On this episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I’m starting to feel a little bit like I’m talking to my teacher, because I’ve got Kane Baron from Progressive Media, who was the guy that taught me how to essentially set up this podcast. Kane is in charge of running podcasts for Progressive Media and for all of their clients, and a host of celebrity clients as well, so I’ve got to ask him some more questions and basically drill into his brain to see how he does what he does and how he helps other people launch hugely successful podcasts with millions and millions of downloads.
Below are some of the highlights from this podcast, which you can see in full over on our YouTube channel:
Kane on meeting Rob Moore and joining Progressive Media…
Kane: All the way from year 11 to university, I used to work at Costa. When you work at somewhere like that, you tend to have your favourite customers based on the cars they drive. One of those people happened to be Mr Rob Moore. So I would open up shop at around 5am, and he was already there, usually he’d be waiting for me. He’d come round in a vintage Ferrari one day, a Lamborghini the next day, always tipped well at Christmas. And I always enjoyed talking to him.
One day, I ended up messaging him one day and saying ‘here’s all of my skillsets, here’s everything I’ve done, what can we do?’ and he gave me an interview. So, Progressive Media’s podcast agency’s been running since 2016, and I joined around three years ago.
…on podcasting still being in its infancy…
Darren: 20 years ago, when nobody was really doing marketing online, you could look at all these businesses and industries and say “this is going to be easy”. You don’t really get that anymore in marketing because everyone’s doing everything, but in podcasting, there are so many industries, so many niches, there are a lot of gaps there for people to clean up in.
Kane: To put it into context, there are say 50/60 million blogs, tens of millions of YouTube channels and a couple billion social media users every day. With podcasts, there’s been about 5 million ever, which is a small fraction compared to the others, but only around 250,000 active users. So it’s not really that competitive.
…on how to get started as a new podcast…
Darren: What about people starting a podcast who don’t have a massive following? Are there ways that you know where you can put stuff on YouTube and actually get increased views on that?
Kane: So there’s two things mainly: shorts and excerpts. Most people aren’t going to listen to your full-length content on YouTube. Our attention spans have been ruined – it is what it is.
…on Progressive Media’s podcast strategy…
Kane: We normally reverse engineer our content. So we’ll go onto SEO tools to see what people actually want to see and hear about, and then when we’ve got a guest coming up we’ll essentially ask them questions that will essentially prompt them into saying what we want them to say.
Darren: So you’re doing your keyword research in advance knowing people are looking for?
Kane: Exactly. Our producer normally has a title and thumbnail picked out BEFORE the podcast has even been recorded.
…on his guiding philosophies…
Kane: One of my philosophies is ‘if you ask me a question, I will give you all the answers’. What ends up happening is you will find a business owner or a rich person, you’ll give them all the answers, and they’ll say ‘here’s some money, you do it’.
…on finding podcast ideas…
Kane: An idea for finding episode suggestions, especially solo podcasts, is firstly: AI. Secondly, I like to go onto Reddit forums, Facebook groups, TikTok comment sections and see what people are asking.
…on the future of podcasting…
Darren: One thing you mentioned at the start is about how podcasting is changing. Is there anything you know about technology or functionality that is going to be coming soon?
Kane: I think one thing that is definitely happening is YouTube taking over podcasting. I think we are a matter of months away from YouTube integrating with RSS feeds. At the moment you have to create and upload a separate file for YouTube compared to the other podcast platforms that use your RSS feed, so I think that’ll definitely be changed by the end of the year.
Huge thanks to Kane for coming on the show to share his amazing insight into podcasting. I learnt a lot from our conversation.
You can listen to Kane’s own podcast ‘The Podcaster’s Podcast’ on all podcast platforms, including iTunes and Spotify.
