184 | Fix This Marketing Mistake to Boost Sales & Podcast Downloads

If you are a business owner who publishes a podcast in order to get more clients and customers, but your podcast isn't growing at all, you're probably frustrated, right? You're probably looking back at all the time and money you've invested into your show, and you're wondering if it all was a waste. Which is a shame. Because when you launched the show, you thought it was going to be a great and fun way to generate leads for your business, right? Well, if that's you, I have good news. You are closer to having an easier time making more sales and growing your business via your podcast than it feels. But the reason why your podcast has not lived up to the vision that you had for it as a client acquisition machine is one simple word that I have already uttered here today. There is a missing piece of your content marketing strategy, a slight misconception that is keeping your podcast from growing and keeping your business from benefiting from all the time and money you've spent on your show. This is Grow the Show, where we help business owners grow their audience and their businesses by publishing chart topping podcasts. My name is Kevin Spidland. My podcast says driven almost $3 million in revenue for my business over the past four years. And I've helped more than 400 other podcasting entrepreneurs to also build podcast driven businesses. And most of those 400 entrepreneurs had the same misconception that you might have right now about how a podcast can grow your business. So today, I'm going to clear that up. I'm going to share with you how to think about your podcast as it relates to your overall marketing strategy. I'm going to explain why your podcast has brought you some amazing clients or customers, but not a ton. And I'm going to map out what you can do right now to get your podcast growing and start getting easier sales from your soon to be growing audience base. Now this episode was inspired by a conversation that I had with a business owner recently. He was frustrated and he asked me why his show has been stuck at 50 downloads per episode for the last three years. And I told him I looked around. I looked at his social media presence. I asked if he's been on other podcasts. I asked other questions about how he's marketing his show. And I said, you're not marketing your podcast. The little marketing that you're doing to promote your podcast is salesy and pitchy. It's just a LinkedIn post that's like new episode available now. I'm really glad I made this episode. You should listen to it. And nobody wants that. He got even more frustrated. And he said, my podcast is my marketing. Why do I have to market my marketing? And I said, ah, great question. This is going to be an episode of Grow the Show. And here we are. The answer to that question is the key to why your show is not growing and bringing you the sales that you want. And it is that marketing is too broad of a term here. He says, my podcast is my marketing. It is a piece of his marketing. But there are multiple stages and functions of marketing and sales that have to happen in order for strangers to become customers. And they are not all the same thing that can be accomplished with one fell swoop, one activity that you do that does all of it. And so to really visualize that point, I want you to think of the journey that someone takes from being a total stranger who has never heard of you or your business before, all the way to a happy customer who has bought your thing and is happy that they bought it. All right, so think about that. How do they find out that you exist? How do they stay in touch with you? How do they finally buy the thing? I'll give you an example. For some businesses, the stranger probably saw an ad on Instagram or Facebook. They didn't do anything. So they saw it again. They saw it again. They saw it again. They finally clicked on it. They followed you on social. They checked out some of your social media content where you talked about your podcast. They tuned into your podcast. They listened to a few episodes over the course of three months. They opted into a lead magnet. So on your show, you said, hey, I've got my free guide. You should go to xyz.com and get it. And they did that and they gave you their email. They got on your email list. They started getting your weekly emails. And then one day, finally, the timer's right. And then clicked on a link in one of your emails to enter your sales funnel. Let's say you have a call funnel with, you know, sales calls. They got on a sales call. They got the information. They said, I need to think about it. They got off the sales call. They thought about it from some more. They forgot about you. You reached out offering them a limited time bonus. If they decided to join now, they said, ah, yes, perfect. Let's do this. They got on the follow up call and they became a customer. Okay. So do you see how many different things happened there and how all those things couldn't be done by one tactic, right? By a podcast or ads or something like that. Now as much as we business owners want to keep things simple and easy, it's not that simple. We are working with humans. It's messy, right? Now, if you go back to that whole process that I just pulled out of you, nowhere, there was a lot of freaking stuff that happened. And yes, that's all sales and marketing. But hopefully you see that there are multiple stages and multiple individual functions within that process. This is where business owners trip up. They don't see these different functions in marketing. And they think that their podcast or their social media or their ads is their marketing when it's only one of those functions. It's only a piece of great marketing. So to maximize growth and sales from your business, you need all of those stages. And so let me map out the four stages as I define it. You might find somebody else that defines it differently. That's fine. But here's how I think about it. Stage one is lead generation. That is where you strangers find out that your business exists for the very first time. It could be they see a billboard. They're like, what's that? Could be a social media ad. It could be content on social media. Could be something that goes viral. Could be a recommendation from a friend. Whatever it is, there's a point where a stranger finds out that you exist for the first time. And that makes them a lead. Then there's lead nurturing, which is what steadily builds up trust between the lead and your business. In most cases, these days, that's content. The lead consumes your content sees that you know what you're talking about gets value from it. It makes them laugh. It makes them cry. Whatever it is. But along the way, they're spending time with your business. They're spending time with your brand. They're building trust. And as they go, they're getting more and more likely to be willing to buy from your brand. There's also re-targeting, which is there to remind you that you exist and hopefully get them to resume the nurturing flow. Now this, especially for podcasting business owners, is something that they don't think about in regards to their podcast. They think that when someone discovers their podcast for the first time, that listener is going to subscribe. And then from then on out, whenever the business owner publishes an episode, that person, bang, gets a notification that says, new episode available now that doesn't happen. Most people have notifications off. And most of them are subscribed to too many shows to be notified all the time of all the new episodes that are available. So you have to not only generate leads, but you have to re-target these people. And as an example, you're probably a podcast listener. If you have a podcast, odds are that you're a podcast listener. I want you to think about a podcast that you use to listen to on a regular basis, but you really don't anymore. Think back. What's a show that you used to listen to? You don't really listen to it anymore. That show you stop listening to it because at some point, you forgot about it, right? You have not thought about that show for several months until I just made you do it right now. That is a show that did not re-target you to remind you that there has been a new episode every single week since the last time you listened. So that's re-targeting. That's three. Number four, the fourth marketing function and stage is sales. That is the process of making an offer. It's usually more step-by-step and designed, designed to take someone through the process of deciding to buy your thing. It handles objections. It gets the lead to become a customer in exchange for cash. So those four functions, lead gen, lead nurturing, re-targeting, and sales are required. No business can grow and be sustainable for the long term without all four of those things, I think, and no marketing tactic can cover all four of those functions as far as I know. And even though there's tons of websites and software that are trying to sell you that we are the one-stop shop, we are the one tool that can do all these things. In my experience, you need multiple things in a tandem that work leads down the path of becoming a customer. And so if you've got a podcast and it's not growing, here's where you've tripped up. You probably think that your podcast is a lead generation mechanism and it can be later a little bit, but what it is primarily now and forever is a lead nurturing mechanism. This is why your podcast hasn't brought you a ton of new customers, but the ones that it has brought you have been amazing, easy sales. They're excellent customers. They've venertured like crazy. And that's great, right? But how do we make that happen more? Well, in order for your podcast to do its job, it's primary job, and nurture the crap out of your leads, it needs to be hooked up to a separate lead generation mechanism. That's where you market your marketing. But more specifically, you are generating leads and sending them to your lead nurturing mechanism, which is your podcast. Now, at the time of this recording, the best lead generation tactics that I have seen that work well to feed strangers to a podcast as listeners is as followed. Number one, organic social media, learning how to get organic reach, either via short form video or like texts like X or threads or LinkedIn or something like that. You're making stuff that's getting reach outside of your followers. People discover you, podcast guesting where you do a podcast guesting tour, pretty self explanatory or collaborating with other shows where they tell their listeners, go listen to your podcast, right? There's tried and true paid ads. You run social media ads. That's lead generation. There's also cold outbound where you are, you know, if you're on LinkedIn, you get all those DMs every single day of, hey, here's how I can help you. That's cold outbound. And those people who are doing that, they're getting clients and customers. It is generating leads for them. And then finally, there's organic YouTube. And yes, organic YouTube is the place where your podcast can be two for one. It can generate leads and nurture them, which is why YouTube is so powerful. And I do recommend that business owners get on YouTube. But what's also true is that it's not for everybody. It is expensive. And there is a skill set that is involved in learning how the YouTube algorithm works and getting your videos shown to strangers. So there's a lot of amazing podcasts out there that are on YouTube that don't have tons of use. The show is good. And the people who watch those episodes, they buy. It's just that creator, that entrepreneur has not yet learned the other skill of the YouTube algorithm. So that is one thing that can be a two for one. But like I said, it's expensive. If your podcast, however, is audio only or if you are publishing on YouTube and your YouTube videos aren't getting views. And so you haven't really learned how to crack the YouTube algorithm yet. Then you absolutely must plug your podcast into a lead generation mechanism in order to get more listeners. You must. It is the only way. Now, if you're a business owner who already has a lead generation mechanism, that is great. Link it up to your podcast. I see tons of business owners whose podcast is totally siled off from their social media and their sales funnel and their paid ads funnel. It's these things that are just living all by themselves and they're not interconnected. They don't send people to the other thing. Here's an example of how you can connect a lead generation mechanism with your lead nurturing mechanism, which is your show. If you're running paid social media ads, usually people are opting into something that you're offering them. So you are asking them to book a call or you're offering them a freebie in exchange for their email. They do that. Usually you then have an email trip that nurtures them over the following days, right? So the ad generates leads. They opt in, but then your emails nurture the leads. See how it's a separate thing? Well, if you do that and you have an opt in welcome drip, for each email that you send over the first few days after they opt in to your paid ads thing, include a link to a podcast episode, whether audio or video or both. Say, hey, if you want more, check out this episode. At this point, your leads are becoming more nurtured because everybody who opts in to clicks on your ad starts getting sent to your podcast and then boom, you've got a podcast growth tactic that's just said it and forget it as long as you can keep spending money on ads. So if you are a business owner who has published podcast episodes and you've only sometimes got an amazing customers from your show, but you've been confounded as to why your show hasn't grown and brought you more customers and more revenue, I hope that this was helpful for you. I want you to think about your podcast as a lead nurturing mechanism, not a lead generation mechanism, and work on mastering and integrating a separately generation strategy paid ads, organic social, podcast guesting, cold outbound, or yes, going all in on YouTube and getting the elusive two for one. And once you do this, you're going to see your podcast downloads start to go up way easier and faster, and you're going to notice how much easier your sales become because now that your leads are consuming your podcast content, they come to the call being like, I can't believe I get the chat with you or oh my gosh, I binge all of this person's content and it's just a way easier sale and it's way easier to grow your business. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now I have a quick favor to ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five star rating. And if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using to hear my voice right now, it just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment, leave us a five star rating, maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post-production by podcast boutique and if you want your show to be post-produced with quality really freaking fast. And if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with podcast boutique. Just head to podcastboutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them because I spent no time editing this episode and neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Shviddlin. I'll see you next time.