73. Maximize Your Podcast's Potential with Web Ads: Expert Tips from Mike Wiston

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In episode twelve of this podcast, I first spoke about the traffic pyramid, the four steps to getting unlimited traffic to your podcast and business. And in fact, I have since mentioned the traffic pyramid about a gajillion times since then. I highly recommend going back to episode twelve to learn or relearn the traffic pyramid because this is the framework you need to be working towards to get visibility for your podcast and importantly, for your business too. It's certainly what occupies my mind whenever I'm thinking about how I grow this podcast and Capsho. Now, you may know that the top tier of the traffic pyramid is scaling through paid ads.

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And paid ads are not something I've spoken much about on this podcast. And when I did, when I spoke about the traffic pyramid and paid ads in the context of growing a podcast in episode 62, I mentioned two things. One, that paid ads may not be for everyone. It is really going to depend on where you are in your podcasting journey. And two, that I actually have a good friend who has built an incredible business around running web based ads to grow a podcast, Mike Wiston, the CEO of Mowpod.

00:01:13
And so I knew it was high time to get that very friend onto the Grow my podcast show so that he can share with you the exact strategy to make paid ads work for your podcast. So if you've been wondering whether paid ads is for you and if so, how to actually run them effectively, then you are in exactly the right place. This is exactly what Mike Wiston from Mowpod will be taking us through. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder of Capsho, the fastest way to repurpose and market your expert content. And this is the Grow my podcast show.

00:01:56
I am the CEO and co founder of Mo Media and Mowpod. We're the largest driver of engaged subscribers and listeners to just about every major newsletter and podcast in the US. So everything from the morning brews and the hustles and front office sports and Wondermind Newsette list goes on. On the newsletter side, we've been working with for quite some time, either as the largest part or a significant part of the paid acquisition. And on the podcasting side, literally working with you name it, we're very likely working with them in the space from networks to podcasts to agencies.

00:02:33
And we're ultimately driving audience growth through paid ads. There is literally no one better than Mike to talk us through how to effectively run paid ads to grow our podcasts. Now, the ads bucket can sometimes feel incredibly full and overwhelming. For example, there are a ton of platforms you can now advertise on. The biggest include social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn.

00:02:59
There are also search engines like Google and Bing that you can advertise on. And then there are specific websites that you can advertise on, which is what Mowpods specialize in. They specialize in placing thumbnail style ads on particular websites, what we call web based ads. In episode 62, I spoke about having to be ready to run paid ads, that there are other things you need in place first before you should be considering spending money. And so I was interested in getting Mike's perspective on this.

00:03:29
When does he think we're ready to run paid ads to grow our podcast? I think first, it's important to understand, like you said, when you should be considering paid ads. Whether it's Facebook, whether it's Mowpod or TikTok or anything, if you're paying for ads on LinkedIn or Google search, whatever you happen to be doing, you first have to know when is the right time to play in paid ads. First out of the gate before you do anything in paid, you should have an organic engine running in some kind of a way. You should never spend a penny on ads.

00:04:00
In my opinion. You should never spend a single penny on ads until you understand that your organic audience loves your content, that your content resonates well with an organic audience. So you go build that engine. Obviously, you're all part of Capshovians here, and you're able to put together your AI descriptions and LinkedIn posts and just that higher social strategy and web strategy, et cetera. So do all that.

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Figure out what works, what doesn't, especially with your content itself. Not just your organic marketing, but the actual content itself. If you're getting listeners that are coming in, you're getting 50 downloads for an episode or 80 downloads for an episode, and it's consistent and it's not growing at all. That's not bad. Good.

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You're maintaining an audience, and your problem is just finding a new audience. If it's dropping. You're getting 50 downloads. Now you're getting 40, now you're getting 20. You're having trouble keeping people.

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Before you pay anything for ads, you need to fix that. You need to figure out why are people not sticking around? Why aren't they continuing to listen? And why aren't we seeing some type of small regular growth on the organic side? The reason is, if you start paying for ads too early, you're not going to know if your content is good enough to hold on to the people that you're paying for.

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You're going to see a drop. You're going to be like, Well, I wonder if the paid strategy is not working. We're not retaining people in any kind of meaningful way, but at the end of the day, it was really just about your content. Maybe it wasn't resonating, maybe it was posted. Maybe your episodes are too long, maybe your titles are wrong.

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Maybe whatever it happens to be, you need to figure all that organic stuff out first. Now you can see why we're such good friends, right? We agree completely on this approach. Get your foundations right first, and only use paid ads to scale those solid foundations and so that's actually step number one in how to run paid ads for your podcast. Get confident in your content and put your organic strategy into place.

00:06:10
And I know what you might be thinking at this point. It's one thing to say, yep, gotta get that organic strategy in place, but it's another to know exactly when to make that paid ads decision. And so that was my next question to Mike, how do we know? How do we know, given what the line is telling us, when that right moment actually is? And yes, Mike shared some of his best practice secrets, which you can access as a bonus clip.

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All you have to do is head over to the show notes and grab the bonus clip for free from this episode's page. So now we know how and when to work out whether running paid ads for your podcast is right for you. When we come back, we're going to get into steps two and three, where we're going to get into the juicy meat or maybe juicy mushrooms if you're a vegetarian, the actual how to running paid ads.

00:07:04
So we just covered step one to running paid ads for your podcast, which is to get confident in your content and put your organic strategy into place. Until you have this figured out, you will be putting money into a very leaky bucket. So step number one is a have to have if you're thinking of running ads at some point. And so if you're feeling pretty confident about this, let's now get into the how, which starts with step number two, setting your goal. How do we do this?

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Define what is growth like? Why do you need to be at 5000 downloads over an episode or 50,000 downloads per episode? Is it a vanity thing? You just want to see the numbers and you want to go to facebook and LinkedIn and say, hey everyone, we're at the top of the charts or we're 5000 downloads. Thank you all.

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I want to thank everyone who listened. If that's the reason, great, at least you know that's the reason. Here's what I'm willing to invest in hitting that goal. Not the best goal, by the way, but there really is in podcasting in my opinion. I strongly believe that there's no difference between 50 downloads or 5000 or 500,000 downloads for an episode if you don't have a clear cut path to monetization or to some type of a bigger goal, right, to either monetization, joining or staying in a network or whatever it is.

00:08:21
You have stakeholders that want to see certain growth numbers or a certain trajectory. Maybe ultimately you want to sell the podcast wherever your goal posts are, but work backwards from those goalposts. We need to hit these numbers for this reason. And now you can start exploring what paid channels make sense. And another major thing, and a major miss, I think for a lot of new people approaching a paid strategy is assuming that all paid channels are created equal.

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They're not. They're very goal based, right? Depending on where those goal posts are, that's where you have to determine, what channels should I use? And the second this applies to any kind of scale growth, if you're just starting out and you're just kind of dipping your toe in the water, that's a different story. But at any kind of scale, you definitely want a marketing mix.

00:09:12
You don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket ever. Whether it's Mowpod or whether it's Facebook or whatever it is, you definitely want a healthy marketing mix. But the big miss is understanding what the results look like, what the results need to look like. What does success look like in a campaign, being able to understand, at the end of the day, once a campaign has run, what needs to have happened for it to be a win for you. And by that I mean if you're running a Facebook campaign and it drives, at the end of the day, 700 downloads to your podcast and it cost you $972, and you kind of back that out, I'm making numbers really hard for myself.

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Let's say you drive 700 downloads and it costs you $1,400, and it's $2 for a download, and you're retaining 3% of those people for new episodes coming out. Is that good for you? Does that work into your model? Like, are you monetizing? Are you going out and selling to advertisers?

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And at the end of the day, you're making more than that. If that's the case, then great, that channel can work for you. But if it's costing you more than whatever the value of that goal is, obviously that channel is something that you need to consider changing. Or maybe that strategy is something you need to consider changing. Maybe the ads that you're running aren't effective or whatever, but something you need to look at.

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But truly understanding the metrics around the results is critical for any paid campaign, and it's something that is an ongoing exercise. And for a startup podcast, it's a part time job. And for a full fledged podcast like your entrepreneurs on Fires and all of those, I mean, that's a full time freaking job, is understanding what channels work, what putting together those spreadsheets, and understanding the value of a listener and just defining what that looks like. Whoa. Okay.

00:11:13
Sometimes setting goals can seem like this somewhat wishy washy thing when we talk about setting those one year, five year, ten year goals for our business or our lives. But with ads, when you're actually committing money to the growth of something, it is so important to set very specific goals, because otherwise, how will you know if you've gotten an ROI on it? And sometimes those goals might not have a direct Money in, money out linkage. Maybe it's more about brand awareness or something a little more intangible and as long as you know that that's the reason and the specific goal, then that's okay. You just need to be able to assess the success of running these ads and what that means to you specifically.

00:11:55
So given that, I was curious to know if Mike had any further specific guidance on setting those goals. You just need to know how you're monetizing. Or to me, the easiest one is monetization, right? Are you selling ads? Are you going out to advertisers and pitching your show as a starting point?

00:12:16
If you're just dipping your toe in the water, as I mentioned before, and you want to throw a couple hundred dollars at marketing, whether it's through us or through Facebook, I would actually recommend, if you have a few hundred bucks, go test a whole bunch of different platforms. Programmatic on social channels. It's pretty easy to get into. You should understand it, and it's something that you should be playing with every show and every audience, depending on the content. If it's a true prime show versus a B, two B show or whatever, the platforms that you decide to advertise on are going to be vastly different.

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At least the ones that are more effective are going to be vastly different. So go test a whole bunch. You don't need to test like thousands of dollars on every platform to know if it's working. You can kind of creep into the strategy a little bit. And again, you have tools like Capsho to put together all those marketing messages if you're not marketing people yourselves as a starting point for a lot of that.

00:13:13
And that actually leads us into step number three to running paid ads for your podcast, deciding which platforms to test ads on. As Mike mentioned, there are many that you can test, but one you need to definitely try out is Mowpod. Here's how it works. So when you're ready to test Mowpod Boost is our largest product, and it's what I'll talk about today. Mowpod boost is fully programmatic.

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We're putting native and display ads on hundreds or thousands of sites, targeting the specific listener, not the web property itself, and ultimately driving back to a Mopod landing page. Either our team will create all the creative, or our system will create it. In the case of our self serve, at the end of the day, we're driving IEB downloads to a podcast with clear expectations around what's going to happen next, along with all the data. In terms of what worked, what didn't, all campaigns are optimized against two things. First, an IAB download.

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So when someone actually hits that 62nd download from unique IP address within 24 hours, that's the first optimization point. So any programmatic strategies that we're running, anything from interest targeting segments to browsing audiences or lookalike audiences, or retargeting segments, if we're retargeting people that listen to episode one for two, three, four, and so on, whatever those happen to be, and then the individual strategies within those programmatic strategies. So things like in browsing audiences, we might have things like strong black women or millennials or parents of young children or new expecting mothers or whatever those specific targeting criteria are. We're optimizing those campaigns against the kinds of people who are converting better, who are ultimately hitting that IB download more frequently with Mopod Boost. Again, the ads are all native, and these are showing up on hundreds or thousands of sites, again targeting that specific listener.

00:15:13
So you won't see the ad unless you match the targeting for that particular campaign. And unless we win the bid on that particular site, we buy on a CPM cost per thousand impressions, and we're selling on a flat cost per download. And I think it's one of the things that really sets us apart in the space or just in marketing in general. We take the risk on our side versus the vast majority of advertising that you'll do if you're running it through social or anywhere else, really. Now, what Mike mentioned is just the starting point to the power of this platform.

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We'll share some behind the scenes screenshots of the types of data that they collect, which I personally get really excited about. This data, if nothing else, can help you with really finding out who is interested in the content of your podcast, and even more importantly, to then use to smartly retarget in future ad campaigns. Seeing this got me so excited that I knew one of my next steps was to actually do it, analyze the data, and show you how we can use that data going forward. So watch this space. So there you have it.

00:16:24
If you've been wondering whether running paid ads is for you and you've been confused about where to start, this episode has given you your roadmap. Step number one, get confident in your content and put your organic strategy in place. Step number two, set your goal. And then step number three is to test different ads platforms, starting with Mowpod. And if you're ready, then I invite you to use CAPSHO' S  link to get started with Mowpod, which gets you 10% off forever.

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We'll leave the link to go and sign up to Mopod in our Show Notes. And of course, our Show Notes are also where you can access that bonus clip on Mike's opinion on how we might be able to tell the right moment to start spending on paid ads. That's all for today. Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Deirdre Tshien.

00:17:07
Stay awesome.