240. AMA ❓
Why everyone should have a podcast, the coolest new marketing tools, where to find remote jobs, and more
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Links that are worth your time:
How to create remarkable screenshot GIFs (written by the Superhuman team)
“Companies need financial capital. But they also need emotional capital—good energy, positivity, and resilience.”
One of my very favorite places to find startup marketing content for this newsletter is Demand Curve. They're a team of growth experts with some of the most actionable marketing guides on the internet. They're also really awesome people. They have offered donate to IFundWomen in support of this newsletter. To learn more about Demand Curve, check out their playbooks (the Product Hunt one is excellent) or sign up for their 2x monthly growth newsletter.
Hi there 👋
Every fall and spring, I spend seven weeks teaching digital marketing at the university here in town. We cover the basics like how to make a great website, getting to know analytics, and connecting with customers on social media, search, and email. You can check out the full program here — and if you have any tips on how to be a great teacher, please do share! I’d love to learn (I have a long ways to go).
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
Ask Me Anything (AMA)
Over the last couple weeks of September, I’ve been collecting questions that have come in via LinkedIn, Twitter, and email (I’m hello@kevanlee.com if you ever want to say hi). I might try to do this every now and then because a) I don’t know all the answers so I often end up learning something new when someone asks a question and b) I’d love for any answer I give to be visible and accessible for others who may wonder the same things — aka, no more ghost knowledge.
If you have any questions, now or in the future, please feel free to get in touch. It’d be great to hear from you.
And thank you so everyone who got in touch over the past couple weeks.
1. Why do a podcast?
(asked by George)
As our content strategy evolved at Buffer, we went from blogging to podcasting. It’s a strategic move that we’ve used to good effect at Oyster as well, rolling out a brand new podcast just the other week (to some very strong, early signals).
The first episode is with Leia Rollag of Wildbit, talking about location agnostic pay.
We’ve chosen to do a few things with the Oyster podcast:
It’s all about the guest. We interview HR leaders, then cut ourselves out of the final audio so that their stories can shine. If you’ve ever heard of Song Exploder, it’s kind of like that.
We run a new episode every two weeks, which gives us two weeks to promote and amplify each episode, repurposing the content across social media, YouTube, blog posts, etc.
We choose really cool, unique stories to tell and influential HR leaders (with followings of their own) to tell them and amplify them
I’ll be happy to report back on the continued progress of the Oyster podcast. At Buffer, we had a weekly social media roundup podcast that drew 20,000 listens per episode, and we had separate, narrative podcast shows to tell unique, one-off stories.
What I think is really at the heart of “why do a podcast” is two things:
How do you measure ROI of a podcast?
Doesn’t the world have enough podcasts?
(There’s maybe a third question: how you do you manage to create a podcast in the midst of everything else we do as marketers? Some possible answers: Use a podcast production agency like Lower Street or Quill, run a seasonal show so that you can take breaks every so often, and/or make shorter episodes of 20 minutes or less.)
How do you measure the ROI of a podcast?
The answer to this question probably depends on the answer to why you’re doing a podcast in the first place.
Podcasts are best as a vehicle for relationship-building. So don’t try to wring every dollar and cent you can out of a channel primarily intended for awareness. Of course, you can get creative and find ways to tie your podcast into core revenue outcomes:
A guest lineup that matches with your ABM list
Podcast discounts and offers with dedicated landing pages (so you can track)
But ultimately, I’ve found it best to think of the ROI of a podcast the way you would think about ROI of a website visitor. The more impressions, the better. At Buffer, we got 20,000 listens per episode, which was above average compared to the performance of a blog post. So the math made sense.
Doesn’t the world have enough podcasts?
Sometimes it can feel that way.
But I think of podcasts the way I think of newsletters or websites or personal brands — there may be a lot of them, but no one has made one like yours.
If you approach a podcast authentically from your personal point-of-view, it will be unique, it will be original, and it will be valuable. If you try to glom on to a trend of interview podcasts or create a company podcast because everyone’s doing it, then in that case it will fall short.
This is how we arrived at our narrative podcast series at Buffer — no one was telling the stories that we wanted to hear about our customers. Same thing at Oyster. We wanted to celebrate HR leaders by letting them tell their stories. We didn’t get in the game to be a New & Noteworthy, Serial 2.0 (although wouldn’t that be nice). We did it to continue developing valuable content to serve our audience in fresh ways.
2. What’s the coolest new tool you’ve come across lately?
(asked by Jenn)
I’ve seen quite a few great ones at Oyster lately. Two that stand out:
But to answer this question, I’ll pull from my university teaching. The most awesome, amazing, life-changing tool I’ve been using lately is Descript.
Descript is an audio and video editor that is ridiculously easy to use.
When you add your audio or video to the app, it transcribes everything, then making edits is as easy as editing a document. Just delete, cut/copy/paste, etc. and the media changes as you’re editing.
Plus:
You can drag-and-drop Looms and Zooms right into the projects
You can drag-and-drop screen recordings and GIFs
You can export directly to YouTube and a million other places
If you’re interested, in a future email I can show you all how I’ve used Descript to create video lessons for my university courses. My students would probably tell you they’re way more engaging than the slideshows I voiced over before.
3. Where do I go to find great remote jobs?
(asked by Nilesh and others)
My two favorites:
https://remotive.io/ (created by a former Buffer teammate of mine)
Others:
https://powertofly.com/jobs/?location=Remote
https://remote.co/remote-jobs/
And from the Kevan archives, I put together a remote marketing jobs Airtable awhile back. I’ve not been great at updating it for the most recent open roles, but the directory of awesome remote companies is still in tact. What I’ve done in the past is bookmark all these jobs pages then open the bookmarks every couple weeks or so to see what’s new.
4. What books do you recommend for learning? (can be marketing books or just life books)
(asked by Gab)
Best business books
Product / Market Fit (pmarca blog archives)
Unlocking the Customer Value Chain
Best books (other)
This is not an ironclad list by any means. Ask me on a different day, and I’ll probably give you a different answer. In fact, I know I’ve given different answers before, in blog posts like these:
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Polly, and Vox.
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