Why Small Numbers Matter, Big Time

Our obsession with big numbers is a hangover from the broadcast era. Targeting and addressability were so crude and unreliable that you needed massive numbers to reach anyone who cared about your product or service in a broadcast medium.  One of the most important things to grasp is that podcasting is not broadcasting, and small numbers matter big time.

 

Wait, what?

 

I can hear the skeptics saying, “this just sounds like an excuse to justify podcasting’s limited reach compared to broadcasting” – a reasonable assumption but grossly wrong.   The key concepts are interest, response rates, and motivations. The short answer is that podcasting makes it economically feasible to hyper-target,  reach,  and build relationships with passionate audiences interested in your subject matter, products, and services.   Interested audiences increase the response rate to your commercial offers and are more motivated to become customers.

 

Here’s the science:

 

 

 

Mindset Matters

 

Two mindsets need to shift to yield the highest return from podcasting.  The first is moving away from “transactional” marketing, where we carpet bomb large, loosely targeted audiences in hopes of hitting the subset of recipients interested in our products and services.  Instead, we focus on building ongoing relationships with a smaller but hyper-interested, hyper-engaged audience who can become passionate, loyal customers and evangelists for our products and services.

 

The second follows naturally from the first. A small, passionate cadre of evangelists can become your most credible and effective sales force and significantly impact your bottom line. So to get big, first thing small.

 

Email us if you want to know more, and we’ll send you a link to the research paper.