At the start of this year, we decided that it was time to put all the advice, skills and work that we do for our clients to the ultimate test.
We launched our own Podcast.
Say hello to The Unhelpful Parenting Podcast.
Starting a podcast is daunting. But thankfully, we proved we do know what we are talking about when it comes to podcast marketing.
In the first 90 days, we had over 250k views on YouTube, 2k followers on Facebook, and another thousand across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. We even caught Usain Bolt’s personal account (with over 13 million followers) liking one of our Instagram reels – that’s now sitting at over 1.5 million views on Facebook!
Here’s a little overview of where our podcast started, what we did to succeed, and where we ended up after the first 90 days of launching a podcast.
We started from nothing. All we had was a good idea, with no budget or pre-built audience.
We didn’t have any huge personal following to leverage on social media. And our business accounts were completely the wrong demographic (corporate business marketing and parenting podcasts don’t tend to overlap much!).
So we kickstarted with ~20 followers and subscribers on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and absolutely zero on TikTok.
Having our Sunshine Coast Podcast studio definitely helped in the budget department. Production and marketing were just costing us our time (which is still precious!). We can appreciate that many other businesses and podcast teams don’t have this head start, but this has demonstrated it's worth the investment.
There’s no denying that getting started, especially from nothing, is an uphill climb. Any marketing team that promises you otherwise is likely full of hot air (unless you’ve some decent ad spend budget behind you!)
But if you get posting and know what you’re doing, you’ll find momentum, and the likes, follows and listeners will come (even though some days it feels like your posts aren’t reaching anyone!).
The four main things that helped us start to pick up momentum was:
We won’t lie – having a few of the key skills in-house made the podcast launch MUCH easier. We didn’t have to outsource a social media strategy (that’s Bec’s sweet spot), or production (that’s Sam’s!). And with our skills and experience, we knew we had a good idea that would work online.
Before you go signing up for marketing strategies and production plans, get a professional podcast producer and marketing strategist to go over your plans. For us, we were only investing our time (which is still SUPER valuable to us as business owners with three kids 5 and under!). But before you spend big bucks, make sure you’re talking with someone in the industry who has had success and knows what they are doing to make sure you’ve got a sound investment.
Yes, video production is usually where a lot of the cost seems to go. Without video, you can get away with recording anywhere, so there are no studio production fees, and editing is much simpler.
But video is where the marketing power lies.
Without podcast video, you’ve got no Instagram or Facebook reels, no YouTube shorts and no TikToks. And really, that’s the four basic pillars of social media marketing.
Yes, you could put the audio over a picture – but when was the last time you sat and listened to more than 2 seconds of audio without video? It might work once, but if you’re posting almost every day (like you need to to get started), then you’re going to need podcast video.
Video podcasts also pay off later on once you get monetized on YouTube, adding a whole new stream of income!
Whatever you do, do it consistently.
We know that if you’re paying for marketing, the more you post, the more it’s likely going to cost. So we will be honest when we say that posting everyday is the ideal, but realistic in knowing that sometimes pushes even the best-funded start-up budgets to the limit (and if you’re doing your social media DIY style, everyday posting on your own will tire you out eventually).
The happy medium is posting with consistency.
Whatever you do, do it consistently and the algorithms will learn your rhythm.
Consistency means the algorithm will start to learn your rhythm and what to expect and will reward your content as such.
Sporadic posting = sporadic growth. Consistent posting = consistent growth at whatever pace you can manage.
Bec will be the first to admit, she thought Instagram was going to be the winner for the Unhelpful Parenting Podcast.
In actual fact, that started off being the least productive of all the social media platforms and took a while to get started.
As marketers, we usually have a pretty good sense of where different audiences consume content. But it’s impossible to know for sure where your audience is until you start posting, so when you start, start everywhere.
As a minimum, that should include Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. If your podcast is business-related, include LinkedIn in your marketing mix.
We quickly found that the embarrassing parenting stories would consistently go mildly viral on YouTube Shorts (around 8-10k views each), and then 20% of those would take off on Facebook reels, but they would go much further there than anywhere else (the biggest is sitting at 1.5 million views).
We found people liked watching on TikTok, but not engaging so much, and Instagram was good for views and engagement, but viewers didn’t convert as well into followers so growth has been much slower.
If we had to go back and only choose two platforms, YouTube shorts and Facebook would now be our choice (although we've had valuable connections everywhere - so thankfully we don't have to choose!)
It definitely goes to show that your audience may not be where you expect, and getting your content out in a variety of spaces to test it is the only way to tell where you’ll strike gold.
At the 3-4 month mark (while writing this), we are still in the early days of our podcast audience building, so we aren’t popping the champagne just yet.
But we’ve seen the progress and momentum building that anyone launching a podcast from nothing dreams of.
Here’s some of the cool stats on different posts that we’ve seen:
- This Facebook reel has over 1.5 million views
- This Instagram reel has over 210k views and 18k likes
- This YouTube short brought in over 28 subscribers overnight
- This TikTok has over 1800 likes
We have lots of exciting ideas and are about to enter into the next stage of content creation.
So, watch this space as we continue unleashing our creative marketing and testing out new campaigns, strategies and podcast tips and tricks on ourselves.
Got a podcast you’re ready to take the next step with?
Talk to us at All In Creative about how to take your podcast idea and turn it into a high-quality production that produces results. We have our Sunshine Coast podcast studio ready for you!
