Building the MarTech Podcast

We’re now halfway through 2021, it’s time for an update. Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC and host of the MarTech podcast, shares his experience building the MarTech podcast throughout the pandemic. The MarTech podcast is finally moving into its growth stage as we come out of the pandemic. So today, Ben talks about his plans for the MarTech podcast for the rest of 2021 and beyond.
About the speaker

Benjamin Shapiro

benjshap LLC

 - benjshap LLC

Benjamin is the President & Managing Director at Benjshap LLC

Show Notes

  • 01:34
    Bens experience throughout the pandemic
    With a brand new baby and sponsors starting to pull out of the podcast, the pandemic had put a strain on Ben both personally and professionally. But despite the turbulence, the podcast survived 2020, though finishing out the year a bit flat on revenue.

Quotes

  • We had some sponsors that pulled out or withheld payment for the services that we had already done. And so that kind of shook our business up a little bit." - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • "Fortunately by the end of the year, everything had recovered and really sort of felt like the business was recession-proof on some level." - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • "With our podcast sponsorship offering, we do advertorial content, hosted advertising, and retarget listeners to specific content. We do direct response for our advertisers" - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “I always felt like the model for the show was to be able to provide value to people that wanted to reach marketers... ” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “It's actually a really scary time for our business because the presenting sponsor withheld payments saying that we didn't own the IP of the content that we recreated.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “It was one of the scarier times I've ever had running this business. We got down to $3,000 in our business checking account.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “We had about $90,000 in accounts receivable that were due, but times and cash management was a little bit of a problem as a scary time at the beginning of year.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “The dirty secret about working with HubSpot and being a member of the HubSpot podcast network is that I cold emailed their CMO... And one thing led to another.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “So we went from, I've got $3,000 in our business checking account... to now we have multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “One of the big things that we did was we hired an SDR. I had been managing sales independently for the MarTech podcast since day one.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “A big part of what our show is built on is making sure there's lots of people listening. So we could sell access to those ears, to our sponsors...” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “We went from the beginning of 2020, about 40 or 50,000 downloads all the way up to our peak of 90,000 downloads in November of 2020...” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “In December, because I was a little concerned about cash flow, we turned our marketing efforts off. We went from 90 to 70,000 downloads.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “Generally, we spend about $4,000 a month on podcast advertising.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “All of a sudden I looked up and we were sitting here close to the middle of the year. And I said, Look, we've lost about a third of our audience.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “What I'm seeing right now is that we're having a tough time scaling just purely based on our podcast advertising.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “At some point last year, we saw our number of reviews we had for our podcast go from about 280 to about 160.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “When you're trying to optimize to get podcasts from the apple app store, you need new subscribers and you need positive reviews.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “I think our low is about 60,000 downloads and we picked up about 10,000 downloads last month.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “We're back to about 70,000 downloads per month or so, which is picking up about a third of what we had lost over the first half of this year.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “So where we are halfway through this year, our goal is to get to 100,000 downloads per month.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

  • “I honestly consider this the pinnacle of my career at this point and could not be more excited to be working with the team at HubSpot.” - Benjamin Shapiro, President & Managing Director of Benjshap LLC

About the speaker

Benjamin Shapiro

benjshap LLC

 - benjshap LLC

Benjamin is the President & Managing Director at Benjshap LLC

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