Podcast 360 Episode 5
Podcast 360 Episode 5 - Fatima Zaidi of Quill Inc. and Dan Misener of Bumper
Host: Fatima Zaidi
Fatima Zaidi: Hi, everyone. I'm Fatima Zaidi, the founder and CEO of Quill. You heard me here first on last week's episode where I was interviewed by Sharon Taylor of Triton Digital. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to that, please do go back and listen.
Dan Misener: Hi, I'm Dan Misener. I am the co-founder of Bumper, a podcast growth agency. I’ve been podcasting for a really long time. Previously at a production company called Pacific Content and before that at the wonderful Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Public Radio here in Canada. I love this stuff and I'm really glad to be here.
Fatima Zaidi: Dan, it's so great to have you on the show. I feel like you are an absolute wealth of knowledge. Every time I chat with you, I learn something more. So thank you for joining us. Let’s kick things off with two truths and a lie. So you'll give us three facts about you, and I will do my best to try to guess which one is a lie. Are you ready to share those with our listeners?
Dan Misener: I am ready. I have two truths and a lie. The first podcast that I ever worked on was an award-winning vegan baking show called Let's Get Baked with Matt and Dave. When I worked in public radio for about a year, the podcast feed for the CBC hourly news, our national hourly news, was powered by a Dell computer that sat underneath my desk.
Fatima Zaidi: Wow.
Dan Misener: And this [next] one is a bit of a running joke in our family. I have never once purchased a product or a service because I heard about it in a podcast ad.
Fatima Zaidi: What! How is that even possible? My Endy mattress, my HelloFresh subscription… I feel like I have so many products and services. Every time I listen to a podcast I get out my credit card.
I feel like all three of those sound true to me, so I'm really, obviously, not gifted at detecting the lie. My guess is that you have purchased a product or service after listening to a podcast. So that would be the lie… But let's wait till later to find out.
Dan Misener: Sounds like a plan.
Fatima Zaidi: Now that we've gotten that taken care of, it's time for listeners to get to know you better. I have three questions for you and you'll have 60 seconds to answer each question. After that, you get to pick one of the subjects we've covered and then go back and elaborate in more detail. Are you ready to go?
Dan Misener: Sounds great!
What is good podcasting data?
Dan Misener: Good podcasting data measures people. My great frustration with bad podcasting data is that it doesn't actually measure the thing that people podcasters want to know. Every podcaster should be concerned about who they're reaching, how much time and attention they're earning, how much of our listeners' mindshare are we gaining for brands…This is especially important, but I think for every podcaster, what they're ultimately after is peoples’ time and attention. We want people to spend this time with us - not just once, but again and again and again. This is an opt-in medium. This is a medium built on loyalty and passion and ongoing engagement over time. People showing up and us showing up for them. And so I think bad podcast data doesn't measure people. And the best podcast data measures what people want - actual attention from human beings.
Fatima Zaidi: Love it. That was exactly 60 seconds! I'm so impressed. You and I have been on enough panels where you know that we're aligned on your answer.
What is one podcast myth that you would like to debunk?
Dan Misener: I would like to debunk the myth that it's easy. I would like to debunk the myth that all you need is a microphone and a boardroom. I would like to bunk the myth of overnight success. I'm not denying that [it’s] a thing a lot of people want. But the most successful shows that I have ever worked on and the most successful shows that I've been aware of were not overnight successes. They weren't two people in a room doing the bare minimum. It takes time. It takes effort, and it takes a commitment to the long haul. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint. It's about consistency. Showing up episode after episode, season after season. And I think if you're in it for the quick wins or you're expecting overnight growth with your audience, think again. Right? This is a medium for the patient. It is not a medium for the impatient.
Fatima Zaidi: So no vanity projects people.
What is one podcast audience growth hack you would like to share?
Dan Misener: I think the most important thing that any podcaster, especially any podcast marketer, can do is to understand their audience, to really take the time before you hit record. And do this before you release an episode, before you make any decisions about what the music's going to sound like, what the sound design is going to sound like, and what your artwork is going to look like before you make any of those really fun, exciting, creative decisions. Take the time to deeply understand the audience that you want to serve and how they are already served. The world does not need your carbon copy of somebody else's show. The world does not need your repetition of somebody else's great idea. And so I think, maybe this isn't so much of a hack, as just a first step before any. Other hacks could happen. Know your audience, understand your audience and how they're already served and what you can do differently.
Fatima Zaidi: Love it, love it, love it. Couldn't agree more.
And finally…
Fatima Zaidi: Dan, thank you for sharing more about yourself. Now that we've covered the three questions, you have the opportunity to choose one of the topics we covered, and we'll revisit that and we can expand on your thoughts and I'm sure I will have some too.
Dan Misener: I would love to dig in deeper on this idea of really knowing your audience and understanding their motivations and how we can serve them as podcasters. I think it's something that not nearly enough people spend time thinking about, especially in pre-production, especially in show design, especially in the less sexy moments before you actually hit record. The prep work. What do you think, Fatima? How does that fit into sort of the workflows that you and your team go through? How do you do the sort of research before you're producing a show, before the show has ever been recorded?
Fatima Zaidi: It's interesting that you say that because I was just recently having a conversation with my team, and the work that we do in the pre-production phase is very focused on the ideal listener profile. Like who are we creating this show for? How can we be something to someone rather than everything to everyone? And it's often a stage in our workflow process that surprises a lot of the brands that we work with. They almost feel like podcasting is a tactic that is intended for everyone, not realizing that, like other content mediums and knowing who the idea listener profile is, what your competitive matrix looks like and how you're going to position yourself in the market is arguably one of the most important steps of the process and so closely tied to audience growth and podcast marketing. So, I couldn't agree more. It's before we get to the data and analytics, before we get to what are the ad spend tactics that are going to help you grow your audience. The question is: who is your audience? Is there a natural community around the topic that you've chosen? That's generally the first step for us is identifying who it is so that we can stay loyal and true to our listener base as we're creating our editorial content.
Dan Misener: Yeah. I love that you talk about this idea of the ideal listener profile. I think it's Stephen King who has advice for writers. He talks about the ideal reader, who is the person you have in your mind when you're thinking about someone who might really enjoy the thing that you're making? Who is the person, if you were to sell merch, would be first in line to buy a T-shirt? If you do a live event, who's in the front row? Right? Thinking about that most passionate word of mouth advocate for your show and really offering them something that is different. I love that idea of the ideal listener.
In a lot of the work that we do at Bumper, we think about that ideal listener. We talk about them, you know, as the kind of core audience who are we really after? Who's that person in the front seat at our live show? We also think about other audiences, and I think this is something that a lot of podcasters miss - is the opportunity not just to serve the ideal listener, but to serve other audiences who might be different than that ideal listener. Right. Can you market the same show in different ways to different listeners? Because yeah, we want to super serve that core audience, or as you say, the ideal listener. But who else might the show appeal to? I think when you combine that idea of the ideal listener with some other audiences, an adjacent audience, or a transformational audience - to use some words that came out of innovation risk modeling work that we borrowed from - essentially, who else can we serve and how else can we market the exact same show? What other itches can we scratch beyond superfans?
Fatima Zaidi: I have a Bumper question for you then - that should become some sort of a verb, “Bumper” question. Given that we know how important audience insights and audience demographic data is - actually this month we're going to be launching audience demographic information (age, gender, household income, occupation). How do you go about figuring out if you're reaching your “ideal listener profile” and sort of the demographics that you're reaching? [For a while], a lot of this data hasn't been available to us. Even prior to Bumper, I'm curious what the work that you and your production teams were doing to figure [this] out? Are you reaching the people that you intended to?
Dan Misener: I love this because you can set out to reach an audience, but how do you know if you've actually reached the audience that you were trying to reach? How do you know if you're hitting the listeners that you had in your mind when you were making a show? And I think there are different ways of getting to that. Obviously, the demographic information that you're describing or information like what kind of company or what company specifically are my listeners working for, that might be really important to say. So it sounds like that's why you're building those features in and why you're releasing that. I think there are ways to sort of passively get that information and to use some of the data brokers that are out there. And I think we all know their names, but there's also ways of doing sort of less IP-based work and focusing on some of the kinds of things that, say, a listener survey can do or the kinds of work that is often referred to as brand lift research. Working with a third party company and we did quite a lot of work when I was working at Pacific Content with Jeff Fiedler and his team - Signal Hill Insights. They do a tremendous amount of work and I think it's really the marriage of those two things. What is the data that we can collect and what are the sort of technical tools that we can use, but also what is the sort of information that those tools may not be able to fully capture that you could only get through a listener survey or a brand lift study by asking real people who have spent time with the program about measures of appeal, measures of brand affinity, measures of aid and unaided brand recall, you know, things that I know are relevant to your clients.
Fatima Zaidi: Totally. That's super informative. And I mean, it kind of brings me back to your earlier point, which is you'd like to debunk the myth of podcasting as easy. I, you know, blows my mind when people say that it's a decentralized medium, that anyone with an Internet connection and a phone can record a podcast. Well, yes, they can do it, but they can't necessarily do it well. So when you're thinking about ways to podcast, I would say at an elevated sort of level, think about sort of the advice that Dan is giving and then think again like, does this sound easy? And there is no such thing as instant gratification and overnight success. It's like building your personal brand or building your company.
Dan Misener: Amen. I couldn't agree more.
Fatima Zaidi: Thank you so much, John, for being a part of Podcast 360. I knew the listeners would benefit from having this conversation with you, and I didn't have to think very hard when they asked me who I wanted to interview. You're the first person that popped into my head because I know I always learn something new every time we have a conversation. There is one final thing that we have to take care of. I have to make my final guess for the two truths and one lie.
I'm going to stick to my original answer, which is that I find it really hard to believe that you haven't purchased a product or service after listening to a podcast. I think that is a lie.
Dan Misener: Yeah. If you totally called me out. Of course. I've bought the mattress and the meal kit subscription and the website builder. Yeah, I have a lot of stuff. You read me like a book?
Fatima Zaidi: Okay, perfect. I'm glad I was. I was a little concerned. It was like sort of debunking my entire philosophy on podcast advertising. I was like, It doesn't work on Dan Meisner? Maybe it doesn't work! Again, such a great experience interviewing you and having you on this show today. To the listeners - you can find Dan sitting in the host chair on next week's episode where he has the opportunity to turn the mic on another founder or person in this industry. Dan Please let our listeners know where they can find you or any other shout outs you'd like to give.
Dan Misener: You can find me and Bumper at our website wearebumper.com and we have a blog there where we write quite a lot about marketing measurement, understanding audiences and serving audiences. So, wearebumper.com is the best place to find us.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Podcast 360.
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Editor: Brittany Temple
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