Does this describe you? You opened your
podcast dashboard this week, maybe as recently
as this morning or yesterday. You saw a number
and you either felt vaguely okay or
pretty terrible, and then you closed the tab and got on
with your day. See, that's not a podcast
strategy. That's reading your horoscopes.
And in this episode, I'm going to give you the playbook for putting
that data to good use and actually grow
your show and grow your brand.
Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights with me, Neil Verlio,
the founder of Podnos, a podcast agency
helping clients get better results from podcasting.
Here's something I want to make clear. Today we are going to be talking about
podcast listener analytics, and
I'm not going to be spending the next 10 to 15 minutes just
pontificating to you about how unimportant download numbers are,
how they're the worst metric to focus on, and all that
stuff. You've probably heard it a million times. Instead, what I'm going to
do is I'm going to give you a way of actually putting
those analytics to good use. Those download numbers
that are staring you in the face and are kind of the poison
chalice, if they're on the high side, it's great. It fuels
your ego. It makes you feel good. It also gives you something to report back
to the board or the CMO or whatever decision maker is in
your business. If that number is low, well,
it's the opposite end of the deal, isn't it? You get scrutinized,
questions are asked. Is this worth doing? What I
want to give you is a playbook where you can start a Monday
morning protocol in terms of what to look at in your
analytics, in what order, and the
most crucial part here, what decision each
number in that dashboard should be prompting you to
make. Here's the problem that most
B2B founders and their marketing teams have
around podcast analytics. They've got the dashboard
open, they've got the data, and they're doing absolutely
nothing with it. Certainly nothing useful.
We have all the data, but no idea what to do.
And it's not because they're lazy. It's because nobody ever
told them what the data is actually meant to be used for.
So let's fix that right now, starting with metric
one downloads. Okay, I know I just said that
I'm not going to stand on a soapbox about downloads here, and I'm not,
because downloads are useful for something. They do tell
you stuff. They're just not telling you what most people think
they're telling you, downloads don't measure
popularity, they measure reach. And reach
on its own means absolutely nothing unless you know
who's being reached. And here's the thing. If your episode
about fixing your sales deck got twice the plays
of your episode about company culture, then your
audience has a sales problem right now. So stop
diversifying. Go deeper into what's already
landing. Here's your Monday morning protocol move.
Stop comparing this week's episode to last week's episode.
That's just noise. Compare episode
topic to episode topic. Which of the topics are
pulling in more plays? That's your content brief. That's telling you
what you should be talking about more. That's your audience
literally telling you, hey, I like this stuff.
Do more of it. And in the only language available
to them, they're telling you what problems they're currently
faced with. Metric 2 episode completion
rate otherwise known as retention data. This is the one.
If you only track one metric on your show
going forward, make it this one. The
completion rate, which you can see in Apple podcasts, in the
Podcast Connect Dashboard, and in the Spotify for Creators
dashboard. That data tells you whether the right
people are sticking around. And what are you benchmarking for here?
Well, let me tell you, a completion rate consistently
below 40% means one of two things. Number one,
your content isn't relevant to them. Those people that are pressing play
are just, nah, it's not for me and they're stopping it.
Or two, your opening isn't making a strong enough
case for why they should be sticking around to hear more. Both of
those are fixable. It just means you've got to get a bit more intentional about
how you hook people in to your episodes and tell them up front
what they're going to get. Back to that intro episode that I published a couple
of weeks ago where I was saying to you, people don't want to hear 90
seconds of plinky plonky piano music. They want to know
exactly what problem you're going to fix for them, or even before
that, making them aware that the problem exists in the first place.
And they want to know exactly what the outcome from listening will be.
Will you help them fix it, or will you steer them towards a way of
doing so and make sure there's absolutely a clear
next step waiting for them at the end of the episode?
Because if there isn't, you're leaving money on the table.
Here's your Monday morning protocol move on this one.
Pull your last five episodes completion rate together and if
one is dramatically different from the rest
figure out what it was that was different about that
episode. And the answer is almost always to be found
in the first two minutes. Metric number three the
drop off points. Now this is one of the most underused
insights in podcasting data and it's sitting right there
in your dashboard again. Apple Podcasts,
podcastconnect.apple.com,
spotify for creators. Look at it. It's
completely ignored. They're also in YouTube. That is
the one thing YouTube is really good at. Drop off timestamps are not
a measure of failure. They're your script doctor. They're telling
you with precision to the second the
exact moment that your content stopped being relevant to the person
who should be most likely to buy from you. Maybe went off
topic. Maybe you started explaining something your audience
already knows and they felt a bit patronized. They went to
another episode somewhere else that was telling them a little bit more about what they
wanted to know at that point. Maybe it's where you put your CTA in and
it felt like a bit of a hard sell too early. The data
is pointing at something, but your job is to figure out
what. Here's your Monday morning protocol move on this
one. Screenshot your top three drop off points across
your most recent batch of episodes and and have a look. If there's a
pattern, is it the same segment of the show every single time?
Is it the same kind of content? If so, you found your
recurring problem. Get rid of it or fix it. And that
will fix the whole show's issue
metric four. Repeat Listeners and
this is your buying window signal. We talked about buying triggers on a couple of
episodes recently and that's kind of what this is about. And
most founders completely miss it. A first time
listener is curious. A repeat listener
is considering what you can do for them. They keep
coming back because something in your show is answering a question that
they're still lingering around. They haven't resolved it yet.
That's an open loop in their buying journey. And your podcast
is what they're using to try and close it. These are your
highest value listeners, full stop. Make
absolutely sure that your call to action is framed for
someone who already knows you, not for a complete stranger
because they're not a stranger anymore.
And here's your Monday morning protocol move on this point.
Look at your listener retention curve week on week. Is it
growing even slightly? That stickiness is worth more
than a spike in new downloads from, say, being featured in a
carousel on one of the podcast apps or somebody sharing
your episode's Link on a LinkedIn post. Most of
that doesn't convert for longer term. So there we have it. That's the
four metrics, the four decisions that you can be taking
around your podcast. None of them require a spreadsheet, none of
them require a data analyst, and all of them can be acted
upon. Before your next episode even goes live
Monday morning, stick an hour in your diary to go through all this stuff.
Downloads compare topic to topic, not week to week.
Completion rate, your audience fit, test drop off
points, your script rewrite, repeat
listeners, your buying window and triggers speak
to them like they're almost ready to buy. Because they probably
are. Each
episode I share questions from founders running their own B2B podcast.
You can send yours to Neal. That's N E a l@podnos.co.uk
p o-k n o
w s.co.uk.
this week's comes from Rachel, who's head of growth at a
professional services firm. Rachel has recorded six
episodes and hasn't published a single one. I see where this is
going, she asks Neil. I keep going back and finding things to
improve on my yet to be published episodes. How do I
know when an episode is actually ready to publish? I'm going to be
honest with you, Rachel. You're not tweaking here, you're hiding. And I say
that with complete understanding, because almost every founder I've worked with has had
a version of this conversation with me at some point. Here's the
truth for you. The six episodes sitting on your hard drive
are converting. Absolutely nobody, not one warm prospect, has heard
them or been nudged closer to making a decision to work with you
or booked a call. Meanwhile, the episode that has
published imperfectly next week and then
lands in the ears of one person who maybe needed to
hear it that's already doing more for your business than anything
you've recorded so far. So you need to meet
the imaginary version with the real version, because there is no
ready, there's only published and unpublished.
And unpublished is just really an expensive hobby that
you're kind of justifying with the brand
attachment. So what I would say is pick the
strongest episode, accept that it won't be perfect, and just publish
it no matter what happens. The second episode would be better, because by
the time you hear the first episode with the ears of a listener rather than
creator, you're going to pick up on things you can improve, and the sixth one
will be even better still. But none of that improvement
happens while they're sitting on your hard drive being quietly
tweaked into the point of irrelevance. Another
tip for you it might be time to hire an external editor
to be the critic on this and actually tweak it
in the way that helps your business doesn't stay anchored in your
ego. Hope that helps. Rachel
Time for this week's quick tip for B2B founders stop writing your
show notes as a summary of the episode. Nobody who
hasn't listened yet cares what you covered.
Your show notes are a landing page for the person who found you through
search, and they haven't pressed play yet, but they're trying to figure out whether they
want to write the notes for that person. Write for
search intent, not for listener resources. By
all means, stick the listener resources in there, because it then gives them an idea
that it's worth them listening to. Then have the outcome at
the end, but don't write it like they've already
listened. And here's something that's worth knowing if your website SEO is
weak, your Apple Podcasts episode page can actually
outrank your own site for the same keywords. Which
means your show notes might be the very first thing a warm
prospect ever reads from you. So treat them accordingly.
If this episode's been useful, I've put together the Founder
Podcast Playbook as a downloadable resource.
You can go and get that. It talks you through everything we've mentioned,
covering all four metrics that we talked about today and with the
Monday morning move for each one laid out so so you can act on
it straight away next week. To grab it, go to
podnos.co.uk Founder
Podcast Playbook. That's podnos.co.uk
founder podcast playbook
and the link's also in the episode description, as you would expect. And
if you want to go a little bit further and figure out
whether your show is actually doing a useful job
for your business right now, that's what the Podnos
Podcast Growth Diagnostic is for.
It's a single session designed to answer
exactly those questions. Also in the episode description.
Until next time, best of luck continuing to publish
your B2B podcast.