Graham Brown: Welcome to The Age of Audio, my name’s Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co. The Age of Audio is a series of conversations with thought leaders and changemakers in the world of audio. Podcasts, Radio and Social Audio converging with big data to create engaging and authentic content for a new generation of listeners.
Let's start at the beginning, if we can. What was the rationale behind eCommerce MasterPlan? Did you start it with the intention of doing 300 plus, or is it just, I just want to talk about this or did you have a game plan when you did episode one?
Chloë Thomas: The game plan for starting the podcast was as my escape route from running a marketing agency. And I found out about the world of business podcasts at the same time, as I decided to start mine. Because a friend of mine, we were doing an event circuit around the Southwest of the UK on behalf of the UK government, trying to persuade people to sell overseas. And I did the e-commerce spot and he was doing the social media spot. He was talking about this crazy thing called podcasting, which I wasn't all that cleared up on at the time. And I had a long chat with him about it and was like, oh, this sounds like something I might be quite good at because I'm good at organization, which is the thing no one tells you when you get into podcasting. It's not glamorous. It's all about organization. And I had two problems that I'd always been trying to solve. One was that I had the most amazing conversations with retailers, but they were all assumed to be off the record. So I had these stupid conversations with people going, "Oh, I spoke to someone who does something similar to you who recommended doing this. I can't tell you anything about how it worked for them, but I can tell you it was good." It was just really dull and frustrating for everybody, quite frankly. And then the other problem I was trying to solve is that e-commerce retailers are very good at never leaving their desks. If you're trying to sell to them, going to events or going to networking just doesn't work. So to bring these two things together, a podcast which someone could listen to whilst they're picking, packing, and dispatching and putting those conversations I was having off the record, on the record was podcasting [inaudible] all my organizational abilities. Kind of all came together. So that's how we ended up with it. As to whether I thought it would reach 300 episodes, I had no end point in mind when I started and I don't see it ending anytime soon, if the audience continues to like it and the sponsors continue to keep paying for it.
Graham Brown: Great. It's a real achievement getting beyond not just 333, but 33 for most people. I think that puts you in the top 20% of podcasts globally.
Chloë Thomas: The first few months. Oh, my God, the effort it was to find the guest. It was one of the most stressful things I've ever done. Trying to find guests for the first few months of the podcast. I don't know if it's because we were new, simply a new podcast or just because back then, people didn't really know what podcasts guesting was, but gosh, we must've sent five invites for every episode we actually managed to record. And it was [inaudible] stuff almost recorded the day before it went out. It was crazy, thankfully, not like that anymore.
Graham Brown: So what's the business model for you? Are you using it to upsell services? Are they using it to sell sponsorship? What's the model?
Chloë Thomas: I've played around with a lot of models, both since starting the podcast and before the podcast. I've never really tried to sell anything myself on the podcast, because it was always both being a [inaudible] of the agency. Like it was also [inaudible] out of consulting. So the aim from day one was to get it big enough for sponsorship, which took longer than I thought it would. Partly because my industry wasn't yet bought into sponsorship. But also partly because we just needed to get the numbers and it's a bit of a numbers game. So it was always, the aim was to monetize the podcast through sponsorship. Now, after doing a lot of testing, we've settled down on the business model of sponsorship pays for the podcast. And then we're starting to explore kickbacks and referrals from some of our guests and that kind of thing and commission rates, just to add a nice little bit of extra to it. But the primary focus of my entire business now is on growing the two podcasts and growing the sponsorship income that comes from them. So we've now pivoted completely to a content company rather than a consultancy.
Graham Brown: And how do you pitch for that sponsorship? Are you doing it through an agency or you're putting all your media packs together and then going out and hustling for sponsors?
Chloë Thomas: I'm doing it myself, but with very little hustle these days. I think it's the, I'm going to shoot myself in the foot saying this, but it's one of the easiest things I've ever sold, which probably means I should be charging more. We have a waiting list of people wanting to sponsor the show which I think is probably a reflection of how popular it is as a marketing method in our industry at the moment. In the e-commerce space, there's a lot of SaaS companies who want to sponsor. So I get two or three people a week contacting me, asking me to sponsor the show. So I don't use an agency. I do it myself and I am considering creating some kind of e-commerce network, because I know there's a few podcasters who would like to sell more sponsorship in the space. So, if they're all coming to me for it, there's only so much inventory you have in a podcast. So like a magazine you can't tag on an extra 24 pages or something. So yeah, we're running it ourselves. I'm running it myself.
Graham Brown: And what typically would a sponsor pay for a podcast like this?
Chloë Thomas: For a podcast like this? See, I really should do an audit of what everyone else is doing. We sell, so across the two shows we structured what we sell the same and I'm currently going through a process of restructuring it. And I will give everyone a number in a second. I'm just going to preface it with what we're actually selling. Don't worry, I'm not trying to evade the question. We sell a pre-roll and mid-roll and we have the same advertiser and both pre and mid and the pre is actually about 90 seconds in and the mid is before we go into a quick fire round about two thirds of the way through. Those are max 30 seconds each. And we have a maximum of two sponsors per episode. That's our current structure. Those are permanent ads. They're not dynamic. And they also get to be in various places on the website during that time span. And we give them some social shout outs as well. So there's a few bits bundled in there for them. They've got to sponsor for at least four episodes, so that's four weeks because both it's far too much work for me to manage too many sponsor changes, but also because the more time someone hears you, the more effective it is and I'm actually considering extending that when we launch it or when we open up our next bank of sponsorships. As to how much people are actually paying it's north of a thousand pounds for four episodes per sponsor, which means we can pay for everything, all the costs of creating the podcast and we make some money on top of it.
Graham Brown: For you, what did you find, has worked in the pitch? Are they buying because of the audience numbers, the engagement, what are the, I guess even the metrics here are going to be important for them to understand why am I buying or do you find that sponsors are like, I just need to have a podcast that matches my key messages. How are people buying sponsorship at the moment?
Chloë Thomas: I find that quite fascinating and I'm not convinced my industry has yet worked out or everyone in my industry has worked out how to do sponsorship. I think there's certainly a number of people going HubSpot did a blog post about podcast sponsorship. We better do some podcast sponsorship, or the CEO really likes this podcast. We better get sponsorships. I'm perfectly happy with the team I should say. But with the questions I get asked most frequently by people are what's the geographic breakdown of your audience. And what is the, I suppose, in a consumer world, we'd say the demographics of the listeners, but business size and what sorts of ways in which they're selling. So are they Amazon FBA people or are they Shopify people? And those sorts of questions. Our best sponsors are the ones who are just after brand-awareness and they want to be, if someone's thinking about e-commerce, they want to be there. And those are by far and away, the easiest sponsors to work with. What surprised me is how much work I have to do with sponsors to perfect their ads, which may seem quietly surprising, but you would've thought they'd all put a call to action in. You have to have some ad script sent through by a sponsor this week who will remain nameless, but we didn't even have a URL. We're giving e-Commerce MasterPlan listeners x hundred dollars off. And that was it. So I was like, what do you actually want them to do? So I had to go, what would you like them to do as a result of this? Do they need to enter a code? And so I ended up working quite a bit with the sponsors to try and make their ads more effective for them and to explain how it all works. But yeah, the key things people want to know is where the listeners are, what size business they've got.
Graham Brown: Okay. Where do you see that going? You have obviously built this, and you've almost, with due respect, stumbled into sponsorship. People have come to you and then you've responded to that demand. And now you've professionalized it. And now you've got a great pipeline of sponsors. There will come a time when you're obviously looking at networks as well. There are so many developments in this space, as an inventory, as a destination for sponsors as yourself. Curious to know what your thoughts are about some of the developments, like for example, programmatic, also, the engagement rates in host reads, whether people really enjoy those like inserts, for example, from brands and just generally about the engagement data around sponsorship that's thrown around, but what's working for you. So let's just go back to programmatic. Does that come up on your radar? Is that something you would seriously consider? Do you think there's a future in that as somebody who already has opted for more relevant and more curated inserts?
Chloë Thomas: Yeah, I love the idea of... programmatic meaning something different in different industries. So I'm going to go with what I think programmatic is. So the whole dynamic ad insertion piece, I think is hugely exciting. I believe my podcast hosts are rolling that out this summer. So my primary excitement about it is it's an upsell I can do to other sponsors or during your month when you're sponsoring the new episodes, why don't you also sponsor the unsponsored back catalog. Because we've got, I reckon I've probably got a hundred shows with no sponsorship on them at all. So I get my VA to go through, work out the timestamps of where we put them and we can slam a load of ads terribly for precision there. We can put ads back in all that underused content. The other way I see that tech being useful, possibly less for sponsorship but certainly for things we do. So last week we ran a virtual summit to grow our email database, to therefore grow our podcast and to have been able to dynamically add an insert before every single episode we've ever put out, that means me going, 'Hey, next week, we're doing a summit. Go here.' That would be really powerful. So I think we do use it partly for our own ends and partly to add an extra level to sponsorship packages. Because as I said earlier, I've got limited inventory, so you have to try and make the most of everything. So that's what I'm thinking of for those, which I realize isn't really true programmatic. It's still staying quiet on dynamic in many ways, but using the tool in that way is what I'm thinking of doing.
Graham Brown: It's an interesting use case, that idea of using it yourself. If you've got 333 episodes, you've got a large back catalog to go back to just each and every episode and they're going to be, you go all the way back the number's going to get lower and lower in terms of the audience. But if you could automate that and then put in your insert for your call out for your summit.
Chloë Thomas: Yeah, or for one of my books or something or potentially it becomes for the back catalog. It becomes an extra announcement. People all the time who want me to promote their events. It's like, 'oh, for this much you could be at the beginning of what our back catalog pre this year or something' I have to trade slightly carefully because one of our promises to sponsors is that we'll only have two sponsors in each episode. So therefore I can't necessarily add a third party.
Graham Brown: Yeah but if it was you.
Chloë Thomas: But if it's me it's okay.
Graham Brown: Yeah, exactly. I wonder for a podcast host as well. That's a really interesting development, especially because a lot of the calls to action we have as content creators change over time. You're doing a summit and then you've got a book and then you've got a new book and that's going to change, isn't it. And then maybe some of the old calls to action are no longer valid and you want to get rid of them. But if you can make that dynamic, that would be really interesting. Haven't you thought about it for self use?
Chloë Thomas: Yeah, I think it's got opportunities on both sides of the coin, both for money-making and for making the business better. So I'm really excited to have a play with it when it becomes available.
Graham Brown: Cool. What about on the data side, about when it comes to selling a podcast, obviously you've got a great inbound interest in what you're doing. You build up an audience. Are there particularly data points, not specific to your podcast, but about the podcasting in general that really interest advertisers like, do they look at it through the lens of, okay 50% of the audience listen to 50% of a 40 minute episode. So that sort of engagement number, or are they looking specifically at the quality of the demographics? What's really interesting? What's developing for you as well in that space?
Chloë Thomas: You see, no one has ever asked me how much of an episode gets listened to. Never, to the point, I couldn't actually tell you how much of my episodes get listened to because it's on my list of things to look at. It hasn't yet happened. I haven't looked at it. The thing which we get people frustrated about, especially first time sponsors is not being able to track the leads, which, we've worked with Podsights, and we're open to working with that type of tech with sponsors, but it's not something we've been asked to do it for two sponsors, but that's been it. And so I'm thinking of bundling something like that into, or as an added extra fee for sponsors to try and sell each piece of inventory for as much as possible. Because I know some of them are after leads. So how do you do that? Which is one of the reasons why we've added a social media post into it and for one of the podcasts we have on the show notes that appear via the podcast player, we've added a link to the sponsor in there. Just to try and show them a bit more love and try and create something that's a little trackable for them. But yeah, the actual play, time play data is not something they're asking for.
Graham Brown: They're not asking for it, and don't need to, unless you see something that's useful there. Okay. Very good. What's happening in terms of tech developments that are interesting at the moment in what you're doing now? What do you plan to do in the next year of podcast that is a new area for you in your podcast? How you're promoting it, less about how you're producing it? Because I don't think production is such a challenge anymore for anybody. In fact, it's dead easy and too easy. That makes promotion even harder for everybody because of the numbers. What are you going to try? What sort of things are interesting? What kind of developments even apps are on your radar now?
Chloë Thomas: Well, I used to run for the agency I was trying to escape, which I used to run a while back was a Google ads agency. And I think there's, I don't know, I like running a nice ad platform. So I think there's an opportunity in an ad platform to make the podcast, to cause the podcast growth. And as you said, it's very easy to create a podcast. I think in the last 12 months, everyone in my industry has created a podcast, again probably because HubSpot said you should have a podcast. So I have nothing against HubSpot, I should say, but it's who an awful lot of my sponsors listen to. So there has to be a way of standing proud of them to keep the listeners. And I love the fact they've all done it because they're going to create more podcast listeners who hopefully can end up back on my show, back listening to my show. So I think there's an advertising mechanism. The reason I've not put a lot of money into advertising so far is because I haven't yet found a good way of tracking the impact of the advertising because to tie a Twitter ad to a play is incredibly difficult. So I've been trying to get my head around a way to do it. And I think I'm just gonna give up with tracking it through to podcasts and instead track it through to email signups on the websites. And then track that through. So make it a bit of a two-stage element. So that's the tech or the opportunities I'm most excited about at the moment on the podcast promotion side of things.
Graham Brown: Let's specifically talk about audience acquisition now. I know Spotify has advertising as well. Has that interested you at all?
Chloë Thomas: That is on the list. I've tried advertising on Overcast this year, which made no difference to our place on Overcast at all. But hey, at least I know now, won't be doing that again. Also tried... have you come across Podcorn? So I tried Podcorn when we launched Keep Optimizing, which is my second podcast that went live last year. I think that hadn't had an impact. We were on one campaign across a number of different places. I'm pretty certain it had an impact, but I need to structure the test better next time to see what impact it has. And we've also tried some Google keyword ads on the search engine in the last couple of months. While they were running, they went to a page that had the trailer on it. We had a really big uplift in trailer plays. So I think we'll be doing more of that, but again, I need the email signup tracking in place, and then I'll be doing a lot of testing around that. And I think Twitter ads have an opportunity too, but those are the areas on the promotional side I'm planning on testing. I'm also always interested in ways of saving time on the grind that is social media marketing.
Graham Brown: That's never going to change, is it? There is a lot of grind there. I think what gets clever as automation kind of devalues here a little bit, doesn't it? You just can't get the results with automated social media as you can, from that one authentic human post, which just gets the response. I'm interested in a lot of your experiments as well with the acquisition part. I guess the challenge is that there's one part of getting somebody to the podcast. There's another part of getting a subscriber because you can easily get a lot of flow by traffic and spend thousands of dollars. And I'm sure Google and Facebook happily eat up your marketing budget as you know, you're from that world, isn't it? A lot of people get slaughtered for spending money on SEO, pay-per-click just because they don't know how to do it properly. And I imagine with podcasts, it's a license to just give them your credit card and you're away, right?
Chloë Thomas: Yeah. As soon as you have a disconnect between where someone technologically sees the ad to where someone hits play. It's like, if I look at my website stats or my email open stats, 80% of the people visiting my website and opening my emails are doing it on a desktop because they're at work doing it. Now I know from talking to them that they don't sit at their desk at work and listen to the podcast. So they're probably listening to the podcast on their personal phone. Not their work phone. Because most of the people who are listening, I would assume don't get given a work phone because they're always in the office. Why would they be given a work phone? So they've not even got the same account logins going on, which is really pushing the attribution of those platforms. You are really struggling, which is why, I think I'm going to take it back to trailer plays and find a way to get a trailer on a page where those stats purely relate to that landing page and then an email sign up on that landing page. So I drive the traffic to there with a fairly big call to action, to sign up to our emails and then create the content off the back of that gets the play. It's not easy is it? You would have thought by now it would be almost straightforward.
Graham Brown: There's also a conflict of interests, fundamentally, isn't it that you want their email address and Spotify and Apple want their subscriber and they're not naturally consistent. Like for you, it makes sense to have that landing page with a sign up, get the emails because then, it could be a podcast. It could be something else.
Chloë Thomas: If I could track it through to Apple or through to Spotify, I would happily do that. And bypass going to my landing page, but I can't track whether someone saw a Facebook ad, clicked through to Apple and listened. Like you can't track that. So therefore I have to do the email signup basis. So I've actually got a metric where I can see how successful, how worthwhile my ad spend is. So it's the way I'm going to have to do it, but I would far rather select an audience of people who have an Apple Podcasts app downloaded on their phone and do it that way.
Graham Brown: They are never going to let you have that. So that's the thing there, isn't it? It's there's. It's not yours. That's their attitude. And Apple only really started upping their analytics game when Spotify in 2017 did the same. They would have happily just kept that black box sharp for everybody. Like they have done since the beginning. So I don't feel that's going to change. It's a different world, but Spotify, I think, is the most interesting one. I feel like what they're doing at the moment, and having talked to a lot of people in and out of that, seeing that, like the way it's going, it's looking very much like Amazon as a platform in terms of how they're building the catalog effectively and how they're indexing it. And then, in the beginning with Amazon, you could publish a book and then you've got an audience because there were more people with Kindles and they were all [inaudible] and that soon changed. And now it became harder and harder to rank, harder and harder to get noticed. And then effectively you're either spending more money to get ranked on Amazon or buying ads with Amazon effectively. So if Facebook learns that as well. Facebook, you remember everybody had those company fan pages and it was like, these are really powerful. And oh, by the way, folks, we just dial it back a little bit now. You're not going to get as many fans as you used to, but you can pay to get what you used to. And I feel that's how it's going to go, because they'll realize actually there's a lot of money in that, that people want that promotion.
Chloë Thomas: Yeah. [inaudible] podcast we just announced, recently announced the whole subscription podcast element to things. They're doing that so they can start monetizing this platform, which is good news because it means that they're starting to invest in the platform more than they did for the first three years I was podcasting anyway. But I have no internal strategy for why we should create a subscription element to either podcast. But I wonder if a ranking factor in the future will be, this podcast has a subscription element. Therefore we have the opportunity to make money off it. Therefore, we will show this podcast more than we show this podcast because we might earn some commission off their fees for additional content. I've spent the last almost 20 years looking at how Google play their algorithms, how Facebook, how everyone plays their algorithms and money comes into it sooner or later in every way possible. So yeah, it's going to be really fascinating to see how this space evolves in the next couple of years. Very much so.
Graham Brown: Absolutely.
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 - theageofaudio.com