Revealed: The EXACT Strategy That Made Steven Bartlett Go Viral

From Grace Andrews, the marketing genius behind DOAC

Hey,

It’s Callum 👋🏼 

Hope you’re good!

I recently had a killer chat with Grace Andrews, one of the geniuses behind The Diary Of A CEO Podcast with Steven Bartlett.

It’s the fastest growing Podcast in the world!

The good news for you?

She told me EVERYTHING.

So if you want to grow a podcast or social following in 2024.

Here’s the 6 step blueprint:

1/ Establish your goals

Every marketer should begin with a simple question:

This is a 3 step process:

1. Define your goals 

2. The social channels that can help achieve them

3. Determine how you will measure the results - metrics 

Now you’re ready to start creating.

2/ “Don’t publish your What, publish your Why?”

When making content you want to ignore “your what” and consider “your Why”.

Think about RedBull…

With nearly 20 million followers on Instagram the brand’s page has an intriguing twist! 

No product photos in sight. 

None of their social content talks about energy drinks.

Instead it seeks to foster a feeling of adventure and high octane energy.

The key insight here is:

Your audience seeks more than a sales pitch. 

They crave a ‘feeling’ and a sense of ‘community’ or something they can ‘connect’ with.

You don’t get this posting product photos. 

What type of feeling are you aiming for?

For Diary of a CEO it’s "Inspire, motivate and engage with as many people as we possibly can".

You now have a lens to think about every piece of content you create. 

Is it doing that?

3/ Platform Specifics

Now you know what feeling or outcome your content should be creating.

Consider which platforms will help you deliver it.

DOAC find different content types work on different platforms:

So make sure you’re fishing where the fish are. 

Is your target audience of FTSE 100 CEOs  really on TikTok?

Will your Dating content naturally perform on LinkedIn?

Choose your platforms wisely.

4/ The forgotten content stages ‘Research’ & ‘Review’

Everyone is busy ‘creating’ and ‘posting’ content.

But very few “RESEARCH’ before starting the creation process.

On the DOAC team, researchers kick off by identifying 20-30 topics they wish to explore in a podcast episode. 

These topics are then visualised as thumbnails and tested to understand what topics the audience are most interested in.

“The results of these tests will shape the narrative for that upcoming episode.”

You can use this 5 step process to help you make better content:

1. Research deeply the topic

2. Understand which points people are more interested in 

3. Test the topics with your audience 

4. Review best performing topics 

5. Shape your next content on those topics

Ask the audience what type of cake they want and then bake it.

Afterwards you must REVIEW performance.

The other forgotten stage. 

What’s performing well? What’s not performing well?

Do more of the good and less of the bad.

It’s simple but most people don’t do it.

5/ Experimentation is an Unfair Advantage

The one thing constant on social is change.

• Platforms are evolving

• Audiences are evolving

• Content trends are evolving 

To harness this, DOAC have an ‘Experimentation Manager’ who ensures every team is running an experiment at any time.

This means they can be first to discover marginal gains and growth hacks.

One such rabbit hole is Thumbnail testing.

The DOAC YouTube team test 100 thumbnails per episode, incorporating three facial expressions and different text hooks.

They run facebook ads up until the day of release to identify the most engaging title and thumbnail so when the video is posted it is already hyper optimised.

This all started as an experiment and evolves into a process that sets the podcast apart.

Experiments create unfair advantages.

You must build experimentation into your content creation.

6/ YouTube hacking

The first hour on YouTube is critical to a video’s success.

The DOAC team discovered that if you can hack the algorithm by helping YouTube find the right audience for your video, you can really accelerate a video’s success.

One such example is their Black Coffee episode. 

The episode initially struggled.

But through use of paid ads, DOAC were able to help YouTube find the right audience in South Africa and get it back on track.

It’s important to remember that very often your content is not “bad” it’s just not being shown to the “right people”.

So consider this if you feel your content is underperforming: how can you get it infront of the right people?

TLDR: The 6 insights from my conversation with Grace:

1. Establish your goals

2. “Don’t publish your What, publish your Why?”

3. Create platform specific content

4. Research & review

5. Experiment to the max 

6. Hack the YouTube algorithm

Want to go deeper?

This 10 minutes on their Short Form strategy is absolute gold:

Thanks for making it this far, if you did!

:)

I hope you got some value.

Have a great week!

Callum