🏆 Steal this idea: Setting up a successful pitch campaign 📈
🤸♀️Podcast marketing: let's have some fun.🌈
Bonjour!
Arielle Nissenblatt and I offer a service called Podcast Therapy, where we spend an hour with podcasters and tell them who they should be working with, what they should be doing and not doing, and how to make their show more marketable. These are always the most fun moments of my day. The only negative feedback we’ve ever received is that we talk too fast and interrupt each other. We are working on it. (We also bring on someone to take notes, so the podcaster has a takeaway sheet with next-steps notes and can truly focus on the conversation.)
Oh. We just made Podcast Therapy t-shirts! Let me know if you’d like one!
A few weeks ago we did a Podcast Therapy session with Maya Chupkov of Proud Stutter, a podcast that she hosts with Cynthia Chin about shifting the narrative around stuttering and changing the way we understand and think about “normal” speech. (Cynthia does not have a stutter.) Maya started the show because she wanted to help stutterers feel less alone and to reverse some of the harmful stereotypes associated with stuttering. Proud Stutter is a show for people who have grown up feeling isolated and shamed for having a stutter, like Maya, but also a show for those connected to people who stutter or for people who just want to learn how to be their allies.
We threw Maya a bunch of advice and said bon voyage. And a few weeks later, I noticed her show was written up in PodNews, Inside Podcasting, and Great Pods. Maya had listened to our advice and taken immediate action, and she got great results.
I wanted to talk to her about what she got out of our Podcast Therapy session and what steps she took the moment we turned Zoom off. I want you to see how possible this is. Maya did it. So can you. I want this issue of Podcast Marketing Magic to inspire you!
Her Podcast Therapy Takeaways:
Follow influencers related to stuttering on social media
Marketing is a great strategy to gain more listeners and grow
When pitching newsletters, it is important to familiarize yourself with what each newsletter before each tailored pitch, and to respond to the newsletter directly
Send mini press releases for episodes I think worthy of spending extra time on
Pitch yourself as a guest to other shows.
Maya’s First Step:
Add and engage with influencers in the stuttering community on social media, and connect with them. Just from this simple first step, she gained a ton of followers and met lots of new people through direct messaging and responding to their posts.
She pitched herself.
She pitched herself to many of the podcast newsletters (at least 50!) after she got a sense of what they would be interested in. She read through several newsletters before reaching out. She also pitched herself to stuttering-related blogs and writers that covered disability issues.
She pitched her episode with musician JJJJerome Ellis to several blogs, newsletters, and media outlets and secured a couple pieces of coverage and got a few leads for future stories.
She swapped.
She appeared on several other podcasts related to stuttering, did her first promo swap, and then swiftly set up three more.
She applied to be featured on apps.
Apple Podcasts and Stitcher.
She didn’t stop there.
She applied to several conferences related to stuttering, podcasting, and narrative shift/cultural organizing, and created a Buy Me A Coffee page.
The Podcast Therapy tips she didn’t take (yet:)
She hasn’t bought any ads yet—because her earned media strategies were working. (She also doesn’t have the funds.)
Why did her pitching work?
It just so happened that the episode she pitched with JJJJJerome was released during Black History Month, and black history is a key theme in JJJJJerome’s work. She says that Proud Stutter resonated with a lot of the newsletter editors as breaking the mold of podcasting and recognizing different types of speech in audio storytelling. Her goal was not only to get more listeners, but to help spread awareness about stuttering. Getting into newsletters is a great way to get stuttering out there.
How she thinks about marketing differently:
She puts more thought into pitching newsletters.
Three tips from Maya to kickstart your marketing campaign now:
Add all influencers and folks associated with your podcast theme on social media - this really helped me build my social media following and connect with others.
In addition to signing up for podcasting newsletters and getting to know each one, follow newsletters that connect with your podcast theme. For example, since my podcast is about stuttering and disability justice, I successfully pitched Proud Stutter to several writers who covered these topics.
Reach out to other shows and offer to do a promo swap. I did a ton of outreach and now have three promo swaps in the que.
The most fun thing Maya did to market Proud Stutter?
Pitching her journalism episode with journalist Mariam Elba to her favorite journalism-related newsletters. For her day job, she follows these newsletters and have come to really enjoy the content. Being able to combine my two passions in life - spreading awareness about stuttering and promoting disabilities in the newsroom - was extremely exciting and motivating!
The results.
You can see all of the press that Maya got here. Sometimes it is hard to see immediate growth with these campaigns, but she saw a bump in her JJJJerome Ellis episode, and hopes to continue to see her numbers rise.
This was all possible even while having a demanding full-time job. Putting in the work can be time consuming, but Maya says if you do it, and do it well, you can achieve great results. The reason she was able to be so successful with marketing is because she wholeheartedly believes in her podcast and the impact of her show, and the extra work just made sense to her because she is doing it for a larger cause - making the world a better place for people who stutter. To Maya, it always comes down to why you are doing the work in the first place.
xoxo lp