Brand Awareness Campaign:
Science Changing Life Podcast
The existing podcast, “Prescrippsion Sound” offered a great opportunity to reach a broader audience with the client’s overall mission, to “advance scientific understanding.” However some strategic upgrades needed to be made to make the genuinely interesting content more accessible.
Podcast episodes feature candid interviews with some of the leading biomedical researchers in their areas of focus. Each episode offers a rare behind the scenes perspective. The goal was to reach a larger subscriber audience and gain more follows on each podcast platform.
Campaign Objectives:
- Creating a more intuitive user experience
- Revamping podcast icon and renaming the podcast to be more relatable and aligned more closely with the larger Scripps Research brand
- Developing a landing page to host and catalog all episodes
- Optimizing the landing page/overall website
- Ranking scripps.edu/podcast on higher search positions
- Building promotional email marketing strategy
- Increasing number of subscribers via paid social ads and organic content
- Raising brand awareness via Google search and display ads
Campaign Results:
- Follower base increased by 430%
- Plays/listens increased by over 200%
- Visible peaks in plays/listens could be reasonably associated with the timing of direct emails
- LinkedIn garnered the best results in organic impressions and engagement
- The new landing page increased unique page visits by 23%
- Direct emails were shared over 500x by recipients; making an all-time record of shared content via the email communication channel
Revamping podcast icon
- The previous podcast title was confusing. It was long and hard to spell and not directly related to the larger brand.
- “Science Changing Life” is the official tagline of the institute and it was an intuitive transition for the podcast name.
- The old icon was difficult to read at the scale it appears on most users devices and streaming platforms.
- The new icon is eye catching, includes the mission and tagline and logo mark of the larger Scripps Research visual brand.
- The new title and icon communicates the content focal point and connects directly with target audiences.
Developing a landing page
Previous to the campaign, the podcast episodes were being embedded (via iframe) from the Soundcloud platform and were not searchable within the scripps.edu domain. The solution I recommended was to build an easy to navigate and search engine optimized landing page where every episode title and description could be searched, accessed and tracked through Google analytics. Additionally, outbound links were tracked by click tags. This allowed a deeper understanding of the target demographics and cross promotion of podcast to press release readers .
Engaging Email Subscribers:
Episode Release Emails
A new episode was released weekly, each Monday, on all podcast streaming platforms. Promotional emails were sent to all scripps.edu subscribers.
Each email focused on the detail of the newest episode, highlighting the credentials of the researcher being interviewed, the focus of their research, custom graphics, illustrating their topic and links to their specific episode.
Reaching A New Audience:
Google Search Ads
Google Display Ads
Paid Social Ads
Search ad campaigns were configured to increase traffic, visibility, leads, and conversions to scripps.edu/podcast.
With both Google and social display ads, an “evergreen” approach, with a general description of the podcast, was tested against an episode specific model. Ultimately, the episode specific model gained the most conversions with Facebook taking the lead. Episode specific ads allowed for more targeted impressions based on the consumer’s self-identified preferences.
Key performance indicators for paid ad campaigns were. Each key performance indicator gained a significant increase as seen in the stats listed above in “Campaign Results, ” such as new subscribers, website visits, length of time on page and number of podcasts played completely.
Growing deeper connections with existing audiences:
Organic Social Posts
• Youtube
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
In addition to reaching a new audience with podcast content, we deepened our relationship with existing followers. The long term goal is to convert these existing followers to either donors or recruiting new talent.
