Fred & Augustus

Executive Summary

The podcast host is an Irish banjo player and a four-time All-Ireland Champion, who is also part of a well-known and popular band from Ireland. Over the last 18-24 months our host has developed a strong interest in broadcasting, and this niche podcast series - which focuses on celebrating some of folk music’s most celebrated artists - was developed in alignment with both his musical background and broadcasting interests.

Fred & Augustus worked closely with the artists management team to develop a marketing strategy for the release of Series 1 of the podcast, paving the way for additional seasons and providing a strong SEO and content foundation from which to build from. 

Challenges

As a new project and brand we were starting from scratch. This meant assessing closely all of the tools which would be needed to promote the series. It was also determined that for season 1 we would not run ads promoting the podcast and that our approach would be entirely organic. With this in mind, and with episodes centered around taking the listener on a journey into exploring the minds, emotions, and experiences of these exciting guests we wanted to encourage a sense of discovery for the podcast by encouraging fans to dive deeper and deeper, episode to episode.

Solution

With a website presence for the podcast being key, we designed a landing page on the bands existing site which would act as a catch all for podcast news and episodic releases. We also implemented an email subscriber capture on this page to encourage fans to sign up for news specific to the podcast. Further, we implemented on page SEO including meta titles, meta descriptions, H1’s, H2’s and on-page keywords. 

With a functional landing page for the podcast in play, we moved onto planning the social media and email roll out. We determined that we would design and share quote graphics, testimonials and soundbites on the relevant platforms, as well as create a sizzler teaser video which would be shared to the artists YouTube channel. In planning dates for the rollout of these assets we were careful to balance content pillar messaging for the artist (who was also promoting a livestream at the same time).

With every episode welcoming a well known guest, each of whom were respected musicians with strong followings in their own right, we decided to create guest asset kits which they could share online. This would allow them to let their fans know about their specific podcast episode, encouraging them to ‘find this podcast wherever you listen to all great podcasts’.

Much like for socials, when addressing email marketing roll out we needed to look closely at scheduled email communications the artist had planned, with our goal being to both highlight the podcast as well as blend the information seamlessly with other planned messaging. We achieved this by sending a dedicated email announcing the podcast, with future episodic releases being included as a section in future email correspondence to fans. 

Overall, as a result of the promotion of the podcast via the dedicated landing page, social media, and email marketing, organic traffic to the podcast landing page increased by more than by 90.9% over a one month period. This was in addition to an 85% growth in subscriber emails, a 99.89% increase in yearly downloads of the podcast and a 162.5% increase in monthly downloads (month two over month one).