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When Maggie Silver joined Podium Audio as the head of strategic marketing, “the company barely had a website,” she said.
It had never really needed one. Podium bought audio rights from authors who had self-published, primarily on Kindle, and in 2012 one of its first releases took off.
The Martian, once an obscure blog by Andy Weir, rapidly ascended to bestseller status. Then, in 2015, became a hit film starring Matt Damon.
That early success — and a lack of competition — propelled Podium organically for years.
By the time Silver joined the team in late 2019, though, the audiobook industry had matured, and Podium needed a more formal marketing strategy.
“I was tasked with everything from building a consumer-facing website to rebranding the company to growing their nascent social accounts — literally building the marketing strategy and team from ground zero,” Silver said.
She was just one woman, though. She needed help.
Specifically, she needed a specialist to help her understand Amazon’s advertising ecosystem, and how it connected to Audible, Amazon’s subscription-based audiobook hub.
Amazon’s pay-per-click advertising is only a few years old, and Silver thought there had to be ways of “hacking it and experimenting, like in the early days of Facebook.”
Most agencies with Amazon expertise only knew the e-commerce side of its advertising offerings, though. The publishing side, which revolves around ASIN numbers, was a different world, and people with experience in it eluded her.
