How Amazon Increased Podcast Engagement by 30% Through B2B Podcast Storytelling

Product Packaging

Product packaging is one of the most undervalued tools for growing your podcast audience. Before a listener hits play on your show, they decide to hit play on your show. And all of your show’s visual elements – titles, descriptions, artwork, author field, category, and ratings and reviews – influence that choice. 

To help potential listeners make this choice, we wanted to ensure the product packaging clearly communicated what the episode was about.

So the team at JAR Audio made strategic adjustments to the podcast’s product packaging. 

1. We removed the names of guests from the episode titles when they were not known entities. We saved that real estate to ensure we were communicating exactly what the episode was about and what listeners would get out of it.
2. We reorganized our episode descriptions to make sure the most vital information was at the top, and we avoided repeating information that was communicated elsewhere, the host’s name or phrases like “in this episode”. We wanted to be immediately clear what the episode was about and how listeners would be better off after listening than they were before.
3. We included time stamps to help listeners better navigate the content and clearly communicate the lessons they would learn in the episode. This also provided data on what lessons listeners were engaging with most. For example, if listeners were repeatedly skipping ahead to a timestamped section, we would see this reflected in the retention charts in Apple Podcasts. And this would give us an indication of what topics listeners are interested in most.

These adjustments ensured we were attracting more of the right listeners – those who were interested in the episode’s content – and it reduced the number of “samplers” to the show – those who listened to a few seconds, realized it wasn’t for them, and bounced. 

Targeted Paid Campaigns

But product packaging is only half the battle. In order for listeners to hit play on your show, you need to put it in front of them. To do this, we conducted a podcast landscape analysis to identify shows that catered to our target audience of aspiring and early stage entrepreneurs, such as Goal Digger, Side Hustle Show and Side Hustle Pro.

We supplied the hosts of these shows with scripts, written in their own voice, promoting This Is Small Business to their own loyal audiences. Again, we wanted to clearly communicate what the show is about, and the value it offers this audience. So we supplied scripts that promoted, not only the show, but specific episodes – and not only specific episodes, but specific lessons from those episodes.