The session began with Andrew Davies, leader of one of ABC’s digital teams, who said that the work on a podcast doesn’t start with the first episode but with the idea. It is important to put all your effort into the podcast from the very start. As Andrew Davies says “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Andrew comes up with many crucial topics to focus on, such as distribution choices, target audience, digital and discovery plan, digital and social plan and to keep your momentum going as the best point. What the audience especially liked was the introduction of the podcast Finding Drago (from the Rocky movie), run by two comedians from Britain.
Up next were Triton Digital’s Daniel Karlsson and Stephanie Donovan, who talked about myths in the audio world, eg podcasts are declining, or they cannot be targeted. According to Stephanie, it is quite the opposite. She then followed up with ways to monetize your podcast or how to unlock more revenue. In the first topic she mentioned three ways, Hot reads, direct DAJ (sales, sponsors,) and subscriptions. The answer to the second topic is to standardize your inventory, programmatic management and enhance inventory. According to Daniel, instead of making the podcasts free, provide paywall protected podcasts in order to reduce churn of paid subscribers.
Arielle Nissenblatt, the founder of EarBuds Podcast Collective and the head of community and content at SquadCast, focused on the ways to use social media to promote your podcasts. “Social media is important but it’s not everything”, she later explains that there are too many social media platforms to cover them all. That’s why she recommends having social handles on every platform despite mainly using only some of them. If you do, make sure to include your bio, website and reference to your most used social media. The easiest and fastest way to reach a big audience is surely through reels, mainly on Tik Tok, thanks to the sheer volume of users. On a platform like this, you can succeed with any kind of content regardless of its quality thanks to the algorithm and big number of users.
