Christina Moore (00:00)
I’ve seen teams publish hundreds of pieces of content only to realise none of it is moving people to take action. Most marketing teams produce content but have problems with conversions. This episode is about how audience development works when it’s tied to outcomes instead of output. To explore this, I’m speaking with Sarah Toporoff head of growth for Headliners Disco, who focuses on helping organisations turn contextual content discovery into measurable listening behaviour.

and long time audience growth.

Sarah Toporoff (00:38)
Hi, I’m Sarah Toporoff and I am head of growth at Headliner. looking at audience growth for podcasts, both on the publisher side and the brand side and doing a lot of business development.

Christina Moore (00:54)
So most So most teams for brands and organisations, you know, they’re producing more and more content more than ever. And there’s like a huge amount of distribution. There’s a lot of churn going on within those teams, but they’re not getting the results that they’re looking for

they’re putting content out on social media and they’re not getting any conversions. So where is it going wrong, what’s happening?

Sarah Toporoff (01:23)
⁓ yeah, I would say that whether that’s a media brand or like a more commercial brand, ⁓ can learn a lot from, ⁓ best practices in tech.

I’m a big evangelist for like agile methodology ⁓ and testing and iterating. mean, I think, you know, pure agile is quite strict and not a fit for everyone, but I’m a big proponent of non-tech teams necessarily, kind of adapting and adopting methods inspired by that. So that can be like working in two weeks sprints, having ⁓

really attainable short-term goals that don’t rely on a bunch of other people. Cause I think when you have huge projects, you never see the end of them and they just keep getting extended. ⁓ And people hate that. ⁓ Another thing that I would say is ⁓ you don’t see enough of product teams integrating with content teams.

⁓ but yeah, I was working a lot with newsrooms on trying to promote cross-functional teams. So, ⁓ I was running events, ⁓ that were basically prototyping sprints, hackathons, very 2010s coded, ⁓ all the rage, but, ⁓ yeah, we would essentially get a journalist, a designer, ⁓ and a developer

we’d bring them together to build a product together. ⁓ And the result was definitely greater than the sum of its parts because you are, from the moment of conception, you have the editorial person ⁓ saying, what’s gonna work and what’s not for…

for what they’re trying to accomplish. ⁓ And then the product person bringing the realities of ⁓ their expertise into the fold and making sure everything is kind of flowing well in terms of design consistency, user experience. ⁓

you don’t see enough of it, you still don’t see enough of it. ⁓ And I think any kind of organisation, ⁓ whatever different competencies they, in different teams they have, would endlessly benefit from more cross-functional ⁓ collaboration.

Christina Moore (03:55)
Sure. So you’re saying that one of the reasons why marketing teams are perhaps, you know, missing the mark in terms of their conversions is that they’re not working well enough or effectively enough with other areas in their organization. For instance, like the tech teams where actually once you collaborate, you could come up with kind of a fair few ideas on either plugging the holes

⁓ in conversions or ideas for capturing eyeballs or ears. Awesome.

Sarah Toporoff (04:29)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, yeah, any, any, any team or individual that’s working in isolation is less effective than when you’re in collaboration, which is maybe obvious, but, ⁓ ways to put it into practice is maybe having like, you know, maybe starting with a quarterly, you know, kind of d- design day in which you’re, you’re, you’re pairing people and you’re, and you’re giving them kind of a goal or something to

⁓ tackle giving people a day outside of their regular tasks ⁓ to work with someone they’d never worked before and try to tackle that. that whatever is going to come out of that day is only the prototype, but it can lead to ⁓ something that’s going to have more impact in the long term.

Don’t Skip Media (05:18)
Sarah has worked at the intersection of content and product, helping publishers and brands think beyond the publish and hope distribution model. And that matters, because one of the underlying issues she’s pointing to is that audience development isn’t just a marketing function, it’s shaped by how teams work together. So I wanted to take that further. If teams are structured in a way that limits collaboration, it’s not surprising they misunderstand how audiences grow.

So where do CMOs get this wrong?

Christina Moore (05:49)
you’ve worked at the intersection of tech and content. I’m keen to get your perspective on

where do senior members, specifically of marketing teams, where do they misunderstand audience development?

Sarah Toporoff (06:05)
⁓ so for, yeah, for the better part of the last decade, I’ve been really specialized in podcasting. so it’s really interesting to kind of see where podcasting fits into this mix.

And you see this in brands that are making podcasts or in podcast agencies or studios that are making podcasts for brands. ⁓ I think sometimes, I guess not in the specific podcast, like production studios, but brands are kind of seeing…

podcasting and audio right now, like they’re kind of treating it like they treated social media in like 2008, where they were like, oh, this thing is here. Like we, guess we have to be there. Can someone just like hire an intern about it or like, someone just like take care of it. Cause like, we would just need to take this box, but we don’t really want to put any effort because we don’t really know what the impact is. And so obviously a brand would never like treat their social strategy like that.

in 2026. ⁓ But they’re still treating podcasting like that. So sometimes you see like one person wearing all the hats when it comes to like the audio workflow. So you have the same person like booking guests, editing scripts, and then also like handling audience development, whereas these are all like, these are all very different jobs. ⁓ And so more and more, I think people are realizing, and hopefully people at the top are realising

⁓ that.

you need specific people to do with specific areas of expertise to kind of handle all of that. So audience strategy is definitely one of them. I’m seeing more and more specific audience teams ⁓ at, you know, whether that looks like on the brand side, integrating podcasting with their audience strategy team ⁓ or on the, you know, more audio specific agency side, ⁓ not just having one,

like project manager per show, but really having a dedicated audience team that’s looking at growing the shows like kind of across their

Christina Moore (08:28)
now what goes wrong. Let’s have a look at what good looks like. you’ve probably in equal measure seen how organisations handle it terribly and then also how organisations handle it well. What signals

a good approach to audience development.

Sarah Toporoff (08:49)
Yeah, when it comes to audience strategy specifically,

I think the three pillars, you have your owned media, your earned media, and your paid media. All three of these are important, right? ⁓ You need to make sure the house is clean before you invite anyone else in. That’s the own media. ⁓ When it comes to podcasting, making sure your episode titles are engaging, making sure you’ve got good thumbnails, ⁓ good…

scripting good audio. Audio quality does not have to be perfect, but it needs to have, you know, listenability. And so and you’re not you’re not going to get that right away, right? You’re not going to get everything right, right away. So, you know, if you you’re if you have episodes regularly coming out, done is way better than perfect. And every episode is going to get better. And then.

making sure that you’re taking advantage of all your own channels. So whether that’s social, whether that’s ⁓ internal communications channels, anyone, know, newsletter, making sure there’s, there’s nobody that has a touch point with your brand that doesn’t know about your podcast. That’s really important. ⁓ Earned media, you know, you can, you can do PR, you can do stuff, you know, looking around.

you know, different calendar dates, like if there’s a whatever, any of those like silly days that, you know, a national cupcake day or whatever, whatever your brand is, but making sure like you’re, you’re, you’re, making your content an event ⁓ that’s able to be picked up easily, whether that’s by podcasting platforms or media. And then ⁓ paid media, which I think ⁓ podcasting has been really shy about historically.

⁓ like it’s somehow cheating or it’s something,

Like paid isn’t taboo, right? ⁓ And so yeah, and then when it comes to paid, think having a smart and diversified strategy is also super important. you need those that owned and earned to be consistent as well. ⁓ But doing paid in a smart way is something that I’ve been. ⁓

trying to hammer home

Don’t Skip Media (11:16)
It’s important to accept that paid isn’t a shortcut, it’s a tool. That example in Paris is a good illustration of what changes when audience development is taken seriously. Every activation had a role, every channel had a purpose, and importantly, it was tied to real world outcomes.

Sarah Toporoff (11:34)
One example I like to give is a show that I worked with that was ⁓ a show that was produced by a big department store in Paris ⁓ who were doing a full kind brand pivot to try to be more identified as a fashion brand. And… ⁓

So the show had ⁓ celebrity kind of fashion oriented hosts and bringing in different celebrities to talk about their relationship with their personal style. ⁓ every paid activation had a really specific goal. ⁓ And so one of their paid activations was partnering with ⁓ podcast influencers.

⁓ and actually hosting a live episode, a live recording, a live event with their community in the store. And one of the goals for the show was drive to store. so creating an event with, with these people who don’t necessarily have a relationship with this department store, but have a relationship with this podcast host, having them in the space. was like, that is, that is so smart. Right. and.

⁓ Yeah, we worked with them as well on paid media and kind of placing their episodes on different publications, know, Elle, Vogue, whatever, these fashion associated brands ⁓ to kind of recommend their content to folks that are already engaging in fashion and style content.

Don’t Skip Media (13:12)
A lot of teams are publishing regularly. They’re active on social, they’re investing in production, but the audience pathway isn’t clear. The conversion point is vague and the team can’t easily see what’s helping or holding performance back. That’s exactly why we created the Content Power Score. It looks at how well your content is set up to perform. You get a clear view of what’s working, what isn’t, and what to fix first. The link is in the description.

Christina Moore (13:40)
was an example of what good looks like. Where would you say brands are either overspending or ineffectively spending to acquire attention that doesn’t convert?

Sarah Toporoff (13:55)
I think that still a lot of times the marketing budgets aren’t matching the production costs. like if you take like cinema,

Like the marketing budgets can exceed the production budget sometimes, ⁓ or at least be comparable. ⁓ Podcasting, there’s not at all that mindset yet. think, and the French market was definitely leading the way,

There aren’t ⁓ any production budgets that go out that don’t also have marketing budget as line items ⁓ in kind of the overall, ⁓ what do you say? I have the word in French, ⁓ estimate. Yeah. But it’s still not enough, right? I would say maybe if.

Christina Moore (14:44)
sure, budget, yeah, sure, yeah.

Sarah Toporoff (14:56)
maybe you’ll have a marketing budget that’s like a third to half of what the production budget is. ⁓ But it really should be like the same. Right. also more and more I’m kind of seeing folks

⁓ repurposing old content. we work with old evergreen content. ⁓ We work with a like a luxury jewelry brand and they have a show that’s been going on for 11, 12 seasons. And what they do is they’ll re-release episodes, but they won’t just re-release them kind of, you know.

Like they have a re-editorialization strategy, right? And so like, for example, in February, they released a new season, but it was all old episodes, but everything kind of had a love hook, right? So I don’t know, like historical engagement rings or whatever. Yeah, so I think being smarter about the productions that you have invested a lot in, in terms of getting

creative around the distribution is something that I would love to see more of, rather than just keeping producing without the marketing strategy necessarily behind it or as an afterthought.

Christina Moore (16:22)
So that was a really good tip, Sarah, and something that in my history of broadcasts that we would do all the time, we would, you know, go dip into the archive, re-editorialise that and make new programs. So I think that’s definitely something that brands and organisations can take from publishers and broadcasters.

One of the things that I wanted to circle back on, and you touched on it earlier, was that sometimes brands are spending time and or money, let’s say they’re spending resource, in areas that they don’t necessarily need to, or they’re trying to achieve the wrong goal with those levers. Can we have a look at a few of those?

Sarah Toporoff (17:15)
Yeah, so in paid podcast marketing specifically, You kind of think of it like a well, I think of it as a funnel, but like with kind of four different sectors. Right. So you have all the activations that you can do like within podcasting. Right.

Those are those that can include, you know, buying programmatic, buying host read ads within other podcasts, doing feed drops with other podcasts. ⁓ Some apps will allow you to do kind of featuring ⁓ as well. And those are great, but kind of limited because, know, any the. Podcasts, are limited. And then when you’re, know, when you’re targeting a specific show or a specific network,

⁓ you know, if you’re buying programmatic ads, like, listen to my show. ⁓ that the KPI for that is impressions, right? it’s not necessarily conversions. but that’s more, you know, it’s reinforcement, right? ⁓ that your, that your shows out there, that your brands out there. ⁓ and then.

on and kind of the non podcasting side. ⁓ You have a lot of, you know, really mature marketing channels. You have paid social, you have paid video, you have classic PR, you even have, you know, out of home. I think

the thing that people don’t understand necessarily about a lot of these is that they’re not gonna drive direct conversions to your content. They are all kind of impression based, right? ⁓ And that’s why the technology that I work on is called Disco, like Discover. We use ⁓ programmatic display buying, but we actually embark an audio player ⁓ in the publisher environment to be able to allow

⁓ audiences to listen to your show directly in article on the page. ⁓ And so that is, you know, we call it performance, which is actual listens, is, which is, which is conversion, conversion, you know, conversions can mean anything, but ⁓ it’s people with ears on your content. And we do have a guaranteed listening model. ⁓ There are a few ⁓ solutions out there that will ⁓

deliver campaigns based on guaranteed listens. ⁓ And I would say always, always do your homework and ask the questions explicitly, like how are these listens being generated and where. And also like check their work, know, I think one thing that we’ve been doing a lot of recently is ⁓ really pushing folks to use attribution. ⁓ So.

that can be like pixel based attribution ⁓ to really, know, we offer full transparency on how and where as in which publishers are generating these, these listens. And we’re always going to be clicked to play. So every listen is going to be an opt-in from the user who saw, saw the image clicked play.

I can do everything to get the content recommendation in front of the most relevant audiences possible ⁓ and also offer full transparency with third party ⁓ verification that these listens are actually being delivered where we say they are.

One thing that’s really exciting right now with attribution is that we can actually track ⁓ longer term listening and impact beyond the initial listen that was delivered by the campaign.

We work a lot with Magellan AI, we work a lot with Pod Track. And what we’ve been seeing is when you’re able to kind of track a user journey from the initial listen, and then you use an attribution window of seven days, two weeks, up to a month, you can see how many…

episodes that person is listening to on their other, you know, on their other apps. And it’s all, it’s all hashed IPs. So we can, we can kind of identify and extrapolate, but just to give you an idea, like we just ran a campaign where we saw 19 % of listeners listened to up to a fifth, listened to a fifth episode in the, 30 days after.

after the initial listen was generated by the campaign, which is really exciting. And so that means that there were a lot of other people also listening to episode two, episode three, episode four, but like 19%, five episodes from one guaranteed listen. I was like, knew we were good, but I didn’t know we were that good. That was cool, that’s cool.

Christina Moore (22:11)
That’s it.

That is a really, really good result.

So let’s go into where we’re heading in the future. You know, you’ve worked at the intersection of content and tech and you see a lot of things. You’ve worked for organisations, you’ve worked for publishers, you’ve worked for brands. Where do you think the future of audience development is going?

Sarah Toporoff (22:42)
podcasting specifically has a huge advantage when it comes to LLMs. ⁓ because what LLMs are looking for is signals across the internet of like credibility. And because podcasting is by nature incredibly distributed, it means that there’s a lot of places that your brand is.

on the internet with like, you know, all these consistent messaging, but it’s like across all of these apps, across YouTube, across, you know, if it’s getting, you know, picked up in any kind of content recommendation, ⁓ but just by its nature, ⁓ podcasting is going to have these like multiple signals that are really, really positive for when LLMs are indexing ⁓ content.

Christina Moore (23:30)
AEO, although as much as SEO people hate the idea of AEO, but I think that AEO is slightly different. I do believe that it’s slightly different. And I think the work that people can do behind that is going to be key to audience discovery in the future.

Sarah Toporoff (23:47)
But again, it’s also just like making sure your content is clean and your tags are organised. it’s like, we know how to do these things. Like do them.

Christina Moore (23:57)
All

the foundations are still the same.

Sarah Toporoff (23:59)
And it’s and it’s all still human first, right, you know, right like like a human To be read by humans, you know, and then that’s I don’t know. I that’s ultimately what’s gonna please The soon-to-be overlords as well if we teach them I guess

Christina Moore (24:22)
Yeah.

Don’t Skip Media (24:24)
Everything Sarah’s described, from collaboration to experimentation to audience-first thinking, isn’t just strategy, it’s a mindset.

Christina Moore (24:33)
what are three mindsets that have carried you well throughout your career?

Sarah Toporoff (24:40)
I like this question. I was thinking about it and and I think one that I I always remind myself ⁓ is that. You’re it kind of goes back to what I was saying about like partnerships instead of, you know, hierarchical relationship is that anytime you are. ⁓

you’re, you know, pitching to a brand or interviewing for like a new job or an employer, like, you’re also interviewing them. ⁓ You’re assessing whether this is a good fit. I kind of, it’s like dating, you know, it’s it’s really like, are we on the same page? Can this work together? And then it really I think once you take yourself out of that, like, I

I need this or like I need to prove myself or to please this person, then you actually come off a lot more ⁓ like collaborative and ⁓ relaxed. ⁓ I also think that if you don’t get the job, if you don’t get the client, it’s again like dating, like it’s only a waste of time if you didn’t learn anything. ⁓

And I will say actually, can we get into our personal story, Christina? I would say that like that ⁓ I kind of talk about how we met a lot because ⁓ I was kind of getting out of the journalism NGO space and I wanted to move into the more audio tech space and you used to work at Apple Podcasts.

Christina Moore (26:09)
Of course, absolutely, go ahead. It’s podcasting after all.

Sarah Toporoff (26:31)
and there was an opening at Apple Podcasts and we had met through radio days vaguely, like was a big Zoom call with a lot of people, but I reached out to you specifically and I said, you offer me any tips for this Apple application? And you did and you were very gracious and you also said, have you ever heard of pod install? And that was a French technology at the time which I had.

which I had heard of, ⁓ but they weren’t super on my radar. And you said, you we were doing some consulting with them. Maybe you should reach out. And actually that ended up being my first job specifically in podcasting and a specific product. ⁓ And then that has, has been, you know, a through line ever since. And that was maybe 2020 ish. Yeah. So I didn’t get the job at Apple.

Christina Moore (27:22)
Yeah.

Sarah Toporoff (27:28)
I didn’t need the job at Apple. probably didn’t want the job at Apple, but you it’s kind of, you talk about the strength of weak ties a lot. And that’s a really good example, which really leads me into like my other kind of mindset that I wanted to touch on is like, never be afraid to ask because yes, yes, never be afraid to ask. Cause people.

Literally nine times out of 10 will say yes, of course. And then again, the one that says no, you’re interviewing them. Like it’s not a fit. That’s fine. That is fine. But like I have been so ⁓ just like consistently. ⁓ Like pleased and odd and humbled by ⁓ just how open people are. And, you know, maybe we’re in a happy podcasting bubble, but, ⁓ you know.

I remember also when I was kind of trying to navigate ⁓ getting more into audio product, ⁓ I had a colleague who had seen a speaker at a conference who was working in public radio product in France, ⁓ she, she’s English originally. And I wanted to work more in France and French is not my first language. And I went to work in audio product and they were like, you know, so like,

I tend to look for like, women who have kind of, you know, international career backgrounds who are about 10 years on in their career for me at any given point. And I’m just like, hey, like, can I buy you a coffee? And like, in that case, like, again, extraordinarily open, so gracious, so open to talk and, and, you know, I’ve done this multiple times. And like, these have been people that have been touch points. So whenever I’m at a career pivot, or when they are, you know, ⁓

And so, yeah, like I think people don’t wanna hear no, ⁓ but the nos are really few and far between and the yeses are worth the risk, you know, I don’t know.

Christina Moore (29:39)
agree with you on the last point and you know the no’s do happen, they do happen but yeah exactly but it’s not a fit and the yes’s are always worth it more, they’re always worth it so much more. So I think they’re really good mindsets to live by so thank you very very much it’s very very insightful. I do you can use another you can have another one.

Sarah Toporoff (29:45)
Not a fit. Not a fit. It was fine.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don’t know if that was three, that was like two and a half, but. No,

I third went, cause you, yeah, cause I was thinking about it. No, that’s kind of the same as the other two. It’s just, I think if you always like lead with kindness, openness and curiosity and whatever interaction, like that’s what you’re gonna

Christina Moore (30:21)
Sarah, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate that you took the time to speak with me today. A very enjoyable conversation.

Christina Moore (30:31)
If we reflect on the start of this episode, the problem wasn’t a lack of content, it was a lack of conversion. What Sarah has laid out is a different way to think about it. Audience development isn’t distribution and being everywhere. It’s about structure. It’s about aligning teams, channels and content around a clear outcome. And most importantly, it’s about designing for what happens after attention is captured. If you were to take anything from this episode, it’s this. Don’t ask, how to reach more people, ask what happens once you’ve reached them. Thank you for listening. My name’s Christina Moore. This is A Mind For Marketing. And if you’re curious where your own content strategy needs to transform, take the Content Power Score. The link is in the description.