MarTech Podcast 2020 Business Review — Benjamin Shapiro // MarTech Podcast

Quotes

• “Going into 2020 we had some ambitious goals, we were thinking about scaling our outreach, our marketing efforts, driving our revenue goals, expanding our audience but we also knew that we were going to have some turbulent times.” - Ben “For me personally, at the beginning of the year before the outbreak of the coronavirus, we were hit with some unexpected turbulence. I had to go to an emergency and have my gallbladder removed. That was no fun. My team was left scrambling for at least a few days to try to make sure that we have enough content, that our marketing efforts would still be successful and we’re able to support our sponsors. After my recovery, I also had to prepare for the arrival of my second baby.” - Ben “For me, my personal goals were for my business to generate $500,000 of revenue and MarTech podcast would be $300,000 of that and my other podcast, Voices of Search representing the $200,000. We had ambitious growth goals, we wanted to hit the 100,000 downloads a month mark which is also our goal for last year but we were really focused on driving organic growth and not invest so much on paid acquisition.” - Ben“Lastly we wanted to have a more stable infrastructure. I want to be able to conduct 250 interviews and publish 500 new episodes. We had our sights on building a marketing attribution dashboard. We also wanted to build a social community of 10,000 members.” - Ben“I walk away from this year feeling incredibly grateful for the infrastructure that we had laid in the previous years as we were starting to build this business. I think for a lot of people, there was a huge transition from working from an office and having that routine to getting a sense of working for yourself and being independent.” - Ben “I mentioned before that our goal before was to reach a 100,000 download a month and we got really close. We peaked out at a little over 90,000 downloads a month which honestly feels incredible. We had to limit our marketing expenses at the beginning of the year, we tried to heavy up at the end of the year as soon as our revenue started coming back as well.” - Ben “When I look at how many downloads we’ve had this year, the MarTech podcast was downloaded 784,000 times this year which just sounds astronomic. I remember sitting in my apartment in San Francisco, publishing the first episode and being excited about the first 50 downloads and now we’re talking about a year with high six figures in terms of download. Total for the entire life of the podcast, it has been downloaded 1.1 million times so we past the million marks a couple of months ago.” - Ben “To put it in perspective, when we take the cumulative almost two years of work we did on the MarTech podcast and compare it to this year, this year is a 92% increase over the previous two combined years. From a growth perspective, we didn’t hit our goals but we got a meaningfully scaled podcast in a niche that is significant, important, and impactful. So I feel great about how the show has grown.” - Ben “One of the biggest takeaways is we pull the plug on some of the advertising, our paid marketing which we have relied on since the start of the podcast to be able to preserve as much capital as we could during the uncertainty of the coronavirus outbreak. We saw a little dip but not a ton. We started to focus on who is going to be an impactful guest and serve as a potential marketing channel.” - Ben “We really feel like we’ve stumbled upon a great growth channel which is understanding who are the highest-profile speakers. A lot of what we look at is their domain rank, social signals, how many followers they have, and then we also think about if they have an email list. Do they have the ability and if they want to, share our content. At the end of the day, we spent about 40,000 dollars on marketing this year and we have about 44,000 incremental downloads so that lands us with an incremental download cost of 1.1 dollars.” - Ben “Unfortunately our revenue projections were a little high. Honestly, we came out of the gates, we were crushing it. Q1 was awesome. Totally thought we were on our way to exceeding our $300,000 revenue goal for the MarTech podcast but then coronavirus happened. All of a sudden, the marketing budgets got pulled so we spent a lot of time making sure we are supporting our existing sponsor relationships and trying to find as many new sponsors as we could but the reality is, in Q2 and Q3, not a lot of people were buying new media type ads.” - Ben “We ended up with $173,000 of revenue which was a little more than half of what our goal was. This podcast was profitable when you think that we have $125,000 of expenses and $173,000 in revenue. We cashed out about $50,000 but I think we had much higher expectations.” - Ben “I am incredibly optimistic for next year and I do think that $500,000 of total revenue with $300,000 from MarTech is something that we are going to hit and part of it has to do with the process that we laid in place and how we are expanding our outreach and also some of the macro circumstances.” - Ben