Creating a successful podcast marketing strategy for David Yarrow

We worked to develop a podcast marketing strategy designed to both reach new audiences and leverage an existing fanbase for David Yarrow’s In Focus podcast.

After working with David Yarrow to produce the In Focus podcast, we were challenged to do more than create great audio: namely, distributing it to the right audience. 

We developed a holistic marketing strategy and put it into action. This comprised of social assets, copywriting, developing a microsite, creating a video trailer, running ads and a PR campaign, as well as uploading and distributing the episodes themselves. The end-to-end package covered everything needed to ensure that this new podcast project would be heard by the right audience, sharing David’s stories and broadening the reach of his personal brand. Of the power of a podcast to achieve this aim, the team have said: “The podcast adds a unique dimension to our activity, it allows listeners to tap into their imaginations and go along with David's adventures in an engrossing way.” Read on to discover how we achieved this. 

The Takeaways

• Understanding both the opportunities and challenges of the brand is the essential starting point for a great marketing strategy

• There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to promoting and distributing podcasts

• Our one-team approach: we align closely with our clients to combine their intimate brand understanding with our specialist knowledge

The Challenge

With an army of followers across social media, David Yarrow already had an audience who recognised and followed his work. Our challenge was to take a new product (the In Focus podcast) and introduce it to this existing audience with clarity. Message Heard’s Emily Whalley had this to say about the challenge: 

At the start of any podcast marketing project, the first challenge is always understanding and uncovering the clients' unique opportunities as well as where they are looking to grow. From there we create a plan that capitalises on the opportunities and strategically pursues areas of growth. For David Yarrow, they had such a strong visual presence and a proud community of fans, so we needed to create clear, on-brand communications that would encourage this existing audience to tune into the podcast. 

Working closely with David, we ensured our strategy would leverage this existing following and make the most of the potential reach of the David Yarrow brand - we used David’s existing platform and worked to discover new fans in the podcasting space, with a bespoke marketing solution. 

The Process

We started by defining the key goals of our strategy. They were to: 

1. Build a general interest podcast audience to expose David’s brand to new audiences;

2. Showcase existing brand values and David’s storytelling skills in a new format

3. Create a compelling case for a Season 2.

Having defined the key goals for our strategy, we worked to implement each component of the marketing deliverables. We started by reviewing David’s existing audience as a natural springboard for our distribution strategy. Being a photographer, visuals are incredibly important to David’s brand, and he had around 400,000 existing Instagram followers, as well as having more recently developed a following on YouTube (of around 1.6k followers). 

This meant that we had to deliver assets that would be appropriate for each social platform, as well as David’s newsletter list. Polished visual assets would encourage sharing among David’s existing network, as well as being appealing to those reached via organic discovery. We created consistent design requirements across assets, which included social images, a video trailer and bespoke visual teasers for each episode. 

When it came to furthering organic reach, we created and implemented a microsite to maximise search discoverability. This SEO-optimised property housed podcast episodes and their transcripts so that listeners had an easy place to find them. We also worked closely with David to identify a list of journalists and other outlets for our PR strategy, and shifted our efforts to find David guest-spots on other podcasts as we evolved this approach. 

Finally, in order to target a broad audience with a general interest range, we defined a strategy and associated budget for advertising to podcast fans. All in all, we built a strategy specific to the client’s brand using tactics aimed to capitalise on the existing brand strengths, as well as other tactics designed to reach a new audience of podcast listeners. By continually iterating our approach, we worked closely with our client to define and implement new elements to our marketing strategy.

Insights Explained

Learning 1: Understanding both the opportunities and challenges of the brand is the essential starting point for a great marketing strategy

With David’s existing audience in place, we were able to define opportunities to both leverage and expand on this. In particular, we knew it would be essential for David’s new product to work with the existing expectations of this audience and be presented to them in a way that felt familiar as well as new and exciting. This meant being aware of David’s branding and working with the existing platforms, and maintaining consistent messaging. 

Learning 2: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to promoting and distributing podcasts

Defining a successful marketing strategy is all about creating a bespoke solution for a client. During our process, we started with a more traditional PR approach that looked to leverage David’s existing relationships with journalists. We then turned our attention to booking David as a guest on other podcasts, to help drive listeners from shows with really engaged audiences that already have a high degree of trust in those hosts. 

Learning 3: Our one-team approach - we align closely with our clients to combine their intimate brand understanding with our specialist knowledge

Our approach plays to each team's expertise — the David Yarrow team brought their understanding of the brand and existing audience, and we at Message Heard brought our podcast-specific marketing toolkit. By working closely as one team, we were able to provide support and guidance based on our specialist understanding of the podcasting landscape with David’s deeper brand understanding. After all, given this project was very much about furthering a personal brand and promoting an intimate storytelling format, success was dependent on being responsive to the insights of the David Yarrow team.

The Impact

We’ve seen some great numbers across each of our implemented deliverables. On social media, we achieved over half a million impressions, with 3.6% engagement. Our microsite comes up third in search results, aided by our published transcripts. Our PR efforts garnered over 20 pieces of coverage including in The Herald, The Financial Times and The Times. Working with Message Heard, David’s team have said: 

Message Heard was a great partner for this podcast. Having the stories is one thing, but turning that into something that's right for podcaster listeners requires the knowledge and talents that Message Heard provided. The choices in production and promotion helped guide In Focus to the positive position it is in now.

We secured David spots on four other podcasts, and also saw an incredible impact from our advertising campaigns - particularly from our Castbox campaign, which saw an uplift of 16,271 subscribers, vastly outperforming the projected subscriber count of 8,000. Of the podcast result, David’s team have said: 

Our content and activity are based on strong photographs that transcend, so to go to a medium where the images are removed and replaced with storytelling was always going to be an interesting journey but the response has been great. We've also had people discover David through the podcast who have then gone on to research his work, so the podcast stands alone as a great content series that brings people into our world before even seeing a photograph. 

Overall, In Focus has over 96,000 listeners, and has demonstrated the appetite out there for this particular podcast. With an expanded, engaged audience, the brand has grown through new channels. We couldn’t be happier to get David’s stories out there into the world!

Want to learn more? At Message Heard, we make podcasts that help your brand reach new audiences. Find out how we can help you by getting in touch.