How Tom Butera Built CompanionCast Network by Leveraging Authenticity, Consistency, and Good Content Creation in Doing Podcast Advertising and Marketing.

[00:00:05] Pod fam, what is up? My name is Hector Sania. Esteban, and I'm your host, and I've spent much of the last decade trying to figure out what makes a successful podcast and how I can bring all of those learnings, those ideas, those failures, and bring them to you and. One of the things that has come up a lot in speaking to a lot of hosts is how do they get their guests to share their podcast episode, because that is a, strategy that a lot of hosts are relying on or they're banking on.

[00:00:44] But the challenge is, is that, Not all of the guests share and some share more than others, but how do we get more of our guests to share more often? Recently on a podcast, AMA, Matt Gilhooly shared that one of his guests reached out recently and shared that the promo pack that he had sent to to her was one of the best she had ever received, and she loved it so much.

[00:01:14] I think she even tweeted out about how great the actual promotional materials were. And so the thing is, is that. The way in which we actually deliver these assets can go a really long way. They can make a really big difference. And I know we're kind of jumping right in here, but I, I think that I wanted to keep this nice and tight and, and short and.

[00:01:38] well, I guess there's, there's kind of levels to this, right? So a lot of you guys have guests and if you have guests on your show, you're gonna want them to share it. Now I know that there are a group of people that, and I, and I gotta tell you, I've been there where. When the episode comes out, they don't even tell their guests.

[00:01:54] They don't even get around to emailing them or notifying them or sending 'em a message. Maybe they tag 'em in a post or something like that, but they don't really have some real way to actually notify their guests. And so if that's you, Just sending them an email will be helpful. And if I can give you a little heads up and a little bit of a tip, it helps to send them a notification or an update a little bit in advance.

[00:02:17] We like to send them like a week in advance saying, Hey, your episode's gonna be coming out. Is there anything that you need to send us any links? Do we have their bio, their headshots? Do we have all that stuff? And we also let 'em know, Hey, we're gonna send you some stuff when it comes out.

[00:02:31] Then we also, ideally, as close to release as possible. As soon as the assets are ready and the episode is live, we like to get that email out to them as well. Now, I'll tell you what we used to do. We used to include a bunch of links. We used to attach a bunch of graphics. We used to have a Google folder with all of their assets in there, and they had their pictures and their videos because, We knew that we wanted to give them a variety of different assets.

[00:03:00] We wanted to make sure that those assets were personalized, that they had their picture on there, that it had their episode title, that it was something that was actually promoting their appearance, not just generally promoting the episode, but people wanna see their face, see their name. And so we made sure that everything was personalized, but even still, People weren't sharing, we would even include a sample like post at the end.

[00:03:23] We would write out some, some captions for them so they could just copy and paste, but we found it looked a little clunky. We even got some feedback that it looked a little spammy and it was just kind of overwhelming. And so I got to thinking, how do we make this better? How do we make it easier?

[00:03:39] How do we make it simpler? And some of you guys who have heard this show, you guys know that I'm a big fan of Notion and I'm a big fan of Notion because it makes it really easy to customize and share different pages specifically. It makes it really easy to share different types of media. That was always the challenge with Google Docs, is we couldn't really share.

[00:04:01] A page. We couldn't just share a Google Docs with them because you couldn't just easily embed a picture into a Google Docs. They couldn't just easily download it. Even if you did that, they had to go to some different links, and so it just, it wasn't as intuitive. But now we have a page where we send them one page, and the feedback that we've been getting is absolutely incredible because people are, they're sharing it, they're loving it, and they're, it's.

[00:04:26] We wanted something where people could also go back and, and, and refer to it often, right? Where it was something where they could always go back and find it. Sometimes when your email things get lost, you can't find the, the particular thread. And so this page, this notion page, if you will, this promo page, which we've come to call it, served all those purposes.

[00:04:46] People could go and they could download the picture right from the page. They could access it from anywhere they wanted. We created a nice little, pretty short link so that people could find it, they could save it, they could bookmark it, and they can go back to it and find it when, you know, use it whenever they wanted to.

[00:05:02] And the nice thing is, is that the things that we were adding to this promo page we already had. And so it's not like we were making anything different. We were just formatting it and putting it in a nice, easy to access page. And so at the top we've got, and I, and I'll give you guys access to this so you guys can go and download it for yourself.

[00:05:21] You guys can utilize the template for yourself, but you, the the top has a, has like a nice thank you, you know, and we, we put a li little message saying thank you for your time. There's a little table of content so people can click easily, find whatever they need. Then we've got the. Episode player. So we've got the, the podcast player that's embedded right there.

[00:05:41] So if they just wanna listen to it, they can just click and listen to it. If we are on YouTube or they have a YouTube video of it, we put the YouTube video right underneath that. They've got the links to their Spotify, their Apple, their Google podcasts, or wherever, you know, the different platforms that they're on.

[00:05:58] They have the pictures, so the individual graphics, like the episode art, if we create any shorts or any videos or clips that they can download and promote, those are all right there, right underneath easy for them to download. And then underneath that we even have some sample tweets or posts or emails that they can just copy and paste right into their social medias to make it really easy for them to share.

[00:06:20] There's one more section underneath there that just has, you know, basically offers any. If they have any questions, it kind of gives 'em a place to send any questions, but we really just wanted to provide a resource to make it as easy as possible for our guests to want to share their, their episode to make it easy for them to not be cumbersome.

[00:06:39] Right. Because I think so many times we've had that experience or we create that experience for our guests. I know I have. And so I, I say this because this has been a process that I've been trying to figure out, a journey that we've been on. And here's the next iteration, and we call 'em a promo page.

[00:06:56] And we have a promo page template. And so if you go to podcast ama.com/promo you can go ahead and access and download this template for, for free. You can also check the show notes as well, and would love your feedback. Would love to know what you guys think about it. And go out and, and implement it.

[00:07:15] Take it and utilize it. Adjust it. I love hearing some of the people who are, are. Iterating it and making it their own and kind of customizing it to fit their own needs. So take it, run with it and and let me know how it goes. But as always, thanks you for being a part of the pod Fam would love a, a rating or review wherever you get your po.

[00:07:36] If you know a podcast who's out there, please send this to them and come connect with me on social. You can find me at Hector podcast on most, most socials and would love to know. How you are using this on your podcasting journey. Thanks as always for sticking with us. We'll see on the next one later, y'all.