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Welcome to today's episode of uploading and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Carly Baker, who is the listener acquisition manager on the audience development for podcast side of things at HubSpot. She's really involved in the HubSpot podcast network and helping and just overseeing so many different creators. Launch podcasts, grow podcasts, acquire listeners. Carly has experience working with one of the biggest podcast networks and access to a bunch of the best industry experts. So we're really excited to chat with Carly. Carly, if there's anything I missed in that intro, I'd love for you to kind of hit on it, but why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and then we can jump into the conversation in terms of what it takes to grow and acquire listeners at the podcast level.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be on. I think you pretty much hit everything and my background and sort of what led me to the industry is, I'm finding out is similar to many folks, but I come from the audio industry on the music side. I went to music school and have just been in sort of the music creator sphere for a very long time as a freelancer myself and went on to study music business and somehow all paths led to podcasting. And yeah, I've been in the industry for a couple of years now and have had a really great opportunity to be a part of sort of the entirety of the podcast lifecycle and creator Lifecycle at HubSpot as it's been developed and have had many different roles and just had a chance to kind of soak in and learn from so many people both in network and out of network, that have really sort of crafted a lot of my holistic approach to how I think about creators and brands and just leveraging the power of podcasting.

Yeah. And today one thing we're really excited about is I feel like in the podcast space, everything in the content space, in general, everything's happening so fast. There's always changes. One day one thing's working, the next day everyone's doing it, and it's not performing as well. So one of the things I really want to focus on this conversation is now that we're into 2024, you've seen kind of what's going on in the landscape. I'd love for you to kind of talk about what are you seeing? What is it in podcasting, especially this year, that is really working on the acquisition side of things?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's many things, there's many levers, and I think actually sort of more levers than ever that folks can pull for growth. What I'm loving seeing now is just larger focus in general on partnership based growth. So whether it's partnering with brands, whether it's partnering with other creators, whether it's having sort of more of a holistic, comarketing approach to shows that have guests, all of these levers are really just rooted in less growth being one sided, or depending on other parties to push you forward and betting and depending more on yourself and leveraging others to help you grow. So that's definitely a huge sort of increase that we're seeing in the industry as a whole, which I think just sort of mirrors now. The fact that it seems like every single brand has a creator program now just the world in general is really feeling the power and the influence that creators have and are really diving in. And so for folks that are looking to break into the industry, while there are more podcasts than ever, there's also more listeners than ever. And so the pools that were previously available to us have just expanded so much more.

And that's allowing the sort of barrier to entry and the amount of niches and specialized folks just an easier path forward in terms of starting and growing their audience in a way that's just much easier.

I think the one thing that you just mentioned was the term niche, right? And one thing that Ramon and I talk about a lot is that not all podcasts are necessarily created equal. When you get into niches, you can go really deep and you can maintain an audience that is into a very specific topic, and that's inherently very difficult than just going super broad and talking about everything, right?

Yeah.