With a constant influx of new marketing tools, social media platforms, and content formats, marketing professionals have to be in a constant state of learning and adapting. Just when a marketer thinks she or he has perfected their strategy on one platform, a new, viral platform appears. *Throws hands in the air* It’s exhausting. Skill Up is here to help with short-form educational content to help professionals learn highly effective strategies quickly.
We achieve our objective through the structure and content of the show. Each season focuses on one topic, such as YouTube Marketing, and every episode highlights one expert and a specific strategy. Over the course of 10 minutes, the podcast offers expert advice, commentary, and strategies that lead to real business growth. The episodes are short, yet the takeaways are impactful.
In 2020, we dedicated three seasons to marketing, diving deep into strategies that would help marketers better connect to their consumers. Season 3, Advanced Marketing, explored new and effective ways to reach audiences, such as multi-touch attribution, personalization, and account-based marketing. Season 4, Social Marketing, helped marketers create a winning social strategy and leverage audiences on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. To follow this, we then created an entire season dedicated to YouTube. Listeners learned how to create a strategy, make videos people will actually watch, and report on the right metrics.
Skill Up is a partnership between the HubSpot podcast team and HubSpot Academy, the leader in free online training for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service professionals. HubSpot Academy creates comprehensive courses, then the podcast team repurposes the major takeaways and seeks an external expert to weigh in. While a course on HubSpot Academy may take days to complete, listeners can binge a season of Skill Up and finish with an advanced understanding of the topic in less than two hours.
To launch each season of Skill Up, we created an internal cross-channel launch plan, partnering with the HubSpot social teams, blog team, and our email marketing teams, greatly increasing our reach through HubSpot-owned channels.
To further our reach, we met listeners where they were: podcast listening platforms. We developed a cross-platform ad strategy and secured placements on Overcast, Castro, Podcast Addict, and PlayerFM. This initiative tripled our listenership.
Due to the popularity of Skill Up, we also launched Skill Up en español for Spanish-speaking audiences. Rather than merely translating the episodes, Skill Up en español localizes scripts, interviews business owners in Latin America, and globalizes the Skill Up audience.
Top Ten Marketing podcasts on Apple Podcasts in the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Ireland (#1)
Spanish version - Top Ten Business Podcasts on Apple Podcasts in Mexico and Columbia
Marketing initiatives led to a 260% growth in listenership
