Phill Agnew’s podcast is full of behavioral psychology tips, and he was kind enough to share some of them with Marketing Against the Grain readers.
If you haven’t listened to Nudge, I recommend starting with the episode about how a fraudster convinced the rich and powerful that cheap tea was worth a hundred-times premium.
Meet the Master
Phill Agnew
Host, Nudge podcast
Claim to fame: Nudge (which is part of HubSpot’s podcast network) is the number one marketing podcast in the UK.
Lesson 1: Stop chasing the algorithm.
A TikTok Agnew made to promote a Nudge episode “went a bit viral,” he tells me. But that didn’t add up to new listeners. “I could measure exactly how many people went to listen to the show — and very few did.”
That’s because the almighty algorithm is designed to keep you on a site or app, not take you away from it. “It’s hard to get people off the feed,” Agnew says.
He’s found that for podcast promotion, appearing on other podcasts is “far and away the easiest way to grow your own podcast.” You’re borrowing an audience that you know listens to podcasts — so they’re much more likely to check out a new pod.
And don’t underestimate other algorithm-free tactics, like public speaking. Agnew told me he’d done three conferences over the past three weeks before our interview. “And after each day, I can see these giant spikes in listenership,” he tells me.
Getting a couple hundred new subscribers after a single talk will push Agnew’s podcast up the Apple charts, driving even more new listeners. It’s more than he ever sees from a viral TikTok video, but this lesson isn’t podcast-specific: Borrowed audiences who already trust a format are more likely to convert. Algorithmic eyeballs mostly don’t.
Lesson 2: Concrete phrases beat abstract ones.
The psychologist Ian Begg did a study where he asked people to remember certain phrases. “Some of the phrases were concrete,” Agnew says, “like ‘fast car,’ ‘square door,’ or ‘blue jeans.’” Other phrases were abstract, like “trusted provenance” or “cutting-edge tech.”
Begg got the participants to do another task to distract them, and then brought them back and asked how many phrases they remembered from earlier.
“The concrete phrases were eight times more memorable — not 8% — eight times more memorable than the abstract phrases,” Agnew says.
Agnew suggests we should all be using this behavioral psychology in our marketing. “We shouldn’t be saying this will help you leverage synergies across your organization,” he says. “We should be saying this is what helps you get on the same page as Jessica in HR.”
Lesson 3: Show social proof, don’t just say it.
Speaking of the gap between what you say and what actually lands in somebody’s brain.
Agnew says that “one of my aha moments in marketing is that we’re used to just saying things — but if we’re creative enough, we can find ways to show it.”
He gives the example of a coffee shop that has loyalty cards for its customers. Instead of giving the cards to the customers to keep in their wallets, “they stuck them on the wall behind the baristas — the back wall of this cafe is full to the brim of loyalty cards. Walk past that store and they don’t have to tell you they’re incredibly popular.” You can see it.
“And I think the same is true for all sorts of types of marketing and especially social proof,” Agnew says. Don’t just tell your customers that you’re the most popular product or service on the market.
The question worth asking about your own marketing: Where can you make your success visible instead of just claiming it?
Lingering Questions
This Week’s Question
What’s the best sales page you’ve ever seen?
—Nathan May, founder, The Feed Media
This Week’s Answer
Agnew says:: I’m biased, but Katelyn Bourgoin and I had great fun packing our own sales page with lots of psychology-inspired nuggets. I’m specifically proud of how we used social proof on the page!
Next Week’s Lingering Question
Agnew asks: If you could only open one book for inspiration for the rest of your marketing career, which book would it be?
