Welcome to uploading the podcast, where we take you behind the wheel with the world's best creators, marketers, and professionals who have cracked the code on how to profit through content. You'll learn the ins and outs of content, strategy, creation, production, distribution, growth, platforms, tools, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to join Castmagic, the all in one content workspace for professionals. We'll be sending out tips from our shows in our weekly newsletter, and we've also got a slack community of over a thousand creators, so make sure to drop in and say hello. And now get ready for the show.

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.

So for someone who's thinking about either starting a podcast or they're trying to decide what topic to focus on, how do you guys see the evolution of niches, and how does that play in the podcasting world? Are all audiences created the same? Is there different value in different niches. How do you guys think about that?

Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely different value in different niches, especially on the brand side. What I think we're seeing a lot of right now is that there's a lot of shows that have a really large audience, but with a large audience, just innately comes a more disengaged audience. And then on the other side of the coin, we're seeing shows with a much smaller audience, but they're very engaged. They follow the creators or the talent or the host, whatever word you want to use on multiple social channels. They hold a lot of influence over their audience. So when working with brands, there's a higher level of conversion. They're really believing in this person and there's much more of kind of like a parasocial relationship.

And so what I think brands are struggling with right now is do we want to go for reach? Do we want to reach a larger pool of people who might not be a good fit for our product or service, but we have very sexy numbers in terms of the reach that we're getting? Or do we want to focus on trust and conversion and make bets and work with sort of these smaller creators, knowing that the outcome and how far people down the funnel are going to go is actually probably much higher? So I think when it comes to starting a new show, it's much harder to have a very broad audience. The other thing that I will say is that no show should have a single audience that they're trying to reach. You should have three kind of audiences or personas that you're thinking about. So you have the core audience, which should be the audience that you want all of your content to resonate with. You could think about it as like the center of a circle, the secondary circle around that is your secondary audience, which has some overlap with the core, but might be straying a little bit further, might expand a little bit on what your core is, and then you have kind of what we like to call the transformational audience. So these are people that are not even in the third circle. They're just kind of hovering around the other two circles. And those are folks where if you can serve the core and the secondary and bring those transformational people into those inner circles, that's really where you're going to see explosive growth.

So not only thinking about audiences as one person, but thinking about it as many people and trying to serve and always iterating on that, I think is going to be a really good way to continue with growth. And this translates well for shows that want to be a little bit more broad, and it translates really well for shows that want to be super niche. I mean, I think I get a little scared by people that are like, I'm trying to come up with an example. Maybe they're like, in the lawn care industry and they want to start a podcast about the history of having manicured lawns or whatever and use it as like a marketing play for their business. Is that going to have a million downloads a month? Absolutely not. But it doesn't mean that it's not valuable for them or valuable for the business or a way to get clients. So with the way that audiences are growing in general, in the medium, there is a way to grow no matter what size you are, you just have to be really intentional and really figure out how is the audience that you're reaching different than who you're reaching, and how are you going to sort of hold those two things as truths and continue forward while also expanding on those.

Yeah, and sometimes some of those niche audiences can cross the chasm into the mainstream if a huge trend takes over. For example, SMB has been really hot on Twitter and the SMB sector has blown up, whereas like three years ago it was all like, nah, SMB, not like SaaS is the so, but now sort of like, there's a turnaround in the market and the economy and the broader sector that SMBs are really profitable. And so I think it's important for people to know, too, that you don't necessarily want to start something to catch on a trend. Just be early to what you really know and what you're an expert on, and just stay faithful, that it could catch on and then you're perfectly positioned. So I'm curious, based on you're mentioning growth, et cetera, and so some podcasts know, they know that they're not going to get to a million downloads. But there are other metrics that aren't just downloads that define success. So how else do you guys look at success outside of, say, download numbers? And what are some of the benefits that people might be able to look for so they don't get discouraged of like, okay, well, I don't have a million downloads, podcasts. This isn't going to work.

Yeah, absolutely. So my own sort of personal crusade, you could say, is that downloads are not people. That's the most simple way to put it. The downloads that you're seeing does not mean that someone is actually listening to the episode. And that's a very important distinction. If we think about the amount of players, the technology, the way that every player counts downloads sort of differently. There are industry standards of what's counted and what's not. I think it's really important to not look at your download number as a source of truth and as a success metric.

It's the best reach metric that podcasters have, but it shouldn't be the primary focus. So I always want to say that, that downloads do not equal people. It's very important. Success looks different to everyone. I think it really comes down to the core reason or reasons why you've started the show. I think what's great now, and sort of what we're seeing that's changed over time, is that creators have a lot more control in how they monetize their show. So the dependency on ad revenue or revenue shares through sort of traditional advertising buys is no longer the only way that creators can make money by having a podcast. So we think about companies like Supercast, which maybe you've heard of, that allows direct audience to create our monetization.

We have private memberships, of course. People are selling courses and digital products and all these other things. You have a lot more options and choices. On the monetization side, I think one of the challenges that goes along with monetization and with reach or with downloads is that many folks expect when they start a show that it's just going to be explosive and they're going to make a ton of money, and the downloads are going to be insane and their audience is going to be massive. And podcasting really is a slow burn. It's not like the TikToks and the YouTubes of the world. And if you are at a place where you want to sort of capture the trends and the virality of the Internet, like podcasting is probably not going to be the best medium for you to do that. And so those are two things that I also like to call out.

But on the editorial side, something that we look at a lot is like average consumption rates for episodes. We look at average listen time. This tells you a lot about where your audience is dropping off, what they want more from you, what they want less, those types of things. We also are looking at deliveries, which is like a little bit different of a metric than downloads. It's sort of like how many episodes are automatically going on your devices, which has changed a lot with sort of the new Apple updates and those types of things. But I think the most important thing is when you're starting, figure out what success means to you and know that's going to change as your journey continues. It's never going to look the same as it was when you started. And if your numbers don't look how you want them to look now, that's okay.

They may not ever look like that. And that's also okay. It's figuring out how you want to use those numbers to give you the success that you want, even if it looks different.

Yeah. And it can also be an educational source. It's just an easier way with less friction, to make content that can feed other channels, et cetera. I know that's the way we're leveraging, uploading. We get so many questions from cast magic in terms of b two B content. So we might as well speak with the experts and relay that. So I want to speak about Hopspot and the creator network. So creator networks are something fairly new, super interesting, great way for creators to grow their audiences and get exposed to more data that they couldn't get by themselves.

And we can expand into that. But first I want to talk about how this whole initiative started within know. I know HubSpot has always been big with content. They did it with blog really early in the day. So why podcasting and how did that decision sort of came about in terms of the inception of the program?

Yeah, absolutely. So something that I think, well, a couple of things folks may not know about HubSpot is we've actually had our own HubSpot podcast for a long time. I think probably for like ten years now. We have regional shows that are done in different languages because our market is very global focused and a lot of these shows are still going on. So there's kind of always been a very quiet podcast arm as a content play, especially like early in the industry. So that's kind of always been going on in the background. But I think folks don't realize we have an entire media team of 100 plus people at HubSpot that are all focused on all of our media properties, meaning all of our newsletters, our blog properties, our podcasts. We have owned original content and licensed content, YouTube channels.

We have a YouTube network. We have an entire team of people that are kind of functioning as a media company within HubSpot as a whole. And a lot of this was of course built on the acquisition of the hustle, which is what brought my first million to us. And with that acquisition and with having my first million, the conversation was, well, we should start a network, why should we not start a network? And at the time we were very early in identifying podcasting as a medium but also really wanting to invest and kind of lead the way in the b two B creator space, which, of course, led to us starting the network. We also had an accelerator creator program. We were one of the first, if not the first, business network to offer that. Creators have always been really important and kind of a part of the fold and podcasting as well. So as the business has grown and as the media company as a whole, or the media function has grown, we've just kind of continued to expand the way that we work with creators, but also thinking about it in a different way.

Right. So when we think about traditional networks, many of them are built on revenue, ad shares. So the network has an ad sales team that goes out and pitches your show and brings in advertisers for you to work with and takes a cut of that, and you're kind of at the liberty of whatever they decide is a good fit and you're really not in the driver's seat for many decisions of your show. And when we think about the network that we've built, it's very creator first. It's very education and community focused. We don't do participate in those sort of ad sales and revenue shares. So we really want to focus on educating and helping our shows grow in a really holistic way and also having a community. And this is easier because we have a niche network, right? We're all business shows.

Everyone's in a different lane, but the lanes are next to each other. And so we have people that have expertise in kind of every area of business. And most of the people that are in the network are business owners themselves, either their podcast business or another business. We have executives, we have ceos, we have all sorts of different people in there. And so that's what's really special about it, I think, is we've found a way to build it that is not primarily to benefit us, although it is, it's also really strongly built to benefit the people that are in the actual community itself.

Carly, could you talk a little bit about, just know, maybe some of our listeners who are getting their shows off the ground, maybe they haven't joined a network like Ramon and I are lucky enough with our other podcast, DTC pod, to be part of the HubSpot podcast network. But for a show that's like getting off the ground, they're seeing some early success as a creator. What's the benefit of joining a network? How do these networks work for shows? What's the value prop to the creators? And then what? Right. Then how do things function and how do things happen on a more day to day basis once you're part of a network?

Yeah, absolutely. So for anyone that's considering joining a network, I think having intentionality behind it is really important. So really sitting down and thinking about, okay, what do I not have the capacity to do for my podcast or for my podcast business that I know would make a difference? That should be number one. Number two, what are some initiatives or marketing plays or strategies that I have that are going on that are kind of working, kind of not working and could use the help of a team to optimize and make these work for me? And number three, what do I want help with? What would I want to offload and be fine giving someone else and having them take full ownership of doing on my behalf. Right. And so once you kind of have those three big pillars, then that's going to help you filter out networks. So if you have a big pool of networks, you say, this is what I need them to have the capacity to do. I need them to be experts in this area so that I can optimize these.

And this is what I want taken off my plate, then you have a much smaller pool. Right. What I think is after being on the network side, on the seller side, I wish that more creators came to calls with networks and could strongly share their value proposition and what would make them a great fit for the network, what they can bring to the network so that it's not so one sided. It should be a partnership of here's what the network is giving me and here's what I'm giving back to the network. And I think that's one of the biggest things that creators miss out on. And they get a really sexy sales pitch from a network who's going to do Xxx and X and they get in there and it's not what they were promised, nothing's happening. They have no idea what's going on. They've gone dark.

It's not the experience that they want. And so being able to advocate for yourself and knowing what you're bringing to the table, what they're bringing to the table and what that's actually going to look like is very important from a deal perspective. There's many different types of deals, some networks, and this is something to be really wary of too, especially for a lot of larger networks. You need to think about if you want to maintain ownership of your content, if you want to own the ip, if you want a license deal, if you're okay with working in a network where if you leave, you can't take any of the content that they produced on your behalf. There's many different legal things that are very important to understand what it would mean should you decide to leave and what the ownership rights are and all of these different types of things. I know a lot of people that have been burned by networks because of this, and they lose two, three, four years of their show because they left their deal early and they maintained the rights. And now all of this amazing content is gone. So that's something to be wary about and always to make sure that you're informed about what's going on and work with an attorney and those types of things.

And that's not like a very sexy part of the answer, but it's very important because there's no kind of standard for how networks are doing that as a whole. And the other thing I think that's important is when we think about creator networks, like, think about the network effect, right? So if you're trying to monetize your podcast without doing revenue sales, if that's not a part of your network, and you're really looking to build a private membership, and you see a network where six out of ten of the shows, those folks have very successful private networks or private memberships, that's a network you should be interested in, because you can learn from the people that are in there, and in return, you can give them something back. So, thinking about how to leverage not only the network as the network, but the actual people that are participating in the network and what they're bringing to the table and what that looks like, and also what you're bringing to the table. So, looking very closely at the talent that's in the network, the shows that are in the network, figuring out what you can learn to learn from them, and also what you can bring to the table. Super important.

What do you guys look for when vetting out or seeking potential shows? You're not just investing in the show, you're investing in the host as well. So what do you guys look for within the components of the show, and then the components of what makes a person be a good fit to join the Hopspot podcast network?

Yeah, great question. So we take a really sort of holistic approach, so we don't have barriers to entry in terms of numbers. Like we don't say, oh, this person has, you have to fit between this amount of downloads and this amount of downloads. We really have shows of kind of every shape and size. What's really important to us, more than reach. I think I guess you could say reach is important, but believing in the editorial angles and the talent of the host is very important, especially in the business space. You want to work with someone who's giving legitimate advice, has diverse viewpoints, has their own experience, and is aligned with what we call our heart values here at HubSpot. So that's really important part of it.

We also look at the diversity of guests that they bring on. Are they bringing on diverse voices? We look at production stuff. Is their production value really high? What kind of social channels do they have? Are they like a thought leader in their industry, those different types of things? And then we sit down and kind of look at all the different components and score them based on that. We also think about shows in terms of what the priority for the business is. And I think this is a way that makes us a little different, maybe, than some networks is. We have strategic priorities as a business, and of course, because we are advertisers, we're always interested in reaching audiences that could benefit from our products. So if we have a big sales push coming out, which we did last year, we really wanted to get more like sales leaders in the mix. So some of it is dependent on sort of the business and how we want to expand the business's audiences sort of as a whole.

But also the qualitative and quantitative aspects of shows are really important. The one thing I will say during my time looking for shows is please invest in podcast SEO. I think some people call it PsO, which is really funny. I really like that term. But discoverability is really hard. And if I'm looking for a sales leadership show, and when I search sales leadership podcast on Google and your show doesn't come up, how is your audience going to find you? How are advertising? How is anyone going to find you? So think about that. Think about what networks and advertisers and your audience would search for and make sure that you're optimizing for that, because I'm sure there's many shows that I would love to listen to, but I can't find them. So think about your digital footprint.

Yeah, that reminds me of the easy and lazy name of DTC pod. If you just look up DTC podcast, just make the title what people would Google and then you will be number one on the results. But as we approach towards the end, I definitely want to touch on discover. Wait, what was the word? Geez, I just blanked. Discover.

Discoverability.

Okay, discoverability. That's my spanish kicking in in my subconscious saying, don't make up a word. So discoverability, rss and so podcasts are rss. And so there is this kind of blend happening now between YouTube shows being ran as like podcasts. So speaking of SEO, there's a bunch of SEO benefits from YouTube. People are reverse engineering the show to even start based on the SEO volume from YouTube. So where do you see this going? How are you thinking about YouTube SEO? You can chip away years and years at a podcast and the RSS feed is, there's no algo to boost you. And so people are coming to this realization.

How are you thinking about YouTube as sort of like podcast YouTube first shows?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's really interesting and people ask me about this all the time and I think it's kind of become like very divisive thing to talk about in the industry. Personally, I think YouTube is amazing for so many reasons. I think you have so much freedom to do a lot of testing. You can test thumbnails, you can test titles, you can really go on the back of YouTube studio and see what terms people are searching for that are coming to your videos. That is mind blowing compared to what we get on the RSS, which is literally nothing. So the power of YouTube is certainly amazing. Do I think that everyone should upload their podcast to YouTube? Personally, I'm going to say no.

And what I think it comes down to is that your audience isn't necessarily on every channel. And if there's not an audience on YouTube for what you have going on with your content, because a lot of people are doing it, doesn't mean you should do it. Right. And so that's kind of one of the big things. The big viewpoints that I have on, like after working with youtubers, YouTube native creators have such high production value in their setups that it makes, if you're going to compete with people that are professional youtubers, the barrier to entry is extremely, extremely, extremely high. So it's much easier to build an audio audience and maybe try to convert some of that audience over to YouTube once you have kind of more of an infrastructure going on that can support that really high production value. So you can kind of compete with other people that are only investing in YouTube. YouTube also has a direct feedback, you can get direct feedback and you have more of a parasocial relationship with your audience.

Right? Like they're seeing you, they're seeing your set, they're seeing your mannerisms. It's kind of taking that one step further, but that can also be distracting. I think in some ways opening up the floodgates to direct comments and feedback on the content that you're making. But I think ultimately there's lower lift, lower barriers of entry to sort of explore what video could look for you. So TikTok like YouTube shorts and having a clips channel for your podcast with CTAs to move over to your audio show I think are a good way to kind of like dip your toe in the water with video and see kind of what's going on. I do think that SEO and discoverability on the RSS side will hopefully continue to become better over time. And I think with sort of the way that Google search is changing and kind of the new era of search and just asks for increased discoverability for these platforms, that it will happen. I think it's a little bit slower and because YouTube is so dependent on search, it's always kind of just been a part of the platform in a really easy way.

And so I'm hoping that these players on the audio side will continue to invest in tools and just increased insights. But long story short, my answer is, is YouTube right for you? Yes. No, maybe. Depends what your goals are. Depends about your content, depends about your audience.

Yeah. And I think an easy way to even get started with YouTube, and this is something we even did for uploading, was you can just start by syncing up your RSS feed to publish to YouTube podcasts. So at least you're covered on that side. You've got some of the discoverability, and then when you've got the bandwidth, you know what content's hitting and you've got the kind of operations in place to pursue a video strategy, then you can kind of go to YouTube. But Carly, I think you're spot on. Sometimes one of the most overwhelming parts of creating content is just nailing the operations to be able to create content that's purpose built for all the different platforms in the way they need to be. So I think that's probably a really good middle ground. And I also love what you were saying about SEO and podcasts.

One thing that Ramon and I have been doing a lot of has been using a tool like castmagic and taking the content that we're generating from our own episodes and actually creating it, publishing it to our own website. So we're outranking even the hosting providers that just have, they don't have really complex show notes and they don't have the full transcript or anything like that. So we're kind of using that as a medium term arbitrage to be able to put out more of our own content so we'll be able to beat them to our own SEO.

Yeah, no, I love that. And definitely transcripts and really detailed show notes are great for SEO. Like, investing in having a really good podcast website and being able to dominate search is great. I love that. And of course, it makes me so happy that you all use your own tool because I feel like most people that are founders don't use their own tool. So I'm glad that you're testing and iterating and using that as a part of your strategy. It makes me happy.

Yeah. And now we've got a whole new podcast to use it on, too. Carly, as we wrap up here, just have a few lightning questions for you. So wanted to get your thoughts on these. So first one is, could you name a creator that you really admire and why you admire them, and it can't be us.

Okay, my gut reaction is Brittany Broski. Do either of you know who Brittany Broski is? She's kind of a she. Her initial rise to fame, I'll keep this short, was she became famous or became sort of on the scene for the Kombucha girl meme? Do you know what that is? Am I exposing myself as Gen Z here?

Please.

So, in the early days of TikTok, she made this video of her reacting to taking a sip of Kombucha and then just kind of went viral during the early TikTok days. And in general, she's continued to build her brand. And what I admire the most about her is I think it's extremely difficult to be authentic online. She is a youtuber. She also has a podcast and also has a very big TikTok following. And she is one of the few people that, as she has grown and sort of risen in fame really quickly, is still exactly the same person as she was in that meme video and just fully embodies and shows up as herself every single time and is like, in a way that's kind of jarring, but is also so heartwarming because you just know it's truly her and who she is. And she talks about that a lot, how being really authentic online is important. And I think it's really commendable, especially being a woman on the Internet.

It's very hard. So I really just love her and love kind of what she has going on. So that's my answer. I think her YouTube is the Broski report, and her podcast is called that as well, if anyone wants to listen. But she's great.

Love that. We'll check it out. Next one is, I know this one might be a tough one for you because you have so many shows, but why don't you name a show in your HubSpot podcast network that you guys are really excited about? Maybe they just joined. And what gets you excited about their show?

Oh, great question. So hard because we've had a lot of people join recently. I want to give a shout out to the show called mistakes that made me. It's a brand new show she just started in January, and it focuses primarily on mistakes that business owners have made and what that has meant and how that they've turned that into success. And she's really wonderful. The conversations are great, really authentic conversations. And I also love that for her sort of full time job, she's an email copy strategist, which I feel like is a very niche job and is also very interesting. So really excited about her show.

And then we also just signed, just signed last year, talking too loud, which is a Wistia podcast, which is just hilarious. Chris Savage is the host, and it's very funny, very irrelevant. Just great conversations with folks in the C suite that are not your typical interview show.

Perfect.

And the last one I got for you is, if there's one content, strategy or medium that really excites you in 2024, what is it and why?

Yeah, great question for a platform. I'm going to say LinkedIn. LinkedIn is going to be the future of b to B. I mean, it's already kind of coming there, but that's going to be huge. That's what I would say. I'm excited about in terms of platforms for creators, is LinkedIn for sure, for trends. I think social selling is getting really big, and it's very interesting. Like we're having the old early 2000s, like QVC live tv is coming back on TikTok with TikTok Shop.

And I think it's such an interesting investment for TikTok as a platform, and I'm really excited to see kind of what that means for creators and how sort of the new era of social selling sort of continues to grow in 2024.

I love that.

Ramon, we may have to do a feed swap with our DTC pod because we go all the way in depth on TikTok shop and all these ideas on that podcast. But anyway, Carly, I want to thank you for coming on the show. For our listeners who are tuning in, where can they connect with you and learn more about the HubSpot podcast network or anything that you guys are working on.

Yeah. So if you want to learn about the network, you can go to the website HubSpot.com slash podcast network. If you want to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn. My at name is Carly C. Baker. Pretty easy. We'll link it down below in case you can't find me, but feel free to hit my dms if you have any questions. And thank you both for having me on.

It's been real fun.

Thank you for coming on.