Behind the Scenes – how we create and market our podcasts – your questions answered (episode 300)

by Chloë Thomas

This episode is number 300.

Thank you all! Whether you’ve listened to 1 episode or all of them if you weren’t listening, and letting me know how the show helps you – I wouldn’t have kept doing it for the last 5 years!

In celebration of meeting this milestone I’m bringing you a behind the scenes the look at the show.

So if you’ve ever wanted to know:

  • How we find guests
  • How we record
  • What happens between recording and this final version you get to hear

This is the episode for you!

I’m also going to get into some areas that are directly relevant to you whatever sort of business you’re running:

  • How we market the show – including advertising, social media, email and more
  • Outsourcing – the specialists I use, how I found them, and how I keep track of all these moving parts

Below are the notes and links to all the tools I mention – but there’s a LOT more mentioned in the episode – so my recommendation is to listen!

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Finding Guests

behind the scenes of the eCommerce MasterPlan and Keep Optimising Podcasts

When the Podcast first started, Chloe had to ask upwards of four people to get a single guest. Now that the podcast is more well known, Chloe is having the opposite problem, with five to six people asking to be on the show in a typical week.

In order to help edit and funnel that volume of people, they’ve created a separate page to funnel and track those requests.

All that being said, Chloe is still always looking for people doing innovative and exciting things in retail. She particularly loves interviewing listeners of the show and always loves to hear feedback from what the audience wants to hear. 

Booking Guests and Recording a Great Episode

Once someone has been invited, guests are able to schedule their own recording time through a pre-sent link.

Guests receive a full briefing on not only talking points, but also how to sound their best. The team has finally settled on using Squadcast in the chrome browser. 

Chloë strives to keep the podcasts conversations as natural as possible. Booking plenty of time at the beginning of the conversation to make sure people are comfortable. 

While there’s a lot of chat that happens outside of the recording, 99% of the time what gets released publicly is what gets recorded, minus errors.

Outsourcing Key Tasks, what we outsource

After an episode is recorded, it gets sent out to our team:

  • Music Radio Creative – edit the show
  • Nicole – writes these shownotes that you’re reading right now!
  • Daniel creates our Audiograms (they look like this)
  • Nick writes (almost) all our Social Media Content
  • April (our Virtual Assistant) pulls everything together

We also use Rebel Base Media’s brilliant Captivate* system to host and distribution the episodes.

Outsourcing – how to find people to outsource to

A huge benefit of using freelancers is that you can remain agile. It’s easy to get out of something that isn’t working out. In terms of how to decide which bits to outsource Chloë recommends considering both Push and Pull factors:

Push:

  • Things you don’t want to do (social media copywriting)
  • Time – it takes more time than it’s worth spending on it (audiograms, graphics, shownotes)

Pull:

  • Where there are experts out there who can do a much better job than you can (editing, social media copy, audiograms)

Outsourcing Tools

How We Keep Track of All the Moving Parts

The tools we use to stay organised:

  • Asana – in house tasks
  • Trello – the editors
  • Email for everyone else!
  • Google Drive for Documents
  • Dropbox for files
  • Paper Printouts where Chloë can tick off each stage of the process for each episode

Batching Tasks to be more Efficient

  • Mondays—Finding, booking and dealing with guests and guests spots
  • Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are for recording
  • Fridays—organizing, checking and looking over everything

Guests are recorded about 6 weeks in advance and eCommerce MasterPlan (in theory) doesn’t record at all in Q4, since retailers are so busy then.

Marketing 

It’s difficult to tie marketing activity to listens in the Podcast world.

While some people are doing some really clever stuff, it’s certainly not a perfect system.

Surveys conducted about how people find new podcasts to listen to have showed that many people get recommendations from social media. Chloë and her team focus primarily on Twitter and Linkedin to promote the show.

For next year, they are excited to make use of Tailwind* (save $30 by using this link) to amp up messaging on Instagram and Pinterest with all their tools.

Marketing Tools we use

  • Tailwind* (save $30 by using this link) – for scheduling and planning Pinterest and Instagram activity
  • Metricool* for scheduling Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn AND for reporting on ALL social media activity. (it integrates with DataStudio too!)
  • RelayThat for creating onbrand social graphics FAST
  • Omnisend for our email marketing
  • RePurpose for automatically putting our episodes onto YouTube
  • Brandox a really easy way to share social graphics with guests
  • Chartable essential podcast performance tracking
  • Podcorn a great way to test and manage advertising on podcasts
  • Audiogram* to create our mini videos for social media

We get a LOT of our marketing tools via AppSumo* (fair to say AppSumo is Chloë’s biggest bright shiny object soft spot!!)

SEO, Email and Partnerships

Chloë also spends significant time focusing on SEO and strategic copy for episode titles and so on.

Lastly they’ve been paying attention to email using Elemental on WordPress which links to Zapier and through to Omnisend for email marketing.

Every Tuesday the team sends out an email that talks about both podcasts, on Wednesday an email goes out for people who’ve signed up specifically for the Keep Optimising Podcast. 

Getting guests to share is another great way to promote the show.

As is by appearing as a guest on other podcasts, and speaking at events.

Breaking Down the Target Audience Segments

In podcasting the potential audience breaks into 3 groups

  1. People who already listen to your podcast(s)
  2. People who listen to podcasts, are interested in your subject space, but don’t yet listen to your podcast(s)
  3. People who don’t listen to podcasts, but are interested in the subject

Credit to Mark Asquith for this!

Above all, it’s critical to keep people interested and work on building the habits of podcasts listeners and finding space and places to show up for podcast listeners.

How the Podcast Fits Within the Business

A lot is invested in the podcasts, and they take up a tremendous amount of time and effort for Chloë.

The podcast started as an interesting project and has become the center of the business.

Besides paying its own way podcasting has opened a lot of doors to prestigious and amazing events and people.

Adding sponsors to every episode is allowing us to shift even further to helping our audience solve their marketing problems.

In 2021, Chloë is looking forward to focusing entirely on the podcast and book areas of the business in order to help hundreds of thousands of people solve their online marketing problems.

More useful links if you want to get involved

  • Be a Guest – if you’d like to be a guest on one of our shows you can find out what we’re looking for and apply here
  • Be s Sponsor – if you’re interested in sponsoring one of our shows (or anything else we’re up to) then get in contact

Related episodes

Without the sponsors the podcast wouldn’t be possible – please do check them out:

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