How I made it, Part 2: Publicity

This is the second of three “How I made it” newsletters which will look at the money and marketing behind BAD SEX. 

I first set up the BAD SEX newsletter to give supporters “early access” to episodes. As time went on, I began to see the benefit of having a record of how I made the podcast. It’s so easy to forget the work that goes into our achievements. Furthermore, I wanted to be able to put the information out into the world for anyone else who might be thinking about making a podcast series, wondering how to approach it and, crucially, how to finance it.

Welcome to Part 2 of How I made it…

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How I made it, Part 2: Publicity

Of all the things I had to budget for when making this podcast, marketing and publicity was the least tangible. I knew exactly how much I needed to spend on equipment. I knew what Anouszka, my freelance audio producer’s day rate was. I knew how much it would cost to license the music, rent a recording studio, and pay for an auto-transcription service. I knew what percentage Crowdfunder would be taking to cover their fees. But the publicity I was doing myself and as a freelancer, as a one-woman-show, and someone who already writes about sex and relationships on the regular, it's really hard to pin down what “counts” as publicity. Indeed, if you look at my social media accounts during the production process, the question becomes more… When was I NOT doing publicity?

Honestly? Never. From early 2021 to mid-2022 I was never NOT doing publicity for my podcast. I’m still doing it now, in a way! These How I made it newsletters are to document the process but,

let’s be honest, they’re also a way to publicise the podcast. Over the next two weeks I’ll not only be making this entire newsletter public, I’ll also be putting out the bonus episode on all podcast platforms. And  while that’s partly about wrapping up the project neatly, and sharing my experience with the world, it’s also a publicity strategy. I want as many people as possible to listen to this podcast. So I’m going to use every tool at my disposal to try to draw them in.

In next week’s How I made it newsletter, I’ll be breaking down the BAD SEX budget and telling you exactly how I spent the money I raised but for now let me just confess this: I did not cover my costs on publicity. If I actually tried to tot up the time I spent on promoting this podcast, and assign it an hourly rate, it would amount to a ridiculous sum. And I think that’s a pointless exercise anyway. Obviously I was going to spend a certain amount of time and energy shouting about the podcast I’d just spent six months making. So, while I’ll do my best to detail what I did, please bear in mind that I did a lot of it in my own time, for free. I honestly think this is pretty normal for most podcasters but it’s worth remembering when you put together a budget. I allotted £600 to marketing. That barely even covered the cost of the crowdfunder.

The Crowdfunder

Trying to sell people something that doesn’t even exist yet is a special kind of hell. I’ll be honest with you, I hated the crowdfunding process, even as people told me I was “smashing it”. Putting together the actual project pitch wasn’t too bad—Crowdfunder provides a lot of guidance and gives examples of successful projects for you to crib from—but coming up with fresh ways to talk about it on social media, making to-camera pleas for people to give you money? Excruciating.

Absolutely not, Crowdfunder

You can see the actual Crowdfunder HERE, immortalised as a successful campaign with its little “We did it” green tick. Everything was done by me, from writing the copy for the campaign, to hopping on Instagram every day to pester people about it. I had some help with the audio/video piece I made to accompany it, both from my producer Anouszka Tate and my graphic design guru Simon Eves who also created the BAD SEX logo and the branding I use across all my work. The costs of these will be included in the budget breakdown next week although, spoiler alert, it comes to more than £600! You definitely don’t need to spend money on the video and I’ve seen successful projects that were definitely DIY jobs but since I was trying to sell a podcast, I felt strongly that the audio sample in the campaign needed to match the standard of the finished series. This was my chance to show as well as tell people what they were buying into.

I can’t say I applied the same logic to the quality of my Instagram Reels, mind you.

As part of the crowdfunder, I offered “rewards” for pledging certain amounts of money. Some of those rewards, such as getting signed up to this newsletter and early access to the episodes, were free. But the merchandise I sent out, the badges, stickers, and tote bags, obviously cost money and so you’ll see that factored into my final publicity budget. 

Podcast trailer

By the end of 2021 I had a projected launch date for the series: Valentine’s Day 2022. With all of my audio content in hand, I was able to create a trailer to be published a few weeks ahead of the series launch. Once again, I had Anouszka help me put it together (since she was already working on the series as a whole, this extra job just got added to her time sheet and so I can’t say exactly how much this cost but I’ll obviously detail what I spent on audio production in the next newsletter).

The nice thing about creating a podcast trailer is that when you publish it on your podcast platform it will drop into subscribers’ feeds as a “new episode” so anyone who already subscribes to your podcast will automatically get it. But, of course, I also wanted to chuck it around on social media so I had Simon make me a video to go with it. Because he is an absolute fucking hero (and also because we’ve known each other for nearly 20 years - gross) he did this as a freebie.

Social media

From the moment I launched the crowdfunder to the moment the final episode aired, I never really stopped doing social media publicity. And, as I said at the start, to a certain extent I’m still doing it. I’ll definitely be posting on Instagram and Twitter to let people know the bonus episode is out and again to tell them when this newsletter becomes public. But it’s fair to say that in the run up to the series release and then throughout the series run, my social media strategy was more targeted.

Episodes came out on Mondays (although supporters got them the Friday before, via this newsletter) and for each one I did three pieces of social media content: A basic episode launch introducing the name of the episode and its themes, a written quote from the episode, and an audiogram featuring a clip from the episode.

All of these I made myself, mostly on Canva, using my branding and logos. The clips I made using Headliner which I had to pay for, although luckily they have a pay-monthly option so I just signed up for one month, made my videos, and then unsubscribed.

I also made myself a Twitter header and an email signature, both of which are still in place (see, the publicity goes on and on).

Press and PR

By now, I could be reasonably confident my existing audience were well aware I had a podcast coming out, either because they follow me on social media or subscribe to my newsletter, or because they had supported the crowdfunder in the first place. But if I wanted to bring in new listeners, to grow my audience, I needed to get people talking about and recommending it—ideally people with huge audiences of their own—so, I wrote a press release. You can read it HERE.

In the same way that, as a long time sex and relationships writer, I had a head start on knowing which brands to approach for sponsorship, I also had a head start on knowing which journalists to contact and how to approach them. I made a list of writers, culture, entertainment, health and lifestyle editors, comment editors, features editors, commissioning editors, and reviewers and I sent each one a semi-personalised email, taking into account their exact beat and job title. For in-house writers, I presented the podcast as something they might like to write about, pointing out a few key themes I thought might pique their interest. For commissioning editors, I suggested angles for features or opinion pieces I could write myself. For reviewers, I included a password-protected link to the first three episodes of the series so they could check it out ahead of the official launch. You can see the email I sent out to reviewers HERE.

If that all sounds like a lot of work, it was. But as a result, the podcast was featured in Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, PodBible, Mashable mentioned it as a good example of conversations about “bad sex”, I placed a comment piece in The Independent, and it got well-reviewed in The Guardian. 

Did it work?

So, did all this publicity actually make a difference? Absolutely. Looking at the stats now, I can see that on average, Series 4 episodes have had double the downloads of Series 3 episodes. But that’s actually not the best way of looking at it. Series 3 has been online since 2019 so a lot of those downloads have been trickling in over the last four years, and many of them are actually thanks to the bump in publicity that Series 4 brought. In order to accurately calculate the difference, I’d need to look at the figures Series 3 had after a year online and unfortunately I don’t have those because I changed platforms in early 2020. 

In any case, the more telling figures are the ones you see in the first 30-90 days. They give you more of a sense of the impact of your podcast and, indeed, your publicity campaign. And in that arena, I can tell you that Series 4 outstripped Series 3 by miles. Miles! We’re talking thousands of downloads versus handfuls! At one point BAD SEX reached #2 in the Apple Podcast charts for Sexuality. 

In terms of growth, Spotify also provided some interesting insights. A caveat here to say that obviously any stats here only come from Spotify which is just one platform among many (in fact only 20% of BAD SEX listeners use it) but it’s fun to see the breakdown anyway. I did a whole Twitter thread on it at the time HERE.

But the most important thing to me personally was the difference I saw in engagement. Yes, I had a lot more people listening now and that was brilliant in itself, but what the publicity and promotion of the podcast also did was help create a conversation which listeners felt compelled to join in. I had more listener reviews and feedback on this series than on any previous one. In fact, I probably had more audience interaction on this podcast series than on any piece of work I’ve ever made and that was wonderful. While I was making the podcast, someone (okay, it was my therapist!) asked me what I felt my goal was for my work and I said that I just want people to think; to think and to question. While I might not be in the big leagues as far as podcasting goes, the engagement I had with this series tells me I’m certainly achieving that.

What’s next

In Part 3 of “How I made it,” I’ll publish my full budget breakdown so you can see exactly where the money went and what it paid for.

The BAD SEX newsletter is written by freelance journalist Franki Cookney for supporters of the podcast. Readers get exclusive behind-the-scenes insights into the podcast-making process and access to episodes before anyone else.