153 | 12 Days of Podcast Growth Day #11: WHEN and WHAT to CTA

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach and today it is time to make some money. We are in part four of the four rungs of the podcast slider and part four is about monetization. And so today we are going to dive in to how to make the right calls to action in your podcast episodes without great well timed calls to action. Your listeners aren't going to do anything other than just listen. And while yes, it's great that they're listening that alone doesn't do anything for us. It doesn't help us grow and it doesn't help us monetize. And we need our listeners to do a number of things. If we want to have a growing monetized podcast, we need them to spread the word. We need them to follow and subscribe. We need them to rate and review. We need them to hopefully opt into our email list. And yes, we need them to buy something for us to make money. They need to either buy something from us or from our partners, our sponsors, affiliates and brand deals. Now the way that we get our listeners to do those things is not by simply hoping that they do it. We must ask them to, but don't worry, we can ask them to do those things in a way that isn't weird or pushy or salesy. You can learn how to do that. And in fact, if we pick the right thing to CTA and we make the CTA at the right time and in the right way, our listeners are going to be thrilled to oblige. They'll be glad that we asked. So how do we do that? Well, as mentioned, there's three ingredients to super effective podcast CTAs. Number one is what you're CTAing. Number two is when within the episode you're CTAing it. And number three is how you're CTAing it. What are the words that you're using? Now that how peace, the words, what you say, that's a bit of an art form and involves writing persuasive yet non-pushy and non-salesy copy. We'll cover that tomorrow. Today though, let's cover the pieces that are more of a science, the what and the when. So we'll start with what? What to CTA on your podcast? Now as I mentioned, we are currently in level four, the monetization portion of this audio course, but there are actually multiple things for us to CTA that will impact other levels of the podcast success ladder as well. And that's because there's five main things that we want to regularly CTA on our podcast. And those five things are this. Number one, we want to ask our audience to rate and review. Very simple yet surprisingly effective ratings and reviews work to increase the credibility of our show because when people pull up our show in Apple podcasts and Spotify, they see tons of stars, they see tons of ratings. And they're like, oh, wow, this is a legit show. And the way that you get more ratings is by asking. So you want to ask your listeners to leave a rating or a review and or to tell a friend about your podcast, which technically is a separate CTA, but I kind of lumped it into the rate and review one here. Number two, there are lead magnets. So this is for those of you who already have a product or service to offer and you're working with an email list, you certainly want to offer something of value to your listenership like a PDF or a video or a webinar or a free trial or a masterclass or a 12 day audio and written course in the name of gathering emails so that you can contact those listeners in the future if you have something to offer them that they might want to purchase. So lead magnets is huge. Next is our products and services. This is where we directly CTA listeners into the sales process for the stuff that we sell. So this is a little bit different than offering a lead magnet, which is where you give them something, they give you their email and you have permission in the future to contact them and tell them about your stuff unless they remove that permission by unsubscribing. Well when we CTA our products and services, when we do what I call a direct CTA, we're straight up talking about the things that we have to offer them on our podcast. And so that's when you CTA them about whatever product or service your sale, it could be a course, it could be a coaching program, it could be merch, whatever it is. And what you do is you CTA your listeners into the sales process of that thing, into the buying process for the stuff that you sell. So that might be a discovery call, it could be a sales page, it could be a website, it could be an application that they submit, whatever it might be, that's a direct CTA. Next up we have the CTA's for our sponsors and our affiliates products and services. And those are advertisements, right? So just like the CTA's for our own stuff, when we put an advertisement on our show, we are simply just making a call to action for the listener to check out the products and services of another company. It's the same thing, we're just sending them to someone else's stuff instead of our stuff. And then finally, this one is optional, but I see this done a lot and it can be done well. You can also CTA your audience to follow you on social media or join an online community if you have one totally optional, not required. I've experimented with this in the past with mixed results, but it is an option. All right, so now I know what you're thinking, Kevin, that is a lot of stuff to CTA. And it is. Here is the key. We do not CTA them all at once. We only ever CTA one of those things at a time. And this is a mistake that I hear a lot where a podcaster, you know, it's a new podcaster. I turn on their episode to check it out. And the first thing they do is they're like, and before we start, be sure to follow us. And rate a review on all platforms and go to our website to get more information and also tell a friend and I'm like, oh my gosh, too much, too much. One thing at a time, right? So we want to CTA simply one of the many things that we can CTA at a time. And I know your next question is, well, okay, if I can't put all of the CTAs all in one go and yet I still have to CTA all of these things, how do I CTA all of those things to my listenership if I can only do one at a time? You simply rotate them out. You implement what I call rotational CTAs. So to implement rotational CTAs from the options above that I mentioned before, you pick three to five things that make sense for you to CTA and you rotate them out from episode to episode. So this week, you might CTA the listener to rate and review. Next week, you might CTA your lead magnet, you know, let's say it's a free training video. Go to the link in the show notes to watch my free hour long masterclass. The following week, you might directly CTA something that you offer. Let's say it's a coaching program, you know, you might say, if you're somebody who's experiencing XYZ, consider working with me directly as your coach. If you want that, click the link in the show notes and fill out the form. Obviously, tomorrow, we're going to talk about how you can do it way better than that. And that's all just off the top of my head, but you get the picture. It's direct. You're directly sending them to something that you sell. And let's say you've got though, let's say those are your only three rotational CTAs week four, you'll be back to CTAing the rate and review and you just rotate them out. When you do it this way, when you do it on a rotational basis, you get a couple benefits. First off, you're only CTAing one thing at a time, so you're not overwhelming the listener with tasks, with options with things to do. It's just this one thing and you're saying, hey, if you do anything today, do this thing. And they're like, okay, I might be able to do that thing. The other benefit there is that you're spreading these CTAs out so that you're not jackhammering the listener with every single possible CTA that you can make, right? You're not telling them to do all these things all at once. And some people think that if you give them a bunch of options, then they're more likely to hear an option than they want to do. But that's actually not true. The opposite is true. The more options you give them, the more likely it is that they're not going to do any of them because they're just overwhelmed and they're just not going to take the time to think about it. They're like, that's too much. I'm not doing it, right? The other thing that's really great about doing rotational CTAs is that when you do it that way, you're giving the listener multiple ways that they can take the next step with you, which is a good thing. That might sound like it might contradict what I just said. It's good to give them the full menu, just not all at once, because if you give it to them all at once, they're going to get overwhelmed and do nothing. But if you just kind of breadcrumb drip it out, the odds are that you are going to eventually offer them something, ask them to do something that they are willing to do and that they want to do. So some of your listeners are never going to rate and review your podcast, but they might be ready to buy your coaching program right away, right? So you want to make sure that every list of other listeners might never buy anything from you, but they might be some of your biggest fans and they might totally leave you a global review. So when you rotate out the CTAs that you make, you're able to make sure that every listener, depending on who they are and where they are in their listener journey with you, can hear all of your CTAs so that the right one can find them at the right time. Okay, Kevin, that sounds great. I now know that I now know to have multiple CTAs that I rotate out. But when within my episodes do I put my CTAs? That is a great question, listener. So here is when to make your CTAs. You see on podcasts, there are three main quote unquote ad placements and what that means is there's three main places you can stick a CTA. There's pre-roll. There's mid-roll and there's post-roll. So pre-roll is when you have a call to action before your episode's content. And so if you've ever listened to a podcast and you press play on an episode and the first thing that you hear is an ad, that is a pre-roll ad. It happens before the actual content that you're there for. So the main thing that you hear is when the CTA interrupts the episode content. So these are the most common placements and whenever you hear, we'll be back after these messages. You're about to listen to a mid-roll ad. It happens in the middle, usually somewhere between one third and two thirds of the way through the actual content. And then finally there's post-roll ads, which is when a call to action happens after the content is over. Everything's been delivered, it's the very end of the episode. And so which of those three should you employ to maximize your desired results with your rotational CTAs? Well, here's my take on those three placements. The first one is pre-roll and I recommend you avoid having pre-roll CTAs as much as you can. Pre-roll advertisements and pre-roll CTAs significantly damage your episode completion rate because many listeners turn an episode on because they read the title and they're like, ooh, that sounds good. And if the first thing that they hear isn't ad or you asking them to go buy something or go to your website, they're like, what is this? And they turn the episode off. And so pre-roll ads tend to actually drive listeners away. Advertisers, however, love pre-roll ads. It is their favorite. Advertisers do not care how much of your episode listeners listen to. They only care how much of their ad. They only care how many people hear their ad. That is it. So advertisers love pre-roll because their message gets heard first and by the most listeners. But as I said, this is the most disruptive CTA to your listener experience because you're basically asking the listener to do something before you have delivered anything of value to them. What also happens is that people tend to skip the pre-roll ad and many times they overshoot the skipping and then they miss key pieces of your episode intro. So overall, I recommend avoiding pre-roll ads unless you either have a time sensitive thing that you want to tell them about. So sometimes I'll add a pre-roll ad if there's some sort of campaign that I'm running like a couple of weeks ago, I ran a Grow the Show audience survey and I wanted everybody to fill it out. So I stuck a pre-roll ad at the beginning of every episode asking people to do it, but I only had that running for a week and then I took it off because I wanted to be more aggressive with that one. So next is mid-roll. These are my favorite ad placements because these are the Goldilocks placements, meaning these CTAs get heard by the most listeners because pre-rolls get skipped and post-rolls don't get heard because a lot of people turn off the episodes by then. So mid-roll tends to get the most listens and they're generally well received because at that point, one to three thirds of the way through the episode, you've already delivered some value to the listener in the first half of your content. So mid-roll is a great place to put it. Also mid-rolls are the hardest to skip because people tend to have their hands full, right? Their hands are busy, their phones away while they're listening. So you're more likely that folks are going to hear the CTA, but the downside to that is that if you're asking them to take an action, they're less likely to take the action right away because their hands are busy. So that's the con to it is that if you're asking them to go right and review, they're not likely to do it right then and they'll have to do it, they'll have to remember to do it later. The third CTA placement is post-roll, and so this is where you put a CTA at the very end of the episode after everything is done. And I generally think that, you know, why not? The downside of post-roll CTAs is that the fused amount of listeners are going to hear it because it's at that point of the episode at the very end where more listeners have already turned off the episode for a number of reasons. But the upside to post-rolls is two-fold. So number one is that because you have just delivered a full episode of content, listener good will is high. And if the listener has made it to the post-roll ad, that means that they listened to the entire episode, which means they got great value from it, which means they're likely to listen to what you want them to do, right? They're likely to well receive the CTA. The other good thing is that at the end of the episode, that's when a listener has to pull their phone back out to either stop listening to podcasts or pick a different episode to listen to, and it's at that point that they are slightly more able to do whatever it is that you ask them to do because they have their phone out. So it's a little bit easier for them to immediately rate or in review or immediately opt into your lead magnet. So that's my take on the three of them, and I know what you're thinking. That's cool, Kev, but can you just tell me which ones to do? I get it. I don't understand the theory behind it, but here's my recommendation. At minimum, I recommend that you have three to five mid-roll rotational CTAs always. You want to rotate those CTAs out every single episode, and record new ones every three to six months, depending on how often you publish. Generally, you want to make it so that people hear a CTA 12 times and then flip it out so that, you know, because eventually, Advoteague sets in, which means when people hear the same ad over and over again, they eventually tune it out. So three to five mid-roll rotational CTAs is the recommendation. And if you want to get more bang for your buck for your overachievers out there who want extra credit, throw in some post-roll rotational CTAs as well because why not? Throw it in there. So there you have it. This one was pretty dense. That was the science of what and when to make calls to action on your podcast, but we are not done with CTAs yet. We have one more day in the 12 days of podcast growth. And that's because while placement of your CTA is key, the language that you actually use to make the CTA is even more important. And that is what we are going to cover tomorrow as we wrap up our 12 days of podcast growth. I will see you then, but before that, I'm going to make a CTA to you and say, if you haven't already gotten these written lessons in your inbox, head to 12daysofpodcastgrowth.com. When you enter your email, I will immediately email you back with all of the 12 lessons from the 12 days of podcast growth in written form so that you can refer back to them later. So you don't have to dig out your podcast app, go find these episodes on the feed in the future when you want to refer to this. So that's one two days of podcastgrowth.com. Enter your email as soon as you do. You will receive all of the written lessons in your inbox so that you can refer to it later. And I will see you tomorrow for the last of the 12 days. Alright, see you then.