Welcome to Podcast Suck, a podcast about starting a podcast, where we dive headfirst into the wild, wacky, and sometimes frustrating world of podcasting. If you've ever sat down with a microphone, hit record, and thought, what on earth am I doing? Or if you're just curious about the magic behind your favorite shows, then you're in the right place. Get ready for laughs, insights, and a whole lot of what not to do advice as we embark on this podcasting journey together. Let's dive in. Matt Shields, welcome to the show, man.

Sebastian Rusk

Thanks for having me.

Matt Shields

Hey, thanks for thanks for being here. Great to connect with you. I know I think we linked up over on LinkedIn. That's what people do over there. They link up over there on LinkedIn. So, uh, yeah. Uh, I, and I was interested in talking to you cause you said, Hey, listen, I help people with podcasts marketing. And I was like, Oh no, are you one of those podcasts promoters? I'm just kidding. If you, if you're on LinkedIn actively, you know what one of those podcasts promoters are. I don't even know if they're real people. Um, I get about three messages a day from them. I think way back in the day I actually bit and was like, okay, cool. Let's try it out. Here's my $25. And then I had a bunch of like random downloads and then nothing ever happened again. And they could never tell me where the downloads came from or how it all happened. So if you're listening to this right now and you've been contacted by an air quotes podcast promoter guaranteeing a zillion downloads tomorrow, steer clear. I'm sure Matt endorses my sentiments there. Oh yeah, we get a bunch too. Yeah, it happens. So you got a podcast marketing agency. Uh, I was curious to learn more what of what that looks like. Cause we're solely focused on launching podcasts, which we're really good at and producing them ongoing. We haven't ventured into any of the other podcasting waters, like getting you booked on podcasts or marketing podcasts. The closest I've come to wanting to figure things out, is podcast marketing selfishly because of my own podcast. Like, well, how can I actually market my own podcast and get some additional, um, traction on that? And then if that works on my podcast, what does it look like to bring it to our agency clients? So let's back up a little bit and tell our listeners exactly how you started, uh, getting into the whole podcast marketing world.

Sebastian Rusk

Yeah, so we when we first started running ads, we've been running ads for about five years, we work with online coaches and course creators and service providers like that. And it's pretty much the same audience now. But it's we're specializing in podcasts, just because from a marketing standpoint, we specialize in Facebook and Instagram. We're adding some YouTube stuff here as well. That's getting really exciting. But specialized in Facebook and Instagram. And just marketing as a whole has shifted so much in the last five years. And the podcasting podcasting blew up right in 2021. Everybody started one, they thought they should start one. And they realized, Oh, my God, this is really hard. Right? Yeah, they realized, Oh, my God, this is harder than I thought. And I don't want to do this for much longer. So a bunch of people dropped off and quit or whatever. And, you know, there's long timers that stuck with it. But We specialize in helping pretty much the same people, online service providers or something like that. if, if you have a podcast, like indie podcasters can do it as well. But if you do a podcast that you use for building authority or generating leads, it works really well. But that's what we got into it. Basically, one of our friends is a podcaster. And he said, I want to know how little I can spend and achieve tangible results. So that was a was a fun challenge, just because we had to be creative and not just go, okay, here's $1,000. See what you can do with that. That's a test. But see how little we can spend is it was more fun and it worked out really well.

Quite the opposite. So walk me through that. What's it look like to act? I come to you today with the beyond the story podcast and actually podcast suck podcast is probably where we're going to release this episode. So, and I'm looking to get more traction on my podcast. What does it look like as far as what you guys do to step in and help that process?

Yeah, so it depends on how you want us to work with you. So we can always do ads as a service. That's one thing that we offer. Or we can teach you how to do it one-on-one. Or if you're one of those people that likes being self-taught or self-paced, we have a course for that as well. So we start with that. And basically, we work hand-in-hand with you to research your audience, do things like that. And we look at your content. So it's all about content and it must be a video podcast, right? It has to be a video. And the reason being is it just converts better. Right? So you can do it with audio only. The strategy still works, but it converts much better with video.

And I don't mean to interrupt you, but would you say that that it just at least needs to have some sort of video and or micro content so that you have something to run ads to? Would that be more of a. Absolutely. Yeah. OK. Cause video podcasts don't exist. I'm standing my ground on that shit, but that's my opinion. And that's the ground I'm standing on. I think they're polar opposites that people are making up the word video podcast, but I get you. I get what you're saying. Here's what I do believe in, Matt. I do believe that there is a video recording of a podcast because that video recording can then be used as micro content to both promote your business, the podcast and the podcast episode and to run ads on it. Would that be an accurate statement you'd agree with? That's totally accurate.

I didn't mean to step over the shades of gray.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let her rip, dude. That's all good. It's all good. Welcome to my life. Constantly a video podcast. Again, I hear it from the youngsters these days, the youngsters, they, uh, they want to watch things, you know, I like to study, you know, while they're death scrolling here on a tick tock, snapchat, et cetera. But I, you know, I don't want, and the reason I'm, I'm so adamant about, You know, standing my ground on my opinion around that is that I want to protect the integrity of what a podcast is, which is an audio piece of content uploaded to the Internet to be consumed auditorily. That means you listen to it, people. You listen to a podcast. Now a video piece of content, you watch it. So anyway, rant over parentheses, rant over on here. So I'm glad I got that out. It helps me heal.

No, that actually, that actually helps a lot because to delineate, we don't need whole podcasts uploaded onto Facebook and Instagram. It just simply won't work. So it's, it's cut selected pieces of video content that we use. in our strategy.

Micro content. There we go. Yes. Okay, great. So take a podcast. All right. So I'm like, cool. Got a podcast about podcasting. And, uh, I've got a bunch of micro content. Here's the entire library of everything we've got. You guys take a look at that, that library of content and decide which is going to work the best, at least for the initial test on there. Now, do you guys go in there and help with the copy and the headlines? And in fact, it's funny that you say this, cause I was just in the Facebook ads, um, dashboard this morning, my brain still hurts. My eyes not crossed right now while we're recording this episode. And I've been in the Facebook ads dashboard many a times before. Right before jumping into today, I was in the TikTok ads form and then I just clicked out and I literally almost just quit everything this morning, just gave up on life after having done all that. And the reason I share that is that I know that I'm not alone. Unless you actually know what you're doing in one of these ads platforms, you will be absolutely just setting cash on fire. So is that something you guys help out with? Like to be able to get in there and like, I just got done with my, my third failed ads campaign, five figure ads campaign. Again, thank God we got a deal from this last one, but I've failed miserably, miserably at marketing my podcast agency via social media ads, unfortunately. So that's the reason that I asked some very curious on, on the handholding and how that whole process unfolds.

Yeah, we, I, I always say it's like, it's way more like flying a plane than it is like driving a car. So if you go in there, right, if you go in there, you can figure out how to drive it. Right. But there's a lot of knobs to turn off and ignore and all these things. And you have to pay attention to recommendations and whatnot. Well, that's the worst pitfall I was just going to say. So one of the rules we're working with us is don't trust Facebook and it's not to toot our own horn because like I said, we, we don't claim to be gurus or anything like that. This is something that we do day in, day out, every single day. We've spent well over close to a million dollars in ad spend with our clients over the years, but it's, we still get, if you call Facebook for help, if you're lucky enough to be able to find a number, good luck. We have a direct line to Facebook to be able to talk to them and ask them questions. And we still get, did you turn it off and turn it back on again, answers from them. So we source our, you blow on the cartridge. Exactly. Yeah. So like, we, we source, we were in groups of our peers and things like that, we actually find out what's working and things like that. So you have to be working with a lot of a lot of money to be able to test things like that to see what's actually going down and know how the algorithm works. And of course, people who are going in there and spending novice amounts of money and by novice amounts of money, I actually mean like under five to 10 grand a month on ads. And if you're spending less than that, and if you're not spending every day in there, it changes all the time. There's always nuance, there's always changes, they're always changing targeting options, all that stuff. But I promise you, you can fly the plane, or at least know what you're talking about. So whether or not you hire us for as a service, or, you know, obviously, we have VIP days, and we have the course, whatever, we explain all that there's certain things that you need to know. to do this correctly, or to be a podcaster to run ads to promote your podcast. And there's things that you just simply don't need to know. So if you look on on YouTube, and try to YouTube how to run Facebook ads, if that video is longer than three months old, it's out of date.

mind blowing. It's crazy. In fact, I'm listening to Gary Vee's new book right now, Day Trading Attention. If you haven't picked up a copy, make sure you do so. Go to GaryVee.com and grab a copy. This is the manual for marketing and building brand on social on there. And he's my, my brain, I've known Gary a long time. My brain is like eyes are crossed and brain is just melting with. all of the information that he's sharing, but he's very adamant about saying being platform specific, which means I'm guilty of a two taking the same content and posting it on all the platforms and making sure that it's different. And that the, and he's also constantly talking about the fact that these platforms are not just changing monthly and not just changing weekly, they're almost changing daily. And, um, it will always be that way, you know,

Yes, then there's no like, there's no panacea for this, right? It's not it's, it's completely subjective. Because I mean, your audience is vastly different than someone than someone even in your same genre of podcasting, right? It's completely subjective. It's you, it's your people, it's all that stuff. So the fixes for you or the strategy for you, the content for you might not convert as well as similar content for someone else. And there's a butterfly effect of people just because of the sheer number of people and the amount of data you're dealing with. There's 3 billion people on Facebook every day. Billion with a B. It's 1,000 million. And people don't get how vastly large that is. So express this time, I think a million seconds is like 12 days. And a billion seconds is something like 30 years. So it's a huge amount of people and a huge amount of behavioral data that you're working with. It's simple. That's a, that's the great thing though, because you don't need 3 billion people to listen to your podcast, right? You'd be happy with a couple, a couple hundred more, a couple thousand more, but you can scale that. Right. And it's, it's, it's relatively simple when you know what you can ignore. If you just break it down to simple basics.

Yeah. So, so a couple of questions. Number one, how long does it take to start seeing some, some results with your guys' efforts or with podcast marketing in general, specifically with ads here? And when I say results, I mean increase in downloads. And then the second part of that question, actually, let's, let's get that one first. The second question is, do these people stick around? So let's, let's tackle one thing at a time. My brain is going on overload. Yeah.

Yeah, minutes to days. Not long at all, so it just depends on. you know, again, it depends on your piece of content, how well that resonates with the audience that you're targeting. All that stuff is completely subjective. I'm sorry to give you a non-answer there, but that's the truth. You have to, you have to test.

Hold on, let me turn it off and turn it back on.

Yeah, but you have to test these things. So it could be minutes right before you see more downloads. We've, we've tested this with old episodes, so we know that organic traffic isn't a thing. So we know it works when you test it over and over again. But, um, I'm sorry, the second part of the question.

The second part of the question is, do the people stick around? So I've got 500 brand new downloads this month because of the ad spend we've done with you guys. Are these people going to stick around and come back? Am I going to see 2000 downloads next month? A thousand from the new ones that we got last month and a thousand again, these are all hypothetical numbers here, listeners, but, um, do, do, do they stick around?

Yeah. So what I can say is there's no data aggregation, fix for podcasters, you have to go find those download data, right. And but what we can do is we promise that we can retarget all those people that click on that link, right, we create custom audiences, and, you know, dynamic audiences, and we can retarget people. So you know that if they interact with you one time, we can retarget them and show them more of your content, and get them to your download again, or at least get it in front of them again, and stay top and center of mind with these people. Uh, retention rates on the platforms. Again, it's, it's completely, you're completely. you know, subjected to the data that Apple and Spotify or wherever you host your podcasts give you.

And I, I'm thinking more specifically like, okay, we start, let's start today. And we did an ad spend and we've been running ads from June 18th to July 18th. And it's shown that we've gone from 500 downloads a month to now 1500 downloads a month. Yeah. Will I continue to see 1500 downloads a month because of this month's effort and even more because we're continuing to spend money on ads? Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yes, it does. Yeah. And you know, it has everything to do with your consistency, right? So if we keep this strategy rolling, it's a long game and we can retarget people. We can, We're always reaching out to new people. So we've had clients that we've been working with for months get anywhere from 10% to 33%. We've seen increasing downloads to 100% increase in downloads. And it varies, but again, you have to find your, your baseline and test all that. And we've got to be constantly improving and testing and all that stuff. Like I said, it's a very long game and it's not like you plug in a strategy and you're like, Oh, we'll get, we'll get a hundred percent more downloads than we got last month, every month by doing nothing. It just doesn't work. People's interests change so quickly that you have to keep changing with them. So. Yeah, the consistency and everything like that, we'll see increases in downloads every month. But it's just about being consistent with it. And that's a lot of different factors.

Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense.

So all right, so we help you. Sorry. We, we help with like, not only do we help with downloads, but it's about building that audience. We have a trifecta ad strategy. So we build audiences on Facebook. We try to get more downloads for your podcasts and we also build your email list. So you can hit these people on multiple fronts in multiple ways so that you can keep that consistency.

Yeah. Cause once they're opting into doing something to, you know, subscribing or there, you've got their information and that's really the goal is to build your own ecosystem. system because of the efforts that you're making with the podcast marketing on there. I've seen a lot of these guys that have gone to like top of the Apple podcast charts and whatnot legitimately is just a matter of like spending a fuck ton of money on. ads and being very strategic and targeting specific categories and being that aggressive. Like it's not rocket science. It's a, it's, it's just a matter of, are you willing to, to really reach way down into your pocket and invest some significant cash into getting this? I don't think it's because you've created a really cool podcast and what, what do you know? People just love it. I just don't think that's it. I think it's good content. is probably 20% of it, and then 80% is like your willingness just to go completely ballistic with ad spend. Have you seen that too?

So it's, you have either money or time. That's the name of the game, right? So that's your currency. So if you spend a shitload of money in the beginning, yeah, of course, you're going to see way better results. But we start off with clients who are spending $10 a day. And they're still getting incredible results, right? Like this is completely scalable. And it's, you know, you can start with this with a low budget. So for the cheapest, the cheapest option we do, I mean, our, our course is $97 a month and you get support in the group and you spend $10 a day in that. So that's $400 in the first month and then $300 a month in ad spend after that. So that's relatively cheap. But yes, if you spend $10,000 a month in ads, you'll get a shitload of results. There's no doubt about that. Love it.

Well, dude, I'm glad I, you really helped me better understand how this whole world works. I kind of had a hunch that it had to do with ads, but the second component to have your listeners right now, it's not just go to, let me go start some ads. Let me go boost a post. And we're going to all of a sudden have some results here. Don't boost ever. Okay. That's great. Intel to do not boost public service development. Do not boost unless you just want to donate cash to the platform. And if you boost a post on Instagram from your phone, you're paying Apple 30% in addition to your ad spend. So there's that. Yeah, that was, that was nice. That was at least they warn you and let you know, you know, that was a nice surprise there. Um, but it also in conjunction to a strategic ad, you've got to have somebody who knows what they're doing and understands the ads platforms and targeting and audiences and optimization. Most importantly, they can help you do that. And that's exactly what Matt and his team, uh, do here. So if you're listening to this right now and you're like, Hey, this sounds interesting. I want to meet Matt, shoot me a DM. I'll make a personal introduction to Matt so that you can make sure that you have actually connected with somebody, um, on his team. or even him to better understand what those options may be. And I look forward to try and make some moves with, with one or both of my shows to be a product of the product, to see what that looks like. And who knows podcast launch lab, maybe rolling out podcast marketing services. Thanks to Matt and his team in the near future on here, but stay tuned for all that. Any final thoughts for our listeners here, Matt on podcast marketing and marketing your podcast.

No, just stay consistent. Our biggest thing when people work with us is the education piece. We like to teach you or like to let you know what's going on. So that way, whether or not you work with us in the future or either that way, you won't get screwed over when inevitably you do go to hire an ad agency to get ads so you know what you're talking about. You know what questions to ask is the most important part. We've had a ton of people come to us. You know, if you ask me a question, I'm going to answer you honestly. But is that the question that you really wanted to ask? Is that the answer you really wanted? So that's important part two. But stay consistent. I mean, we've seen people drop off, they take breaks or whatever. But the most, the most important thing is, like you said, it's either, it's either a lot of money or a lot of time. And I mean, podcasters pride themselves on longevity. It's only, there's a reason why only what, 7% of podcasters get past 10 episodes or whatever. Yeah, they quit. Got a bunch of quitters out here. That's right.

Hey, Matt, thanks again for your time, brother. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Oh, appreciate it. Thank you. Anytime. You got it, bro.

Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. It's a way to get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review and share the show with someone you know should start a podcast or may already have one. And remember, podcasts suck if you don't have one. Until next time, friends.