139: How to Promote Your Products Without Being Salesy

I'm about to share with you my podcast sales hack that will make it more easy and more fun for you to talk about your paid products and services on your podcast. What you start using this hack, I think you're going to find that you have way less resistance to actually selling and CTAing your products and services on your podcasts and you're going to make more sales. This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Shavidlin. I am your podcast growth coach and today I'm going to share with you what I call celebrating and how celebrating on your podcast is going to change the game for you and get you more sales. So just this week I hopped off a one-on-one call with one of my Grow the Show Accelerator clients. So she meets with me one-on-one every week or two and our goal is to grow her podcast downloads and monetize her show so that she makes more money from her podcast. Now we've been working together for just about a year but recently she was not satisfied with how many membership sales that she got from her show. So she has a membership and when I chat it with her about a month ago she already had 200 members in her membership which is impressive but the thing is her podcast audience is you know somewhere around 20,000 to 30,000 listeners and her membership costs about $5 or $10 a month and 200 is a lot of members but generally what we want to do is we want to shoot for a 2% to 7% conversion rate from podcast listener to paid members. We want 2 to 7% of your listenership to sign up for the membership if your membership is $5 to $10 a month. So doing math with 200 members she was only at about 0.8% which is low so I decided to look into how she was promoting her membership on the show turns out she really wasn't and so I asked her why why don't you talk about your membership and so like many of us podcasters she was afraid of being too salesy she was afraid of putting her audience off and you know turning them off because she was telling her stuff too much which I get but here's the thing about promoting anything that you sell number one you have to promote it in order for people to buy it you can't rely on people just hoping and guessing that you have something to sell and going and finding it on your website that just doesn't happen and the other thing that's true in my experience is that one of the top reasons people actually buy your product or service is social proof meaning people buy when they see that other people like them also bought and here's the key word glad that they bought that's why when you order on Uber Eats or DoorDash you filter out any restaurant that has below a 4.5 star rating because 4.5 stars and above mean that people were glad that they bought from this place so what does that mean for us as podcasters and of folks who sell online products and services well time and time again I've learned that my most effective marketing comes from times where I am talking about the specific wins that my clients have achieved in other words I am celebrating the results that my clients get so I said to this accelerator client what I want you to do is in each of your upcoming episodes that you publish I want you to simply celebrate something that one of your members has gotten out of your membership right so you can celebrate a specific results or you could also celebrate you know something the membership is doing as a group as a whole right it might be an initiative or just something that you all did together I don't know and so when I share this with this client she immediately lit up she said oh my gosh I can totally do that and it makes sense she's got 200 members in there the people who are in there love it and so she'll have no shortage of people and results to celebrate so two weeks later I caught up with her again and so I said hey how did it go celebrating your membership she said Kevin I've gotten 100 new members since we last spoke 100 her membership grew from 200 to 300 members in just two weeks because she started celebrating her customers within her podcast that is not all I had that conversation with her two weeks ago and just two days ago I caught up with her again and asked for another update and guess what she's done she's now up to 400 members in her membership her membership has doubled from 200 to 400 in just a month once she started celebrating her members on her podcast now keep in mind that a huge piece of this is not even just the way she was talking about her stuff but the fact that she started talking about her stuff is going to play a big part in the fact that more people bought the thing but time and time again when you celebrate when you share social proof when you talk about the good stuff that people got from buying your stuff that's when your listeners are like okay I want to do that too so what I want you to do and your next episode of your podcast as a part of your call to action I want you to celebrate a client a customer or even just you know your community of clients and customers as a whole just celebrate it you know you don't have to just you know goes super feature heavy or make it you should buy this thing because here's what you'll get just celebrate and watch the sales come in by the way that's exactly what I'm doing here on this episode now I am selling this growth show accelerator client who has doubled her membership from 200 to 400 she got her membership from point 8% to 1.6% which is much closer to that 2% to 7% target that we have so not only does it freaking work but you know the speed with which her membership is currently growing but keeps up at this rate she'll probably be within that 2% to 7% range very very very soon so congratulations you know who you are for growing your membership finally getting past the resistance of talking about your stuff on your podcast and actually celebrating your clients and customers so congratulations to you my accelerator client who I'm talking about and for you the listener you know what to do get out there start celebrating your clients and customers on your podcast and watch how much easier it becomes to actually make sales so that is going to do it for this episode my name is Kevin Tridlin I am your podcast growth coach and I will see you in the next one