How Buzzsprout Became a Category King

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There are plenty of podcast hosting companies out there, but Buzzsprout has become a dominant player in the industry. They have become the go-to service for podcasters of all types, which is a testament to their service and brand.

What are the things they've done to stand out? Can you use them as an inspiration for your own business?

In this episode of Honest Marketing, we're going to take a look at what makes Buzzsprout a category king and what you can learn from their success. Travis will detail what he believes are the three key elements that have led Buzzsprout to grow into one of the biggest names in the podcasting space. As someone who had been a head of content for this company, Travis knows firsthand what it takes to succeed in this industry.

So if you're looking for inspiration on how to stand out from the competition in your niche—or even just for some tips on how to improve your existing business—you can learn a lot from this episode!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• The key elements behind Buzzsprout's growth
• How to optimize your podcast content 
• Tips for successful product innovation

Have an idea for a future podcast episode (or a guest in mind that you think would be a great fit)? Send me an email at hello@honestpodcasts.com.

Want to give your podcast the boost it needs to stay ahead of the competition? Check out honestpodcasts.com and take the first step toward achieving your podcasting goals!

And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Transcript

Travis Albritton  0:00
How did Buzzsprout become the industry leader in the podcast hosting space when just five years ago, they're barely cracking the top 10. In this episode, we're gonna be digging into our first case study how Buzzsprout became a Category King.

Travis Albritton  0:18  
Welcome to the Honest Marketing Podcast where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton. And in this episode, I'm gonna be sharing some of the things that I learned when I was an employee on the marketing team at Buzzsprout. Yes, before I went and started my own podcast production agency, actually worked for a company doing podcast production. Imagine that. And so in this first case study episode, where we reverse engineer the successes of businesses that are not only growing but growing the right way, I wanted to share the case study of the business that I was able to be a part of, and help it grow into the industry leader or Category King that it is today. Now what do I mean when I say Category King, I mean, it is indisputably the best performing business in whatever that niche or industry is. And so if you're thinking about premium podcast hosting, then you can measure that based on number of customers or members or clients, you can measure that based on revenue, if those are public figures. You can measure that based on, you know, market cap and how much of that market cap the business holds. And then for podcasting, you can think how many podcasts does Buzzsprout host and how many of those are creating episodes and pushing them out to the world versus competitors. And for the last year and a half, Buzzsprout has been at the top and a lot of have a lot of those different rankings for premium podcast hosting, meaning podcast hosting that you pay for. The most popular podcast host, Anchor, is a free platform. But because it's based on a free model, then within the industry, you typically will separate those out and put like SoundCloud and Anchor in one category. And then companies like Podbean, Buzzsprout, Spreaker, Lybsin, in a different category. So when I was working at Buzzsprout, I was the head of content, which means that I was basically there to help create the video, audio, and written content that would serve Buzzsprout customers independent podcasters for the most part, and help them be successful. And the whole reason behind my role, the whole reason that I was there was because there was an opportunity. Alvin, the head of marketing, and Kevin and Tom cofounders, of the company saw an opportunity to really start to pivot the marketing into more of a service oriented direction. And so this is back in 2018, when I was brought on board, and at that point, they already had a blog, it was performing relatively well. Alvin, the head of marketing was running paid ads, to row the listeners and signups and leveraging affiliate relationships and those kinds of connections. But they wanted to push into content marketing as a way of growing the businesses, but we're diversifying the marketing and the traffic coming in and the signups coming in, and be able to kind of diversify how the company was growing. And so in this episode, I'm going to break down three of the things that I think led to Buzzsprout becoming the company that it is today, and how you as a business owner, marketer, entrepreneur, can apply some of those same principles to your business as well. So all of the things I will be sharing, are publicly available information, I just happen to have a front seat to the shell, and be a part of an incredible team, you know, so this is in no way saying that, like I am personally responsible for Buzzsprout growing into the epic company that it is now. But I was able to have a front row seat and to take part in a lot of these initiatives and projects. And so I just wanted to offer my perspective and give you a sense of how you can implement some of these things for your business. So the first thing I think Buzzsprout does exceptionally well that really sets it apart from a lot of the other competitors in this space is that Buzzsprout has a very disciplined approach to product innovation, a very disciplined approach to product innovation. And what I mean by that is typically, whenever you have a product or a service or an offering, rather than, you know, trying to decide between a lot of different options of things you could add to make the product or the service better. The temptation is to add everything that if you get three or four support requests asking for the same feature, you may have 10,000 customers, but if those three or four rise to the top or become the squeaky wheel, then that can pull your focus as a product development team into creating products and features that don't add a lot of value to the rest of your customer base and may scratch the itch of this these couple of people that are writing into support team, but it doesn't necessarily make the product better. And so that's where you can get feature bloat where you have so many features, so many options, that it becomes overwhelming to anyone who is signing up and using your product or extra service for the very first time. So imagine that you're signing up or you're trying to get into a new industry. Maybe you're a business owner, and you're looking for a new CRM product, or you're trying to use a new social media manager or scheduler, and you sign up for this product or feature, and then you get in there, and the dashboard is cluttered with like 50 buttons, 100 links, tutorials and everything. And oh, if you have questions, go to our FAQ blog. That will be very overwhelming. Right? When typically, if you're signing up for like a social media manager, or scheduler, for instance, you just need it to do a couple things really well, number one, make it really easy to connect your social media accounts. Number two, make it very easy to upload content. And then number three, make it very easy to schedule it. Those are the core things that a really excellent social media management software should do. And so if you not only have that, but then you have an editing suite where you can edit content within there, like a Canva spoofer or Canva integration, so people aren't pulling from Canva, but they're doing it directly inside of your software, maybe you're connecting it to a CRM. So you're you're pushing out emails, now you start hosting audio files and video files, because, hey, they're uploading videos anyways, you might as well host them. And now you have all these other things that you're doing. Because over time, it's just kind of gradually expanded the number of things that you can do as a software or service. It can feel incremental at the time, like oh, well just add one more thing, but to someone coming in, it's brand new, it can be completely overwhelming. And so something that Buzzsprout does exceptionally well as it kills almost all of the features or ideas that are brought forth, and really puts them through a very rigorous review process within the team, and within various aspects of the company from every different angle, to make sure that if they're going to consider creating a feature, or are adding a new benefit to the software that is holistically approach so that it's not just hey, so and so had a good idea, let's go do it. But that everyone on the team is like, yeah, no, not only is this a great idea, but this is going to serve our customers better by having it. And so always asking the question, would adding this, this particular feature make your company a better solution for the customer you're trying to serve. And not better from the sense again of more things, but is it meeting the need that they have better than before? And so recently, Buzzsprout has rolled out a new monetization feature that is serving a lot of podcasters exceptionally well. But it was a very long product cycle to create that. They started working on it when I was still working there and then released it after I left and started my own company. Buzzsprout Ads, and it took a long time to go through the review cycle to really refine, it really make it exactly the kind of feature or solution that would not just be something that you put on the marketing site, but will be something actually serves their customers well. So that is something that you want to consider whenever you're thinking through how to position your company, what features to add, and what benefits to add. Make sure you have a very disciplined approach to product innovation and expansion. Because you don't want to become a bloated software or a bloated service where you know. And you'll go on these websites and you'll look at the top toolbar, and you'll see all these different buttons and each of them have a drop down with like 10 different options of like services we provide. And what do they do? Everything in the kitchen sink. Whereas if you just focused on a handful of things and did them better than anyone else, more than likely in long term, that will lead to greater growth for your company because now you become known as the go to person or the go to a company that does X, Y or Z. Okay, so that's the first thing that I've noticed about Buzzsprout, I think has contributed to the success they've had and been able to sustain long term is they have a very disciplined approach to product innovation and that bleeds into their marketing. The second thing that Buzzsprout does better than anyone else in the podcasting hosting space is content marketing. And by content marketing, I mean creating things for the Internet. Content is such an overused word nowadays, but audio content in the form of podcasts, written content in the form of blogs, newsletters, and video content, whether it's YouTube, or webinars or trainings, things like that. And the reason that Buzzsprout brought me on again, to begin with was to start creating a lot of these things and setting up these systems is starting to take advantage of these channels. Because your customers and your prospects are already spending time online. And if they're at any stage in the prospects journey of becoming a customer of a company, and you hope they become a customer of your company, then there's gonna be questions that they have. There's gonna be things that they don't know yet because they're brand new to this whole process. And so at Buzzsprout, the number one thing that people would type into a Google search bar or YouTube or anything like that is "How to start a podcast?" That is the search phrase that indicates this person is interested in looking to start a podcast.

Travis Albritton  9:55
Buzzsprout as a company is pretty well positioned to take care of that person, but they don't just have that question, they have all kinds of other questions. Like, how do I find music that I can safely use in my show without getting sued? You know, how do I get into Spotify? How do I get into Apple Podcasts and get my show listed there? How do I actually record and edit a podcast episode? What kind of gear or microphone do I need? And so part of Buzzsprout approach to marketing is answering all of those questions along the way. So that way, when someone gets to the end of that journey, and says, I'm ready to start a podcast, Buzzsprout becomes their choice. Buzzsprout becomes the software that they use to host their podcast, because they're the ones that have been helping them along the whole journey. So of course, they've built up the expertise and the credibility. To say, hey, if they can know all of these answers, chances are they're gonna know all the answers to the questions I have in the future. And they understand the things that I'm trying to figure out. And so there's an implicit trust and a deferment towards, you know, hey if you know all the answers to these questions, then chances are the product that you've built is pretty awesome, and is going to serve my needs exceptionally well. But by expanding the amount of entry points into your business, where you're not just creating one lead magnet or one blog that's how to do X and then hoping everyone comes through there. It is really identifying what are the 50 to 100 questions that people have about my industry, about the kinds of businesses that I'm competing against, about my niche, about the problems that I'm solving, and creating answers for each of those things as a way of getting in front of your ideal customer and your ideal prospect when they're in the process of trying to decide what service they need and even answering this question before they knew they need a service. So if we're taking podcasting, as an example, when someone types in how to start a podcast, the chances that they know that they need an independent service that can store their audio files on a cloud based server, and then distribute them to Apple Podcasts and Spotify is very very small. They don't have the information and the knowledge to know like that is a thing that I need to know about or be concerned with. All they want to know is how do I get from point A to point B. And so if you can really lay out what that customer journey looks like, from when they first start the process of searching and discovery, and learning about how to do whatever it is that you do. And then start answering all those questions along the way, the much better off your marketing will be because now you're going to be attacking it from angles that are overlooked by your competitors. Right? So for instance, you know, at one point in time, Buzzsprout had a blog called how to submit your podcast to Spotify. And it was so popular because this was right at the time when Spotify was getting into the podcasting game. It feels like ages ago, but there was a point in time where it was brand new. The Buzzsprout blog was ranking above Spotify's own blog post, and like the actual Spotify website on how to get listed in the show. And so imagine all the people that are searching for this, how to get listed in Spotify, how to get listed in Spotify, how to get listed in Spotify, and Buzzsprout shows up as, hey, we know how to answer this question for you. And by the way, did you also know that you need all these other things in order to get into Spotify? We do all those things if you need help use our service. So that is where content marketing can really set your business apart from your competitors, where it's not just, you know, again, the blocking and tackling of having a lead capture page or a lead magnet and automated email sequence and SEO and those kinds of things. But really partnering with your prospects and your customers before they become your customers to help them through the journey. And in addition to creating all of that content and allowing it to grow organically, Buzzsprout does use Google ads to specifically boost blog posts and feature pages and things like that, where there's a very easy correlation between an intent to sign up for a service like Buzzsprout. But it's not necessarily directly the keyword. So how to start a podcast is becoming a much more competitive keyword to go after because it's kind of common knowledge that's where somebody starts their journey so you'll have a lot of people competing on that. But how to submit your podcast to Spotify, for instance, might be a cheaper keyword to go after if using Google ads. But someone who is in the process of trying to get a show they've recorded into Spotify may still be in a position where hey, I need actually a podcast hosting software or platform to use. And so Buzzsprout then becomes the choice. And so you can also make your ad dollars stretch farther if you start going after less competitive keywords and you're not just driving traffic to a signup page but you're driving traffic to content that someone can consume to answer a question. And guess what, it's on the website. We're right there. At the top of the website, you have like a sign up for free or check out our plans or about or services or features or whatever it is, right. So these are just all these different ways that you can diversify the way traffic is coming to you and your business. And then partnering with your prospects to help them get to a place where they can make a really informed buying decision. So the second thing that Buzzsprout does exceptionally well is content marketing. And not just in one area or sphere, the YouTube channel has over 80,000 subscribers. The blog is one of the top blogs in the podcasting space in the world and they've done a really great job of optimizing it to make sure it stays that way. And then also podcast audio content, right that they have shows for podcasting, how to start a podcast, probably one of the most downloaded podcasts about podcasting in the world on a per episode basis. And then several others that I'm talking about here in a second, because the third thing that Buzzsprout does exceptionally well, is building community and brand affinity. So it used to be that you could just leverage performance marketing, drive people to sign up page, your landing page. And if you persuade them enough, with enough words, and enough copy, you can get them to buy from you. But now, people are much more sensitive to the kinds of businesses and companies they're doing business with, and who they're giving their dollars to. It is just kind of the natural state of things, especially as Gen Z is becoming more and more prominent within the demographics that everyone is targeting. Right? That 18 to 35, or, you know, 25 to 44 demo, whatever your key target demographic is. And so having a community, or a sense that you are joining something that's bigger than yourself, however, you know, spiritually want to get with that. And then brand affinity, meaning I have a positive impression of a company simply because of the reputation of how they present themselves. Buzzsprout says both of those seasons exceptionally well. So one of the first projects that we launched when I started at Buzzsprout, over four years ago, was a public Facebook group. So this used to be all the rage, and you know, the course creation, niche and industry and support groups were showing up. But there were not a lot of companies at the time in the podcast hosting industry that had Facebook groups, specifically dedicated to interacting with their customers and providing tips and feedback and really just like a sense of like, how can we all help each other. And so that Buzzsprout Facebook group has become a huge part of the marketing of the company, where people will discover the Facebook group, interacts there, and then we'll ask questions like, hey I'm trying to figure out who should I sign up for and what kind of podcast hosting service. And guess what everybody says? They all say Buzzsprout. Like, you should totally use Buzzsprout. And it's actually kind of funny, like when someone will go in and say, hey I'm hosting at these other place and I have this question about podcasting. And all the other responses are like, well, here's the answer to your question, but then follow up, like, why are you hosting over there and not on Buzzsprout. And so that Facebook group has built a culture of the people that use that product and service. To the point now, where people are fans of a software company, in a way that I've rarely seen replicated. Maybe Click Funnels comes to mind is like another software that is semi consumer facing that has a very strong tribe and group identity. Buzzsprout podcasters are just a whole another breed of podcaster. And I think a big piece of that is that sense of community. It is that Facebook group and that connective tissue, where they're all helping and serving and encouraging one another.

Travis Albritton  18:14
But then going beyond that, it's not just about connecting your customers with each other. Buzzsprout also produces multiple podcasts, one of them is Buzzcast, which is a twice a month show. That is just for Buzzsprout podcasters. Now anyone can listen to it, it's publicly available. But when you listen to Buzzcast, you were hearing people from within the company, talk about what's going on in the podcasting industry, what's going on with the Buzzsprout products and things that they're learning. The company is learning that can help their customers be successful. It's totally free. There's no strings attached. It's just something that Buzzsprout does, in order to serve their customers better. Not only do they have that show. Buzzcast, which is at this point, probably one of the industry leaders when it comes to like podcasting news. Just because it's been doing it, they've been doing it for quite a while. But then podcasting Q&A, a show that really leverages the community to source questions and topics. And so you're able to hear Buzzsprout talk about things that you've asked them to talk about. And so as a customer, imagine that you are using a service or a product and there's a venue for you to be able to get answers and feedback, not just in a customer support query or an FAQ, but a whole piece of content dedicated to answering the question that you have from the experts of the company of the product that you're that you're using. Like that's really special. And as a company, as a brand, as a business, that's advantageous for you because if that one person has that question, chances are there's 100 or 1000 people that have that same question. So now you can answer it from all for all of them at the same time and leverage the community that you're building and the positive affinity that people are building with your brand and to then create the content that you're going to use to market your business and to grow it. So all of these things are interconnected, they may feel like different pieces. But if you start to put them all together, you start to see that there's a holistic approach to really building a tribe of people that are passionate about what they do and see your company as a partner in helping them be successful and what that venture is. So with Buzzsprout, it's how do we help independent podcasters podcast longer, keep podcasting, remove obstacles, help them grow their show, help them cover the costs. How do we do that? That's how I say we, I worked there for four years. So I still feel a sense of we, how can your company do that? Because if you take it upon yourself to help the people that you were serving beyond just what they're paying you for, but really building that sense of community and serving them with the content you're creating, then not only are they going to be successful, but they're going to attribute that success to the relationship they have with you and your brand. And so now when a competitor pops up, that's cheaper, that has different features, they're less likely to shift and to see you as commodity, because they have a personal emotional relationship with you and your company. That goes beyond simply the service that you provide. And then in addition to having the Facebook group, creating these shows, and this content that's really driven at serving their customers, Buzzsprout also has an outstanding customer support. Like absolutely outstanding to the point where you don't even have to use them, they probably don't want me sharing this, but you don't even have to use Buzzsprout to have them help you with your podcast. So they now have the reputation of just help being a really helpful resource and really good at what they do. So you'll have podcasters that use competitor's platforms. And they will ask Buzzsprout the answers to questions because they can't get the answer from their own customer support. That's how incredible Buzzsprout support team is and the reputation that they have within the industry. And so if you can find ways to go above and beyond and surpass expectations for what people think and what they expect for customer service, that goes a long way at winning people over not just to you as a business on a one to one level, but also in who do they recommend if they have friends that are in similar industries. If you're in the B2B space, and you know, networking as such, and word of mouth is such a big part of growth and connecting, what is their impression of you? Are they going to not only tell people about you when solicited for that advice? But they're they're gonna go out of their way to tell people hey, you may need this. You haven't even talked to me about this, but you may need this product or service and this is why I think they're outstanding. Are you creating that level of an impression?

Travis Albritton  22:42
And when you put all that stuff together, a disciplined approach to product innovation, really outstanding content marketing that's holistically driven around the different stages of the prospects journey, and then building community and brand affinity. If you can do those three things, then you can start to replicate some of the momentum that Buzzsprout has been able to build within the podcast hosting industry to become a Category King in their space. Now, if you enjoyed this case study breakdown and you want me to do more of them, then over on the YouTube version of this episode, drop a comment with a company that you want me to reverse engineer in the future and break down the things that they are doing exceptionally well to grow their business and some of the things that I think all of us can learn from them in order to grow our own businesses. But thank you so much for watching this episode or listening to this episode. You can subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. And if this was really helpful for you, leave a review, leave a comment on YouTube, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and that would mean the world to me and I would love to hear your feedback and how this show is serving you and how I can continue to serve you into the future. We'll hope you have an amazing rest of your week. And as always, be honest.