On this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast we hear from Esther Newman, Senior Editor and Podcast Host at Women’s Running. Esther explains that a recent exercise to create a persona for the typical Women’s Running reader led to the realisation that there were a range of audiences accessing the brand in a variety of ways.
While running is the banner that attracts readers to the brand, a whole host of women’s interests are what drives the community. From a monthly print magazine through a weekly podcast, to a Patreon Discord and social channels, Women’s Running is ‘so many things’ to its diverse audience.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
Attracting a range of audiences
We were talking recently about creating a persona for Women’s Running so that we could speak to her better. It’s a fantastic marketing tool to really get under the skin of your audience. But we realised, we could probably come up with one or two people for the magazine, but they’re not going to be the same as the podcast persona. And that’s not going to be the same as the person that uses the website, or the person who talks to us through Instagram and comments on things there.
Women’s Running, we have a magazine, we have a podcast, we have an Instagram feed, we have Facebook, we have a website, and then around all of that, there’s various marketing tools like email newsletters, and all the ways in which we communicate with our audiences, which are much more varied than you’d think.
We still have a print monthly, it’s the beating heart. We use print a lot, so not only do we have the once a month issue of the magazine, we’ve also dabbled in things like bookazines. We’ve used the podcast to reverse back into print to see if we can pick up people that way.
Evolving the Women’s Running podcast
The podcast started off as me interviewing people. My big passion in terms of podcasts was Adam Buxton – I loved the interview format, so that’s what I was trying to do. Then I started adding in podcasts where I was essentially training a colleague of mine, Holly, as she trained towards her first half marathon.
It turned out that people were just far more interested in those conversations than they were with me talking to Paula Radcliffe. I think that’s fair – unless you’ve got a comedian or someone you really know, it’s tricky to get that chemistry in a one-off podcast.
It’s way more about women than it is about running. We’ve had a lot of people criticizing the fact that we’ve been talking too much about running recently; they’re honestly really, really cross with us because both of us are training for the London Marathon, so obviously we’re talking about it quite a lot. They’ve had enough, they want us to go back to talking about telly again!
Monetising the podcast
We are making money on the podcast, which is great because the first year we didn’t at all, I really had to battle for its existence. It was basically just there to sell subscriptions to the magazine, it was used as an extra bit of marketing to see if we could pick up a few extra subs. Now it’s absolutely its own broadcast publishing entity, almost separate from the magazine.
There are three different ways we make it commercially viable: sponsorship, Patreon membership, and Acast advertising. Of those three things, the most lucrative is probably the sponsorship. We work with our commercial manager, and it’s lovely to have [the podcast] as an extra thing because it really helps with the commercial spend elsewhere within the ecosystem. You can say to people, okay, do you want a page of advertising in the magazine? That will work to a degree, but you might find that actually you’re going to reach more people if you go on the podcast with a sponsorship message.
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