On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we hear from Daniel Smith, Managing Director of the Mark Allen Group’s Agriculture division, which includes brands like Farmers Weekly, Pig World and Poultry Business. His team are behind the Farmers Weekly podcast, which was shortlisted in the Best B2B Podcast category at the Publisher Podcast Awards earlier this year.

Farmers Weekly have been really smart about monetising a niche podcast topic and audience, so we discussed creating a podcast that would fit into a farmer’s lifestyle, where the podcast fits in terms of subscriber acquisition and engagement, and collaborating with sponsors to create a sale-able proposition.

Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:

The podcast proposition

It had been on the roadmap for a little while… and actually we ended up launching very, very shortly after Covid lockdowns kicked in. The timing was right in many respects; because everything was locked down, access to information became much more important for everybody, so we bought forward the launch of the podcast.

I should give credit to two people in our business: one on the commercial side, Tom, and Johann [Tasker] our editorial host that were the two champions behind it. That’s certainly been a learning for us, is that you have people that really, really want to do it, to make it successful, and certainly without their enthusiasm, we wouldn’t have got off the ground in the way that we did.

Farming by its nature is a pretty remote job, and a lot of individuals spend a lot of time on their own or in very small teams doing tasks 24/7 on some farms. So tuning into a podcast, we always thought there was a good appetite for that there in our community.

Timing-wise, we were able to benefit from the explosion of podcasts at the time as well. But we’ve grown, and it’s got a really consistent audience of listeners now. So we’ve been very pleased with how it’s gone.

Where the podcast sits in the Farmers Weekly portfolio

Initially, it was much more of an extension for subscribers and that retention of audience who engage with Farmers Weekly in a way that they couldn’t before. So when you want a piece of information, or you’ve got five minutes, it’s very unlikely that you’ve got the rolled-up copy of Farmers Weekly in your back pocket. Even visiting the website is not really a common practice for most people now. We wanted to be able to give people access to the same information, just presented in a different, more easily-consumed way.

It’s always hard to know exactly who the audience is, but we certainly have seen a good retention of those weekly and monthly listeners. The format is very magazine-led; there’s a number of features, and a bit of interaction between the hosts, which I think is one of the things that our audience like the most.

We need to make sure that our product is available however, wherever and whenever our audience want access to it, and that’s been a big part of our overall strategy of engagement with our audience, of which the podcast plays its part.

Demonstrating value to sponsors with a smaller audience

A learning curve we’ve been on is trying to demonstrate the value to our sponsors and tell the story around why they should consider doing it.

Where we get a lot of success is trying to think about the frequency of interaction with the brand. We might have 5,000 downloads a week per episode, but we know that a certain proportion of those listeners are listening every week. They’re really engaged. They’re listening to the whole episode.

So we try to use those metrics to build up a story that frequency of interaction with your brand is much more likely to give you a positive outcome when that person – that listener – comes to make their next purchasing decision.


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