Marketing Lessons from the 10 Most Listened Growth Today Episodes of 2019

December, for me, is the time of the year where I reflect on things I’ve learned and accomplished.

This year, I published 41 episodes so far (three more are on the way before this year ends). That’s about 32 hours of recorded content.

That’s a lot of episodes to go through!

That’s why I’d like to share with you the marketing lessons from the top 10 most listened episodes of 2019.

1. Positioning B2B Products so That Customers Find Them Obviously Awesome with April Dunford

April Dunford - Obviously Awesome - Podcast

Not all your customers are great customers. Some of them are lousy customers. Some of them bought your product and didn’t really get what you did.

A lot of folks think they have a lead gen or sales problem. Their problem really is that they don’t really know the value they’re delivering. And they don’t really know the best people to deliver that value to.

2. The Secret SEO Strategy that 2x Atlassian Organic Traffic from 4M to 8M with Kevin Indig

Kevin Indig - Growth Marketing Today Podcast

Focus on the problems of your customers. Kevin said that you have to think beyond Google. Search volume is a lagging indicator. It’s so easy to get caught up with keywords, monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and other metrics. But, Kevin’s problem-driven approach to keyword research starts with deeply understanding your customers’ problems, pain points, and obstacles.

To win with SEO, you need to build a strong brand. Finding keywords to exploit is great. But going forward, we have to make sure that our site becomes a real destination. You really want to create a brand that stands out from the rest, with its own positioning and values.

3. Writing Content that Ranks #1 on Google with Marijana Kay

Marijana Kay on Growth Marketing Today Podcast

Put yourself out there and build genuine relationships. Marijana got her first marketing gig when she was in B2B sales by volunteering at a marketing conference. She also said that a lot of her growth in marketing came from her being humble enough to reach out to people who need her help or just telling folks in her industry how she admires there work. Send out emails to folks and tell them how much their work means to you.

Do your research and planning. This goes against the “get-shit-done” mentality that’s so prevalent in the startup work. Obviously, there’s a balance between planning and doing. But, all too often, most, including me, do things with zero planning. Marijana spends about 60-70% of her time doing research and planning – figuring out keywords, main points, suggested terms and more – before she evens starts writing This saves her time in the long run.

4. Rand Fishkin: Google Isn’t a Search Engine Anymore, but Your Competitor

Rand Fiskin on Growth Marketing Today Podcast

Marketing flywheels are almost always better than growth hacks. With growth hacks, it works for a little while, then it sputters off. On the other hand, a marketing flywheel is something that you build that generates inertia and energy, such that each effort and piece of energy that you put into it helps it spin faster and faster, and it carries through. That’s much better than a one-off trick.

5. SaaS Copywriting Lessons After Working with Hubspot, Hotjar, and Aweber with Josh Garofalo

Josh Garofalo - SwayCopy on Growth Marketing Today Podcast

Be super specific with your copy. The more specific you are, the easier it is for potential customers to understand what makes you different and why your product costs the way it does. The example Josh said is that you don’t want to just say you’re an email marketing company because people will think you’re Mailchimp right away. As Josh said, lean into what makes your product different.

6. How Baremetrics 2x Their Trial-to-Paid Conversions Using Personalized Videos with Corey Haines

Corey Haines on Growth Marketing Today

Approach growth from a bottom-up approach. Don’t jump into trying to acquire users right away. Sure you need some users through the top of the funnel. But what’s the point if your funnel is leaking and they end up leaving your app anyway?

7. The “Dinner Party” Email Strategy That Increased Conversion by 209% with Val Geisler

Val Geisler FixMyChurn.com in the Growth Marketing Today Podcast

Don’t be afraid to email your customers. It’s absolutely crazy when I heard Val tell me a lot of companies don’t email their customers. Email is one of the highest ROI when it comes to channels. Remember that people who sign up for your app forget so easily why they signed up. You need to remind them of the value. Val says, “Our job in customer onboarding is to teach our customers new habits, new ways of being.” And the best way to communicate value is via email because people are in their mailbox all the time!

8. How YC-Backed OpenPhone Acquired Their First 100 Paying Customers Using Facebook Groups and Reddit with Daryna Kulya, Cofounder of OpenPhone

Daryna Kulya - OpenPhone Growth Mrketing Today

When you’re early-stage, optimize for learning and not “growth.” Daryna and her team implemented a 7-day trial because it gave them the opportunity to learn as quickly as possible who was going to be their best customers. They also got better feedback because they’re listening to paying customers, versus users who just want free stuff.

9. Creating Viral Content on LinkedIn and Drive Massive Inbound Leads with Gaetano DiNardi – Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva

Gaetano DiNardi - Growth Marketing Today Podcast

Give a fresh perspective on problems or questions in your industry. One of the things Gaetano did was ask the sales director at Nextiva for some of the absurd sales pitches he’s gotten over email. Then he went out and used that line to random strangers in the mall to show how absurd those lines. He gave a fresh perspective on a problem in the sales industry.

10. Grow 2-3X Faster With a Research-Backed Growth Plan – Katelyn Bourgoin – Founder of Customer Camp (GMT044)

Katelyn Bourgoin - Growth Marketing Today Podcast

You don’t know what you don’t know. One of the first steps of Katelyn’s customer research process is to gather the team and ask the question, “What don’t we know about our customers?” It’s tempting to fill in the blanks with assumptions. Audience research starts with having the humility to say there’s a lot of things your team doesn’t know about.

Questions and Suggestions

If you have questions or suggestions, the best place to reach me is via twitter – @RamliJohn.

To follow along with my journey with this podcast, subscribe to my mailing list here.

 

August 2019 Podcast Metrics

In May, I announced that I’m going to start publishing the metrics for this podcast. I’m following in the footsteps of Baremetric’s The Open Project, where SaaS companies publish their metrics publicly.

I have three main reasons why I publish my podcast’s metrics:

  1. I believe that being completely transparent will ultimately result in increased trust. And for me, trust is everything, whether that’s the friendships I’ve built or the businesses I’ve worked with.
  2. I believe transparency creates better products. Unless you have a Steve-Jobs-like instinct, great products and services are not created in a vacuum without any user or customer feedback. That’s one of the reasons I’m opening the curtains and showing everyone the experiments I’ve been running to improve my podcast – I want to get better at this.
  3. Publishing my podcast metrics publicly helps me organize my thought process. I’ve been optimizing to the title, description and overall design of my podcast’s website based on the data I have. The problem with me is that I suck at documenting. So, a month after, I look at the things I’ve done and forgotten why I did them. By going through in actually writing about what I’ve done and why, it helps me keep track of those changes and reasons.

If you have any questions about why I’m doing this, feel free to tweet at me or send me a DM via Twitter @RamliJohn

Let’s jump in

August 2019 Metrics

Downloads: 4,063 (-13% from last month)

August Listener Trends

Podcast Snippet Video Views: 4,801  (-54% from last month)

GrowthToday.fm Sessions: 643 (-55% from last month)

Growth Today FM Sessions

Most Popular Episode: GMT054 – Juliana Casale – Head of Marketing at Clearbanc – 561 downloads

August Episode Breakdown

Most Popular Podcast Player: Apple Podcast

Income Earned: $0

Observations and Reflections

➡️ To put the metrics this month into context, in July, I published almost double the number of podcasts (7 episodes). In August, I went back to publishing one episode a week. It’s more clear with the August metrics, that publishing twice as many episodes impacts the reach of the podcast snippets video (-54% than last month) and website visitors (-55%) and not as much as the actual downloads (-13% than last month)

➡️ This data shows that publishing twice as many episodes results in an increase in website visitors and podcast snippet videos, but not necessarily podcast downloads.

➡️ In terms of the episode with the most downloads and podcast snippet views. Juliana and clearbanc posted up the podcast on their social channels. That made such a big impact instead of them re-tweeting or re-sharing my post.

➡️ This is a lesson learned that guests sharing the podcast on their own does impact downloads and reach. I ask my guests to share it on their own and provide them all my promotion files (podcast snippet videos and images). But, I know they’re busy so if they prefer, I ask if they can just re-tweet or re-share my post on Twitter or LinkedIn about their podcast episode.

➡️ One of the reasons why I do this podcast is to build relationships and friendships. That’s one of my measures of success. Case in point, I’m going to Boston with my wife for her birthday later this month. Juliana, Bill and Josh (all past guests) all jumped into offer suggestions

➡️ On to some things I’ve messed up, I realized late last month after finally setting up Google Websmaster that I’ve accidentally set “no index” in all my podcast pages. That means I told Google not to crawl those pages. I quickly fixed that and ask Google to re-crawl my site.

➡️ In terms of monetizing this podcast, I’m happy to announce I have five supporters sponsoring this podcast for $2 per episode starting in September. That’s enough to cover my podcast hosting fees and remote recording tool 🎉. I have episode sponsors coming up in October.

➡️ My main goal with this podcast has never been to turn it into a profit machine. If it does, that’s great. But really, if I can monetize it to the point where I can outsource everything but preparing for interviews and doing interviews, that’s gold! I love talking to people who are incredibly smart and passionate.

Questions and Suggestions

If you have questions or suggestions, the best place to reach me is via twitter – @RamliJohn.

To follow along with my journey with this podcast, subscribe to my mailing list here.

 

July 2019 Podcast Metrics

In May, I announced that I’m going to start publishing the metrics for this podcast. I’m following in the footsteps of Baremetric’s The Open Project, where SaaS companies publish their metrics publicly.

I have three main reasons why I publish my podcast’s metrics:

  1. I believe that being completely transparent will ultimately result in increased trust. And for me, trust is everything, whether that’s the friendships I’ve built or the businesses I’ve worked with.
  2. I believe transparency creates better products. Unless you have a Steve-Jobs-like instinct, great products and services are not created in a vacuum without any user or customer feedback. That’s one of the reasons I’m opening the curtains and showing everyone the experiments I’ve been running to improve my podcast – I want to get better at this.
  3. Publishing my podcast metrics publicly helps me organize my thought process. I’ve been optimizing to the title, description and overall design of my podcast’s website based on the data I have. The problem with me is that I suck at documenting. So, a month after, I look at the things I’ve done and forgotten why I did them. By going through in actually writing about what I’ve done and why, it helps me keep track of those changes and reasons.

If you have any questions about why I’m doing this, feel free to tweet at me or send me a DM via Twitter @RamliJohn

Let’s jump in

July 2019 Metrics

Downloads: 4,693 (28%+ from last month)

July 2019 Podcast Listener Trends

Audiogram Video Views: 10,431 (55%+ from last month)

— Ramli John (@RamliJohn) June 6, 2019

Most Popular Episode: GMT046 – Corey Haines – Head of Growth at Baremetrics – 624 downloads

Most Popular Podcast Player: Apple Podcast

Most Listeners by Location: United States (56% of downloads)

Income Earned: $0

Observations and Reflections

➡️ I published twice as many podcast episodes in July. However, the number of downloads only increased by 28% from the previous month. Publishing more podcasts meant I had less time to promote each episode.

➡️ However, publishing twice as many episodes in July resulted in a 55% increase in podcast snippet video views. July was a great month for getting awareness for Growth Marketing Today. This didn’t necessarily result in podcast downloads though.

➡️ The most watched podcast snippet video is with Marijana Kay, with over 1,859 views. This was a special episode since it was episode 50! It was also my first guest from Europe (Dublin, Ireland to be precise).

 

➡️ One of my favourite moments in July was when Val Geisler sent the following email to her list about Growth Marketing Today

“I was kinda having a bad going into this recording but Ramli is such a good host that my day instantly turned around within a few minutes.”

➡️ The most popular episode in July is with Corey Haines from Baremetrics. However, as you can see below, the top 3 podcast episodes for July were very close:

 

New Changes

1) I have started creating podcast cheat sheets. My hypothesis is that listeners want a one-page note of actionable tips from each episode. This is to help them take the learnings from the episode and apply it to their work. I just started this in July. So, I’ll publish the result of this experiment next month. So far, it’s promising for lead gen.

growth-cheat-sheet

2) In terms of monetization, I have created a Patreon membership. I got my first Patreon supporter in July 🎉

Questions and Suggestions

If you have questions or suggestions, the best place to reach me is via twitter – @RamliJohn.

To follow along with my journey with this podcast, subscribe to my mailing list here.

 

June 2019 Metrics

June 2019 Podcast Metrics

Last month, I announced that I’m going to start publishing the metrics for this podcast. I’m following in the footsteps of Baremetric’s The Open Project, where SaaS companies publish their metrics publicly.

I have three main reasons why I publish my podcast’s metrics:

  1. I believe that being completely transparent will ultimately result in increased trust. And for me, trust is everything, whether that’s the friendships I’ve built or the businesses I’ve worked with.
  2. I believe transparency creates better products. Unless you have a Steve-Jobs-like instinct, great products and services are not created in a vacuum without any user or customer feedback. That’s one of the reasons I’m opening the curtains and showing everyone the experiments I’ve been running to improve my podcast – I want to get better at this.
  3. Publishing my podcast metrics publicly helps me organize my thought process. I’ve been optimizing to the title, description and overall design of my podcast’s website based on the data I have. The problem with me is that I suck at documenting. So, a month after, I look at the things I’ve done and forgotten why I did them. By going through in actually writing about what I’ve done and why, it helps me keep track of those changes and reasons.

If you have any questions about why I’m doing this, feel free to tweet at me or send me a DM via Twitter @RamliJohn

Let’s jump in

June 2019 Metrics

Downloads: 3,672 (33%+ from last month)

June 2019 – Listener Trends

Audiogram Video Views: 6,695 (35%+ from last month)

Most Popular Episode: GMT043 with Kevin Indig – 709 downloads

June 2019 - best performing

Most Popular Podcast Player: Apple Podcast

June 2019 - most popular player

Most Listeners by Location: United States (60% of downloads)

June 2019 - most popular countries

Income Earned: $0

Observations and Reflections

➡️ This is the highest downloads of Growth Marketing Today ever, 33% more than May 2019 🎉

➡️ The most popular episode is with Kevin Indig, GMT043 – The Secret SEO Strategy that 2x Atlassian Organic Traffic from 4M to 8M

  • This is the first time Kevin shared his “microsite 2.0” SEO strategy
  • The timing was perfect because he was preparing a talk for the MN Search Conference for it

  • The timing was also everything for my most popular episode ever with April Dunford, which now has surpassed 1,400 downloads!

april-dunford-stats

  • Another reason why I think this is the most popular download in June is because of the title. I debating with adding the word “secret” to add a little bit of curiosity. I decided to go with it since it’s not something that Kevin has shared before in public.
  • This is now my second most popular episode ever, beating out the previous episode which had 680 downloads.

➡️ Apple podcasts has now become my number one player. Why? I’ve done a few things:

  • I created a short link for it  https://growthtoday.fm/apple
  • I added this in my Twitter bio:

  • Everytime I post it up episodes on Twitter or LinkedIn, I add the short links:

post-apple-link

➡️ Even though 30-40% of my guests are Canadian, most of my listeners (60%) are from America. Last month I had two Canadians on the show – Georgiana Laudi (former VP of Marketing at Unbounce) and Katelyn Bourgoin (Founder of Customer Camp)

➡️ It seems like there’s a direct relationship between number of audiogram video views to the podcast downloads. The audio videogram video views increased by 35% from May 2019 and the downloads went up by 33%

➡️ The most downloaded audiogram video is with Georgiana Laudi. I think this is because the image I used is of Georginia looking directly forward. Images and videos with faces tend to do the best.

Changes based on Data

1) I have streamlined and custom-designed icons for each podcast player so it’s easier to click on using mobile:

2) I’ve removed the episode number in titles and stopped including “in this episode” in the description for almost all past episodes.

My hypothesis is that people are becoming more selected with which podcast they listen to. So they want to know first what value will they get from the episode. They don’t care as much about the podcast episode number.

I need to do more research to validate this hypothesis.

4) I have started creating podcast cheat sheets. My hypothesis is that listeners want a one-page note of actionable tips from each episode. This is to help them take the learnings from the episode and apply it to their work. I just started this in July. So, I’ll publish the result of this experiment next month. So far, it’s promising for lead gen.

growth-cheat-sheet

5) In terms of monetization, I have two potential sponsors who reached out when I posted up my last metrics. I have also created a Patreon membership with perks such as:

  • Growth Today thank you note and stickers mailed to you
  • Access to the private Growth Today Slack community
  • Get podcast episodes at least one day earlier than the public release
  • Unlimited access to all the growth cheat sheets
  • Listen LIVE to select podcast recording sessions (at least once a month)
  • And more..

Right now, I have an Early Adopter package for the first 20 patrons for only $2 pledge per episode.

Coming Up Experiments

1) This July, I’ll be publishing two episodes per week – Tuesday and Thursday. It’s been a lot of work since this is a one-man show so far. I do all the editing and asset creation. But downloads have been amazing. Let’s just say I got as many downloads in May in the first two weeks of July.

2) I’ve been experimenting with two monetization methods next month – sponsorships and Patreon membership

3) I’ve also bought a new domain since this podcast is becoming a more serious side hustle for me. I bought growthtoday.fm on my birthday, July 2. It’s shorter and more memorable than growthmarketing.today. Unfortunately, .fm domains are $100 CAD. So, I guess this was a present to myself 🙂

Questions and Suggestions

If you have questions or suggestions, the best place to reach me is via twitter – @RamliJohn.

To follow along with my journey with this podcast, subscribe to my mailing list here.

 

Growth Marketing Today - May 2019 Metrics

May 2019 Podcast Metrics

In the spirit of transparency and openness, I’m going to start publishing my podcast’s (Growth Marketing Today) monthly metrics going forward.

This is inspired by the movement that Baremetrics has done with The Open Project. It’s a collection of SaaS companies that publish their stats to the public.

Baremetrics Open Project

Why would I go through the trouble of publish my podcast’s metrics?

First, I believe that being completely transparent will ultimately result in increased trust. And for me, trust is everything, whether that’s the friendships I’ve built or the businesses I’ve work with.

Second, I believe transparency creates better products. Unless you have a Steve-Jobs-like instinct, great products and services are not created in a vacuum without any user or customer feedback. That’s one of the reasons I’m opening the curtains and showing everyone the experiments I’ve been running to improve my podcast – I want to get better at this.

Third, publishing my podcast metrics publicly helps me organize my thought process. I’ve been optimizing to the title, description and overall design of my podcast’s website based on the data I have. The problem with me is that I suck at documenting. So, a month after, I look at the things I’ve done and forgotten why I did them. By going through in actually writing about what I’ve done and why, it helps me keep track of those changes and reasons.

If you have any questions about why I’m doing this, feel free to tweet at me or send me a DM via Twitter @RamliJohn

Let’s jump in

May 2019 Metrics

Downloads: 2,766

Growth Marketing Today May 2019 Listeners

Audiogram Video Views: 4,955

Most Popular Episode: GMT039 with April Dunford – 1,116 downloads

Top Download May 2019

Most Popular Podcast Player: Breaker App

Most Popular Player

Most Listeners by Location: United States

Worldwide Listeners

Income Earned: $2,100

Observations and Reflections

➡️ This is the highest downloads of Growth Marketing Today ever 🎉

➡️ The most popular episode with April Dunford, with 1,116 downloads, is the most popular episode of Growth Marketing Today since I started this podcast in October 2017. To put this into context, prior to this episode, the most popular episode had 684 downloads, which took over a year to reach that.

How did this happen?

Honestly, I got lucky. In April, April tweeted at my podcast episode with Asia Matos.

Obviously, I took this opportunity to ask her if she wanted to be a guest on the podcast (DUH!)

April was gracious enough to say yes. We set a date to record a few weeks later. What I did not know when she said yes was that her book was coming out in 6 weeks.

I just co-ordinated the release date of the podcast episode to come out a few days after her book, Obviously Awesome, came out.

That’s how my most popular episode so far came about.

➡️ The second most popular podcast episode is with Bill King. I released that episode a few days after he just got a new job at Drift. He also has an interesting story from being a professional poker player to becoming and SEO and Paid Acquisition Manager at Drift.

➡️ I was surprised by where my podcast was consumed the most. I assumed Apple Podcast, Google Podcast and Spotify would top it all. But instead, next to the web player, it’s Breaker App.

➡️ Creating audiograms (those videos with excerpts of podcast episodes) has been one of the best ways to create awareness for the podcast so far. Several of those videos have gone viral in LinkedIn.

➡️ Getting podcast guest to re-share each episode on Twitter and LinkedIn is another great way to create awareness for the podcast.

➡️ I earned $2,100 with my podcast through a referral from one of my listeners for corporate training. This monetization method is sporadic, but lucrative. Last year, it earned me $17,000 with one deal from a referral from one of my guests. I am looking for more of a consistency monthly way to monetize this podcast.

Changes based on Data

1) Based on the most popular players, I added more icons in each episode’s web page to different podcast app:

Podcast Players

2) I’ve removed the episode number in titles and stopped including “in this episode” in the description.

The more I think about podcast as an SEO asset, the more I think about ways I can increase clickthrough or better yet “play-through” for each episode. I believe leading with a value-packed title and description will result in more play throughs in each app.

I’m going to write a whole post on this another day:

Coming Up Experiments

1) I want to know the relationship between the number of download and number of episode downloads. My hypothesis is that if I publish twice as many episodes in a month, there would be twice as many downloads. So, in July, I’ll be publishing two episodes per week – Tuesday and Thursday.

2) I’m experimenting with two ways to monetize this podcast in a more consistent manner. One is using Patreon.

Questions and Suggestions

If you have questions or suggestions, the best place to reach me is via twitter – @RamliJohn.

To follow along with my journey with this podcast, subscribe to my mailing list here.