🏋️♀️ From body building to 1M downloads in 3 months: You need to know Stephanie Arakelian 📈
🤸♀️Podcast marketing: let's have some fun. 🌈
Hello hello! Friday at TINK arrives with a lot of happy news and wonderful vibes. We’re sending some of those to you through this issue.
This week we meet 🥁🥁🥁
Stephanie Arakelian! Stephanie is a senior podcast marketing & audience development executive at CurtCo Media, developing marketing campaigns, promotions, and features for all podcasts in the CurtCo Media catalog.
I (Shreya here) first heard from Stephanie through another newsletter I write. What stood out to me was Stephanie’s journey into podcasting. The words “competitive bodybuilding” were mentioned followed by the story of how she and her team got the fiction podcast SOLAR to 1,000,000 downloads in 3 months. This to me was representative of just how fluid everyone’s journeys into podcasting can be.
🥇If you only have time for one thing🏋️♀️
Then let it be Stephanie’s words on the importance of community in podcast marketing:
In what other industry can you call your ‘competitor’ and say, ‘Hey! We have similar audiences, want to swap ads…for free?’. ABC doesn’t call NBC and say, ‘Hey, let’s swap ads for our newest shows’, but we do that in podcasting! Why? Because rising tides raise all boats, and this industry is still new, so growth for any of us is growth for all of us.
Let’s get to it!
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell us about your journey into podcasting; how did you end up where you are?
It’s been quite a journey! I feel like I’ve had 12 lives and careers - and they’ve all led me here, where I believe I am supposed to be.
Ever since I was a child, I have only ever wanted to be one thing: an actress. And I was lucky enough to be able to pursue my dreams, receiving my BFA in acting from NYU. A bright eyed and bushy tailed 20-something hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan….wait, wrong 20-something. But she had the same ideals. As an actor, you try many things to make you stand out, and I decided I wanted to be a competitive bodybuilder. And not the side where you see how much you can lift, the side where you stand on stage in a tiny bikini and have a row of judges eating cake right in front of you (while you’re carb deprived and water depleted) tell you how good or bad your body looks. Totally a great idea for a millennial woman, right? The entire story of how that all came to be (and serious, long-lasting mental and physical effects) is for another day, but what I did learn from this time was how to use social media to help market your brand. While I was competing, it happened to be the same time of the beginning of ‘The Influencer’ and I became enthralled with it all. It was fascinating to me.
I began to study and bought books like, ‘Social Media Marketing for Dummies’; and started learning everything I could. Asking my current job if I could build social media accounts for them, and learning how to build audiences for different industries. I used this information I had learned to talk my way into a Head of Marketing position for a manufacturing company. Very soon I launched my own agency - Dimont Media, a digital marketing agency, with a strong focus on social media. I had a plethora of clients from an organic dog poop bag company to social media influencers, and everything in between.
One of my clients at Dimont Media introduced me to Bill Curtis, CEO of CurtCo Media, as he was looking for someone to help him develop and implement social media campaigns, among a few other possible digital marketing projects, for his new podcast network. It was literally building a new network from the ground up. Soon I came in full-time, in-house as the VP, Marketing and Audience Development at CurtCo Media.
I love podcasting and have big goals for this industry; I think there’s room for continued growth, room for even more diversity and inclusivity, and room for (partial or total) disruption. I believe podcasting can be so much more. And that’s why I’m still here, and want to stay here, to see what podcasting can truly achieve, and how I can help facilitate that.
SOLAR achieved 1,000,000 downloads in 3 months. What was most successful in your podcast campaign?
Honestly, our most successful campaign also turned out to be our least successful campaign at the same time. We were trying to be as strategic as possible with our marketing efforts, so to start, we solely focused our marketing budget on ads on other podcasts. We ended up buying two campaigns on different networks. Same budget. Same campaign duration. Same ad creative. Same amount of impressions. One campaign was to run on a fiction-only network, and the other campaign was to run on a very popular, mostly non-fiction network (with a few fiction and storytelling shows on their slate.)
The fiction campaign was incredible - it had over a 5% conversion rate (of listeners who heard this ad on this specific network, and then came and listened to SOLAR), which is an unheard of rate in this industry (around 1% is industry standard), and we were amazed at the results.
The second, mostly-non fiction campaign, had a less than .5% conversion rate. Again, we were amazed, but for different reasons.
It really showed the importance of marketing to the right target and audience. And clearly, marketing a new fiction show to current fiction listeners was a huge success for us in the moment, but we used this data to inform us for future campaigns, not only for SOLAR, but for other fiction podcasts we develop.
What role does curating and nurturing a community play in podcast marketing?
Community is the most important thing in podcast marketing. Most of us in the industry have heard people say ‘podcasts’ or ‘podcast marketing’ is ‘like the Wild West’, right? My interpretation is that it means we’re all still figuring it out, no one has the ‘magic sauce’ of what makes an uber-successful podcast - yet. We are still paving the way for this medium and industry. And we’re all still figuring it out – together.
If you’ve heard me talk about this industry, you’ve probably heard me ramble on about how much I love the podcast industry because of its community. In what other industry can you call your ‘competitor’ and say, ‘Hey! We have similar audiences, want to swap ads…for free?’. ABC doesn’t call NBC and say, ‘Hey, let’s swap ads for our newest shows’, but we do that in podcasting! Why? Because rising tides raise all boats, and this industry is still new, so growth for any of us is growth for all of us. It’s such a beautiful thing to see the community come together like that and I’m incredibly proud to be a part of it.
What do you see happening for the genre of fiction in podcasting's future?
There’s so much more in store for fiction podcasts. Even with some breakout successes, fiction podcasts still only make up about 1% of all podcasts. Are they more time consuming and costly to produce than an always-on or traditional interview or chat style podcast? Absolutely, yes. But is it the next generation of storytelling streaming medium? I also believe absolutely, yes.
Think about Netflix or Hulu in their beginnings…they didn’t have original content, they were just sharing what others had already created. But they slowly started releasing their own, original content. And they could get away with things that traditional TV networks couldn’t get away with. And as the quality of their content began to grow, there grew an incredible demand - not only for more original content, but content that continues to evolve and push the boundaries. And that’s what I believe is in store for fiction podcasts.
As technology continues to evolve and allow listeners to become completely immersed in the audio (ahem - when podcast players will adopt the full immersive audio technology that is already available on their music counterparts), it only deepens the relationship and connection to the listener.
I think storytelling is going to continue to evolve. The character development, writing, and acting, are also going to continue to evolve in this medium, demanding only top tier content creation.
Thank you so much, Stephanie! You can follow Stephanie on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
🪄 More Magic 🪄
Show Notes
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One year ago today. I posted this simple tweet, threw my phone on my bed and hopped in the shower. It was a real dream but a casual post. Then @arithisandthat retweeted it and @laurenpassell dm’d me and not to be dramatic but my life changed.I could spend all day reading podcasting newsletters, checking out new shows, writing about them, helping pitch ideas for shows/episodes… Seriously, can I do that?
Devin @7ShadesofDevin
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🗃 From the Desk of Tink ✏️
We’re working with a podcast from The Leakey Foundation, Discovering Us, where you’ll hear the stories behind some of the most important human origins discoveries of the past 50 years. Narrated by Ashley Judd, this short series celebrates science with 12 exciting tales about the search for what it means to be human, from the sisterhood of bonobos to a remote cave on the island of Flores where researchers uncovered unusual fossils, to Gibraltar, where researchers think the very last surviving population of Neanderthals lived and died. It’s tiny bursts of ear candy for you curious science nerds out there.
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