Graham Brown: Welcome to The Age Of Audio Of my name is Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co. The Age Of Audio is a series of conversations with thought leaders and change makers in the world of audio that's podcasts, radio, and social audio converging with big data to create engaging and authentic content for a new generation of listeners
Podcast for B2B brands, medium sized businesses, small businesses, how can they use it for generating results? Let's talk about that.
Tony Skinner: One of the issues with podcasts is listeners. The reality is if you want to do a podcast, especially starting off with a B2B and just focused on listeners, it's going to struggle. Because it takes a bit of time to get known and well-known podcasts have known for a long time. They've had a lot of money thrown at them and so-and-so. If you don't have the money to throw at it, to publicise it, then it can take a long time. So the way I explain it to clients is that the purpose of a podcast is that you record it once, and you can use it multiple times in multiple ways. So you've got the audio with the podcast and then you can convert it to text, or can use that in a blog on your website. You can then cut the content and use it on Facebook and Insta or Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin across various places. So you can have it as a press release and news article instead of as emails to your business, to clients, to prospects. So it's a multi-channel approach from one podcast, you get all those large levels of content.
Graham Brown: Omni-channel love it. Why would you say a podcast is the best placed piece of content to drive that as opposed to why not start with a YouTube video or why not even start with a blog post and then reformat that for a podcast?
Tony Skinner: Okay. Let's say you could actually start off with a blog post and reformulate that into a podcast if you want to be that scripted. But in my opinion, and from what I've seen, the best podcast of what we're doing now, where you interview someone rather than reading a blog post, I've done it. And you read a blog post and you got a blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know what, if people don't fall asleep in the first three minutes, they'll turn it off. So there's your engagement zero. And in relation to video, I attend a lot of business networking meetings, and the easy way to explain it is if you're in a room of 10 people, how many of those people are able to talk into a video camera without any problem? Would you think maybe one or two of those 10 people?
Graham Brown: Yeah. If you're lucky.
Tony Skinner: If you are lucky. So video is expensive, it's difficult to do, requires a lot of setup, one person can't, it's very difficult to talk straight to the camera and again, you still want to interview, and then you've got to do the post production. There's a lot more post production with the video than there is for the podcast. Yeah. So it's easier and quicker with a podcast. And out of that room with 10 people, how many do you think we'll be able to talk about their business? Yeah, 100%. And what's the one thing that people like talking about the most? Themselves. So in essence of podcasts for businesses, talking about your business, interviewing other people in the business itself. I got a testimonial from a client the other day. They are packaging something really simple. You package up items for your business, you send it out, and of course with COVID, their business has exploded. That would be known as I told people these days to become the expert voice for your industry. And it is a play on the words that you use your voice for a podcast, but they want to do that. And they're doing the traditional thing. The podcast is easy for them now, they've got better blog posts, they have got better engagement, they're having fun. They're interviewing people who work in the industry so they may become the industry expert to go, oh, who, what, who should I talk to about that? I know they have podcasts that can help me because I've interviewed all the big players in Australia.
Graham Brown: But how do you make packaging interesting, because by default, it's not the most exciting subject with all due respect to them. There's plenty of subjects that you could talk about. How do you make that interesting, because that's the challenge, isn't it?
Tony Skinner: It is a challenge and If you are typing it up, It's pretty dry. Yeah. There's absolutely no doubt about that. So if I send you a list of questionnaires, you will answer the questions. We could have done this by questionnaire or you could have sent me an email. So look, Tony, answer these questions for me, I would have given you probably two or three sentences per answer, and that would have been the end of it. But because we're having a podcast, we're having a discussion. It's more interesting. It's nowhere near as dry. And to give you an answer in relation to the packaging one, if you have a business that's e-commerce and you send a few items out and if they're not packaged the right way and you've ordered an item and it turns up broken or damaged. What's your customer experience going to be like? Apple, they put a lot of effort into their packaging. They have you buy a new iPhone, you open the top, they have timed how long it takes for the phone to elevate itself up, so you can pick up the phone to a few seconds, so you can glorify the magnificence of the phone. That's how interesting packaging is made.
Graham Brown: Hmm, that's a great example. Now, how do you turn that into deliverable business results? Because it's easy to sell a podcast on the basis of authority or leadership, but how do you measure that? What is tangible? Is it the audience? Is it click through? What's the business case that you find people respond to, that you can deliver on?
Tony Skinner: Well, when I talk a lot about it I guess, visibility, reach and people becoming more familiar with you. For example, last year I did a lot of podcasts, interviews post COVID. One of them was with Fred Schebesta , who was the founder of Finder.com. Finder is becoming a well-known brand around the world. It's one of the biggest comparison websites in Australia. I think even in the US now it's grown exponentially. Out of the interview with them and yesterday, without me even knowing they repackage that podcast, they edited it, so they had a series of questions of him talking and they have re-released on Linkedin. Now the benefit of that for me is I'm reaching his audience on LinkedIn. So I can do many things. I can say, look, thank you for that and I take that and share it on my network. So I get to co-brand myself with Finder. And I've done it with Census, I've done that with a new [inaudible] player. Today I uploaded an interview I had with Ronald McDonald house charities for a charity fundraiser they have got. So I'm leveraging my brand to connect with all those bigger brands. So people start seeing and go, oh, I must share it with all those different brands. So that's just the benefit for me. I get to engage with other businesses, audiences.
Graham Brown: How have you dealt with the doubts when it comes to the quantitative side of that? Because let's put it into context, for example, if I was to go onto Facebook, I could buy Facebook ads and I can tell you what the click-through rates are or you could do pay-per-click anywhere, Google, and you could get an idea of what the actual numbers are. With podcasting it's not so clear. And therefore when we position this as a marketing or even a business development play. It's always going to be compared in the context of the alternatives. All right. If I spend 10,000 bucks on pay-per-click, what am I going to get by comparison? How do you deal with that? Do you focus on the qualitative deliverables? Like you're talking about getting to people's audiences or are you able to show them, okay, here are the numbers. This is where it counts.
Tony Skinner: Look, the reality is I'm glad that you quoted a figure. So $10,000 a month on Google ads. Yes, I do Google ads. I'm a Google partner. So I know all about that side of things. So the reality is you can spend $10,000 a month and I can show you what you're going to get, but you wouldn't spend that on producing and uploading and delivering a podcast. So the reality is the bang for your buck is going to be different. So if you want to spend a lot of money, yes, you can track it. Then the cost per reach is going to be much, much higher. So I decided on a business look, it's in the marketing mix. It's an influencer. It's a way of influencing getting your brand out there, getting exposed other than the consider is that the podcast for businesses and business to business and business to consumer from businesses themselves is in its infancy. So you can't, if you don't get in, somebody else will. So it's again becoming that industry's expert voice. So that way you get to dominate the industry. So for example, if you do mortgages, there's a couple of big companies that do mortgages in Australia. There's probably a couple in Singapore and wherever around the world. A couple of big agencies started from some way. Right? So how do you overcome that? Well, you start doing things that they may be doing, but most of your competition aren't actually doing. Another thing that we haven't even thought about is presence on the front page of Google. Because podcasts can help you to do that. Now that's even more in its infancy, but that's where we're heading as well.
Graham Brown: I saw a quote from Neil Patel just the other day. And he said that websites are 1,400 times more competitive than podcasts in terms of ranking for SEO. And he knows it's tough right. So if you think about it, for example, if you were to do a podcast about mortgages, what are your chances of ranking as a website for that? It's pretty low, right? You've got to spend some big bucks on peep pay-per-click to even get on page one, but I'm sure page one is full of paper, clip paper, right? If you were to do a podcast, your chances are higher. And people haven't really discovered that. I've run some experiments. I was surprised that if you were to set up a very niche podcast, even with one episode and just name it, the keyword title you can rank on page one of Google with that. Now that's interesting because that would take, I don't even know you could do that in six months with a website, right? You would have to buy a website with traffic these days, right. What are your experiences? Are you seeing anything like that on your site? Very early days, I think.
Tony Skinner: It looks like it's very early days. I have seen that and I have proof and I have deliverables on that for my businesses okay. So I have two businesses: one is a digital marketing agency, the other one is a podcasting agency. Now I'm in Sydney, I'm a podcast producer in the city. So if you type in podcast producers, Sydney both of my businesses are on the front page of Google. Now that's going so one is podcast my business, and one is clicks for profit. So they should both be, and it always changes where it is and what happened. But I'm on the front page.Now not only that, but if you look up business podcasts Sydney, I'm there as well.
Graham Brown: So I'll verify the first one,you have got two, on page one.
Tony Skinner: Okay. So hang on. I've got two businesses. I'm a podcast producer. I'm in Sydney. What keywords do you want to think of? I want to be found for. So I want to be found for podcast producers in Sydney. So I'm being found for that. Now, if you're talking about non-competitive keywords or what we call long tail keywords. So I have one called Google Digital Marketing Tips podcast. If you're typing Google digital marketing tips podcast, because the way it will work in the future is that Google puts podcasts on the front page, but to add in the word podcast at the moment.They are moving towards you no longer needing to do that. There you go, you verified again. I'm on the front page for that.
Graham Brown: Yeah. That's Stripe that comes up. Sometimes it comes up, sometimes it doesn't depend on the keywords, but that seems we're giving away a bit of the secret trade secrets here that to me is extremely valuable real estate to get into Google digital marketing tips as a keyword. It is extremely competitive and you're competing with people that are Neil Patel potentially. That's really tough.
Tony Skinner: And hang on, is Neil Patel on my page?
Graham Brown: No, I don't know.
Tony Skinner: So am I beating Neil Patel?
Graham Brown: Yeah. Marginally.
Tony Skinner: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm not even a flea on his back. I'm not even a Flea on the fleas back.
Graham Brown: What is it? Let's obviously come from the world of pay-per-click and SEO and you know that very well. You've been in that space for some time. I remember when all that started in the early, early days, the early two thousands, when Google was just getting, going with paid advertising. And You know, that was the time that you talked about getting in early with podcasts. That was the time to get in early with a pay-per-click because those people that got in early and learn the algorithm fast, and then, able to use that knowledge to get up the learning curve effectively, what they did was shut the door and everybody else behind them because they made it more expensive for those guys to make their mistakes. Whereas they were making their mistakes when it was still cheap right? And therefore it became harder and harder to rank for pay-per-click I found over those years. I don't know what’s your experience?
Tony Skinner: Okay. Well look, certainly Google ads, obviously the focus for Google is to make money from Google ads. And if you look at the organic side, Google keeps making changes on all of us in the industry. They're doing that because Google needs to make a little bit more profit. Their profit is down a few percent. So they'll drive a knife in the back of everybody doing organic to push more people into Google ads. There's no doubt that it's much more competitive, but interestingly, last year, All of my clients' cost per click went down and went down substantially. So what actually happened is I Googled it, gave some credits out to help drive it down. And B a lot of competitors fell by the wayside. Now, You may think traditionally people think, well, it's an auction, and therefore whoever pays the most gets the most. It's actually not how it works. You got to think, I'm not going to teach anybody to suck eggs. I'm just going to say, you know, there's a thing called a quality school and the quality of school ensures that at least you have a decent website that addresses what people are looking for. Now you're talking about back in the day. I remember back in the day, it used to put white text on a white background. And if you are a plumber and you can put in plumber Sydney, plumber Singapore, plumber London, plumber, anywhere, and you'd put every single suburb. You'd load up all 500 suburbs in white on a white screen. And guess what? Google would find you. And it would put you on the front page, right? And over the years, Google has realised, well, hang on, you are not delivering the right thing. So again, not, I'm not going to tell you what techniques I use. But the reality is you repeat your searches, a good user experience, and you get rewarded.
Graham Brown: With that in mind, looking at podcasts, seeing that Spotify now is talking a lot more about search on the store, Spotify also has Spotify advertising for 250 bucks. You can run a campaign now, which is interesting. You know, Amazon did the same, , if you want to promote your books, you can effectively buy your way up the rankings. So it's happening, isn't it? In the sense that they have to in the same way, Google relies on serving up quality, to keep people engaged. Spotify and Apple have to compete against each other and make sure that what comes up at the top is going to keep people coming back and at the same time, make money on top of that. What do you think that's going to go? If I was an average mid-level podcast that didn't have the budgets of a Wondery or a Pacific, for example, and I didn't have a celebrity host like a Tim Ferris, what does that mean for me? It's going to get harder. Isn't it? It's going to get harder for me to win organic traffic in the same way it did with Google over time right? Knowing if we were to say like in 2000, let's go back 20 years, if we were in 2000 in terms of where we are with SEO and search, what does that mean what's coming next from your parts, your vantage point, knowing what you have known in SEO?
Tony Skinner: I think if you look at a podcast, purely in rankings and listens and positions and listeners and whatever on Spotify, and Apple, I don't think you're getting the full benefit of the podcast. Because you're right, nobody's going to get there quickly unless they're a Ferris or Anessa got a budget on this,[inaudible] unless you got that. So I don't know whether that's the right approach to take. I got into podcasting a year and a half, two years ago because I was looking at the SEO landscape and I looked at voice search. And I believe voice search is the future of SEO and the internet. Now I did some research with university of New South Wales and some of their students, and it's definitely an industry, something that's in its infancy, and I believe that podcasting is a way that you can benefit by providing the voice search capability on your website that Google will be looking for because Google is actually capable of analysing the podcast, understanding the words that are being spoken and matching that to a user's search. And around the world, I would say 90% of people have a device that can be used for voice search. It's called a mobile phone.
Graham Brown: How is voice search related to searching voice? I know don't want to get involved in wordplay, but how do they [inaudible]
Tony Skinner: Okay, so you do a voice search on your mobile phone and Google's capable of finding a podcast or text to give you the best result. And because you're on your phone and you don't want to read something, then Google may choose to deliver a voice result. And what would that voice result actually be? It will be a podcast. So you know, that Google in fact has already stated that is their intention. I have a quote podcast that shows up in Google search as a first-class citizen, alongside the text image and video results you're used to seeing. This is the guy who's in charge of voice SEO Google's podcast, product manager ZackWeeden, so if Google is saying that, then what does the future indicate?
Graham Brown: Well that pretty much to tell them in the future of search, as the biggest stakeholder right. It's really interesting. Yeah. So as I understand I get the bit about having searchable audio. I mean, that's been around for a while now and the cost is going down. Look at the AWS libraries, they're pretty cheap to use. Connecting the icon, see the bit about voice search as well. Because it's just an easier form factor connecting the two dots together is interesting. IE that because you're not typing and I see it's the search with voice. It's going to serve you by content in the form factor that you want to use it right. It'd be interesting to see how that's going to work. Obviously, podcasts are set up as any regular or usable information source, right? They're not catalogued in or indexed.
Tony Skinner: Yeah. They can be and the way that you do a podcast can help you. I'm not going to reveal that, sorry, I have my methods and methodologies and whatever, but yet there are ways. Look, obviously there are ways of enhancing the potential for that to work to your benefit. So again, if we go back to, okay, I do Google ads and I do all these things that I pay for and I pay $10,000 a month and I'll do this.And it's well, hang on. Right? If you want to be in part of the future and you want to get in early and get in, give back to what you're saying about 20 years ago where the SEO market space was, then potentially this is where the space is going. And if you want to get involved in voice search, then you need to be producing content. That's using a voice.
Graham Brown: You've been listening to The Age Of Audio with me, Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency, Pikkal & Co.To get access to all the audio conversations and book content for The Age Of Audio,go to www.theageofaudio.com. One more time. The age of audio.com.