The most common mistake in podcast titles

0:00The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcasts, production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit I Hear Everything dot com. From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated to content performs better than TV advertising. Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call at action that it's just a matter of timing. Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use

1:03technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me today is Cody Gough, a podcast growth strategist who also works at Nerd Wallet, and a longtime operator who's scaled award-winning shows for major brands. And today, Cody's going to break down what actually drives sustainable, organic growths in podcasting. Time for a short break to hear from our sponsor, Scrunch. When was the last time you actually visited a website to research something? For me, AI does all that work now. So if AI is doing the discovery research and deciding who or what is your brand's website really for, the rise of AI bots becoming as important as new visitors is a massive change in user behavior, and that's what Scrunch is taking head on. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform

2:04that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results, where it doesn't, and what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted, or recommended. It's not just visibility. Scrunch shows you the content gaps, citation gaps, and how to fix the technical blockers that matter so your brand is found and chosen in AI answers. Face it, your most important site visitor isn't human anymore. If the AI deciding what gets surfaced, and for Martek podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps, and where you're showing up versus your competition. To see how LLM's evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com slash martek. That's scrunch s-c-r-u-n-c-h dot com slash martek. All right, Cody. Now it's time to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of Martek related questions, specifically centered around your experience and organic podcast growth. Are you ready?

3:07Probably not, but we'll try anyway. We're going to do it. We're going to force you into it. All right, here we go. What is the one single most common mistake you see in podcast titles and what's the fastest way to fix it? People use people's names when no one's searching for those names. I talked today. The title will be like a caterina Moses from blah, blah, blah. The thing is no one very likely in the world is going into Spotify and searching a caterina Moses, unless they're researching her for another podcast that they're about to interview her on, which I've done many times. So just don't do it. Just give the value, put the guest's name, unless it's a really, really high profile guest, which I saw you did with the CEO of Reich. I think it was a former CEO of Reich or a CMO of Reich. Or maybe it was Hobbespot. It was Hobbespot. The Hobbespot guy. Yeah, you put his name in the title because like the dude was a huge deal of Hobbespot, which is a huge deal, right? If it's if you're talking to the CEO of Microsoft, yeah. Okay, but like for the most

4:10part, most people at most companies are not being searched for like Brad Pitt or whatever. Yeah, it's funny. We have gone back and forth about this. How much should we be trying to own the guests name and company combination, you know, in our organic growth strategy or how much of we we be trying to own the topic. And for us, the companies tend to be more recognizable. But if it is not the chief executive something of a major company, right? When it was when I interviewed Alex Schultz, who is the CMO of meta, Alex Schultz, CMO of meta says blank is a logical title. If I am interviewing somebody who is the head of demand at a demand generation company, I interviewed Sarah from qualified. I don't think people are understand who Sarah from qualified is they might not even know qualified, but they do understand AI SDRs. And that's the hot

5:12topic. And that's probably what people are looking for. So you have to use your judgment on how truly impactful is the person's name, the company, and then what is the actual topic generally I lean topic. You know what my biggest no no is? Stop putting the damn episode numbers in your titles. They don't need to be there. I mean, I would I was going to say that, but like that's first there's those two things on that. Yes, one, that's like amateur hour two. This American life does it, which drives me crazy because this American life is in for my money, the best podcast I've ever made, like, and it's not even close. It's just perfect. But it's yeah, it's like 86. Now, as a side note, I actually really like that they do that because it's just a number. And I know when they run a rerun because they will put because if I see my feed 435 436 82, I know it's a rerun immediately and I'm never interested in those are very rarely interested in those. So they're the one exception, but that's like using Rogan as an example for anything like you just don't

6:15exception and not the yeah, they're very much the exception. But yes, agreed. If you're not this American life or Joe Rogan, please don't put the episode number in your podcast. All right. And a special thanks to scrunch for sponsoring this interview. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results where it doesn't and what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted, or recommended. And for Martek podcast listeners, scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site where you have content gaps and how you're showing up versus your competition to see how LLMs evaluate your site go to scrunch.com. That's scrunch s-c-r-u-n-c-h.com. Well, that wraps up this episode of the Martek podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Cody Gough, a podcast growth strategist. He also works up nerd wallet. If you'd like to contact Cody, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in

7:16our show notes or on martekpod.com. You could always visit his personal website, which is podcast growth consultant.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, click the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Thanks for listening to the Martek podcast and I hear everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand, then visit I hear everything.com.