How AI Helped Us Get 100,000 Podcast Downloads in 2023

Our podcast reached 100,000 downloads in 2023 alone thanks to smarter content strategy and artificial intelligence. Here’s how it happened.

The Marketing AI Institute podcast, The Marketing AI Show, recently hit 100,000 downloads across 28 episodes in 2023 – a milestone that would have been unthinkable just 12 months ago.

In 2022, the podcast had only 4,800 downloads for the entire year. In 2021, it had only 1,600. Today, episodes average 3,000 – 5,000 downloads each.

what changed

What lessons can you learn about how to use AI in your marketing?

Keep reading to find out.

Why the initial podcast strategy wasn’t sustainable

Paul Roetzer, founder/CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, and I proved the case study in episode 55 of The Marketing AI Show. And it all started with an unsustainable podcast strategy.

Our original podcast idea was to have Paul interview experts every week. But it took a lot of Paul’s time – at least 5-7 hours a week per episode.

At the time, we also needed an outside production team to help post each episode, as our team lacked professional audio and video editing experience. While it saved us some time, it also cost us between $600 – $1000 per month.

Additionally, we simply didn’t have the internal support to manage the podcast optimally, and we weren’t able to hire for this type of role.

We realized pretty quickly:

This podcast strategy was simply not sustainable.

How a shift in strategy unlocked growth

At the end of 2022, we changed our strategy.

Instead of interviewing experts, Paul and Mike began covering the best AI news on a weekly podcast.

It was an effective way to stay on top of AI news and make the institute a hub for relevant AI trends and updates.

“The change in format was actually a change in content strategy,” Paul says.

“How to get new content on the site? How do we update the blog more regularly with new content, keep up with news and funding, and how do we take it and grow it?”

We settled on a format where each week we explored three main topics about AI, followed by a few rapid-fire topics that we briefly discussed.

Listeners seemed to like the new format, which was now consistently produced weekly, and our audience began to grow at a steady clip.

The podcast also created efficiencies in our content production process. In addition to the podcast episode itself, we’ve also effectively created several content assets from each episode:

• Full review post with embedded audio and video, transcripts, and timestamps to promote the episode itself.
• Three blog posts came out of our discussion of each major topic in a given week.
• Four YouTube videos, one for the entire post and one to discuss each main topic.
• Dozens of social media shares of excerpted quotes and excerpts from episodes and posts.

“We said, ‘Let’s just use the podcast as the hub of everything,'” notes Paul.

How AI Made Podcasting Massively Effective

In addition to the change in strategy, we have made extensive use of artificial intelligence to make strategy execution possible, successful and highly effective.

We’ve used artificial intelligence to save you dozens of hours of work in key cases of podcasting:

• Research. We manually check the news for the previous week as we monitor the development of artificial intelligence. Often, we’ll have dozens of links to process when it comes time to create a research brief for the week’s podcast. While we still read every article, we use artificial intelligence to summarize articles for quick reference and clarify or explore further topics.
• script writing. Sometimes, we use AI to write the first draft of the scripts used to introduce each topic. Or, we’ll use AI to write a script to get us started, then write a script for each topic independently.
• Transcription. We use an AI tool called Descript to automatically transcribe each podcast minutes after it’s recorded.
• Audio/video editing. We also use Descript to edit the audio and video for each podcast episode, even though we have no professional experience in audio and video production.
• Blog post introduction. Remember those scripts we use to introduce themes? They are rewritten by AI to become the introduction (or first draft introduction) to our blog posts.
• summary. Artificial intelligence is used to summarize the transcript section for each key topic. This is an invaluable reference, which we then provide to the human writer (often Mike) so the writer can write a value-driven post about the topic that connects the dots for the audience, includes unique insights and readings, and layers in our unique viewpoints and experiences.
• Promotion. We use AI to create social shares that are then reviewed or rewritten by human writers. We’re also experimenting with AI to automatically extract shareable video clips from our long podcast videos to quickly create YouTube Shorts or videos for TikTok.

Thanks to these AI use cases, Mike takes about 3-4 hours to prepare and record a podcast. Paul’s time is only 1.5 hours — 30 minutes to jump and review the briefing before the episode and about 60 minutes of recording time.

This makes it very possible to have your CEO or senior management in your organization on a similarly structured and AI-powered podcast.

Some important lessons learned

As part of our conversation on the podcast, Paul shared some important aspects of the whole process.

1. Be consistent. Sometimes success just depends on consistently showing up and creating as much value as possible. Our change in strategy has nothing to do with beating Metica. It was all about creating as much value as possible every week without fail.
2. Look for AI use cases in the things you already do. You don’t need to transform your business overnight using AI to get value. Look at what you already do and ask: Where can we use AI to make it more efficient and creative? We literally broke down the podcasting process into dozens of subtasks, then isolated them where AI could easily be used to make the process faster and easier.
3. Marketing is a very humbling profession. You never know what will work. Sometimes, everything that works is by design: you’ve carefully crafted a smart strategy and executed it flawlessly. But, many times, persistence and luck play a big role. For example, if ChatGPT hadn’t launched shortly after we changed our podcast strategy, there’s no way we’d be seeing the type of growth we’re seeing.

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