Episode 35: Data-Driven Podcasting
Download MP3[00:00:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Hello and welcome to Value Driven Data Science brought to you by Genevieve Hayes Consulting. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and today I'm joined by Tom Schwab to discuss how he combines data with podcast interview marketing to drive business results. Tom is the founder and chief evangelist officer of Interview Valet and the author of podcast Guest Prophets and One Conversation Away.
[00:00:29] He is also an engineer whose first job out of college involved running nuclear power plants in the US Navy. Tom, welcome to the show.
[00:00:38] Tom Schwab: Genevieve, thank you for having me here. I'm so excited to talk with you.
[00:00:42] Dr Genevieve Hayes: According to the interview valet 2023 state of podcast guesting annual report, there are over 380, 000 active podcasts in the world right now with the average podcast episode receiving just 150 downloads within 30 days of release. So for individuals and organizations looking to use podcast marketing to grow their business, just booking podcast guest appearances isn't enough.
[00:01:10] It's necessary to use a targeted strategy based on data. And this is the approach taken by you, Tom, and your team at Interview Valet, which focuses on optimizing for business results rather than interviews in podcast interview marketing. And we're going to discuss this approach later in this episode.
[00:01:34] However, before we go too far down that path, I'd like to begin by discussing your background as an engineer with the U. S. Navy. I suspect you're going to be the only person I ever have on this podcast who has ever run a nuclear reactor. As an engineer, I'm certain there must have been a plethora of career options available to you after graduating from college.
[00:01:59] What led to you enlisting in the U. S. Navy?
[00:02:03] Tom Schwab: First of all, I went to the U. S. Naval Academy, so my options were limited. So I graduated from the Navy, and I actually wanted to go and be a CV. It's the construction engineers, right? That build the buildings and the roads and the ports. Well, the needs of the Navy were different, and they needed people to run nuclear power.
[00:02:27] And luckily for me. I had a kidney stone when I was in high school because I never wanted to go on submarines. And so they said, okay, well, you can go on aircraft carriers. And I loved it. It was a great experience. It really taught me a lot about systems processes and culture and what that is important.
[00:02:48] And which 1 isn't right. So it was a great foundation. And people often will say, well, how did you ever use that business now? And I'm thinking everything we're doing is similar to nuclear power, right? If you can't measure it, you can't control it. If you don't understand it, you can't come up with a process that's repeatable.
[00:03:09] And if you're the only person that can do it because you have all of this tribal knowledge in your head, God help you, you'll never be able to scale it because no one else will ever be able to do it. So for me, back to your question of all the different things that you could have done. It was sort of the needs of the Navy at that point, but I am so glad that I got that foundation because it gave me a way to think through the rest of my life.
[00:03:36] Dr Genevieve Hayes: It doesn't surprise me. I mean, I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink and even though I have no military background whatsoever, I find all the advice he gives from what he learned from his time as a Navy SEAL is so relevant to what I'm doing in business. And you can learn so much from him.
[00:03:53] Tom Schwab: Oh, very much so. And you know, even the engineering that I learned, I would be a lousy engineer right now, but the way to think through it, right. There'd be a, an equation with, you know, 15 different variables and the professor come up there and say this one, we really can't measure. This 1 doesn't impact it a lot.
[00:04:14] You know, here are the 2 or 3 things that are really going to move the lever on this. So make sure you pay attention to those. And I think that's so important because now. As decades have gone on we've got more and more data and sometimes we're blinded by the data. And I think of years ago, my college roommate took command of a fighter squadron in the Navy.
[00:04:40] And he invited me out and my kids with me and we got to go in a flight simulator. And he always gave me a hard time. You know, I was a ship driver and he told my kids here, let your old man try the flight simulator. And I got in there and Genevieve, it was just overload. There's so many gauges and lights and everything as we're coming in.
[00:05:04] And I was amazed because I got in there and on the first try I landed the aircraft. And I was like, how tough is this? Right. Granted, this is the simulator. And Brett was laughing and he asked the technician, could you roll that back 10 seconds? And he told me, okay, now look at this meter here.
[00:05:26] That's how many G's you're pulling, right? And look at what happens when you quote unquote, land the aircraft. And. When I landed it, I probably hit 20 G's or something. He's like, you didn't land that you crashed it. I'm like, Oh, that's bad. Isn't it? And he was the one that pointed out to me. He's like, of all of the things that are in front of you right now, as you're landing, there's two things to watch for.
[00:05:52] And maybe I got this wrong. I think it was two. It was your speed and your glide slope. He said, everything else. Doesn't matter if you know, your oil pressure light goes on or anything like that, those things can't kill you. He says, these are the two things that if you don't get right, they'll kill you.
[00:06:11] And I'm like, Oh, okay. And I even remembered that through business, it's like, what are the critical data points? What are those things that I'm looking at that make a difference? What are the things that can kill me here? And make sure you're paying attention to those because, today we get so much data about things and some of it's noise and some of it's just downright wrong.
[00:06:34] Dr Genevieve Hayes: It's sort of like, don't pay your bills and you're dead. Don't answer your emails. And no one cares.
[00:06:39] Tom Schwab: Exactly. Make sure that you're paying your bills and you know how much money you have in the checking account. Right? Because that's what's important.
[00:06:47] Dr Genevieve Hayes: It sounds like you're a very technically minded person. Why did you choose to start a podcast marketing agency? Why not some more engineering centric business?
[00:07:00] Tom Schwab: I always say I love engineering, but I don't know. I was the best engineer. Right? So I love the operation, not necessarily all of the details on it. Right? I don't do my own taxes because I'm not a detailed person where I get it down to the penny. Okay. Right and so it was like, yeah, we know what direction we're going.
[00:07:20] And so when I got out of the Navy I took a job as a production engineer for a fortune 500 medical device company. And while I could do the engineering. I really liked the operation side. So I think I was an engineer for less than 3 months before they promoted me to production supervisor and then unit manager and then distribution manager.
[00:07:45] And I wasn't doing engineering, but I was thriving with that. And then I went out and was in sales and I can remember being in the operating room, the theater with orthopedic surgeons and trying to explain to him one time about zirconium, which is a bearing surface. They use an orthopedic implants now, and I was explaining to this orthopedic surgeon about zirconium and all these different things that I'd learned in the Navy.
[00:08:14] Right. And he's like, wow, you are the most overqualified sales rep I've ever had in the theater. And I'm like, well, maybe everybody else was just under qualified. So I was able to use what I had learned in the engineering, the problem solving to, you know. Be a great sales rep, be a great sales manager, and then went on to start my own company.
[00:08:38] My last company was HubSpot's first e commerce case study. We built that up, we sold it off, and then about 2014, I just started to think of the idea that you could use podcast interviews almost like we used to use guest blogs. You know, to tap into that audience. So started to test that theory.
[00:09:01] It worked really well. And then we launched interview valet and really for the first 3 years, I'd give my elevator pitch on how you could build a brand and build a business, you know. With targeted podcast interviews, and people would shake their head and then they'd say what's a podcast now about 2019 that started to change.
[00:09:21] And we had all of the systems, the data, the relationships behind that. And it really let us take off with that at that point.
[00:09:29] Dr Genevieve Hayes: I remember listening to the first podcast I ever heard about 10 years ago and. I think in order to make a podcast back then, you pretty much had to have a full blonde studio with the guests actually sitting there opposite, but things like Zoom have made it possible for anyone to have a podcast now.
[00:09:49] Tom Schwab: Podcasting is out 20 years now, and it's almost funny to call it a podcast because ask people what the pod stands for in podcast. It references back to an iPod and, you know. Most people didn't own an iPod or don't understand it, but yeah, when they first started out, you had to be technical to even listen to them because it meant going into the computer, downloading, then putting the cable in and syncing the files and, moving all 10 episodes over something to your iPod before it filled up.
[00:10:22] And so it was very, very technical and, you know, today. You know, if somebody listens to it on social media, is it still a podcast? If they watch a video on YouTube, is it a podcast? If they hear it on satellite radio, is it still a podcast? I don't know. It's just amazing that we can create in ways that work for us and then repurpose it for other people.
[00:10:47] Dr Genevieve Hayes: On your website, Interview Valet is described as a concierge level podcast guest marketing service. What exactly does that mean?
[00:10:57] Tom Schwab: Yeah. And I think there's a lot of important words in there because podcast guesting. Is an activity, right? Podcast interview marketing is a strategy, and so the concierge level comes from when we first started out, we had a client that said, I like working with you because , you let me be the guest and you take care of the rest.
[00:11:21] And I'm like, Oh, that's good. Copy on. But really, it's not just about random guest appearances. Right. It's about finding the right shows, having the data behind that, and then having a system in order to get real business results out of. And almost like any other strategy. There's little tactics.
[00:11:44] So if somebody says I'm fishing, right? Well, there's a big difference between dropping a Fisher price fishing pole in a swimming pool and being a commercial fisherman, they're both fishing, or social media. If somebody says, I do social media marketing, making a post every now and then with a cat meme.
[00:12:05] Isn't social media marketing, right? There are entire companies that have built the company off over that. So we really look at what's the process. What's the data? And what's the ultimate goal? Because people's goal are not. And I just want to do a podcast interview. No, their goal is that they want to build their brand.
[00:12:23] They want to build their business. They want to launch a book or a new category of business where they've got a different point of view. So it's very strategic in that standpoint.
[00:12:34] Dr Genevieve Hayes: I find this really interesting because I've worked with several agencies in producing this podcast and the impression I get is that some of those agencies are more data focused than others. And I get the feeling that being data focused is the exception rather than the rule. Is your strategy of taking a data centric approach unusual among podcast guesting agencies?
[00:13:06] Tom Schwab: I'll say that we didn't start this way because there wasn't a lot of data at the beginning, and when we started nine years ago, we looked at what was out there and we made our best guess, it was a lot of manual. It was a lot of scraping. But the data wasn't really good. Now, fast forward nine years, we spend a fortune in licensing databases because it allows us to do the job.
[00:13:33] I look at what we were doing nine years ago. It was more podcast guessing than podcast guesting. And I don't know how you can really do the job without the data. And I hear some people say, well, you know, the data is so expensive to get. Well, a lot of tools are expensive, but you can't do the job with them.
[00:13:54] So we've really looked at it. And while I think the industry was more, well, just do a lot, right, throw a lot at the wall and some of it will stick. You know, if you don't have data, maybe that's what you have to do, but the more data you get, the more targeted you can, and really that shaves people time and money because every time somebody is on a podcast interview, that is an investment of at least an hour.
[00:14:20] Probably more than that by the time they're getting prepped and getting ready for the interview. So you want to make sure if you're taking an hour of a CEO's time, or a thought leader's time, or a marketer's time, you better make sure that you're making good use of that. And so that's why I, I don't think it's common.
[00:14:41] But it should be because the data is out there if you license it. And I'd say the other thing too, is if you understand it Genevieve, you said something at the beginning there and quoted the report that we do every year. And you'll hear people say that, Oh, there's like four or 5 million podcasts today, and that's true.
[00:15:04] Less than 400, 000 have actually published in the last 30 days. So with that people will say, Oh, you know, there's 4 million podcasts. Well, is that, could you say there's, 50 million people in the world? I'm sorry, 50 billion, I guess if you count the dead people to that counts, but that's not really.
[00:15:29] Accurate, and there are some databases out there. One in particular, and it's a great marketing ploy. They tell the hosts that you're in the top, whatever percent of podcasts and there's a little asterisk and it says of all podcasts. And so when you start a podcast, congratulations, your 1st episode, you're in the top 15 percent of all podcasts.
[00:15:54] Because 85 percent of podcasts are dead, so they're not going anymore. So people use that as a badge, oh, I've got a top 1 percent podcast, and I don't think they even understand that's top 1 percent of all podcasts, not just of active podcasts, and by that metric there if you're listening to this, You know, you could claim to be in the top 7 percent of the most beautiful people, the most athletic people, the most physically fit people, because I looked this up, 93 percent of all people who have ever lived are dead.
[00:16:33] It's only 7 percent right now that are alive and it's like, well, it's not fair comparing your looks to a dead person. Well, I would say it's not fair to compare your statistics to a dead podcast.
[00:16:48] Dr Genevieve Hayes: The one I've heard, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I got this off Reddit, is that only 1 percent of podcasts go beyond 20 episodes.
[00:16:59] Tom Schwab: Yes,
[00:17:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So all you have to do is produce 20 episodes of a podcast, which anyone theoretically could do. You could just. Record yourself talking to your cat, but that wouldn't be a podcast anyone would want to listen to.
[00:17:15] Tom Schwab: but you could say that you're in the top 1 percent or, you know, why would you do a hour long podcast? Why don't you just do 20 one minute podcasts? Put those out and now you're in the top 1 percent of the people that have published the most episodes. I remember in high school, I had a professor that 1 time said figures never lie, but liars often figure.
[00:17:41] Right. And I don't want to call people liars, but what are you optimizing for if it's just to be in the top 1%, then put out 20 quick episodes. Or you know, if you just want lots of downloads, people used to put celebrities names in them, right? So everybody would click on it. And once you clicked on it, and there was years ago, there was something on Twitter Where there was podcast promoters that were charging podcasters.
[00:18:11] Based on the downloads and, they would put out a tweet that said, something like scandalous photo of Britney Spears or, whoever the celebrity is and people would click it. And as soon as it clicked, it counted as a download. So you could say with that oh, wow, you just got 10, 000 downloads to your podcast.
[00:18:32] Technically. Yes. Did anybody listen to it? No. So.
[00:18:37] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So when you're targeting these podcasts, obviously you would target. Based on what industry the person is in and the podcast, but do you also target down to things like location, age of the audience, things like that?
[00:18:55] Tom Schwab: Very much so, and it depends on what the client's goals are, so we might have a client that came to us and said, I am doing these podcasts just for backlinks, just for the SEO value. And in the United States the most powerful backlinks come from domains that end in gov, which is the government.
[00:19:20] Or dot edu, which is education, so if someone was just going after the SEO value, all that we would look at is the SEO value of that site. So if you looked at them and said, do you want to be on Joe Rogan's podcast, or do you want to be on a podcast run? by an undergraduate community at Harvard that gets 10 downloads per episode.
[00:19:48] The one that ends in harvard. edu backlink is gold. So people would take that. But what we're always looking at is what their goals are, right? So if you want to increase your Instagram following, well, then we'll search podcasts that have a large Instagram following. If you want to target a certain Focus or keyword, you can do that also, and some of it is data based and the data is getting better all the time.
[00:20:19] But one of the sort of the gut checks on there too, is often the audience is like the host or aspires to be like the host, and so sometimes you can say, this is a great podcast, Well, it's not a great podcast for you, so we had a client came to us one time and we do a lot of virtual book tours and always with a nonfiction book with another business that they're trying to support around that.
[00:20:45] So there was a gentleman that had launched a couple of great companies in the UK, and he had a course for young entrepreneurs and he was promoting his book and he came and said, well, I want to be on. Harvard Business Review, IdeaCast, and I had to tell them, that's not your audience and they would never have you on there. HBR is about promoting their graduates, their authors, to you, for you to come in there and say, I did all of this and I'm a high school dropout. they're probably not going to have you on there. And I said, and the people that are listening to that, they value the education, the PhD. They're going to see that you're in your early twenties and don't have a degree.
[00:21:32] They're not going to listen to you. No matter what it is. So trying to match those, you know, a little bit of the demographics, a little bit of psychographics, the age, the focus, and a lot of times we'll even find lookalike audiences, often we'll hear people that will come in and say, I want to be on Gary Vaynerchuk's podcast.
[00:21:53] You know, well, you and about a million other people, at the end of the day, you want to talk to Gary Vaynerchuk's audience. So unless you know him personally or have some tie in there, why don't we just go and say, of all the people that subscribe to Gary Vaynerchuk's podcast or follow him on Instagram, what podcasts do they listen to?
[00:22:19] What podcasts do they subscribe to? And you can get that data. And now if all of a sudden you say there's two or three influencers that you want to target, you can look at the Venn diagram and find what podcasts are in there. Or if you could say all of my ideal clients go to this conference.
[00:22:40] Well, then that probably means they've visited that website and signed up for that. So we can find lookalike audiences based on that, on who they follow, what websites they go to. And it becomes a lot more targeted that way. And then if they would say, well, you know, we love the American market, but we don't serve the American market, right?
[00:23:03] All of our customers are Australia. Okay, well, let's carve that down what podcasts are either in Australia or have the most portion of Australian listeners there, or, you know, my, my ideal clients are male or female, we can start to track it based on that too. And so, all of a sudden, you take this universe of 4 million podcasts.
[00:23:26] And pare it down to, well, there's 380, 000 that are active. And then you start paring it down and you can come up with a list of saying, okay, well, there's, you know, 50 podcasts that are ideal. And there are people follow this influencer. They go to this conference they're during this, these ages. And Oh, by the way, they're in Australia and you know, they've got female audiences.
[00:23:51] Dr Genevieve Hayes: That's incredible. Have you ever seen the TV show Bull? It's a legal
[00:23:56] Tom Schwab: know that I have.
[00:23:57] Dr Genevieve Hayes: One of the things that the main character, who's a trial scientist does is he creates mirror juries in order to figure out what the real jury is going, what verdict they're going to bring in, in a trial.
[00:24:14] And it's meant to have, you know, 99 percent accuracy or something like that. But I'd never heard of anyone doing that sort of lookalike group in real life, but what you're describing there with the lookalike audience, it reminds me of bulls lookalike juries.
[00:24:32] Tom Schwab: And in some ways it's almost a little bit creepy. That you can get that much data, but it's great because now you're not wasting the listener's time or the guests side. And another book or thought that has been very influential in my life and in the business. There's a book called super consumers by Eddie Yoon.
[00:24:55] It was written by Harvard business review and he does a lot of work with consumer products, goods, but I think what he. Has discovered is applicable to other areas also. And his premise is that you should market to your super consumers, not to everyone, because your super consumers will buy the product or buy the service, but they will also amplify the message.
[00:25:23] And he uses a couple of examples in there. One that I can think of is the U S is called the American girl doll.
[00:25:30] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Oh, yes.
[00:25:30] Tom Schwab: these. I didn't know if it's universal, but those dolls are expensive. The attachments are, and accessories are expensive. And he's like, they looked at it and said, they don't want to market to everyone.
[00:25:43] They just want to market to the people that are their super consumers that buy everyone. And by every accessory, because he said, those people are the ones that now take that and they put it on social media. They take pictures with it, all the rest of that, and they'll market it and expose it to the rest of the world.
[00:26:04] You don't need to spend your marketing dollars to do that. It says spend your marketing dollars on the super consumers.
[00:26:11] Dr Genevieve Hayes: That's good advice. One of the things I was wondering. With some of your clients, I know with a lot of authors, they will often have different versions of their message. So they might have the original version and then the for kids version and the Not for profits version and all these different versions of it, you know, all those chicken soup for the soul books, they had a million versions.
[00:26:37] Would you use data to customize your client's message for each podcast they appear on? Or would you just start with their core message and then find the right podcast for that core message and focus there?
[00:26:50] Tom Schwab: Yeah. And we've tried it both ways. And to make it general, it gets boring for the guest, it gets boring for the host, and it gets boring for the listener. So if somebody's doing the same interview over and over and talking about, you know, their book in generic terms, after you hear them and it's like, wow, that sounds great.
[00:27:12] You know, I want to check out Genevieve Hayes new book. And you listen to one interview. And then you listen to the 2nd interview and it's like the same thing you almost think, oh, I guess I just got the book already. I don't need to buy that. We worked with a gentleman early on Jeff Madoff and.
[00:27:32] He wrote a book called Creative Careers. And as I read through the book, one of the observations I made was, I think there's 13 chapters to it. And every chapter could be a standalone mini book. And so he had been out on some podcasts, trying to do it on his own for a while. And he'd always talk about the book overall.
[00:27:55] And so we started working together and I said, why don't you really drill down on the different chapters, go on a podcast and talk about, the myth of the lone genius. And that way you could talk about that and say, well, this is just 1 of 13 ideas in the book. So, not only did it help drive the book sales.
[00:28:15] But now he had these foundational pieces that he could promote. He could repurpose. He could go to his social media and after a while, you don't want to. Tell your social media about here's another interview that I did that I talked about the same thing. He could really focus it in there. So I think it really gets to that point of, you know, everybody always says context is King.
[00:28:38] I agree with them. Their context is King or content is King, but context. is God, right? Small G. And I think that's the example that you used with like, chicken soup for the teenage soul, chicken soup for the young parent. It's the same book, but they've changed it to give different contexts, and that becomes so much more valuable to the person.
[00:29:05] Dr Genevieve Hayes: I've interviewed people on this program who deal with traditional digital marketing. And I know from that, that one of the key metrics that they would look at is things like conversion rate or click rate based on Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads or something. If you've got someone who's doing podcast interviews, there's obviously nothing that people can click on to determine how successful the podcast interviews has been.
[00:29:34] What key metrics do you look at in order to determine how successful their podcast guest appearances have been?
[00:29:44] Tom Schwab: And I'm going to push back a little bit on the premise of the question. Right? And there are ways that you can attribute traffic from a podcast interview. But this idea today that all. Marketing activity can be perfectly attributed, I think is being pushed by the people that sell the attribution, right?
[00:30:05] So the paid social media search engines, let me give you an example. So what if you were talking at a conference, right? And somebody heard you and they're like, Oh, I've got to work with her, right? And they leave the conference and they go to Google. And they type in your name and they misspell it, but Google helps them find your site and they come there.
[00:30:34] Well, Google is going to say, we brought you all that traffic. Then somebody gets distracted before they make the purchase and they leave. Well, you've got Facebook retargeting and. All of a sudden, Facebook brings them back and they make the sale there. Facebook is going to say, we brought you that sale.
[00:30:55] Now, was it 100 percent Facebook? No. Was it 100 percent Google? No. Was it 100 percent of your public speaking? No. All of that went together to do that. So I think if this idea is that you got to have clicks and attribution, if that's the basis of your marketing, then you need to stop doing public speaking, billboards.
[00:31:21] Newspaper advertisements sponsoring the local little league team, because those don't have perfect attribution. So I think you have to look and say, overall, where is traffic? What's influencing this? And on podcast interviews, there are things that you can do to attribute the traffic. And one of the things that we have found is that on a podcast, you know, at the end of every podcast, somebody is going to say, So, how do people get in touch with you?
[00:31:52] Any final words, right? And so you don't want to just. Send them to your LinkedIn or confuse them with, Hey, here's my phone number. All the rest of that. The best thing to do is to send them to 1 dedicated page on your website. And this is. Evergreen traffic that's going to an evergreen page.
[00:32:17] So you want to make sure that it's not just the homepage that you're sending them. So for like, for this podcast, it might be just come back to interview valet. Dot com forward slash value and everything Genevieve and I talk about will be there and you can do some special offers there. And typically, our testing is always shown give people 3 ways to say yes.
[00:32:42] A small. Yes. A medium. Yes. And a heck yes. So the small yes is typically a quick win. Doesn't take a lot of time or money. It could be a questionnaire. It could be a PDF. It could be an assessment. The medium. Yes. Takes them a little bit more time or money. And then that heck yes. You know, if somebody hears you and you're the answer to prayer, don't slow them down in a funnel, right?
[00:33:04] Let them go there. Let them engage. So when you do that, That's a way to attribute that traffic. So you'll be able to know what podcast they came from, what they converted on. And it's not a hundred percent, right? Some people may just hit the homepage, but we've been able to attribute traffic that way.
[00:33:24] And recently we got a client from an interview that I did seven years ago. He was like, yeah, I was listening to Jamie masters on eventual millionaire. And I heard you and I came over to the website and I had to go back and I'm like, what was I talking about seven years ago, but it was a crude attribution of podcasts.
[00:33:46] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Why podcast interviews and not say articles or blog posts or YouTube videos or any other form of content? What Yeah,
[00:33:55] Tom Schwab: much about me as it is the listener, right? So I've written a lot of blogs in my, at Genevieve, every one of them felt like a homework assignment, I'll draw you a free body diagram and for all you engineers, you know exactly what that is, but to write a blog for me is more of a challenge.
[00:34:13] And so I find talking is very easy, answering questions is easy. And now. We've got the technology that we can repurpose it. So we're talking here for 45 minutes or an hour. Think about there's probably four or five good blogs that you could get out of this, right? There's all of these little clips that you could do.
[00:34:36] You could do tweets out of that. And it's all just repurposed. Now that has been true since podcast started. I think in this AI world that we have right now, I think. collaborative content has gotten to be much more important. So, you know, AI has been around or chat GPT has been around for over a year now and people can't figure out is this real or is this chat GP and the search engines are having a problem with that too.
[00:35:06] So if I read a blog or an article in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, I wonder if this is really. Written or is it just a rehash of everything that's known, right? And the search engines are looking at it the same way. And I've heard a couple people that are much smarter than me in SEO saying that the search engines look at everything that's printed now as artificial intelligence,
[00:35:32] and you've got to prove to them otherwise that it isn't. And sometimes you can prove through including stories in it or things that a AI wouldn't do, but this kind of collaborative content that we're doing right now, the search engines look at that and let's be clear, they're not looking at keywords anymore
[00:35:51] they looked at keywords 20 years ago, right now. They're listening to every podcast. They're watching every video. They're looking at all the images and they're looking for tales that it's human. So by me dropping my G's right. And every time I say a word that should end in I N G, right. Sorry. I grew up in Chicago or us.
[00:36:17] Not speaking in full sentences or talking over each other. They'll listen to that and think, Oh, no, those are humans. And so with that, they're giving it higher authority. And I think people are doing that too. So that would say video, audio, I'm a big fan of audio. And while you and I are looking at each other right now, when we're talking, when somebody.
[00:36:42] Here's this podcast it's audio and there was a book called the new leadership literacies by Johansson. He's a futurist out of Stanford and one of the observations that he made is that the future is vivid audio and most people are rewinding this right now and go, no, it's vivid video. What he argues, and I agree with, is that video can be very dated very quickly,
[00:37:11] so, you watch a video, and I think of back when I took my kids to see Star Wars. I thought it was great special effects. They laughed at it. Or you look at somebody's video and you're like, wow, that hairstyles out of date, or, you know the lapels are way too big, whatever it is, people stop listening to that.
[00:37:33] The other thing is that sometimes we all have natural biases. So if I'm watching a video, I may think that person is too young to know anything, or that person is too old to know anything, or, they don't look like me. And so our biases start to come in there. Whereas with audio, you're really listening for the content.
[00:37:56] Now, somebody might be able to pick up, you know, your accent or something like that. But by and large, audio is, is timeless and connects a lot more than video, which tends to be dated.
[00:38:11] Dr Genevieve Hayes: I understand what you mean. I mean, there's one YouTuber I'm thinking of who I've watched the videos of for a long time, and I've seen his original videos, and In his original videos, he was in his thirties, but dressed up in sort of teenage boy skater dress. And now he's matured a lot and dresses like a man of his correct age.
[00:38:36] But, you know, you can see how someone who saw the skater costume videos originally might have been put off by them. And even though he had a very good message itself.
[00:38:48] Tom Schwab: Yeah. We worked with a super smart author and consultant and her big thing was she was helping large companies on how to deal with Generation Z. She was wicked smart. She graduated college. I want to say when she was 19 and she understood marketing. She understood psychology. She understood generation Z because she was part of it and she wrote a great book and she did a lot of podcast interviews.
[00:39:17] And when. She would talk, people would listen to her. But if people saw her videos, there was almost this thing of she's too young to know anything. And she did intentional things on her videos to make herself look older, because if people would have thought, you know, I'm hiring a consultant, that's how old and paying them how much it just wouldn't have worked.
[00:39:41] So she actually enjoyed audio a lot more than video.
[00:39:45] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Fair enough. I found early in my career, I enjoyed writing more than anything where people saw me for a similar reason. So going back to the state of podcasts. Guesting annual report. One of the statistics that really fascinated me as a podcast host was how, I think you said there was statistics around what it means for a podcast to be big.
[00:40:08] So the top 20 percent of podcasts receive over 1, 200 downloads in the first 30 days. Top 5 percent receive over 8, 300. Top 36, 000 and I'm guessing the number of downloads Joe Rogan would receive would be Astronomical.
[00:40:32] Tom Schwab: iN the millions,
[00:40:34] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Based on your experience, what makes a top podcast?
[00:40:39] Tom Schwab: the top podcast is really for an audience, so if you just say it's based on purely numbers, joe Rogan appeals to a large audience. Comedians, a lot of times will appeal to a large audience. Is that a top podcast? No, might be a popular podcast, you know, there's. Things that are in the United States.
[00:41:02] Like we have one called this American life or how I built it. They're very wide areas, and so because of that, they attract a lot of people. Now, is that a top podcast? Well, I guess it could be, but I remember a client coming to us and saying he wanted to talk with fortune 500 CEOs. And I had to tell him there's not a podcast called the Fortune 500 CEO with 500 downloads per episode.
[00:41:31] But if there were, if you had every CEO of a Fortune 500 company on there that was listening to that podcast, that would be a top podcast. People would pay dearly for that one. So I think how you define top podcast is important. What audience are you going for? Are you top for your area?
[00:41:55] We do a lot with dentists, and top dental podcasts are a fraction of what Joe Rogan gets. But they're very big in their area there. So sometimes I think we can be going back to data and numbers and analytics. It can be misleading, I remember early on, we worked with a client and she came to us and we got her on a great podcast, right?
[00:42:20] it had, Oh, I think it was about 10, 000 downloads per episode, which puts that, in the top 5 percent of all podcasts and. She came back and she said, well, I don't understand why I was on such a small podcast. And I said, well, what, what do you mean by small? You know, this is, this is top 5%. And she's like, well, I was just on a radio station the other day and I got heard by 4 million people.
[00:42:47] And I'm like, wow, that's a big radio show, I said, well, what radio show was it? And she said, well, I don't know. I think it was out of Indianapolis, Indiana. Oh, okay. It had a reach. Of 4 million, so that meant if everybody was listening to that station at that time, 4 million people would have heard it.
[00:43:09] So that doesn't mean that you're heard by 4 million. It's just the reach. So I would say, Genevieve, you could say that your podcast has a reach of, I'm guessing what? 3, 4 billion?
[00:43:22] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah. Every English speaker in the world.
[00:43:24] Tom Schwab: No, no, it would be anybody that has access to the internet, because even if they're deaf even if they speak Chinese, they still are reached like just the same way with that radio station.
[00:43:38] Even if you don't have a radio, they're going to count you in there. So you could say my podcast reaches however many people have access to the internet. Now, does it really reach 3 billion people? Technically, yes, but not really. And sometimes we get so enamored with the big numbers that I'll walk it back and somebody will say, well, this podcast has, 2000 downloads per episode in the first 30 days.
[00:44:08] And I'll reach it back to the people and say, what's the largest audience you've ever spoken to? At a conference at anything, and most people would be scared to death to talk to a hundred people. They've never talked to a thousand. And here you on a podcast talking to tens of thousands throughout time.
[00:44:28] I remember years ago, we had a client that spoke at a baseball stadium. He was speaking at Marlin stadium in Miami and that place seats, like, 35, 000 people. And he was speaking to a crowd of about 30, 000 and the night before I was talking with him and he said yeah, I'm really, really nervous. And I'm like, it's only 30, 000 people,
[00:44:53] you've spoken on podcasts that are bigger than this. And he's like, yeah, but those people weren't looking back at me. And so it's different, but I would also argue with that too, is that if he messed up royally. It wasn't for all time, most people weren't recording it.
[00:45:10] Whereas a podcast, well, it's recorded for all time out there. So maybe someday it goes viral.
[00:45:16] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Although if you messed up royally at a stadium, someone's pulled out their phone and recorded it and it is going to go viral.
[00:45:22] Tom Schwab: True.
[00:45:24] Dr Genevieve Hayes: You've been running Interview Valet for around 10 years now. How has your use of data and analytics evolved over that time?
[00:45:33] Tom Schwab: When we started out, like I mentioned, it was podcast guessing. There was no data. There was no analytics. So as we've gotten more and more information, we've used that and. One of the things that is great about podcast, but it's also the Achilles heel is how fragmented it is, if you've got a video, most videos are up on YouTube, so they can tell you the downloads and all the rest of that.
[00:45:59] There's so many different players in podcasting that it becomes fragmented, often people will say, well, leave me a rating and review on Apple. Well, most people don't listen on Apple anymore. So, if I'm listening on Overcast at two times speed is that going to be picked up on that? So what we've always tried to do is not only gain the data, but then share the data also,
[00:46:26] and so that's why you've been gracious enough to mention the report that we did. We've got a huge database of Over the last 10 years of over 1500 clients on 75, 000 different podcast interviews, and we have all of this data in there. So every year, the 1st week of January, we pull that data and run reports on it.
[00:46:50] And, everybody's got an opinion, but if you bring enough opinions and data points together, you can make some observations, like how many podcasts are. Video versus audio only, or we've got that data, or what's the mean time between when you invite me to a podcast and it's recorded or when it's recorded and it goes live.
[00:47:16] So, we've got all of that data and so it's exciting because it allows us. To understand the market better, but then also share that with other people. And I always challenge people. If you've got data, please, please put it out there because I can tell you all of our data is based on, we only work with podcasts in the top 20 percent based on downloads. They've got at least 10 episodes. The verticals that we're in are, business, leadership, real estate, health, nutrition, and wellness. And people say, well. So does your data apply to comedy podcasts? No, I can't say that. But there's somebody out there with the data for comedy and let's put theirs out there too and see how it compares or does yours apply to news podcasts?
[00:48:04] Definitely not right, but let's see how there's goes in there because we can all learn from that. You know, say it again. Everybody's got an opinion, you can hire a coach, to be a catalyst in your business. But the 1 that actually has the true answers. Those are your customers,
[00:48:23] and they're telling you what they love and what they loathe. So with that, just get all that data and figure out what to do more of and what to do less of.
[00:48:32] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So on that note. What final advice would you give to data scientists who are looking to create business value from data?
[00:48:40] Tom Schwab: My word for this year, you can see it over my shoulder is better is better. I know that's more than one word. When I turned 50, I gave myself extra words. And it's the idea there of. We want better. We're not just optimizing for more or bigger. We want. Better results. So with better results, look for the better data.
[00:49:04] Look for what's meaningful in. And I think we need to use data to help people, not only the people that are trying to grow their brand and grow their business, but also the hosts. Make sure that you're reaching out to the right hosts and giving them the right information. For years, I've gotten pitches to be on my podcast.
[00:49:26] I don't have a podcast, but I'm on a list, and everybody loves it and wants to be a guest. And I know that I'm on a list and it's easy to send out there, but it's not helping you. It's not helping them. So I would always drill down on how can we get better data? How can we use it better? How can we make it more meaningful?
[00:49:45] Because doing that more data is not just going to help. we need better data, better understanding to get better results.
[00:49:53] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So for listeners who want to learn more about you or get in contact, what can they do?
[00:50:00] Tom Schwab: Okay, now we're going to pull back behind the curtain. Remember before I said, just go to interview valet. com forward slash value. That's how you attribute the traffic if you want to see what the welcome page looks like. So when you go there. You're going to see a welcome page. There'll be everything Genevieve and I talked about there.
[00:50:22] And there's three offers that people a lot of times find valuable. The first one is there's just an assessment. Will podcast interview marketing work for me? Right? 10 questions. It'll give you a score. Doesn't take much time. There's also you were polite enough to mention my book. If you want a copy of podcast guest profits, how to grow your business with the targeted interview strategy, you can go there get a free copy.
[00:50:48] If you're in the States, I'll mail it to you. If you're overseas, I'll email it to you. And then. If you listen to this and said, wow, I'd like to learn more about this. See how I could use this as a strategy to talk directly to field customers, to not worry about breaking through the noise, but get in on the conversation they're talking to.
[00:51:08] I'll put my calendar link. So all of that stuff will be back there at interviewvalet. com forward slash value.
[00:51:17] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. So, Tom, thank you for joining me today.
[00:51:23] Tom Schwab: Thank you, Genevieve. And I always say you're doing the hard work and the lifting on this, right? People want to do a podcast but it's hard work. That's why the majority of them die within those first 10 episodes. So I appreciate all the work you put into it.
[00:51:37] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Thank you. And for those in the audience, thank you for listening. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and this has been Value Driven Data Science, brought to you by Genevieve Hayes Consulting.
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