How to get from 100 downloads per episode to 1000.
Vol. 25 - Jeremy Enns unpacks Legwork Marketing and finding your "podcast market fit".
Hihi!! Happy Pod the North Tuesday! Only 22 days until I’m on my way to Nova Scotia. Taking your last minute recommendations now! Are Lobster rolls worth it, or are they only for mayo-lovers?
In this issue:
Jeremy Enns says successful podcast marketing is about “podcast market fit”.
Canadian Indie: Contra Zoom
True North Podcast Feature: Young & Indigenous
Canadaland blocked by Meta and more news!
There are currently 29 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 27 First Nations communities across Canada.
Podcast marketing is one of those things that can feel like you know exactly what you’re doing and like you’re doing everything wrong at the same time.
It can be exhausting and annoying, and then really exciting when you discover something that works. That’s why I’m constantly checking out workshops and panels about this stuff.
One free workshop that I attended early this year was particularly impactful for me as both a freelance producer and an indie podcaster. It answered questions like:
What’s the most efficient use of my time and energy?
Should I really be using every social media platform imaginable to promote my podcast?
Do social media posts even convert new podcast subscribers?
Why are my episode downloads hitting a plateau?
If these are questions that have haunted you too, then buckle up!
Pod the North is now open for ad bookings! Tell the Canadian podcast community about your brand by booking the one-and-only ad spot at the top of the newsletter. :)
Thoughts from the ecosystem:
Jeremy Enns says successful podcast marketing is about “podcast market fit”.
If you’ve been following the podcast newsletter space for a while, you’ve likely heard the name Jeremy Enns amongst other notable podcast newsletter writers, like Arielle Nissenblatt and Lauren Passell.
Jeremy Enns is the author of Scrappy Podcasting, a newsletter that gives readers a two-minute tip each week on ‘how to punch above your weight as an underdog brand or podcast creator’.
Jeremy’s career started in audio engineering and the music industry. He eventually transitioned into the podcasting space having been a big podcast fan for years and getting burnt out by the music scene. With audio production skills in his arsenal, Jeremy started offering podcast editing services on Upwork, ultimately building an agency over the last few years and getting more and more obsessed with marketing. Eventually he made a full-on pivot into the world of marketing. Jeremy says that while he’s still an audio engineer at heart, he thinks of himself as “a marketer and writer first and foremost.”
Today, Jeremy runs the Podcast Marketing Academy, writes a few other newsletters outside of just Scrappy Podcasting, and has quickly become a go-to podcast-marketing wizard.
Jeremy is a fellow Canadian, hailing from Vancouver, BC, and he and Arielle hosted that workshop that I mentioned off the top. So I asked Jeremy to share some of his insights on podcast marketing here, and chat about where it’s best to spend your time, energy, and sometimes even your money, when it comes to growing your audience.
This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
KL: First of all, can we start with telling me about non-scalable growth versus scalable growth. These terms aren’t super exciting, or probably even that familiar for the average podcaster, but are so helpful to to figure out where to focus your marketing efforts.
So what does ‘scalable’ and ‘non-scalable growth’ even mean for podcasters?
JE: So ‘scalable growth’ would be where the results that you get are not tied to the amount of time that you're spending on an activity. ‘Non-scalable growth’ is more like; one hour in = X amount of result out.
People often think about scalable growth when they get into marketing of any kind, because that's usually what is presented to us. Things like social media, like creating content and posting content, that would be conceivably scalable growth. If you're playing the algorithm game, that's entirely scalable. It [might] take you an hour to create a post but potentially your reach could be millions of people. That's the dream that everybody has.
Doesn't usually work that way for almost anyone. You essentially have to go viral in order to do that. When I think of scalable things, they're things that we can do to reach a very large number of people more than we could do on a manual outreach type of activity.
The non-scalable growth side of things [is] actually reaching out personally to individual followers that we have access to in a community. Reaching out one-to-one to people who could be listeners. That's usually where I recommend people start.
It's actually way faster to grow your show through non-scalable means because you're building these actual one-to-one connections and it's much more likely that that person, once they connect with you, that they're actually gonna go listen to the show.
KL: That's super helpful. So what foundation would you say people should even set before they start thinking about marketing campaigns?
JE: Yeah, so this is one of the challenging things with marketing, is there's this chicken and egg type thing where a lot of times you need to have people listening to the show to find out what resonates with people and then you need to do more of that.
I need to do audience research to be able to create content that people like, but I need to have something people like to get people to listen to the show.
I take a lot of my inspiration around marketing from startups. The number one thing that every single marketing person and every founder of a startup obsesses over is finding ‘product market fit’ – making something that people actually want to the point where it feels like you're being pulled by the market.
Once you get to that point where you get in front of your ideal target audience and their eyes light up when you tell them about what your show is, that's the time to go all in on marketing. That is the foundation that everybody should be aiming for. Not trying to create all these audiograms and all these graphics and stuff.
Early on, it's not about going for scale, it's about going for, ‘let me identify this audience that I wanna build or that I want to create content to serve and how can I iterate on this podcast till I have that kind of ‘podcast market fit’’.
But no show achieves that instantly.
When you look at shows from studios like NPR or any big studio, they usually spend multiple years developing a concept and doing audience research and testing, and feedback, and iterating on the show before it ever launches. People see [a podcast] launch on day one with this incredible show, and it gets all this traction immediately and it's like, yeah, they spent multiple years doing what most of us as indie creators are doing. They also have a network of people that they can tap into.
I just wish a lot of people would recognize that [market fit] work needs to happen. It happens for every show, whether it's a massive show or it's an indie show, and it’s gonna take two or three years to really find that fit. And once that happens, it's time to really double down on everything else.
KL: This is something I've been telling a lot of indie creators actually, there is no need to rush your show. Take the time to make sure your audience exists, tap into the people that already support you, and create something that they're gonna be excited about. Then you can grow from there.
KL: I do wanna talk about the 1000-downloads-a-month audience size, because I think that's where a lot of indie podcasts find themselves stuck in a plateau. The journey of getting to 5K-10K-per-month, which is where advertisers notoriously start giving out money, can be really difficult. Realistically, how long would you say that journey should take if scaled correctly?
JE: It's so hard to say because we don't actually know what anybody else is doing. Even look at a lot of big shows and you realize a lot of the advertising that they do; are those actual subscribers or are those one time listeners that they use to boost their download number so that they could meet a quota that they'd sold to one of their advertisers? It's just hard to know how many downloads does any show have. And are those real subscribers? Are they people who are committed audience members?
And then you start to look at niches. One of the exercises that I take all my students through in the first week of my program is looking at ‘demand validation’. Are there other shows out there that you might personally know have certain numbers in your niche? Are there YouTube channels? ‘This potential audience that I'm tapping into here, is there even 10,000 people who are going to potentially listen to this?’
I usually think of a show that has a Listen Notes score of 40 or 50 is a pretty big show. So are there shows that are 40 or 50 on the Listen Notes score? If so, there's a pretty decent size audience here to tap into. If you can only find shows that are in that 20 or 30 range, or outside the top 3% globally? Anything less than 3% is not a very big audience, you're probably a few hundred downloads an episode at that point. If that's all you're finding then, I wouldn't have any confidence that I could actually build a show that would get 10,000 downloads an episode in that space.
I feel like a downer sometimes, but there's nothing more frustrating than having these expectations that can never possibly be filled and working for years on something.
KL: Yeah, that's also where we get into the conversation of Blockbuster podcasts. We know that a successful podcast doesn't necessarily mean that you are a Blockbuster podcast, and it’s hard to create a podcast for mass audiences. Instead, you could be a go-to-podcast within your specific niche, and that might mean your audience is only a thousand people every month. The pressure to be a blockbuster is tempting because that's where the money is but I don't think it's necessarily realistic.
JE: I think for a lot of people, success is doing something that you enjoy and creating art and I think that that's great.
I think everything becomes a slog at some point, but the big part of growing anything is just in the mundane repetition of putting out more content and keeping doing the marketing activities and whatever. And I think you have to make sure there's some piece of that that is always fulfilling to you.
There's gonna be a long haul of several years probably, where you gotta find some part of the process that you enjoy even while you're waiting for all the results to come.
KL: I mean, that's a reflection of growing up in general as a human. Every day is just the task of repetition and finding joy within it. So yeah, podcasting is just life.
Thinking about just generally wanting to find success in growing your podcast audience, you've talked about how a lot of the success in marketing is around building connections and ‘Legwork Marketing’. So what is Legwork Marketing?
JE: For me that's the whole non-scalable side of things. You talked about people getting to the plateau at a thousand, I think a lot of people plateau much earlier than that in the low hundreds. And if we look at any of the podcast data, the median episode gets what, like 216 downloads an episode?
[With Legwork Marketing], you can conceivably and realistically get a thousand fans for your show just by one-to-one connections. Not all at once, but you could probably find ways to connect with five people a day through social media on a more personal level, by engaging in communities, by finding people who are publishing content on your topic and just commenting on their stuff and building connections that way through the DMs. And it's not about pitching your show, it's just about connecting with people. Naturally there will be an opportunity at some point to talk about your show.
Where it usually starts is not through any strategy that I'm following. It’s, ‘I'm on Twitter or I'm on LinkedIn’ and there's somebody talking about something interesting and I'[ll comment], ‘oh wow, that was a really interesting thought’. And so we'll have a bit of back and forth in the comments. That's just one interaction. Maybe that takes place over the course of a week or a month. And at some point I'll send them a DM and be like, ‘I really have enjoyed these conversations, I'd love to get to know more about you and what you're working on.’ And they'll often then reciprocate and say ‘what are you working on?’
There's no pitch there, there's no sell. It's just people who I like, who I respect and admire, and we happen to be interested in the same thing. So when I bring up the thing I'm working on, they're very naturally gonna be like, ‘oh, that sounds really interesting I'm gonna check that out’.
To me, that’s ‘Legwork Marketing’. It's making friends essentially. It's finding people interested in the same topic, the people that you wanna talk more with anyway. And then naturally your show is gonna come up in the conversation.
I think you can do that to get to a thousand people over the course of, I would say certainly a year. Essentially like three people a day. I think that that's totally doable. And to think of somebody who's stuck at a hundred downloads an episode, if you had this almost guaranteed way to get to a thousand downloads an episode to 10x your numbers within a year, that to me seems like a pretty good use of your time and effort rather than repurposing content. This is where that non-scalable side is – time in, results out.
But what's nice about it is that you can actually see the return on your effort and have a conversation with somebody and they start listening to the show. That feels good. I think that that's one of the big missing pieces in marketing that gets people discouraged, is you put all this time in and you can't track any results from it. I talk with so many people who stop publishing social media content altogether and see zero difference in their downloads. You could have been putting that time and effort into making friends, building connections, and that actually would lead to results.
KL: You answered my question about social media conversions! So this one-to-one marketing can seem like a lot for indie podcasters. I know you've got some really helpful tips about spending 15 minutes a day or so browsing through some stuff that you can engage with. So how do you pick and choose where to put your energy?
Should you be spreading it wide and thin or just going all in on like a couple of places?
JE: Yeah, there's this push and pull to go on. One of the interesting things if we look at data from startup marketing, I've talked with a lot of people who reflect back the same thing that most companies will get like 80% of their users through one channel. I assume that podcasting works the same way because it feels like the same type of challenge when it comes to marketing.
What the challenge then is, is finding something that works and then just doing that. Eventually it's gonna stop working, everything in marketing follows that pattern usually, but we're actually short-changing ourselves if we have something that works and we're taking time away from that to diversify our marketing and spend it elsewhere.
The challenge is doing enough experimentation to find out something that we can prove – ‘I put in effort here, this leads to listeners’. I've talked to a lot of bigger teams and they have come to the same conclusion that, yeah, it was a waste of time to be active on all these social channels.
I really struggle to think of anyone who benefits from being on every social platform available or who can do it well enough to benefit from it. I think the only time it makes sense is when you're already at this level of ubiquity and you have the resources to do that. Everybody looks at Gary Vaynerchuk, everybody wants to model their marketing after him. His goal is to be absolutely ubiquitous in the world of entrepreneurship. And I think he's actually achieved that because everybody's trying to copy him, but he has a full team of people creating content 24/7. None of us can match that.
Building authentic connections and relationships with people cannot be done at that scale – it's much easier to do on a smaller basis.
In medicine, there's this idea of ‘the minimum effective dose’ – you need to take a certain amount of a drug to have the effect of it. I think that that applies to marketing too, where if we're spreading ourself across five different social platforms, we're never actually reaching the minimum effective level of connection to actually create a meaningful relationship with anyone.
That's talking specifically about social media. This could be anything like, you could go all in on podcast guesting or all in on podcast collaborations. I think finding the one thing that is not overwhelming that you can do on an ongoing basis that you can prove that it works for you and spending all your time there is gonna be the best way to get success.
KL: In terms of repurposing content and just creating content in general for a social media platform – even if you just choose one – it’s a whole other machine in itself. How much do you know about how successful that can be? Like audiograms, are they worth it? Do they drive conversions?
JE: The way most podcasters approach social media is not useful, and so audiograms I don't think are really worth it. Every time I say this somebody's like, ‘they've been amazing for us!’ So they do work for some people.
I also wonder how people determine whether they're successful or not. I ran this survey, it's called Podcast Marketing Trends. One of the questions was, ‘what has been the most effective marketing channel for growing your show? And what has been the least effective?’, and at the top of both lists, I believe, was social media. Some people are saying that social media is the most effective thing, but also the least effective is social media.
Clearly there's people using it in different ways, but what does it mean to be the ‘most effective’? Does that mean you can tie back directly that listeners discovered the show through social media? Or does that mean you grew your social media following?
I think you can build your brand through social media and that can lead to podcast listeners in the long term. What I would recommend people do is use social media to build a brand on social media [and] eventually, maybe a year from now, [your followers] might be like, ‘man, Jeremy, shares so much good stuff, I can't believe I haven't listened to his podcast already’.
And the way to become that person on social media is not creating posts about your show. It's about creating platform specific content, create content that people don't need to click away from on the platform, so that you’re seen as somebody on this platform who is worth following.
There's this element of faith almost, that you do that stuff and people are gonna find their way to your podcast eventually.
KL: Yeah, you have to shift your perspective on what that content is for. One of my clients puts out audiograms but they don’t expect them to drive actual podcast listens. Instead, they just look at the average of what the views are from those audiograms to get an idea of the audience, on Twitter for example, who follows them just to watch those clips and get that content. People can start to measure those views and I think you can talk about that too if you are reaching out to sponsors.
JE: To me it's a healthier mindset to think of yourself as a media company. Even if you are primarily a podcast, it doesn't matter if people don't listen to the podcast. You're still building your brand by having a million followers on TikTok, even if you only have 500 downloads an episode on your podcast. That's still valuable.
Once you understand that, then it becomes a lot easier to think about, ‘why am I creating the content I'm creating on social media?’
KL: In terms of scalable channels that seem to work well, like guesting on shows, newsletter promos, paid ads, what does it look like when something realistically isn't working?
JE: Yeah, this is another thing that I think is so hard with podcasting and most of the podcasters I talk to. In order to allocate your time effectively, you have to try and get some guesstimate of like, ‘I'm spending this much on paid ads. I'm doing this many podcast guest appearances. Is that actually working?’ Trying to find ways to measure those, setting up custom landing pages where you point people.
There's always gonna be stuff that's really hard to measure with podcasting, you have to start getting really crafty about how you think about these things. Let's say you do a cross promotion, you'd wanna make sure that you set up that cross promotion, that it's not on a day that you typically release an episode. So then you can hopefully see [if] there was a spike.
Thank you Jeremy!
What Jeremy is loving:
Check out this Canadian Indie: Contra Zoom
Contra Zoom is a film based podcast going in depth about varying movie related subjects.
Dakota Arsenault, Rachel Ho and guests go over both academic and the fun aspects of enjoying the film medium. Episodes feature lists, interviews, comparisons and a really fun movie-related “would you rather” segment at the end! If you’re into A24 movies, they’re currently in the midst of their A24 Retrospective series!
True North Podcast Feature: Young & Indigenous
Listening to the voices of our ancestors, reclaiming our narrative and preserving our way of life.
Tribal youth creating an outlet to express opinions, voice ideas and concerns, and share stories that have been, until now, untold.
What’s going on in Canada’s podcast ecosystem:
Ryan Beil, Maddy Kelly, and Mark Chavez are back with CBC Podcasts’ Let’s Make a Horror! The new season is due for release in the fall, but you can catch it early, LIVE at the upcoming Just For Laughs Festival in Toronto on September 30th! More info here.
Add This To Your Playlist is a new show from Lead Podcasting that is now on Toronto Metropolitan University’s upgraded community station, MET RADIO! Each episode is hosted by Lead Podcasting creator, Amanda Cupido, and features podcast episodes that more peope need to know about!
Meta has officially blocked Canadaland’s content from it’s Canadian users. Both the Canadaland Facebook and Instagram pages now display messages from tech platforms in retaliation against Bill C-18.
Captivate’s
joined the Into the Podverse podcast recently to talk about the challenges of podcast growth. They also discuss how Danny’s love for Arsenal parallels his podcasting journey and more!What kinds of ads are podcast listeners most likely to skip? Signal Hill Insights and Pacific Content have released new research that shows that four in five listeners would skip a radio-style ad in a podcast, with the most common complaints stating that they’re “too loud” or “jarring”. Read more.
For your pod:
Submit your podcast for the 2023 International Women’s Podcast Awards! I love this awards show because there are so many unique categories, like Moment of Behind-the-Scenes Brilliance, Moment of Dramatic Tension, and Moment of Raw Emotion. Apply by September 22nd!
The Podcast Academy’s annual awards, The Ambies, are now open for submissions. Early bird pricing runs through to September 15th and the deadline to enter is November 17. More info here.
Want to get your podcast on TikTok? Some podcasters have started to get messages from TikTok with details of how to add podcast feeds to TikTok via their RSS. [HT: PodNews]
Just Joe (sniffing the sweet Toronto air this weekend)…
If you have thoughts or Canadian podcasting news, please share them with me! Leave a comment or reply to the newsletter email.
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Kattie | @Podkatt
(Find me on Twitter, Threads, Spotify, and Goodpods)
