This week, Dan Misener and Jonas Woost launched Bumper, a new podcast growth agency. What’s a podcast growth agency, you ask? Dan joined Vocal Fridays to talk about why, as the industry grows and matures, podcast marketing deserves its own special attention.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Bumper is poised to fill a niche gap in the Canadian podcast landscape. Why was now the time to launch a podcast growth company?
I think we're at a point in the podcast industry where we need increased specialization. I have worked in this field for many, many years, and I remember the earliest days of podcasting where it really was a medium where everybody did everything. One person might book a guest, write a script, cut some tape, upload the audio file, publish the blog post that goes along with it, send out the newsletter. I think as the industry and the medium has evolved both from an artistic and a creative and a technological standpoint, we're at this moment where no one person can do all things well.
We've seen this in other aspects of podcast production. We've seen sound design teams expand and specializations emerge within podcast sound design teams. Some people are really very skilled at music and scoring. Other people are very skilled at dialogue editing or restoring poorly recorded audio.
We haven't really seen increasing specialization on what you might call the podcast strategy for audience development or marketing and promotion. I think for a certain kind of show and a certain kind of team, there is a real need for specialized work on marketing and promotion.
What do you mean by a certain kind of team/show?
We expect, at Bumper, that we're going to be working mostly with organizations. So that might be large brands, and it might be mission-driven organizations. And most often we expect we're going to work with teams that have more than one show, have a portfolio of podcasts, or need to think more about their own network and cross-pollination within their network. Organizations that are experienced in podcasting that maybe have hit a plateau. They've seen how far they can get on their own, and they need some help getting to where they want to be.
What do you think Canadian podcasts are doing wrong when it comes to marketing and audience growth?
I did a little bit of research into this idea of home grown hits: shows that are not just popular in Canada, but shows that are popular in Canada and also made in Canada. What I found is that there are some very clear content areas that domestic homegrown shows have found success inside and outside our borders: news and current affairs, sports, French language programming, and personal finance and investing.
I think partly because of the geography of our country, partly because of the legacy of public media in our country, and partly because institutionally a lot of big podcasting in Canada isn't well set up to, for instance, sell ads into the United States, there is this worldview that focuses on Canadian success without necessarily having broader ambitions outside of our borders. There is a lot of work that has been done, but more that should be done around expanding the scope of our ambitions and telling Canadian stories to broader global audiences.
About 10 percent of what's on the Apple Podcasts top charts in Canada was made here. My sincere hope is that companies, individual podcasters, and people investing in this space can help move that number, so that 10 percent isn't the ceiling of what's possible.
What percentage of a show’s budget should be dedicated to marketing or promotion?
I have seen shows on shoestring budgets do a lot of good work with not a lot of money, and I have seen incredibly well-resourced shows throw money down the drain.
That means I am reluctant to say there's some percentage of your budget that you should allocate because I've seen so much done with so little. And I've seen so little done with so much. Maybe more important than a percentage of your budget is the worldview and the idea that marketing and promotions cannot be an afterthought. It cannot be the thing you do after your show is done.
I get this question all the time: how do I build an audience for my podcast? And in so many ways, that's the wrong question.
The better question is, how do I build a podcast for my audience?
You say on your website that “viral success in audio is rare,” which I think can be hard for brands to hear. No one’s going to be the next Serial, because Serial came out in 2014, and the world was a different place. What do you think “success” can look like for a podcast beyond those mammoth viral numbers?
One of my biggest pet peeves in the podcast industry is this singular idea of what success looks like. I have worked with large American financial service companies, mission-driven organizations, small, independent podcasters, and some of the biggest names in the business, and not one of them has had exactly the same goal.
Some people want to increase their numbers so they can sell ads. Other people care about changing people's hearts and minds. Other people care about things like brand favorability. Other people care about getting together with their friends and telling stories and having a good time.
I know how downloads loom large in the mind of nearly every podcaster. But the download numbers alone do not tell you whether you changed somebody's mind, they don't tell you whether someone liked your show or not. They don't tell you whether they're going to get in touch with you to do business. A download number isn't going to tell you if they recommended the show to their friends or if you ended up on the desk of a very important or influential person.
My sincere wish for people working in this industry is that, rather than blindly comparing their numbers to other people's numbers, that it be done through the lens of asking: what was our goal? Why does our show exist? And actually using your own yardstick to measure success rather than somebody else's.
You’re giving a talk at Podcast Movement in a few weeks about podcast neighbourhoods… can you give us a sneak peek? What’s a podcast neighbourhood?
A podcast neighbourhood is a way of making a map of podcasts and podcast listeners. And when I say map, I really do mean a visual representation of podcasts and podcast listeners.
It's a tool that I've been working on for the past couple of years to help make smart decisions around editorial. What kinds of guests should we book? What kinds of topics or stories are most resonant with our audience?
But also marketing and promotion decisions — who should we do cross-promotions with? Who should we book guest slots on? Who should we do paid media with? It’s this really useful tool that can help you take a very large number of shows — hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of shows — and break those shows up into more manageable pieces.
You can think about a category in Apple Podcasts like Society and Culture. It's massive and it's so broad that it's almost un-useful to talk about a society and culture podcast. But if you take a neighbourhood approach to society and culture, you can break it up into these constituent audiences. That lets you do a competitive set analysis and market your show in much more strategic ways.
Big thanks to Dan for sharing his insights with us!
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