About the Episode

‍Stephanie is the Podcast Marketing and Audience Development Specialist for Impact Theory — a podcast hosted by Tom Bilyue that currently has 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube — and the Marketing Advisor for Great Pods.

Before working on Impact Theory she was the: Marketing Director for Innovations 4 Health, President and Founder of a social media marketing agency called Dimont Media, and VP of Marketing and Audience Development for the podcast network CurtCo Media.

In this episode, Stephanie Arakelian shares her insights on podcast marketing and audience development, drawing from her experience of over 5 years in the podcast industry. From effective content repurposing to creating a podcast that converts, Stephanie breaks down key strategies for achieving success in the evolving podcast landscape.

Today, we'll cover:
- The contrast between YouTube and audio podcasts and how to cater to each audience
- The importance of community building and focusing on one platform at a time
- How to effectively repurpose old content using AI for business growth
- The importance of understanding your "why" when creating content

2 Ideas from the Podcast

Idea #1: Writing B2B & B2C are Virtually Identical.

Neville’s work started with House Of Rave, a B2C brand selling LED products of all kinds to party-goers and planners. At some point, he worked with AppSumo’s email marketing strategy; and he realized that the process of writing the emails isn’t all that different.

Mainly because at the end of the day, you’re not selling to a corporate entity; you’re selling to an individual. Someone who eats, sleeps, and drinks the same way you do.

Someone who makes decisions based on their necessities or desires. As such, you need to figure out what makes the possible client tick. Why would they buy your product? Do they want a tool for pleasure or do they want something that fulfills a need?

You could try to sell a pen to someone, but if everyone you’re selling to already has a pen; then you’ll have a hard time selling it.

On the other hand, if you understand that those you’re reaching out to want a pen that writes smoothly on a specific type of paper; and you know your pen does, you’ll have a much easier time selling it to them using this proposition.

Play Segment (04:49-08:54)

Idea #2: Using AI as a tool to help you grow

Neville’s been working on an idea for a while trying to figure out how to use AI most effectively.

He’s boiled it down to three distinct levels where AI is most to least useful:

1. Low-level Writing: Repeatable pieces of text, like confirmation emails, or other sorts of templates that anyone can do. AI is great for these sorts of things.
2. Mid-level Writing: This is where Castmagic shines. The level of text where AI can act as a companion in creating a first draft, giving headline ideas, creating timestamps for videos, etc. The use-case here is to save time getting from 0-1 so that the person working can take it from there.
3. High-level Writing: This is the point where AI is arguably not that useful anymore, and it has a difficult time trying to do it. It’s level for C-Suite people with access to everything in their company writing little snippets, taking all of their human experience and combining it into this thing of 280 characters max.

Keeping this in mind, you can offload some tasks to ChatGPT, send others through Castmagic with the media context it has, and then do some others by learning it yourself. And that’s how you can hope to grow to an extremely high level.

Play Segment (10:15-15:30)

1 Key Learning: The best 0 - 1 advertising framework

One of the longest-standing, best-working copywriting & advertising methods is the AIDA framework. If you haven’t heard of it, it stands for:

• Attention- This is your hook, where you grab people’s attention.
• Interest- This is the main benefit or differentiator of your product.
• Desire- These are extra benefits and features of the product that will make people want to buy your product.
• Action- Finally, the action is your CTA, what you want people to do.

Using this framework you make a psychologically sound way of advertising a product while saving time. And obviously, you don’t always need to start from the beginning, Neville gave us an example where he’s going all over the place, starting with the action.

• Attention: “There's a famous artist out of San Diego that makes these mugs out of porcelain. Each one takes like 8 hours to make. It's a collector's piece with about 1000 collectors in the world that collect these types of mugs.”
• Interest: “These mugs are made by an artist named Michael Bottero; he spends hours on each”
• Desire: “If you want to collect this ultra-rare collector pot, sometimes these mugs go for $100. Sometimes they go for $1,000. But you can get it for $200. They’re all made from the highest quality porcelain, etc…”
• Action: “Go to DrippyPots.com and buy this mug for only $200.”

Now, of course, the pitch isn’t perfect, but it’s not a real product, and Neville was able to make it up on the spot using his experience with the framework. On top of that, it’s meant to be a starting point to weave a proper argument to move forward.

And it’s not just useful in advertising and business negotiations. It’s helpful in almost any aspect of your life. From getting your kids to make the bed in the morning, to even getting people to join a D&D group.

Play Segment (30:10-33:22)

Episode Timestamps‍

01:31 Podcast marketing for startup and established networks
02:53 What Impact Theory is all about
04:11 The importance of treating YouTube audience separately from audio audience
07:33 How podcasts grew, analyzing podcast data, how to make a podcast stand out
10:56 Podcast analytics, how and what to measure, adjusting strategy based on data
13:18 Turning podcast listeners into fans, fans into evangelists
16:29 Strategies for placing ads on podcasts
19:45 Impact Theory’s podcast workflow, from guest selection to publishing
23:27 Repurposing podcast content — replays, mashups, special clips
27:11 Impact Theory University as a hub of growth mindset
29:20 Content strategy for Impact Theory podcast and university
31:14 Stephanie’s growth tips for emerging podcast creators

Understanding Different Podcast Audiences: "And then what was really interesting when we dove into the podcast side of it is breaking out their YouTube audience versus their audio audience, because they are separate. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to implement into the industry, is to show people, as podcasts are moving into the YouTube space, that you have to treat them separately because your audiences are not going to be the same. YouTube is still the number one most-played listening platform for podcasts, but it's a completely separate audience." — Stephanie Arakelian [00:04:10 - 00:04:37]

Maximizing Listener Retention: "So anything over about an hour and a half, hour 45. We will split into two episodes to make that a better listening experience so that people feel like they're getting, you know, a decent amount in the chung, enough information in there, and then when they come back, they get another part of the conversation, and that's good for listener retention, listen rates, ad sales, everything. And so we've seen a huge spike in our downloads because of that." — Stephanie Arakelian [00:17:59 → 00:18:23]

Why New Podcasters Should Rethink YouTube: "I think that confusing content creators right now, if you do, are not already familiar with YouTube, and this is an unpopular opinion, I say that new creators should not try and push their podcast on YouTube unless you have no expectations for it, because it's a whole other ballgame, right?" — Stephanie Arakelian [00:32:16 → 00:33:25]