AMA: Podcast KPIs & Growth Strategies

Quotes

• “We have launched a podcast at Quora which has around 20 episodes at this point.” - JD “There are several reasons why we have decided to start a podcast. Marketers love to hear from other marketers. And the podcast offers a chance for marketers to explain how they are leveraging Quora.” - JD“The show is 20-25 minutes long and we publish once a week.” - JD “Our guests are content people, PR people, SEO people, and even advertisers as well.” - JD “If you get a big name guest, downloads go through the roof.” - JD“We struggle with measuring the analytics.” - JD“There are four ways to think about the growth of the podcast.” - Ben “You’ve got to look at the organic side and make sure you are producing content that people are actually searching for.” - Ben “The other ways are virality, paid promotion, and partnerships.” - Ben “There is a variety of hosting providers. The most popular one is the Libsyn. All you have to do is upload your RSS feed and once established, Libsyn will send it to every podcatcher with few exceptions. You’ll need to do some extra work to get it into the Google Play Store and Spotify.” - Ben “You need to establish separate feeds for some of the other major players.” - Be“At MarTech podcast we use ART19. It does the same thing as Libsyn but best of all, ART19 allows dynamic insertion for the advertising.” - Ben “All these hosts give you the ability to see how many downloads you are getting.” - Ben “Downloads are a tricky metric. The hosts won’t actually tell you how many people are listening to your podcast or what content is being consumed.” - Ben “iTunes connect can give a couple of important metrics, but only for Apple users.” - Ben “When it comes to consumption, 18 to 22 minutes is the sweet spot for our podcast.” - Ben “I am a huge advocate of the tool called Podsights. It helps you understand how many households are downloading your content and best of all - it even allows you to retarget them.” - Ben“Another great tool is Chartable - it gives people the ability to click on one link and be directed to a specified podcast player.” - Ben“We also use Knit advertising platform.” - Ben “By producing a lot of content you are getting more organic growth.” - Ben “We break most of our interviews into short-form content. That is also the right amount of content that people want to consume.” - Ben “There is so much risk with buying app store rankings.” - Ben “If you don’t focus on providing quality content it doesn’t matter how much outreach you are going to do.” - Ben “I prefer hybrid model - not seasons but themes.” - Ben “The best podcasts are conversational.” - Ben