Case Study | Start With A Win Podcast
Overview
What do Brand Viva and Adam Contos, CEO of RE/MAX, have in common? We both like to challenge conventionalism. Breaking conventional barriers starts with choices. This particular mindset inspired Contos to partner with Brand Viva Media to launch his independent podcast, Start With A Win. Our team produces the show every week from start to finish. In hopes of helping others achieve success, Start With A Win spotlights various success stories, key learnings, and best practices from leaders with a range of personal and professional backgrounds.
In August 2020, the show premiered its 100th episode. Our team developed a two-week campaign strategy to promote and celebrate the podcast's milestone. For this campaign, Brand Viva executed production and messaging, as well as content and social media strategies. The campaign launched after announcing the special guest: Business and digital marketing expert, Gary Vaynerchuk.
About Client
Start With A Win Podcast | RE/MAX World Headquarters, CEO, Adam Contos
RE/MAX, LLC is a well-known, leading global real estate franchise. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, since 1973, it has gained over 120,000 agents in more than 100 countries and territories. Adam Contos initially joined RE/MAX World Headquarters as an independent contractor in 2003 and became the company’s CEO in 2018.
Upon making the transition to CEO, Contos partnered with our team to launch his independent podcast, Start With A Win. The podcast reflects Adam’s aspiration to challenge conventionalism and portray success as an ongoing journey. The show has featured the stories of various industry leaders, discussing topics such as real estate, emotional intelligence, leadership styles, financial literacy, relationship-building, social media presence, and more.
Objective
Start With A Win’s 100th Episode Promotion
Our team created a campaign strategy to promote the podcast’s 100th episode—with the goal of reaching a total of 10,000 episode downloads from listeners by the end of August.
Brand Viva’s Role
Podcast Production
Content Strategy
Video Production
Graphic Design
Email Marketing
Social Media Strategy
Process & Solution
Since its inception, Brand Viva has produced each episode of Start With A Win—researching and booking guests, building episode structure, recording/editing audio and video footage, creating promotional content, and developing ongoing ideas for the show.
For the 100th episode, our team welcomed Gary Vaynerchuk—entrepreneur, influencer, and CEO of his marketing agency, VaynerMedia.
Brand Viva Media team provided graphic design solutions.
Gary’s scheduled appearance was announced via social media two weeks before the episode aired. In addition to our team’s typical podcast production responsibilities, Brand Viva managed a campaign leading to the release of the 100th episode. The campaign consisted of content development, social media promotion, email messaging, and SWAG design and giveaways.
After announcing Vaynerchuk as the 100th guest, we began a top 10 episodes countdown of the show’s most memorable moments, which ranged from Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, Steve Young to RE/MAX’s co-founder, Dave Liniger.
Top 10 Start With A Win Episode Countdown | Pull-quote Series
Each countdown promoted a SWAG giveaway for Start With A Win apparel to increase audience engagement. Users were encouraged to participate and required to comment on each post to enter the contest. Winners were chosen at random.
A week before the 100th episode aired, our team created a video sizzle reel conveying the “Road to 100 Episodes,” which consisted of quick recaps and a variety of guests from previous episodes. The video concluded with a call to action to listen to the 100th episode.
Start With A Win Road to 100 Promotional Reel
After the episode released on August 19, 2020, we created additional social media assets. Post-episode content launched with a video—a personal thank you message to listeners from the host, Adam Contos, which was produced and edited by Brand Viva.
We created additional video clips and graphics by pulling content directly from the episode, including pull-quotes from Vaynerchuk. The content generated an extra boost in engagement and targeted new listeners, as well as others who did not catch the episode the first day it aired. Before releasing the content for the additional push, the podcast’s analytics depicted a little over 9,000 total episode downloads for August.
Brand Viva designed additional graphics for the final push of the campaign.
Results
New and existing listeners tuned into the 100th episode as Vaynerchuk emphasized the impact of transparent leadership across all industries. The 100th episode produced the most traffic in August, reaping over 1,000 episode downloads less than a week and a half after it aired. Overall, more than 8,000 episode downloads alone converted directly from the Apple podcasts platform. Our final push strategy eliminated the streaming platform gap by directing additional promotions (social media and email messaging) to Apple podcasts only.
The email outreach promoting the 100th episode attained a 42.1% open rate, contributing to August’s average open rate of 37.7%.
In total, the podcast performance for August surpassed 10,000 episode downloads with a total of 10,848 downloads, establishing a new performance milestone for the Start With A Win podcast.