Squarespace Case Study — What Podcast Audiences are Most Aligned With the Brand?
In this series we’re putting StatSocial, our social media audience insights engine, to work.
We’re checking in on the audiences of some of those companies whose names will be familiar to any regular podcast listener, as they are among the most prominent sponsors of many of the most popular podcasts.
What are we trying to determine? Above all else, for which brands do the most passionate members of these podcasts’ audiences show the strongest affinities? StatSocial scores audience affinities for 1,000 top podcasts in every audience report. In this series, we’ll show you the top-five podcasts audiences that are best aligned to the brand in question.
For marketers and agencies looking to optimize podcast ad spend, StatSocialis an indispensable tool. StatSocial also works for podcast ad sellers and networks looking to best position their podcast properties to the right advertisers. This article is a window into what StatSocial can uncover for ad buyers and sellers of all sorts.
(You can check out parts 1 and 3 in this here and here)
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Squarespace
Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace, built the service’s earliest incarnation in 2003, while still a student at the University of Maryland. The initial inspiration was simple personal need. Casalena desired a more design-conscious, attractive, and user-friendly alternative to the clunky, website building assistance tools and blogging platforms available at the time, such as GeoCities.
Squarespace was developed, at first, solely for the purposes of Casalena cultivating his own online brand. As time passed he began to give friends and family members access to his tools, as these people in his life were encountering the same frustrations that had given birth to his invention. As ever more people began to use the Squarespace service, Casalena found himself with a bona fide business on his hands. While the company continued to grow he remained the only employee for the first few years.
By 2007, when Casalena graduated college, the business was pulling in $1 million a year in revenues. He moved to New York City and began hiring. Fast forward to now and the website building assistance tool and web hosting service has published over one million websites.
Squarespace is a frequent sponsor of some of the biggest podcasts out there. They’ve also shouted their name for all to hear from the peak of the highest mountain top, with spots that have aired during the past couple of Super Bowls.
The below, which aired during Super Bowl LI in 2017, even won an Emmy.
StatSocial’s insights tell us that 42% of Squarespace’s audience are female and that 58% of their social media audience makes $50,000 a year, or more. The city most strongly represented among Squarespace’s fans is New York, with its residents accounting for a little over 9% of their social media audience.
As is the case with Dollar Shave Club, the podcast topping the list here pairs with the brand in question perfectly.
1) Design Matters
Debbie Millman is, according to her own bio, a “writer, designer, educator, artist, brand consultant and host of the podcast Design Matters.” Design Matters, of which over 300 episodes have been recorded since its launch in 2005, is described on its home page as “The world’s first podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture through wide-ranging conversations with designers, writers, artists, curators, musicians, and other luminaries of contemporary thought.”
These above-mentioned luminaries have included Massimo Vignelli, Steven Heller, Marian Bantjes, Tina Roth Eisenberg, and Stefan Sagmeister, Milton Glaser, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Barbara Kruger, and Seth Godin.
Worth noting, Millman is a professor at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, where she co-founded the first ever graduate degree in branding.
Her podcast finds favor among Squarespace’s audience to a degree exceeding the average by a whopping 46 times.
2) Side Hustle School
Chris Guillebeau is best known for his The Art of Non-Conformity blog and best-selling book. The Side Hustle School podcast is for those seeking to “Make Money without Quitting” their jobs, and expounds on the principles laid out in Guillebeau’s book ‘Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days.’
There’s little question that Squarespace is a service employed by many trying to give their own “side hustles” a more professional and sightly online presence than they might otherwise have the resources to create on their own. Guillebeau’s podcast finds favor among those in Squarespace’s audience to a degree exceeding the average by 17 times.
3) The Tim Ferriss Show
We summarize the 4-Hour Ferris phenomenon in our previous entry.
Here, Ferriss is on the list of influencers who resonate most strongly with Squarespace’s social media crowd, finding favor among them to a degree notably four times the norm. The proportion of fans of his podcast among this group, however, exceeds that of the average social media audience by over 11 ½ times.
4) Radiolab
Once nationally distributed by NPR, Radiolab — now in its 15th season since officially starting in 2005 — is produced and distributed solely by New York public radio station WNYC.
While it is a radio show, the majority of its 1.8 million listeners access it via podcast means.
The show/podcast is the product of the unlikely pairing of NPR science correspondent (a role he’s held in the past for ABC and CBS) Robert Krulwich and experimental composer and sound designer Jad Abumrad. The two met while the latter was working for NPR and was assigned to interview Krulwich, who was working at that time as a science correspondent for ABC. While 25 years apart in age, the two discovered they had a lot in common which led to their collaboration on this experimental, hour long show. Each episode explores a theme — — sometimes scientific in nature, sometimes philosophical — through intricate sound collage, interviews, anecdotes, and thought experiments.
Squarespace’s audience contains 10 times the quantity of Radiolab admirers as you’d find on average around the social-media-sphere.
5) The GaryVee Audio Experience
Gary’s podcast, as well as Gary himself, was summarized in our last entry in this series.
Just as a social media influencer Vaynerchuk finds a proportion of this audience in his corner to a degree four-times greater than the average. His podcast, however, finds fans among this audience to a degree just a bit shy of 10 times the average.
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Check back later, as there are more podcast sponsors to come.
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