Content Business Week — Audience Engagement

Quotes

• “There are a couple of things we think about in building new channels and ways to engage the audience, one is a newsletter, the second is community. We are thinking about the community in terms of networking learning collaboration in the Slack platform. In parallel, growing our reach to newsletter where we can repurpose or take our content and put it in a format that is great for the newsletter and grow our audience that way.” -Todd “With content businesses, my advice is that you start with one channel. We started with the podcast and I did not start this project thinking I am going to create the MarTech podcast, the MarTech blog, video series, events, and community because it would have been too much to tackle all at once. You need to get a foothold in one channel. Do what you do well and this depends on what inherent talent you have.” -Ben“As we are getting to that point where we have credibility, an audience, and a podcast base, we want to provide incremental value. When you start thinking about increasing your audience, it has to do with understanding who your audience is.” -Ben“We started to proactively reach out to people who are friends of the shows so to speak, former guests, and ask where they are gaining value from the show and where they would like to see more.” “We also reached out on Ben’s network on LinkedIn which is extensive and we did a survey of what people would like to see more, and what they think is most valuable to them, taking that response and getting back to basics. It helped us to get out of our own heads a little bit and not just on where we imagine we are adding value but going to our audience and figuring out from them.” -Todd “This is really more product management than it is content production. You can be a little more instinctual in my opinion with content production. When you are doubling down and thinking about expanding the different channels, do your homework, and talk to ten people that are your customers, ask them what they want, run surveys.” -Ben“If you already have an established audience and have already engaged with them, why does it matter? To me, this is about cultivating a deeper relationship and more stickiness. It is also about creating other monetization channels for you.” -Ben“Our plan is we are going to launch some sort of community, most likely on Slack. That is going to help our email addresses because when you sign up you will give your contact information and that will subscribe you to our once a week newsletter and now we have another vehicle that allows us to distribute our content, talk about some of the courses that we might be making, and also give us an opportunity to talk about our sponsors.” -Ben “I also think that engaging the other partners or content creators is important too. The example for us is we will create marketing assets for our guests so they can help us with content syndication. We will try to deepen our relationship with our sponsors by providing them discounts for additional sponsorship campaigns.” -Ben“People that are our guests, they serve as a marketing vehicle and at times they turn into our sponsors but in general, just building relationships and finding ways to stay engaged with the people that are interested and relevant to your brand, is a really important thing to think about.” -Ben When it comes to audience engagement, a lot of times this means that you are expanding beyond one key channel and you have to be very careful because you can be distracted from your core businesses. It’s one of the things that we have been tryingto focus on, this is let’s make sure that we produce great content and providing the same type of value to our listeners, to our sponsors before we think about an extension to other places.” -Ben