CASE STUDY

How Red Hat Proved their Audience Strategy

Measuring Impact and ROI for their Branded Podcast

Enterprise software company Red Hat invested significant resources in developing its branded podcast, Command Line Heroes, to meet the specific needs of professional software developers and system administrators, in order to build brand equity with them. The company needed to measure their return on investment (ROI).

Research Objectives

While the podcast garnered a sizeable audience, the company wanted to understand,

  1. if Command Line Heroes was reaching its target audience of software developers;
  2. how that audience responded to the podcast’s content;
  3. and the incremental brand impact it generated.

Signal Hill’s Solution

  • A call-to-action drove engaged listeners to an online survey, collecting their opinions on the podcast along with their employment and demographic characteristics.
  • In order to generate brand lift metrics, demonstrating the incremental impact of Command Line Heroes, a control group of non-listeners matching the engaged listener profile was recruited via a national panel. Affinity towards the brand was compared between the samples.

Outcomes

The Signal Hill Insights study showed Red Hat obtained a strong return on its investment.

  • The audience survey confirmed that Command Line Heroes was successfully reaching the target audience of software developers and system administrators – 6 in 10 belonged to this segment.
  • These listeners gave overwhelmingly positive feedback – 95% said they liked or loved the content.
  • The podcast delivered a 29% lift in brand affinity for Red Hat among that engaged audience, compared to the matching sample of podcast listeners who did not hear Command Line Heroes.
successful branded podcasts