Martic podcast and today we're gonna talk a little bit about generating reviews. This podcast is sponsored by hub spot. So why is it so important to have reporting as part of your company's crm. Well have you ever spent a day. Knee-deep d. in spreadsheets reconciling different data. Sources trying to figure out what's actually driving your business performance. The reality is that when teams use multiple systems the data informing your insights becomes incredibly difficult to reconcile and trust hub spot. Sierra platform was built differently. It was handcrafted from the ground up and not cobbled together through acquisitions so rather than having insights locked away in different silent systems. Your entire team has access to one unified system so you can align your team to a single source of truth and get a clear view of your businesses performance across marketing sales services. The whole team helps spot will help your team adapt and evolve as fast as the changes in your market by enabling you to make better smarter data back decisions through custom reporting and built in analytics to learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity. Got a hub. Spot dot com. And this podcast is also sponsored by conversion fanatics all right. You've spent the last few years helping your company. Grow to seven maybe eight figures revenue. But how do you know that you're not leaving money on the table. While if you haven't fully optimized your website for conversions than the answer probably is that you are not why you need to join companies like clorox. Birth birthdays and click funnels and use conversion fanatics. Conversion fanatics runs thousands of marketing experiments. Every year for their clients to help them optimize their website conversion rates and they contest anything. Ab testing different website. headlines called actions. Faq's what's the ideal number of fields for your intake forms. What's the difference between your mobile versus. Desktop designs and you see conversion fanatics uses those test results to create an optimized and customized plan for your company to help you get more customers. Scale your traffic faster and see more prophet and best of all conversion fanatics makes it easy for you. They've already optimized the crap out of hundreds of websites and they have an extensive test volt of proven winners to draw from. Plus they handle everything from idea and you ex design to development and execution and of course. They're co founder and president. Justin christianson was one of the first ever guests on the mar tech podcast. So they're friends of the program. All right brass tacks the biggest. Roi is always optimizing your own website. Make the most out of the prospects that are already coming to you so get started today. With conversion fanatics good conversion fanatics dot com to get a free audit where conversion optimization specialist will analyze your site and give you over a dozen conversion boosting ideas for free it's conversion fanatics dot com so get optimizing with conversion phonetics and this podcast is also sponsored by the wicks partner program. Look iran a professional services business. Right before i started working on the martic podcast full-time and one of my biggest pain points was working with early. Stage companies that needed to either invent or reestablish their digital footprint at create their website built into their crm. Make sure that your data flows get your social stuff set up. It can be a real pain when you're trying to do something custom and creative and that's what's great about the wicks partner program so when your agency or consultancy in my case partners with wicks you can unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating managing and growing your business online so you can run that agency the way that you want to you. Get the full. Coding and design freedom to create. Anything that your client's needs along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team seamlessly from anywhere and when it comes to growing your business you can also get match with new leads every day. The wicks partner programs going to help you find. Some business earns some revenue for every website. That you can create an. They're backed by wicks as industry leading security incite performance. You'll have a dedicated account manager on standby for twenty four seven. Apparently they do not sleep so you can reach your goals and then start setting new ones to see it for yourself. Head over the wicks partner program at wicks dot com slash partners. That's w i x dot com slash. The word partners and reimagined. What your agency can accomplish. That's wicks dot com slash partners for the wicks partner program. One of the things that we've realized that the most important channel for podcast growth for at least our show is the apple. Itunes store the vast majority of our downloads come by being visible in apple's podcast app store. So what are some of the ways that you can optimize your visibility and apple. Well there's a couple of different things that i think you can do when you're talking about being in the app store for a stop you have to optimize your shows feed. Make sure that your brand is something. That's recognizable that something that search for so we show up. I when somebody searches for the keyword martic were also one of the top two hundred shows in marketing regularly so when people are looking for marketing shows. Maybe they're looking for that list. I think one of the biggest things that we do successfully as since we are a daily show we produce high volume of content and so when someone is looking for a given topic related to marketing. Maybe they're looking for podcast review optimization strategies while hey that's going to be something similar to the topic of this episode and we will hopefully show up for the individual episode search. Not necessarily just the show search. The other thing to do is try to boost yourself up the apple app store rankings and this is kind of a controversial topic. What we think really matters when you're trying to be a top podcast and apple's app stores. I think there's really three variables one you can't control. Which is how long your podcast has been around. I think that apple weights podcast little older because they've shown that they are consistent and dependable and they don't want brands that are relatively new without large audiences popping up the app store. Top two hundred and then going away without having been a podcast her for a long time. That's not necessarily something you can control. The other things that you can control are the number of subscribers and also how many reviews you're getting we talk a lot about marketing. The tech podcast content on the show and our big strategy for the most part has been buying audio ads in remnant inventory. Today wanna talk a little bit more about review generation lou couple of different ways to garner reviews. We've tested a couple of different channels. Honestly even some of the like gimmicky buying review type stuff and those were experiments not something that we necessarily rely on. But i wanted to see with. The impact was months. If not years ago of going through one of the like now somebody hits up on linked in says i can be a promoter. Say yes see what happens. What have happening as they end up generating a bunch of fake reviews for you. And they're probably getting data that looks like subscribers to apple i tunes and then all of a sudden you end up popping up in the app store and you get real listeners. But we wanted to try to do that but without actually faking it so recently we started a review campaign and my thought was well. How do we figure out who to ask for a review for going to explicitly. Ask someone to do something. We should make sure. It's something that we are providing or have provided value to now. I would love to ask you our listeners. To leave us a review and by all means. If you're listening to this podcast go into any app store. You can get a hold of leave a five star review. Tell us what you like or don't like about the show. I actually do read those reviews. We get our feed from chargeable. And if there's any way that we can make the show better by all means we are one hundred percent open to that feedback but leaving a five star review specifically in apple. Podcast or itunes. Miss something that actually does really benefit the show. That's at we haven't actually found much success by asking our listeners for review so we started to do was think about mojo the other people that are involved in helping us with the show. We've got our sponsors. They're paying for the shows. I don't really want to ask them for view. Then we have our invited guests and tech podcast is over. Nine hundred episodes already published. We've had about three hundred speakers so far in the three years that we've been doing this podcast on the show. So what i did to try to garner reviews reach back out to some of our previous speakers. We did a one email campaign. We didn't ask for follow ups. We just basically sent one email on our read. You what that copy is including the variables that included the title of the email. That i sent out to our previous guests was guest. How many downloads your podcasts. Generated dot dot dot. Here's the copy of the email. Hey i named variable. It's been a while house. My favorite podcast guest. The hope you enjoyed being a guest on the tech podcast. Back in month variable year variable. I'm reaching out to reconnect and to give you a quick update on how your podcast episodes have been consumed new paragraph bolted since it was published. Your interview has been downloaded number of downloads. Times new paragraph. my and i are working hard to keep content like yours. Well circulated and what we've realized is that the most important channel for driving organic podcast growth is to raise the profile of our podcast within apple. Podcast rankings new paragraph there too key variables that impact podcast rankings one driving content followers and subscriptions and to receiving podcast reviews new paragraph. If you're willing to support my work and the marquette community which will in turn increase the exposure of your episodes. I'd be grateful if you would share your experience. Where share experiences a link as my guest on apple podcasts. If there's anything. I did do to return a favor. Please let me know. Thanks in advance. Best dash be. That's kind of how i signed my name. Ps here are the instructions on how to share your experience as my guest on the tech podcast. Where when somebody clicks that. Ps link it. Brings them to a document that i created which has linked to apple podcasts and screen shots of how to create a review. Either from your phone or from a desktop device turns out leaving. Her view is a relatively complicated thing to do. I really wish apple would make it. More seamless to collect feedback from the users. If you're on your phone tends to be a little easier. If you're in the itunes podcast app store trying to desktop device. It's kinda hard to figure out where the reviews us are native to go leave five stars and then you also want to leave a comment. What a wanna do. Now that you've heard what content we sent to our email and again. We only sent one email to the people that had been speakers on the show. We emailed two hundred forty seven speakers. Two hundred twenty nine of them were actually delivered our inbox over the three years of us recording podcasts. Basically around twenty people have changed their email address of the two hundred twenty nine people that we delivered the email to seventy six percent of those people. Open the email which tells me all right. we've got an audience that's at least receptive to reading our message. Now here's what's interesting to me. Twenty eight percent of those people sixty three people actually clicked on something in the email that was either are called action. Hey leave us review or the instructions on how to leave her view and twenty percent of the people wrote back and most the responses that were written back where hey. I'd love to leave a review. Maybe i'm not a itunes user. How can i help you support the show. Hey i left her review. Can you leave a review for my shell or is there something else that you can help me with a little bit of a barter and exchange for some services some people it also said. Hey i already left her of you. Here's a screen shot at the review. Moral of the story is about a quarter of the people that we emailed responded back and we generated twenty or thirty reviews over the next couple of weeks. Twenty or thirty reviews is a meaningful number of reviews. When you're thinking about a podcast now look you can't always be emailing your guests and so what we've done realizing that this copy started to work is that we built out a trigger in monday dot com. Which is our product management software that after a guest has been on our show sixty days after their content is published. We get a trigger in our communications board. That says it's time for you to send the email asking somebody for a review and we're basically going to follow this same template some moral of the story what ended up happening when we launched. Our review campaign is our podcast went from its low point of fifty five thousand one hundred ninety nine downloads in april and we saw a spike to seventy two thousand downloads. So we have an increase of seventeen thousand downloads with basically nothing other than doing this review campaign. Getting thirty reviews for us meant seventeen thousand downloads. That ends up being a pretty impactful process. And so we're building this in to a regular process basically every year so. I thought that not only that copy would be interesting for you but also if you're a podcast or if you're just an app if you're running your service power of reviews and working with your community is something that can really not only boost your credibility when somebody who's thinking about being your listeners. It also sends a very strong signal to the platforms where you're trying to optimize to grow your marketing. I hope you enjoyed this. Episode of the mar tech podcast. Thanks for listening and that wraps up this episode of the mar tech podcast. If you're interested in getting in touch you could find a link to my linked in profile in our show notes. You can contact me on twitter. My handle is benjy shop. Be nj s. h. a. p. a. You could find my personal website. It's been j shop dot com a special thanks to hub spot for sponsoring this podcast. If you're ready to align your team to a single source of truth to get a clear view of your business performance across marketing sales services the whole team hub. Spot will enable your team to adapt and evolve as fast as the changes in your market through data back decisions with powerful custom reporting and built in analytics to learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity could hub spot dot com and also a special thanks to conversion fanatics for sponsoring this podcast. Look the biggest. Roi is always optimizing your own web traffic. Make the most of the prospects that are already coming to you so to get started today with conversion fanatics you can go to conversion fanatics dot com and get a free audit way optimization. Specialists will analyze your website. And give you over a dozen conversion boosting ideas for free get optimizing with conversion fanatics at conversion fanatics dot com and also a special thanks to wicks for sponsoring this podcast. When your agency partners with wicks you can unlock an entire digital ecosystem for creating managing and growing your online business. So you can run your agency the way you've always wanted to get the full coding and design freedom to create anything. Your clients need along with the tools to manage and collaborate with your team effortlessly and seamlessly from anywhere. And when it comes to growing your business you can get matched with new leads. Earn revenue share and get an account manager dedicated to your success. So you can reach your goals and start setting new ones to re imagine what your agency can accomplish head over to wicks dot com slash partners. That's wicks w i x dot com slash partners. Just one more link in our show nuts..