As you know... we run podcasts for a growing number of B2B businesses.
And we get paid to do so...
We meet with clients every two weeks to present the performance of their podcast and if the metrics are not going up, the meeting is always harder.
This blog post shares all the metrics we track for our clients, how to track them and why they are important.
So if you're a marketing manager, and you have to justify the ROI of your podcast to the CEO, this post is for you ;)
1. Social Engagement
Kicking off with the big one...
We want to try to understand how much noise your show is making on social.
Why?
Because the more total targeted impressions you can generate on your B2B audience, the easier it will be for your sales people when they reach out to these prospects.
Ideally we want the majority of the podcasts in your market saying:
"Oh yes [[your company name]]. I've heard of you guys..."
A podcast is a super cost effective strategy to start generating these impressions.
To calculate this metric we use the following rules:
- Likes: 1 point
- Comments: 2 points
- Shares: 5 points
Let's take this recent social post by one of the hosts of a client podcast for example:
We would count the following: (48*1) + (6*2) = 60.
We would the repeat this calculation across all social posts released to the podcast during the week along with any extra promotion and then calculate a total social engagement score.
This should ideally grow approximately 5% per week but will fluctuate greatly as some guests will share, generating significant engagement, whereas some will not. And therefore we also like to calculate "Share Rate", the percentage of guests that share their episode on social, though it isn't a core metric.
2. Downloads
Of course: downloads.
A notably esoteric metric. It is the most accurate metric for telling how much people are enjoying your audio content.
We class a download as a request from a podcast player or directory of the audio file on the RSS feed.
We use the podcast hosting software bCast to calculate this for us.
We typically like to see a spike at launch and then incrementally increasing spikes as we proceed. Ideally looking to increase downloads by 10% each month, indefinitely.
This is a typical download pattern we see for the first few months of a niche B2B podcast where the client doesn't have a large existing audience:
3. Total Podcast Website Traffic
We ensure that client podcasts are hosted on their own website. We typically build a main podcast page: "clientname.com/podcast" that links out to directories, and highlights specific episodes.
Here is an example of a podcast website:
Each episode then also is embedded onto a blog post that includes links to the guest, key takeaways, a transcript and the embedded podcast player.
And an example of a podcast blog post: Inspiring Women Of Color with Minda Harts, Founder and CEO at The Memo
We want to understand how much web traffic these pages are generating each week. This is a further gauge of the interest in your show, we typically calculate this through Page Views as shared by Google Analytics.
4. Total Podcast Website Organic Traffic
At the same time, we also want to understand how much organic traffic these web pages are generating. Generating organic traffic is the key to growing a podcast sustainably.
This can again, be calculated using Google Analytics and should grow slowly during your first six months of the podcast, but then should start to ramp up.
5. Community Growth
You may also wish to start a community around your podcast. This typically will be created on Slack, Facebook or Linkedin.
You will invite all guests and listeners to the group and can connect over the shared mission and ethos of your show... here is an example of one of these we started and are growing: Knowledgebase Ninjas.
We want to understand how fast the community is growing as this gives a good indication of future podcast growth. It also increases the number of targeted impressions your B2B brand is generating.
6. Leads Generated
Our podcast host: bCast allows listeners to convert into leads in a few different ways:
- Optin form on the podcast website (An example here)
- Optin form on the podcast player
- A feature called Auto Optin
We typically spend time thinking about how we can solve a problem for the listeners, and then offer the solution to that problem in the form of an eBook, webinar, video case study or live event.
We then offer that to the listeners using the methods above to add more value to listeners, but also generate leads.
The number of leads generated, is a good indicator of how much value you are adding to your audience.
7. Outreach Attempts
We also want to understand how our guest outreach is performing.
If you are using your podcast as a relationship building tool, we advise reaching out to thought leaders, potential customers or partners in order to bring them onto your show.
Of course, if you are pushing yourself, not all these outreach attempts are going to be successful, so we need to understand how many.
We simply track the number of new outreach attempts during the week.
8. Guests Booked
At the same time, we want to understand how many of the people we reached out to, to invite them onto the show... booked an interview.
This will tell us how effective our outreach is. If this number is too high then maybe we need to increase the quality of guests we are reaching out too. If it's too low, it may mean that we should shift the outreach approach, whether that be the copy in the outreach messages or the type of person we are reaching out to.
9. Guests Taken To The Next Stage
For all clients, we are trying to build relationships with guests that will ultimately lead to a positive ROI.
Whether this be that the guest becomes a customer of the client or a new partnership is formed.
There is typically a simple next step that a guest will take to move down the specific funnel, it is typically another meeting to:
- Discuss a partnership
- Demo your software
- Talk about your service
We track this weekly.
10. Guests Conversions
And now... the one that really matters.
When a guest converts into a customer or partner, we like to track this.
You want to have an understanding of how many guests it will take to achieve the conversion you are striving for. It may be that one in five guests will take a demo of your software and then one in five of those that demo will become a customer.
This therefore means that you know that approximately one in 25 guests will become a customer. You can then tweak your outreach and post interview conversion process to improve this metric... without decreasing guest experience of course.
OK there we go team...
After close to two years of running many client podcasts concurrently, we believe that these are the metrics that when tracked, will give the most accurate account of how your podcast is performing.
Thanks for reading, hit us up on team@fame.so if you have any questions!
