A Podcast Expert’s Advice on Growth — Bryan Barletta // Sounds Profitable

Quotes

• “You’d think that the written word is probably the furthest thing away from people talking about podcasting. The Sound Profitable newsletter is built with the intent to be a resource to the people in the industry, not on the microphone side and not on the mixing side but people who are leading with the AdTech, hosting the business side of it who need a little bit more information.” - Bryan “I have a 12-year long career in advertising technologies, I started in mobile display and rich media and moved over to podcasting about six years ago and I do a lot of sales engineering product management work and what I realized is that there’s not a lot of education in the space about how this works and it’s not that complicated.” - Bryan“My entire goal was to take these concepts that are confusing just because they’re not presented well because so few companies are putting in time to educate people or put a premature out there and break it down and make it accessible for a sales engineer all the way up to the decision makers.” - Bryan“When you talk about podcasters and most of us are still in the phase where we are thinking about monetization, some of us have hopefully mastered monetization but fundamentally we’re also trying to get to the mountain top and get to a critical mass because most of podcasters are selling on a CPM basis and you need an incredible amount of listeners to make a CPM-monetized podcast valuable.” - Ben “The podcast AdTech doesn’t have that level of depth yet and complexity so I mean it’s more accessible. If I said, you need to learn trade desk programmatic tomorrow, that’ll be hard. But if I said you need to plight in a podcast ad tomorrow, I think it’s super doable.” - Bryan“About growing a podcast, the first thing to keep in mind is you can always go back and add advertisements. You need to figure out where you are in your career with podcasting whether it’s a hobby or you’re trying to make a business you’re investing in it, or you’re getting a paycheck from it already then you need to set your path from there.” - Bryan“For growth I really recommend investing in binding podcasts that are similar and have a strong community. I read an article with Jordan Harbinger about how he buys podcast ads at scale. So if there are people with other podcasts that have a strong community and touch on similar topics, that’s a great way to grow your audience and share your audience with other people.” - Bryan“So the first thing that I’m hearing here is you need to engage with the podcast community. If you are building a podcast, you should reach out to similar podcasts and try to essentially exchange assets, put your money where your mouth is and sponsor their podcast.” - Ben“It’s something we talk about a lot in this show. We buy a lot of podcast inventory. I’m trying to buy in on a cheap, remnant inventory, programmatic inventory, we’re doing post rolls so the cheapest of cheap stuff with a lot of reach.” - Ben“I think that you’re trading sometimes ad spend for a time and other times you’re just really spending and figuring out what works. I think there are good approaches to both. I think that there’s something about endorsement. There’s something really attractive about podcast advertising considering it more like influencer marketing from the social media side.” - Bryan“What you’re talking about is that you can buy that remnant inventory and reach out to an exchange and you can record something to yourself that’s funny, that’s you and fits what you’re looking for and can captivate an audience that doesn’t know you and you can take that risk.” - Bryan“I recorded the ad that we’ve been using for two years and at the time I was using a platform called Knit which I don’t think exists anymore. It had an access to CNN’s inventory, Turner Media so I knew that my ad was gonna be flighted on CNN so I tried to sound super professional like a CNN anchor. So, sometimes you just have to find an ad that works and run with it.” - Ben “I think that right now, TikTok could be a really fun place to explore, things like Clubhouse have captivated a lot of people’s attention and that’s a great way to go about it or two. I think almost every advertising type can work if you pay attention to it and if you’re not getting conversions, pull it out. Just optimize what you are spending.” - Bryan“My biggest piece of marketing advice is you need to market where your customers are and when you’re trying to promote a podcast, the intuitive thing to do is market in a podcast. You’ve already got 50% of the targeting. I am looking for technology-driven marketers that listen to podcasts. If I’m advertising on podcasts, I know with 100% certainty that 50% of my targeting criteria has been met.”  - Ben “If I’m on a social network, I better be damn sure that the people I’m targeting are at least technology-driven marketers because there’s no guarantee that they’re listening to podcasts.” - Ben “I can’t read as many articles as I can listening to podcast content. So the amount of newsletters out there that have the ability to offer me the audio version get way more of my attention. I use pocket for example to turn my newsletter into something that I can listen to.” - Bryan“What you’re saying is, you have your installed list, your subscriber list. Obviously you want to promote your podcast in the email that you’re sending and try to get some cross promotion. But you’re also taking it a step further by saying you can convert your email subscribers into retargetable households that you can then use in podcast advertising. So you’re taking the list of emails, taking them to a data provider, they are converting them into households and then you’re using an advertising platform to reach out to them.” - Ben “The big thing is that in podcasting, the only way to target by user is on an IP level. And there are no platforms that will let you upload on IP list. IP is becoming more and more personally identifiable information under CCPA and GDPR and all that, it’s listed on its own. I’m not expecting a world where you can take the IPs that you get from the people who read your newsletter and set it in and target and skip that middle area so that’s where those demographic partners that you can create customer segments on really gonna excel.” - Bryan“Depending on the demographic partner you either gonna have to prove that you have the rights to that data, the email address and/or the IP address of the individual on your list and then you manually upload it to them which either has a price per record or like a flat rate aspect to it. They might insist that you put a pixel in your emails so that they can generate the list for you organically. So that means you either have a seat or a relationship with those specific partners to store your own data and then when you’re targeting with the podcast partners, you can expect from a dollar to five dollar cpm increase at a minimum to be able to target these demographic partners.” - Bryan“Those prices that I’m more familiar with are based on those targeting the default data from the demographic partners. It can be a custom version based on the list you’re offering for them to target. And if you do that, you really shouldn’t apply any additional targeting because that segment you’ve created is the people you’re looking for because it might be a very small list and you want to make sure that you hit as many of them as possible.” - Bryan“When you’re trying to port your list over to podcast advertising it can be prohibitively expensive. I’ve tried to do this. Tried to get our list of IPs and mobile app IDs and tried to convert them into other types of data and you’re looking at at least 10 cents a record just for the data conversion going from email to mobile app ID and then you have to pay the extra cpm to use a custom segment with your ad platform.” - Ben “So not only for 10,000 records are you paying a thousand bucks just for the data conversion but then you’re paying extra 5 dollar cpm on top of what you would have paid to get those advertisements out to the right people. You basically have to do the math of what you think the value of your podcast listeners are to do that conversion. My thought is if you have an existing list, if you have a media asset, one of the ways you could focus on converting those people is integrating some of the podcast content into the other media.” - Ben “I think developing a relationship with the people on your podcast and getting them comfortable with engaging with you to provide you information back is a really good habit to start early. The more engagement that they’re used to, the bigger the community grows around it, the more that they feel involved and they’re gonna spread it by word of mouth.” - Bryan