How to Harness Social Media Ads for Podcasting Success w/ Matt Shields

If Facebook ads have been a mystery to you then this episode is for you.

We've managed to nab Matt Shields for a chat - the chap who runs a wildly successful ad agency on these platforms. This episode will help you learn effective strategies for organic traffic, the importance of understanding your audience, and the power of targeted structure for your podcast.

Matt spills the beans on his secret sauce - cross-promotion and consistent social media presence. So, if you're thirsty for tips on how to reach your audience without breaking the bank, this is your watering hole.

Matt's journey from employee to self-employed is a tale worth telling. His secret weapon? Self-discipline. But, it's not all work and no play. He talks about the importance of having a 'North Star' - a guiding light that keeps you focused and consistent.  Check out his math formula for choosing entrepreneurship over his 9-5.

Matt also shares how adapting to the fast-paced changes in the industry turned his ad agency into the success it is today. However, the cherry on the cake is his belief in genuine relationships and networking.

So, if you're ready to take a deep dive into podcasting and entrepreneurship, join us for a heart-to-heart with Matt Shields. You don't want to miss this!

Connect with Matt: Website | Facebook |

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Transcript

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 0:00

This is Tools of the Podcast Trade, where you can learn about the tools and resources you can use to start and grow your podcast Tune in this week, as we talk about the help you need to remove the mystery from podcasting so you can become a successful podcaster that can reach your audience where they are, matt Shield helps podcasters connect with their ideal audience through Facebook and Instagram ads. Welcome, matt, thanks for having me. Yes, thank you for coming in and talking to us on Tools of the Podcast Trade. Alright, before we get into ads, could you tell us who is Matt Shields?

Matt Shields: 0:44

Yes, so my wife and I run a Facebook and Instagram ad agency. We live in Charlotte, north Carolina. We're originally from Ohio. We moved here about four years ago and we had corporate jobs and then we got served a targeted Facebook ad, actually to take a course on how to run Facebook ads, and we've been doing that ever since. So fun. Yes, so we live in Charlotte, north Carolina, with our little dog and, yeah, we just. We're on our entrepreneurial journey, so it's been a blast. We've learned a ton and met a ton of people, so it's been really great.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 1:24

Yeah yeah. Podcasting is really cool for meeting people. Alright, so before we delve into ads Facebook and IG ads, which is your specialty can you break down for us the three effective, the three most effective strategies for getting organic traffic, starting at the foundation right?

Matt Shields: 1:51

So the three most effective for organic traffic? Yes, okay. So cross promotion right, like networking. Cross promotion because you're you're borrowing authority, right. So if you're meeting with other people, you're going on podcasts and really this is the great part about being in the podcast community, because it's actually a community. This is the first niche that we've worked in where it feels like people know each other and there's a certain amount of respect and decorum. That happens when one you book a podcast and you show up consistently and you just have that mutual respect for people and longevity seems to get a lot of respect here. So just being part of the community, doing all that cross promoting and having genuine conversations with people, and there's this sense of community where people support each other in this community. So that's one showing up consistently, right. So organic reach on social media is pretty abysmal, right. It's hard to achieve that. So, like you have to show up consistently, you have to cross promote. And the reason why is if the more you have to speak about the algorithm on social media, like it's a person, the more that it thinks that your content is engageable, as entertaining, as educational, as all these things that people want to see stuff, the more, it'll promote your stuff. So if you can return the favor cross promote, a lot of people forget to do that. A lot of people forget to go and like and share, and people will show up on a podcast and then forget to promote it themselves. So other things like that. And then I guess the third one would be a good organic strategy, like an actual applied strategy. So, are you doing more reels consistently? Are you doing more reels? How are you applying that? Are you doing video content? Are you just showing up entertaining wise? Are you batching your content? All this stuff. So you actually have to put some sort of strategy behind it. Have you done hashtag research? All that stuff? All these organic parts that go into it are really fantastic. And then, if you have an email list, building an email list, always be promoting things like that. Any sort of those organic strategies basically help the substance behind your brand. And then you can talk about getting paid ads, because it's set up for pay to play, but you have to start somewhere.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 4:28

Right, and I guess the organic doing the work to get the organic traffic is laying that foundation for when you're spending money, right?

Matt Shields: 4:39

Absolutely.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 4:40

Yeah, okay, all right. So what are the key elements to Facebook or Instagram ads? I remember when I first started podcasting, I kind of just put it out there select my audience. And it worked for a while, but after a while it stopped. So tell us, you know, what can we do better?

Matt Shields: 5:04

Well, it depends on what kind of podcaster you are. It depends on who your audience is. So if you're a podcaster that's a business owner who's selling service or something on the back end of your podcast, it's an entirely different strategy than someone who's just trying to promote, to get more listeners to grow based on their personality. Right, you want to get sponsors, you want to get downloads, you want to get all those things. It's a totally different thing. On one hand, if you're just trying to get sponsors, you need eyeballs, you need downloads, because when you go to these sponsors they ask how many downloads per episode you get, whereas if you're selling a service on the back end and it doesn't matter, okay, I said, if you don't have a niche or a specific topic of your podcast, then your audience can be everyone. But you have to realize when your audience is everyone, your competition is also everyone. So you need to keep that in mind. If everyone can hear your podcast, if it's good for anybody so say, like a comedy podcast, right? I mean, those guys just grow their podcasts with their personalities and that's great because it's entertaining. It's mindless. It's totally fine If you're trying to sell something on the back end of your podcast and you use your podcast to cement authority. You have to have some sort of targeted structure toward that, right? So you have to. When it comes to ads, knowing your audience is important, but finding them on the internet is a different task altogether. This is where some people get turned off, because Facebook is set up for pay to play but it's not very user friendly. So it's like it's sort of like in anybody who's played around an ads manager. You know it's like walking into an airplane cockpit there's a lot of knobs, so you can absolutely fly that plane. But if you walked in there cold and you didn't know anything about it, you're the plane's not going to work for you. You might get it started by taxing it down the runway, and taking off is a totally different thing, right?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 7:07

Yeah, good enough, I like that yeah.

Matt Shields: 7:10

So it helps a lot in it. I really mean that, but it's the strategy part of it is basically like what do you want to achieve? Okay, so do you need if you're trying to establish trust? It's a podcast or fantastic for this, because, rather than consuming a bunch of six-second clips about somebody, you can listen to them speak for a half an hour on a subject and it's fantastic. But you have to target the right people, people who will find that message and the message will resonate with them. And it's easily doable. You just have to research targeting options, all sorts of different things, and then you have to apply some strategy again to your ads. So how are you filtering this audience so that you're not wading through a bunch of people to get to your ideal customer? And that's what we do.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 8:03

Right, okay, so it makes sense then that if you're an independent podcaster who is in podcasting, then let's say you can't just advertise your podcast, you have to zero in on the topic for that week or that episode. That makes better sense, right?

Matt Shields: 8:24

It makes much more sense because you have to figure out just think about, okay, if you want to talk about London, right? So who's advertising on the weekends? Who's advertising for Saturday For everybody? Right? It's anybody who sponsors a football team. Anybody who sponsors People live for the weekend, and they do the same thing here in the States different type of football, but it's the same thing. So it's beer companies, it's beer and chips and whatever. It's snacks and all these things. So they have a lot more money than you have to spend. So you're going to wade through all of those ads and you're not going to get ideal placements. But if you can niche down a little bit and try to target specific people, you're looking for behavioral traits. So you have to really dig deep and do some audience research and do some market research of who's actually listening to you, right? So one way we do that is through a mix of organic strategies and paid ads to sort of filter audience based on content, and people who keep interacting with you are more likely to keep listening with you, right? So it's not just a one off, like they like the subject matter or anything like that. But if you're an independent you know podcaster, you can absolutely run ads to success, but it would be way more cost effective for you and you'll get way better results if you niche down for the topic of that episode. Absolutely.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 9:56

Right, okay, thank you, and tell us how you help your clients.

Matt Shields: 10:02

So we have a couple of ways that we work with podcasters. There's a do it yourself group and they're independent. They might have lower budgets. They don't want to deal with especially an independent podcaster when you're just trying to achieve this, you know, trying to grow but you don't necessarily have recurring income coming in. So we have a course that we've created on how to run this podcast audience building strategy that we play, and it can be employed for $300 a month, $10 a day, and it's you can reach tens of thousands of people a month. We've had up to 30,000 people in a month with people, and so it's really a great way to grow that audience and every one of those people that you can target using our strategy can be retargeted and showed your content over and over again. We also have done for you service. So for someone who doesn't have the time so say someone who's this is more for the business owner, who needs help running ads for this and they want more eyeballs on it and they wanna put people through their sales funnel and they don't have the time or the want to learn how to do this themselves. We have done for you ad services as well, and we do everything from Google, youtube, facebook, instagram. We specialize in Facebook and Instagram, but we also do Google and YouTube and anything else you can think of Right.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 11:23

Okay, all right, thank you, and how can we get in touch with you?

Matt Shields: 11:27

Yeah, so we're at Chimehouse Media C-H-I-M-E-H-O-U-S-E and on Facebook and Instagram, and also chimehousemediacom.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 11:37

Okay, I will put those links in the show notes. And I'm not done with you yet. Okay, great. No, I'm not done with you at all. So tell me, what is Matt grateful for today?

Matt Shields: 11:48

Oh, I'm grateful. This is my entrepreneurial journey. I'm grateful for waking up. I'm grateful for it's a nice sunny day today. I'm really grateful that I get to work with my wife and we get to wake up easy every morning. That's the whole reason why we do this, so I get to spend a lot of time with my wife. There's a math problem that I love. That I did when I started this and it's sort of that you have to have mental. You have to build that mental toughness up when you're an entrepreneur, because it is a fight sometimes. So I did a math problem at the end of 2020 when we were spending all that time together and things were pretty hectic. But I did the math. And if we're working 60 hours a week which we were in our corporate jobs here in the States and we were spending all that time apart and it was bumming me out so we have 60 hours a week, 10 hours a day, it's 252 working days in the American working here. There might be more or less in Britain, but if you do the math, that's like a hundred and some odd days 650 days a year worth of time that you're spending away from your family. So by the time we retire, I will have gained 13 whole years with my wife. Stay in the fight and keep working for myself. So just grateful to get up and keep doing this every day.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 13:21

That is awesome. That's your why, right, here's my why Awesome, I love it. Thank you for sharing that, oh boy. All right, so we have a plan of action to get organic traffic and we're running ads consistently on Facebook or Instagram or wherever else we choose. What are your top tips for staying motivated and consistent when podcasting?

Matt Shields: 13:49

Oh, staying motivated and consistent. So it's just you have to have an absolute North Star, because if you have short-sighted goals or you have finite goals, you put all sorts of mental blocks in the way of getting there and you can get burnt out because you're like I'm doing this, why am I doing this? So you can't expect to wake up on a Monday and have five perfect days in a row. It's just impossible. So, you have to have an absolute North Star so you can focus on those things and not let little things get in the way. Just incremental growth, learning new things, trying new things, letting yourself be yourself I think that's, and just knowing like your competition is quitting. So if you're podcasting and you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you're hosting your podcast, it's like 7% of podcasts make it past the 10 episode mark. So if you're past 10 episodes, you batched past 10 episodes, you're on your way, you're winning.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 14:52

Yes, yes, thank you. And now you said that because this has been bothering me ever since Alex published that report, because I'm thinking to myself but what would cause someone? You're excited, you have a topic, you want to do a podcast and all of a sudden, three episodes, 10 episodes. What's your take on that?

Matt Shields: 15:18

It's literally, it's fascinating. But I can see where if you're just starting a podcast, so people got bored during 2020. You might dabble into something like journaling or starting a blog or something like that, and just like anything. If you want it to become a habit, if you want it to become a thing, you have to start being consistent about it, and it's a discipline that you need to have. So the passion needs to be there. Yes, if you're just talking about the same thing every day, you can see how people can get burned out. So every once in a while you have to talk to somebody who's? And if everybody's saying the same thing, it can get monotonous. It's like it's really boring. But If you really love doing it and you continue doing it, right, it's just like anything. You can make it a habit and then it just becomes part of your life and consistent like so. You wake up and you're like I'm not, so we don't have bad days at all. I don't know, I'm gonna do At least the podcast episode this week. You look at it like that and it's. You don't negotiate with yourself, that's so. It's so hard to do, it's so hard to do, but it's. It takes practice, but that's been, that's been the journey, for me at least, is going from an employee to self-employed is like I've had to. No one's come in to force you to do this stuff.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 16:39

Right.

Matt Shields: 16:40

So self-motivation is a practice. Yes it's been hard, it's been difficult. So every once in a while I'll watch like a motivating movie or like a podcast episode or listen to a speaker or something, and I'm recharged, and Every so often you need to take a break and do something.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 16:57

Yes, yes, true, I think too. One of the things that down to me is that two people Listen to everything, like there is a shiny, shiny object syndrome, but there's a shiny advice Syndrome as well. Try that, try this. That don't work. This work, that work, yeah yeah that's a that's.

Matt Shields: 17:19

Another thing, too is like twofold with the North Star idea is you have to aim at something or you won't hit anything. One of those like adages but you can't get distracted by, especially on social media. You see it, and you're consuming so much stuff every day. Yeah, you feel like, and it's. I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and people who are doing stuff for themselves and it's, they don't feel like they're doing enough and that's just the internet doing that to you. Yeah, so if you're doing what lights you up every day and You're doing it consistently, you're practicing these things, just like exercising or eating healthy or anything like that. It's not any one thing that's gonna make you. It's the continuous, it's what do you call it? It's the consistency. They come, there's a compound. The compound effect really makes it so that and Again, having all these options and seeing what works for you, having all these options is a blessing and a curse, because one you feel Like you're not doing enough, but if you just keep going and you try something and it doesn't work. We've pivoted a couple times. We worked with a couple different types of people and we're very successful with working with online coaches and course creators and they had smaller budgets and things like that. So I was like it was going really well and then all of a sudden, facebook throws a wrench into the game, apple throws a wrench in the game. You can't retarget people. It's not as easy to get as granular with your targeting, so you have to come up with different ways to adapt and then sometimes you have to work with different people. So, as long as you can continue, like we have a North Star and this is the reason why we do this and it's again, it's a fight and a practice, and Sometimes we are head and hands like what am I gonna do next? But Sometimes you just celebrate little wins. It's awesome. So practicing gratitude and things like that are huge for us, just because Otherwise you just gonna be like, oh, the weight of this is too much and it's so easy to quit that it's it's worth it to keep going.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 19:30

Yes, awesome, thank you. Thank you, matt, she is for coming and speaking to us on tools at the podcast trade. I'm gonna give you an opportunity to give us your parting shot, oh.

Matt Shields: 19:41

Okay, well, stay consistent. That's the whole thing. Stay consistent, keep going, stay motivated, and If you need help, I'm more than willing to help. I just I love networking, so Anything you need to meet people and I think if more people focused on having genuine Relationships as opposed to focusing on sales techniques and things like that, I think genuine relationships and real networking is how we all help each other. Yeah, you can all have honest conversations. We could all hook each other up with people who can actually help and Everybody would win together. It would be, yes, fantastic.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 20:20

Awesome. Thank you mad, I appreciate you.

Matt Shields: 20:23

I appreciate you. Thank you for having me. I.