The Global content and media team at BlackRock develops, produces, and distributes high-quality, engaging and shareworthy content that shares the firm’s economic insights, reflects our purpose around financial well-being, explains our business and humanizes our brand.
The Bid, BlackRock’s podcast, is a key component of our content newsroom. Each episode breaks down what is happening in the markets and explores the forces that are changing investing. The Bid aims to help listeners, which include both financial advisors and end investors, learn more about developments in the markets through storytelling from thought leaders in and outside of BlackRock.
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As we planned the 2021 strategy for The Bid, we used previous years’ data to learn which episodes and topics resonated best with our audience. We found that topics such as COVID-19, global outlooks, megatrends and technology perform best, and the optimal length of each podcast should be between 20-25 minutes. We analyzed these insights and used them to develop a mini-series featuring these topics.
We leaned into these insights and developed a mini-series format that allowed us to plan topics ahead of time, book external guests who are leaders in their fields and create a story arc between episodes, where each episode builds off the prior episode. Episodes had a connective thread such that audiences know what to expect and what to look forward to for the next episode.
Our podcast series helps inform our target audiences on the broader forces in society and markets that shape the way we invest. Our audiences use the Bid podcast as their go-to source for insights on markets and the global economy.
In order to reach our target audience and engage prospective new listeners, we promote each Bid episode with paid and organic support across our LinkedIn and Twitter channels. We frequently review our social reporting to gather insights on how to better optimize our tactics, creative and promotional copy to ensure we are effectively reaching our target audience. For example, we learned that including a video snippet of an interview resonated better with our audience than a static creative asset. We also learned that users preferred short, pithy social copy.
We continue to test new formats and expand our distribution methods - curating thoughtful conversations and innovatively using our existing library to draw in more listeners.
Since launch, The Bid has generated 1 million downloads, with an average of 11K downloads per episode. We also increased the average consumption per episode to 70%, which is a 3% increase from 2020. By leaning into topics that matter to the audience, The Bid was able to drive strong performance with over 200K downloads earned from episodes published in 2021. The top episodes spotlighted sustainability including “What’s next for sustainability” which has nearly 16K downloads, and “Larry Fink on our sustainable future” with 15K downloads.
An additional objective in 2021 was to increase brand awareness amongst our target audience. To measure success against this objective, we tapped into our social partners to help us implement quarterly brand studies. In our latest brand study with LinkedIn (conducted via Nielsen), that measured The Bid as well as our other owned content series, we saw a lift in brand perception that validated that our target audience were regularly listening to The Bid as a source for market insights.
It is clear that The Bid continues to deliver relevant content to help lift the brand, insulate the firm’s reputation and position BlackRock as a force for good at scale.
