Whether it’s a trifling text message, an abrupt email, a curt message on Slack, or a Dear John letter, there is something about communication through words that leaves us lacking – lacking context, tone, or feeling – and maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be – antiseptic and quick, the written word slaps our brains differently than audio.
This is why a face-to-face meeting over coffee, hearing our name across a crowded space, or a speech in a lecture hall, are fundamentally humanistic experiences in which communication is at the forefront – the human brain attends to sound in an entirely different way than written language, this is because we’ve been speaking to one another for much longer than we’ve been writing and reading.
The earliest records of writing can be traced back about 5,000 years, whereas we’ve been using speech to communicate since the very beginning of the species, anywhere from 50,000 years to a million plus. We are listening creatures, because listening is learning. It’s one of the earliest ways we connect sensorily with our world.
So when it comes to podcasts, this new fangled way we distribute content, we’re actually treading a communications pathway that’s been laid down by our earliest ancestors, one in which we are primed to pay attention and learn from.
Podcaster, Producer, Musician, Entrepeneur
Ryan Estes is a content marketing renaissance man – he’s Founder of the podcast booking agency, KitCaster, co-founder of the podcast platform Wildcast, host of The TalkLaunch podcast, and that’s just stuff he does on Tuesday. Ryan’s started more businesses than most people have fingers and we are grateful he found time to break away from all that to join us here on Sounds Like Marketing to talk about his experiences with the power of interview podcasts.
Connecting Podcasts To Analytics And Business Results
Our conversation with Ryan starts by tracing his path from musician to marketing. Like many of us musicians who start families, he made the transition from live musician into marketing because these new responsibilities did not match up with the income and lifestyle of a working musician. “My first podcast was just a replacement for music, with fellow musicians talking s**t about music.” Flash forward to The Denver Business Podcast,and then on to Talk Launch. Things were moving in a specific direction, but it wasn’t until he met Brandy Whelan that things really began to click. They threw around a few ideas to start KitCaster, and four months before Covid launched the platform. Podcasting was really the only medium being created, and they’ve grown to a team of 20 helping their clients find podcast opportunities.
The success Ryan has had with his own podcasts, as well as the successful podcasts he helps get his client booked on, all have a common denominator – longevity. As we discuss why some podcasts last and some don’t, Ryan notes,” I don’t think they know how much work goes into it – you have to show up and record, you have to listen to yourself, you have to edit, publish, promote, build an audience, and deal with indifference. If we’re talking specific about marketers, particularly performance marketers – you can’t quantify what happens on a podcast – the way you measure engagement, it can be hard to pin those analytics down.”
Further complicating the issue of measurement is the unfortunate reality that podcast analytics are frequently sparse and un-anchored to other metrics, leaving them floating on their own and often unquantifiable. “After the podcast is recorded, the results should be self-evident,” Ryan says. “New clients, raised money, it doesn’t happen every single time, but sometimes you hit a home run and you want to maximize the chances of that happening.”
The interview goes on to cover the future of interview podcasting, which Ryan says does NOT include AI, as well as some hits and misses, the power of good intentions, how to avoid booking psychos and the three key ingredients for a successful podcast.
References & Resources
Hot take – https://www.npr.org/transcripts/812934447
https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/
https://kitcaster.com/
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