or you can say, like, okay. I know that it's possible to do more, and I'm not gonna settle for for just being in this average, growth group. And so I think if you have higher aspirations, it's possible, but you're going to to need to find that podcast market fit that Justin mentioned.

Jeremy: 35:44

And then, the last thing the last takeaway, was was really this fantastic question that you came up with, which I'm going to now, pose to everybody listening to this, which is if you're enjoying the show so far, we would love it if you would recommend it to a friend. And, if this is not a show that you would recommend to a friend, let us know. What can we do that would make this show recommendable worthy recommendation worthy? What would make the show recommendation worthy? Maybe there's the wording.

Jeremy: 36:10

Let us know. You can get at both of us on Twitter and LinkedIn and email. Got the links in the show notes, and, we would both really love to hear, what would make this one of your favorite shows on podcasting?

Justin: 36:22

Yes. We wanna hear your feedback. Don't hold back. You don't have to be gentle with us. We wanna hear your feedback.

Justin: 36:27

And yes, please recommend the show if you love it.

Jeremy: 36:30

As always, you can check out the full report where all of the data that this episode and all of the episodes, are based on at podcastmarketingtrends.com/2023.