How to boost ROI from podcast appearances with targeted paid promotion.

Speaker A: Uh, a problem facing every podcast host is how to get the show noticed. I can tell you Having produced over 800 episodes over four years, everybody has the same challenge unless they've got a big, big budget. We're all doing earned, we're doing shared, we're trying to promote it on social networks. My guest today has got a solution for all of us that are, uh, podcast hosts, whether we're independent or big agencies or even branded shows. We're going to talk to the co founder of a company called Listen Network. He's joining us from Nashville, Tennessee, normally home of country and western, but today the home of the solution to podcast promotion, Ledge. David Ledgerwood calls himself Ledge. Welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you, Jim. You are a joy to be with.

Speaker A: Oh, uh, mate, I hope you don't say that to all the boys, to all the podcast hosts, to all the hosts. He says that's all the hosts because he has a solution for the host. And uh, one of the reason that I've invited Legend on the show is because we're in talks about how I can use Listen Network to promote the unnoticed entrepreneur Ledge. We're going to talk about podcasts and the massive opportunity, but also the massive challenge that people, people face when producing podcasts or using them for marketing because it also applies to the guests because if the shows aren't downloaded, they've really wasted their time too. Before we do that, tell us obviously something about you and your background in getting to be an entrepreneur as well as being a podcast, uh, expert.

Speaker B: Well, getting to be an entrepreneur was uh, an easy path because I just simply was not very good at working for other people. So uh, I think I got fired about seven times and I finally said, um, clearly I'm not built for this. And I had aspirations that I wanted to build things and work for myself. And uh, like, like all wide eyed fools, I, uh, quit my job and moved from the New York area to Nashville. I had no income. I had an idea and I rented a garage and got a phone and sat there and thought people should call me. And uh, not many people.

Speaker A: It just doesn't happen, does it, that you have a product and a phone number. It's very, very disappointing. One of the first harsh lessons, we all learned it.

Speaker B: This is the field of Dreams challenge. If you build it, they will come, right? So, um, as a result of that, I learned that marketing is a real thing and I also learned that sales is a real thing and uh, nobody else wanted to sell anything and everybody else wanted to get paid. So um, surrounded by myself, who wanted to be a practitioner and my colleagues who were wonderful practitioners, someone had to go out and find some money and things to do. So I did that. And it turned out I was kind of good at that. And so I, against all odds, became, uh, a sales guy and started wearing, in many ways, all the different hats of how you run startups. And, uh, I'm a bootstrapper, so, you know, chief, janitor, cfo.

Speaker A: Yeah, we've all been guy.

Speaker B: Uh, you know, you got. You do what you got to do. We, we start businesses from zero and we grow them up. So, you know, $2,000 in the bank. All right, everybody, let's go. We're going to be insolvent for two in two days. Let's. Let's rock and roll.

Speaker A: Why do we do that to ourselves? A carousel of business cards. You mentioned before we got chatting that you've had about 17 different startups, and unfortunately, my show is not long enough to accommodate all of those storage ledgers, as fun as they would be. Can we fast forward to Listen Network? Because so many people are producing podcasts, so many people try to be guests on podcasts. It's the growth medium, especially since the election in America, where it's kind of gone even more mainstream. But we had this perennial problem that people produce a lot of content, but they do not reach a lot of years. So tell us about Listen Networks, the problem that you solve and how you solve it for really everybody in the podcast industry.

Speaker B: Sure. The nature of Listen Network happened because I, uh, was involved in running a large, uh, podcast agency. Right. And what I found, being in the sales seat, cause I was very interested in retention and revenue because I got paid based on it, was that podcasts would die and they would get canceled, uh, particularly by large brands and companies or people who just were consistently saying, I don't see the roi. And when you ask them, well, how would you. How would you know if you had roi? They would say, well, my downloads never go up. And you'd say, well, do you care about downloads and why? And they said, well, yeah, absolutely. I want to get in front of my target market. And we dug into that and, um, that was accurate. And the fact was that these people, what we, you know, you come to realize is someone pays for this podcast to exist. And it could be yourself, solopreneur, you know, who's building a business around it. It could be thinking about monetization from a sponsor. It could be thinking about, you know, having a company podcast or a branded podcast. And in that case, the marketing budget pays for it. But one way or another, there's a budget holder. And I started to ask the question, what does the budget holder care about? Because I was only talking to the marketers. The podcasters, they get it, but the people who pay the bill so that it exists maybe don't understand it. And what are those people asking for? They always say, well, how many downloads do you have? And then they say, yeah, but how do I know those downloads are from the people that I want them to be from? And that is the nature of what Listen Network was built to do. Those of us in the podcast space know that podcast data, as a result of RSS and the closed gardens, if you will, of, of Apple and Spotify, like, it's just not very good. Even if you got the numbers, you don't know who they are. And there's a beautiful thing about OpenRSS architecture, because it's open and it has no data payload. You don't know who those people are unless you do other things like build an email list and do social media. And you should do all those things. But for some reason, and again, coming from startup world and getting into podcasting, this seemed odd to me. I like to think of the peso model that comes from Spin Sucks and Jeannie Dietrich. It's great model, it's open, so open source, common, uh, access, anybody can do it. P E S O. It's the. So is the, uh, eso, right? Earned, shared and owned. Earned is PR media, you know, so in podcast world, that's. I got on other people's shows and they had invited me and doing the thing like we're doing today, you're a PR guy, you know, this shared his social, you know, and then YouTube and such. And owned as well. I already own the property, right. I. That's the reason I have a podcast or a website or what have you. But for some reason, podcasts were all just completely ignored. Paid. And I think that's because, you know, paid for a long time was really just sort of poor.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: The targeting was bad. You didn't get good results. You could improve the results. Um, but also, uh, podcasting grew out of, uh, an artist sort of, you know, mindset where we're creating beautiful things and that's Right. And it should be that way. So, you know, we think of the additive nature of that as, um, like a startup. If a business, if a podcast is a media startup, and if I think that this is not a hobby, then it's a business. And if I think that I want to make money from it, uh, I need to tell people about it. And if I were making a startup of any sort and I spent all my money on making the product which in podcast world is production and repurposing and none of my money about on paid for extra reach, that would be a very silly thing to do. I can't make a SaaS startup. Uh, I can't make an agency and only just post on social once in a while and hope that people come to it. I've done that. I know you can't do it.

Speaker A: Yeah. So just, just to hold you up there. Ledge, I think, you know, you're absolutely right that what podcasters have done by and large is to create for the sake of creating, maybe have an audience and build a community often afterwards. And then what you've also said in there, which I think is really, you know, uh, important is that it's a media business. Right. And that podcasting is now a, ah, publishing business, although it's in the audio realm. Right. And what you're doing with, with Listen Network is you're ushering in really an opportunity to monetize that content that hasn't been had before. So tell us then about how this works and for anyone that wants uh, to watch this on YouTube, you go to imajames and I'll put a link in the show notes to my uh, channel because I've got a screen share and you can go to ListenNetwork Co by the way at any stage to find more about Ledge's offer. But you call it predictable growth for podcasts, helping global B2B and B2C brands hit impactful growth targets with episode and follower promotion. So it's a nice bold statement and I think one that any marketing and also cfo, um, in a, in a company would resonate with Legend. How does it work? I have a podcast, the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. How would I go about using Listen Network to demonstrate to my sponsors that I'm giving them roi?

Speaker B: Right, Right. So sponsor wants to reach a particular audience. That's why they buy your sponsorship. If you're on the train of the sponsee, the, you know, sort of show or what have you, the creator, it behooves you to have a report after the fact that to go back to them and say, hey sponsor, this was a really good thing that you did working with me. Check this out. Here's my post campaign report and it shows that we got downloads from your target market. Now you can't do that with podcasts. Uh, so every podcast media kit, and after action report or after campaign report, it just doesn't contain that. Well, the chart went up. We don't know who it's from. Yeah. And the reason is that podcast data doesn't have that. That's not a fault of podcasters. It's the fault of the system. But who does have all that data? Who knows everything in a creepy level about everyone? And everything you do on the Internet, it's ad, uh, networks. So people used to go, and they would run. Well, I'll run a campaign, and I'll drive traffic to my Apple page or my homepage or whatever. But you still don't know the correlation between the download and the actual targeting. We built the piece in the middle. So now you do know. And you can say, I want a thousand downloads for each episode from exactly this target market in very, very detailed fashion for your icp. And we know that download number will go up exactly that amount. They will be real, and it'll be from that audience. So your podcast just got put in front of the right people, and some of them downloaded it, and we sell it per download. You don't have to worry about cpm. You don't have to worry about cost per click, and all the data is there for you. So I can say 1000 people with VP of marketing titles from financial services companies did in fact download that podcast, and that's how we built the whole thing.

Speaker A: Look, that's fantastic. And just to be clear, then, you're giving a guarantee because you're running a certain number of impressions, and the guarantee is really that once you've reached that threshold, isn't it? Whereas in the kind of dark web market, we all get approached by people from other parts of the world who I know are just trying to earn a living. But it's a guaranteed number of downloads or views on your YouTube. But then when you look at the analytics that they come from, you know, Iran, they come from wherever. And bots. Right.

Speaker B: Country. That's not your target market. Right. So the correlation ought to be that it's my target market.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And you're doing that by that number going up in any number of fashions. The question is, who did it go up by? I was an early Twitter user, and I bought Twitter followers, and they're still there. I don't know who they are. They don't do anything. But I sure got some followers.

Speaker A: Yeah. And those are. Those are vanity metrics, aren't they? But I just want to be clear with people that are listening, that what Ledger's got here is not a sort of, you're buying, um, a fake click. And I used to have a client that was in the mobile ad business and they used to say that about a third of all advertising was served to bots. Right. And so it was a great business where you run bots on a website and get money from the advertisers. Right, yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, now the advertisers are obviously, or the, rather the providers and the networks have become thankfully more wise about click fraud.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So they will ban you if you do that, you know, so.

Speaker A: And that's really what we're. And what I think so exciting about what you've done with Listen Networks is that you're getting the profiling from LinkedIn, for example. So the same job title, country classifications and so on, you can use those as your icp, your ideal customer profile in terms of setting up the campaign. And then you're running a campaign to, uh, thousands of people with that ideal profile. And then a percentage of those will click. It's not that you're guaranteeing that a thousand will. You're running the campaign until 250 or however many, as you said, the threshold, however many people have actually clicked on that and downloaded and listened to that episode, may, may or may not be all the way through. But that's very clear that that's a real differentiation, uh, there.

Speaker B: That's right, yeah. And we took the risk out of it for the agency or the podcaster or what have you by saying we're only charging you for the downloads. It our job to make sure that thing is in front of the right people and that we manage in great detail at our own risk, the CPCPM and the CPC.

Speaker A: And for anyone's interested, what, uh, Ledger's created here is also very cost effective. So on his website he has, for example, that the average CPM for LinkedIn ads is about $25. It's for podcast host Red, it's about $18 CPM. That is obviously per thousand, but with Lister Network, it's between 1 to $5. How can you do it so cheaply when you're running it on one of those big networks? Ledge.

Speaker B: Yeah, one to five dollars per download. And the answer is, um, for a while we could not do it cheaply and we ran millions and millions of iterations and training on the ad accounts so that we could learn how to optimize for this particular behavior and drive downloads out of cost that came down from the actual audience. So There's a lot of services that are gray hat, let's say, you know, that'll say they'll cause a download but they do it in a different way. You still don't know exactly what the targeting is. And then there's the black hat ones which are just fake.

Speaker A: Yeah, and that's not any good for anybody actually because that happens then is you get delisted. Um, and I'm interested in listening networks because actually I had a sponsorship agreement with a brand and the strategic fit was great but it was the issue of how do you get that show to enough people, um, for a big company. Right. But with what you've got, if a producer is making great content for a client, they don't necessarily have to have the distribution network in place. Right. To get the promotional money. And that changes the dynamic and the equation, which is fantastic. Um, let's um, just talk about a couple of case studies so perhaps you could just help us here. Um, you've got a couple on your website. Well you've got lots on your website but obviously we can't go through them all again. This is at ListenedNetwork Co Wiley, which is the publishers. I'm interested in this one because they publish my, my books as well. The three unnoticed entrepreneurs. You, you have a project here, research impact. Um, would you like to just take us through, you know, the problem to solve and how you solved it using this network.

Speaker B: So Wiley is a, I don't even know, multi billion dollar publishing shop. You know, around the world they had a podcast related to one particular business unit and it's something about the uh, essentially they do publishing support for the group. So their target market is essentially high level academics and think tanks and people who do publishing support activities like a really niche, strange thing. And a podcast where they could interview those types of people would be very interesting to those that small group. Right, but how do you do discovery for such a thing? If you just were to launch organic for that because you don't have anywhere to go. So the more niche it is, the more you need a solution that allows you to target in a very, very niche way. So we use our LinkedIn approach in that case because finding those people who work high level academic institutions in a very particular seat, it requires job level targeting. So we did that. And um, from the agency side I can say that that effort, like this one piece of that thing caused a multi year relationship because we could do it in a way that nobody else could. Like that podcast would have been canceled because they couldn't go into the next marketing meeting and say we reached exactly our target market and this is working and uh, the agency would have churned, you know, that that client that is now a multi year relationship and we're helping them reach their target market anyway because of the impressions. So you were going to run LinkedIn ads somehow, some way for a business like that. Now you can have an ongoing relationship with them because they keep seeing the next episode. That's really valuable.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And the campaign performance which Ledge has got on his website, you've got over 7,000 downloads and 64% consumption rate. And you know, if that's one episode, you know, if you can get close to 10,000, you're really in the top 1% of of all shows. Right.

Speaker B: Maybe there's a thousand people in the world who have that job. Right. You know, so you got to get in front of them and then you got to make sure that that brand is in their head, the opportunity is in their head, the download happens. We can then do retargeting. Say maybe they didn't do anything after they got episode one, but let's put it back in front of them, let's remind them, let's get them to go and follow and be a part of this community so that you even get a chance to do shared.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: They're not in your world until Discovery works.

Speaker A: No, I think that's fantastic. And what I love about what you've got at Listen Network is you're leveraging the profiling of LinkedIn. I know you also work on Google, you also work on on Meta. So you're not trying to create a whole new platform. As you said, you've built the middleware between the podcasts. Can we just talk legend about how it works? I mean in terms of As a podcast host myself.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Interested in your services. How would I go about promoting one of my shows, you know, through Listen Networks. What's the mechanics of

Speaker B: is a white glove service? So you would go on our website and you would book a call and chances are I'm the guy you would talk to and we would talk about how to set up your first campaign. Once you do that, we then provide you with a detailed ad plan based on your targeting. After you give us your basic information and we design all the creative for you, you put the the creative in front of you, you approve the ad plan, you approve the targeting, you approve the creative, we do all that for you. You're in the driver's seat in terms of making sure that that campaign happens. In ad world, we call that an IO or insertion order. That's what our campaign is. And once, um, you say yes, that's right, you can pay your invoice and we will go to work. And when it's done, we will bring you a very, very detailed and white labeled report that you can show your sponsors, you can show your corporate overlords or budget holders and it's branded as you. So nobody even knows that you did that. We like it that way. We just want to empower the creators or the owners of the show to have great data. But that data will show and will have been drawn out of that ad campaign. You reached 63% female and you reached, you know, 12% senior leaders at such and such marketing companies in, you know, it's like every single piece of data we can pull out of there will be presented to you in a way that is ready for you to walk into your next meeting or send to your sponsor.

Speaker A: And I think obviously for the, for the brand owner like me, the opportunity to go with that kind of data to an existing or potential sponsor is revolutionary because otherwise we're doing, for example, the Buzzsprout 1.4 cents per advert, um, and it runs across different podcasts, but you're just getting a play number, um, of a 30 second spot. But actually what you're doing is giving us the opportunity to be in the platform that everyone wants to be in, which is obviously LinkedIn or Meta. You know, um, in that world just

Speaker B: depends on, uh, yeah, choose the right place to. We're going to help you choose the right place to promote your thing. Okay, so more data costs more money. Less data costs less money. Because this is all about targeting. Right? That's why LinkedIn ads are more expensive in the first place.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so it's kind of um, like a digital dm, uh, in a way, isn't it? Because you're as you say, very targeted. Um, what about the sort of collection of user information? So is it possible, for example, that someone's clicked on the show, downloaded it, listening to it to encourage them to subscribe? Because that's the next thing. If we're using a podcast as the top of funnel, what can you help me?

Speaker B: We are first focused on driving the behavior, the first call to action. And the only initial call to action is this whole thing is optimized for download link to your Persona. However, in order to at least try to get people to take that next step for you, um, on the landing page, that's dedicated to your campaign. There's a pop up just like when you go to somebody's website and it, you know, sign up for my newsletter, it comes up like 15 seconds later. It's like that. But it's designed to follow us on Spotify, follow us on Apple. Now they click that and um, thank you Apple and Spotify for not allowing anyone to track anything. Um, all we know is they went there. We don't know if they followed it but we do know over the course of clients that have run essentially every episode with us over time you can see a greater lift in subscriber follower in tandem with the download and presuming you're also doing like don't stop doing the other things you're supposed to be doing like so that's why it's the peso remodel, right? We're one leg of the four legged stool. This is not a solution that you can stop doing other things. It will make all the other things more effective.

Speaker A: I think that's fantastic and well said. It's not a um, sort of a stop everything else and just do this. It needs to complement be part of the strategy. You did raise something there though David. Or uh, ledge. Sorry. Um, I, I can't help but think you know on the ledge. You know I think so.

Speaker B: But uh, jump off the.

Speaker A: Not, not jump on.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But as an entrepreneur you sometimes feel like you're doing that. You mentioned about number of shows. Um, is there kind of a magic number because could you do one? Do people need to have a series of 10? What's the kind of frequency?

Speaker B: Do whatever you want. You know it's like uh, think of an ad campaign. It's like you run it or you don't. Um and if you stop running them that number will go down. So you know like I think of this as like an ongoing investment. It's just like if you stop posting your repurposed material on social, nothing will happen. So we are just saying the same thing and causing that additional lever to be in place. So the most successful ones with the fastest organic growth come on a floor of standard budget for paid. And it's the same way you think you pay X dollars or you put X labor into making an episode. It's the same thing. So you just are using a channel that you could never do before and it's now effectively reported on. So that's uh, I advocate people think about it like don't start one of these things unless you can finance paid at the same level that you're financing the other ones. We've just trained podcasters for some reason to think if I make a thing and I share on social, it's going to be great. And it's just not like it doesn't work.

Speaker A: No other product works that way either, does it?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like, not really. For all the, for all the sort of show notes and everything else.

Speaker B: If I made art and I put it in my garage, it's an audience of one.

Speaker A: Yeah. And your wife will probably ask you when you're going to move it. So. Speaking of moving. So let's move on then. So we've got this, um, service if you want to, um, find out how to do that with you. Where should they go?

Speaker B: Listenetwork Co is the place that anybody can make a call with me. We'll be happy to look at it with you. Um, if you're not so sure about that yet and you want to see what's this crazy guy ledge talking about, I recommend follow me on LinkedIn where I post very regularly about this exact issue. So this is. I'm a, I'm a one message pony. And this, uh, Jim, you are kind to comment on my posts at, uh, times. But this, this is a huge issue to me. I do not want podcasts to die. I want podcasts to be flawed, funded. I care about this and I post about it all the time. And I think, um, I take a little contrarian view on our industry, that we are in fact doing things very wrong and we're going to be in trouble in the next few years if we don't stop doing that.

Speaker A: You and I connected with you because I read your post, because I've also believed that podcasting is actually, um, either a hobby. Right. Or it has to be a business. Trying to run it as a business, but with the same mindset as a hobby isn't going to work. So, um, that's why interesting.

Speaker B: I mean, people like skiing, it's really expensive. It's never going to pay the bills for you.

Speaker A: No, no, that's right. So I think that's why I was commenting on your, on your post and I think that that's why I was keen to have you on the show. We haven't had a chance to do some of the other entrepreneur things, but I'm going to keep this focused on Listen Network because I think it's such a valuable and unique offering in the market. But I am going to tease from you a book or a podcast that you recommend, um, because you're plainly someone that thinks and you know, looks at this subject a lot.

Speaker B: I, um, I like to use for my, my books and my podcasts, I use things that are not necessarily related to my craft. So what you will not see on my shelf is a great deal of business books or anything like that. I am currently enjoying and reading a, uh, series of books called the Great Mental models. It's uh, P.S. farnum, I think is the name, or F.S. farnham, or, um, what's the guy's name? But he, um, Shane Parrish writes it and it's called the Great Mental Models. And uh, Farnum Street, I think is their, their website. But, um, he is a researcher that stilled essentially all the great inter. Interdisciplinary thinking models. And I was fascinated with that. How do you make better decisions? How do you learn from other disciplines? And uh, it's pretty weighty. It's about, I think, well over a thousand pages in total. So I chip away at that as I'm able and then riff, uh, with my, my kids in the car and they think I'm annoying and boring.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. Welcome to the club. So that's at FS Blog, um, forward slash, tgmm. And I'll put that in there, obviously in the show notes as well. Thank you. I'm looking forward to having our trial with the Unnoticed entrepreneur. And you and I are going to put this episode as a trial, aren't we? Um, we are. So he looks at me like, oh, yeah, we are. Uh, because I really believe in what you're doing and so I'd like to, um, pioneer this with you. Obviously not the size of Wiley, but I have the same kind of desire to get the downloads up. So watch this space, Ledge. So people want to find out to get you on LinkedIn. How can they do that?

Speaker B: David Ledge Ledgerwood. Um, just pretty easy to search for. I am the, uh, striking bald guy,

Speaker A: so there's kind of a lot of those, including you and me, but, you know, that's why I have to wear a hat, unless it looks like a mirror image. Um, my digital twin reincarnated Ledge. Thank you for joining me from Nashville, Tennessee today.

Speaker B: Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure.

Speaker A: So you've been listening to me, Jim James. A slight change to schedule. Ledge, uh, has got his own entrepreneur journey of 17 businesses started and I actually suspect this could be one of his biggest successes yet. Glad to see a growth market and a real pain point. And he's got a really excellent and robust solution. Watch us try it and see how we get on. And in the meantime, if you know anyone else that's struggling to get notice, do please share this episode because we don't want anyone to get left behind. And until we meet again, just encourage you to keep on communicating.