🔬Indie Marketing Case Study: This Is Propaganda
Learn how to land killer promo swaps regardless of your numbers
Hi hello, Wil back with another edition of our Indie Series here at PMM! Today I’m going to talk about the marketing campaign I recently ran for This Is Propaganda. You might remember them from another recent edition on our deep listening practice, and I’m back to hype them up even more. This campaign was such a delight, and there’s so many great takeaways from how it unfolded.
⬇️Starting point
When This Is Propaganda came to us at Tink, they had a full first season released. Beautifully written, researched, edited, sound designed, and scored — but not nearly the traction they deserved. And, notably, their show was without any live promo swaps. That’s going to be the focus of this edition: how we went about landing promo swaps for this podcast.
Promo swaps are the kind of promotion you hear in a podcast that go something like, “If you like our podcast, you’ll like this other podcast. Here’s the trailer.” Sometimes they’ll just have a short clip of audio swapped without introduction, too.
When setting up promo swaps, many podcasts like to focus on the numbers, namely impressions. Impressions are more or less how many times a promotion is heard based on listens tracked in your podcast hosting service. Some podcast hosts allow dynamically-inserted ads based on these numbers, and some don’t, but that’s a conversation for another day.
Many of our clients at Tink will trade impressions anywhere from 20k - 300k. Promo swaps will stay up on the podcast until that number of agreed-upon impressions has been hit. That doesn’t always happen at the same time; a promo swap for Podcast Friend A might hit 20k in a week, while it might take Podcast Friend B a month to hit 20k impressions.
Today, let’s focus on how to land promo swaps when you’re a small independent podcast looking to grow, but without the hefty numbers a lot of promo trade partners want to see. Too many podcasters think they can’t land promo swaps without giving big numbers, and that just is not the case. Don’t get in your own way! And everything we’re discussing here can also be applied to podcasts that haven’t even launched yet — yes, you should be setting up promo swaps before you even go live.
🌟Know what makes your podcast special
Going into this campaign, I knew immediately what our biggest asset would be: This Is Propaganda is really good. It’s straight up just a high quality show. Coming from a background that has largely focused on fiction, This Is Propaganda sounds more like a high-concept audio drama to me than most deep-dive nonfiction podcasts, and I mean that as a very good thing. The creators, Malcolm Chricter and Josh Belhumeur, know what they’re talking about (just take a look at the references tab on their first episode site page) and they’re passionate.
Of course, everyone thinks their podcast is good, as they should. Our marketing campaign couldn’t just be “it’s good fr,” it had to have specific standout factors that made it different from every other podcast in its genre. We focused on the research, the timeliness of the topics, and of course, the sound design. When figuring out who I wanted to pitch the podcast to, I focused on podcasts with a similar keen execution of sound design, shows that I knew would immediately understand the amount of effort put into the podcast at first listen.
🏹Shoot your shot wisely
When pitching podcasts for promo swaps, don’t be scared to go for the gold and pitch podcasts you
think are way bigger than yours. Here’s my favorite unwritten rule about the podcast industry: people in podcasting are kind, generous, and genuinely excited about collaborating. Don’t ever think you’re going to get a bad name for sending an email saying, “Hey, I love your podcast! I’d love to do a promo swap.” People don’t get a bad name for paying sincere compliments. At worst, you’ll either get ignored, or you’ll eventually be told they only do swaps for X number of impressions that you can’t realistically deliver on.
That’s okay. There’s literally nothing wrong with that. If anything, you just have your foot in the door for collaboration later on when your show is bigger.
But be smart about it. Don’t include any preemptive apologies about your download numbers unless they’re being asked after — and if they are, just be transparent. But I actually like pitching promo swaps for smaller podcasts in a different way: timing.
Instead of focusing on numbers, I pitched promo swaps that would live on both feeds for two weeks. No worries about numbers, no tricky scheduling, no waiting and going back and forth to deliver numbers. Two weeks. Bing bang boom.
And it worked. Most podcasts didn’t really care about numbers at all.
Most podcasters think their size is going to drastically limit the podcasts they can work with, and I have yet to see that be true. You might not be able to land a chart-topping network podcast that gets hundreds of thousands of listens per episode. But you’d be shocked how many podcasters are willing to trade just because it’s fun, it’s nice, it’s mutually beneficial, and it’s free. By the time out campaign wrapped, This Is Propaganda had a full slate of promo swaps to drop for the foreseeable future.
💕Try some asymmetry
Realtalk, when I heard This Is Propaganda, I got a lil greedy myself because it’s so good — and so relevant to a podcast I was dropping imminently, The Deposition. This Is Propaganda is about how the history of propaganda and the history of marketing are just full on the same history. The Deposition is a full-cast dramatic reading of an unhinged, unbelievable, real Elon Musk deposition. The content isn’t identical, which is a good thing, but the vibes have a lot of overlap, which is what makes for the best promo swaps in my experience.
Both This Is Propaganda and The Deposition are indies, but The Deposition hadn’t even landed yet. I had absolutely no idea how many listens this thing would get. Remember when I said everything that applied for This Is Propaganda applies for podcasts that haven’t even dropped yet? I meant it — because I did it too.
Here’s how I pitched promo swaps for The Deposition, including This Is Propaganda. Instead of saying I’d run a promo swap on The Deposition for X amount of time, I said it would just live on the episode forever. In return, they could run our promo for however long felt fair. Being generous can work both ways!
Asymmetry in trades can be a huge benefit. At Tink, we often leverage a swap in which a huge podcast drops a promo for a smaller podcast, who in turn drops an entire episode of the bigger show’s podcast on their feed (this is called a feed drop). Feed drops have better conversion rates than promo swaps because they give your listener so much more to really sink their teeth into. They’re also prime real estate — most podcasters don’t want too many episodes of other peoples’ podcasts on their feeds — so they show a real commitment both to your trading partner and your audience.
⭐ More Magic:
Going to be at Podcast Movement next week? Go see some lovely Tink folks! I won’t be there, but plenty of my lovely colleagues will be there!
And go vote for Lauren to panel at SXSW!
And some VERY exciting announcements from the world of fiction:
Shelterwood: A Suburban Gothic has dropped! I have been waiting on this podcast with bated breath for years, and I’m absolutely feral about it being here. Fans of Skinamarink, I Saw the TV Glow, Limetown, and The Black Tapes, this is for you. Let’s get WEIRD AND SPOOKY!
Stormfire Productions has just announced their newest show: HAVANA SYNDROME: An Audio Drama. As soon as I saw the press release I thought, “Oh my god of course. It’s so obvious. It’s perfect.” This seems like something only Stormfire Productions could do, and something only they could pull off. Go check out Once Upon a Time in Havana, their audio documentary prequel, now!
🧩 From The Desk of Tink
Still going hard on Wordle? Love the NPR Sunday Puzzle? Listening hard to the Twenty Thousand Hertz mystery sound? I have something you’re gonna love, because I know you’re a puzzle lover like me, and I love The Puzzler with A. J. Jacobs! It’s a daily puzzle podcast with guests who try to solve each puzzle along with the listener. Puzzles range in style and format and difficulty, and they’re all available in bite-sized listens every single day. It’s so much fun.
Thank you for reading! Shreya returns next week with more tips and tricks for our indie darlings. ✨
—Wil 🦇