215 | Where Your Podcast Fits In Your Funnel

If you're a business owner who has poured time, money, and energy into a podcast, but your downloads haven't gone up and you really haven't gotten a good ROI from doing the podcast, watch this video in its entirety because I'm going to correct a misconception that you probably have about how podcasting works. My name is Kevin. I am the founder of Grow the Show. I've been helping entrepreneurs grow their podcast and use a podcast to grow their business for the last five years and almost every single entrepreneur that I have come across who has launched a podcast is mistaken about how a podcast fits into an online business. And so what I'm going to do today is tell you the story of a client that came to me with dismissed conception. She was sad that her podcast wasn't growing and she did not understand how her podcast was actually working within her business and by the end of the conversation I showed her that a her audience was actually growing and she didn't know it be the way that she was operating her content marketing was ineffective because it wasn't cohesive. It wasn't integrative and see I shared with her the actual strategy that's going to achieve all of her goals, which is to grow her podcast downloads. Yes, but more importantly grow her revenue so that she's making more money in the business. And my hope is that by telling this story and sharing with you the realization that she just had you will also be able to get more out of your podcast and grow your business faster and more easily. And yes, grow your audience as well. But before we tell that story, there's one misconception that we have to correct first and that has to do with your funnel. Now all the time I hear people debating about whether a podcast is top of funnel, middle of funnel, whatever it might be. And we are going to talk about that today, but the misconception that comes along with that is this everybody thinks of their marketing systems as a funnel. And the funnel looks like this in their mind, right. It's a funnel and there's different levels. There's top of funnel, which is the people who have really never heard of you, there's middle of funnel, which is the people who have kind of heard of you and are considering maybe buying. And then there's bottom of funnel, which are the people who are like really just about to buy. And while this is generally correct, here is the misconception that isn't serving you people tend to think that a lead starts top of funnel. They've never heard of you and they make their way through the funnel and then they buy and the misconception is that this is like a one way street and that a lead is somebody who will start top of funnel and then they'll consume some stuff. And then they'll be kind of middle of funnel and then maybe they'll stop, maybe they'll disengage and then they'll consume some more stuff and they'll be bottom of funnel until eventually they buy, right. So that's what people think, but that's not actually how it works. It's not like somebody goes here and then they stop. It's more active and it's the type of thing where people are always moving around. So someone who's never heard of you, they discover your stuff and then they binge a bunch of stuff and then maybe they don't buy and they disengage for a bit. So they drift back up and then maybe they see your content and they drift back down a little bit through the funnel and it's just this long dance until eventually they buy. And really after they buy the same thing kind of happens. It's just they've given you money, but they still oscillate with how warm they are with you. The first distinction I want to share with you before I tell this story, people are not warmed once and then stuck at that level of warmth, their temperature changes based on how much they're interacting with you. And so there could be a prospect who starts super cold gets really hot and then cools off after a while. And if that's the case, you have to do the work again to get them super warm. So that's the prerequisite to telling this story. So I was chatting the other day with a client of mine who came to me and we set up a check in because she was unsatisfied that her podcast downloads hadn't gone up. So we've been working together for a while and her downloads didn't really change all that much. They went up a little bit, but not a huge amount. So she said like, Hey, can we talk about this? My podcast hasn't really grown. Now I've worked with several entrepreneurs and over the past couple of years, I actually track success differently. I don't trust success by podcast downloads anymore. I track it by two things, total audience growth and sales revenue, right, because that's what the goals are. And so we started this check in and I had this client bring up her total audience growth tracker. That's the spreadsheet that I give the clients that I work with that tracks their social media audience, their podcast audience, their YouTube audience, their email subscribers. And it adds it all up so that we can truthfully see what is your total audience size? What is your total reach? How many people are you reaching on a regular basis? Now when we looked at this client's numbers, we saw that her audience had grown a lot since we started working together. So these aren't the actual numbers, but just for demonstration purposes. Let's say she was at 10,000 downloads a month and then she got up to 15,000 downloads a month and then back down to 10. So she came to me here and she said, hey, I started with you to grow my audience and my podcast, it grew a little bit, but it's still stuck at 10,000 downloads per month. So what gives? Why has my podcast grown? And I said, okay, valid question, but let's zoom out of it. My first question for her was, why do you want your audio downloads to grow? Why is that important to you? She said, well, I want more clients. Let me ask you this. Have you gotten more clients? She said, yes, I said, okay. So if your goal is more clients, why do you care about your podcast download numbers? And she got to look at me funny because on the grow the show guy saying, why do you care about your podcast download numbers? But I said, hear me out. And she said this because everyone who buys my stuff tells me they listened to the podcast. This is important. So remember this, we're going to come back to it. I said, okay, cool. So let me ask you this. If I could double the amount of clients that you're getting. But your podcast downloads don't change at all. They don't go up. Would you be happy? She said, yes, I said, okay, would you care that your podcast didn't grow? She'd say, I mean, no, I wanted to grow, but no, I said, all right. So let's look at your total audience over this time period. So we look at her total audience and we see that it has actually grown over this time period, but her podcast downloads kind of swelled a little bit and then shrunk. So what gives? Well, here's what happened in this period of time, this client did a launch. And so what that means is this client was getting a bunch of people to buy their stuff. So she was showing up a ton on social media on her email list and also on YouTube and her podcast a little bit more than normal. So in this period she launched her podcast downloads got a little swollen and then they went back down. Why is this? Well, what you need to understand is that your audio podcast doesn't sit at the top of your funnel. Generally, people who are listening to your audio podcast for the most part, it's not the first thing that they're hearing from you. They found out about you either on social media or on YouTube or by listening to another podcast. So that was top of funnel. They found out about you there and then they worked their way and at some point you said, hey, I have a podcast you should go listen to it. And they said, oh, cool. Yeah, I've heard of this person. I've seen their stuff on social media. Let me check out their podcast. So they listened to your podcast. When that happens, that's when they go like this, because in my opinion, a podcast is the best lead nurturing mechanism around. And this is where we come to a key distinction lead generation is the moment that somebody finds out about you. Alex Hermosy defines it as the moment they give you their contact information, which is probably a better definition. But for me, a lead generation is the moment someone finds out that you exist. So lead generation is the moment that somebody becomes this blip within your funnel. Boom, a lead has been generated. They saw an ad, one of your videos popped up in their browse section of YouTube. They saw a real social media post, whatever it might be, but they see your stuff and they're like, wow, I know that that person exists. Real quick before we continue, if you want me to come in and be your fractional chief audience officer and be responsible for bringing all this stuff together and giving you a cohesive audience growth ecosystem, where all you have to do is record one piece of long form content a week and your team handles the rest. Then click the link in the description, book a time with me. I'll explain how it works back to the show lead nurturing is everything that happens after lead generation that builds no like and trust factor with you. AKA, it's the stuff that brings them further down the funnel. It's consuming more of your social media content. It's watching more of your YouTube videos. And in my opinion, the thing that makes people go from here to here, which is buying your stuff, the fastest is a podcast. Because that's when people are spending 30, 40, 50, 60 minutes with you at a time, and the whole time they're digging deep, they're getting to know you, they're seeing that you're an actual person who knows what you're talking about, which is just harder to do on social media in like 60 second clips, but with a 45 minute podcast episode, people really spend a lot of time with you and get to know you. So while some people launch a podcast because they think it's top of funnel. I hear this all the time. I want to launch a podcast. So more people find out about me, not so nobody's going to find out about you. If you simply launch a podcast, you also have to market that podcast. You have to go generate leads elsewhere. So if you want to grow a podcast, you have to show up on social media and get people to find out about you there and tell them about your show, get to show up on other podcasts and get interviewed, right, which is more lead generation. You got to run ads to a funnel or webinar or a product or service and people find out about you there. Or you can put your podcast on YouTube and make it so that the YouTube algorithm makes people find out about you. But your audio podcast is not going to generate leads in and of itself. So you have to go generate them elsewhere, get them to tune into the show so that then they will listen, listen, listen and be nurtured. So that's how a podcast actually fits into your funnel. It's middle and bottom of funnel. Now here's what's key. This client I was talking about said, I want to grow my podcast downloads because everybody who buys my stuff says that they listened to my podcast. And so the conclusion that this client made was people bought my stuff because they listened to my podcast and I believe that's true. But I think it's more useful if we actually flip it on its head a little bit. Instead, you want to think about it this way. People listened to her podcast because they were about to buy her stuff. So what that means is when you look at your podcast downloads, that is not an indicator of how big your podcast audience is in total. It is an indicator of how many warm leads you currently have. So if your podcast downloads suddenly start to go up, that means that you're doing other lead generation stuff and you're getting more and more people at this point in the funnel. And if you look at what my client experienced, you'll see that her podcast download numbers went up while she was launching. And at that period of time, she was emailing her list every day. She was all over social media. She was running tons of ads. And then after the launch stopped, she stopped showing up. So what happened was number one, fewer people were starting to find out about her because she stopped doing all of those lead generation mechanisms that she was getting really, really hard for a period of time. But also everybody that got this far down the funnel during the launch. And remember, this is the podcast listener zone. So people that are there in the funnel listen to your podcast. So there was a bunch of people who were super warm because she was doing all this activity. But then she launched and she stops doing all that stuff and people drifted up and they drifted away because they hadn't heard from her in a while. They hadn't seen her stories on social media. They hadn't gotten emails from her. And you know, she just wasn't top of mind anymore. So they drifted out of the podcast listening zone. Now that person, if you ask them about my clients podcast, they would say, oh, yeah, I've listened to that show. It's awesome. But they haven't in a while because they're disengaged. And so it's counterintuitive. But if I was brought in to simply grow a business owners podcast downloads, the first thing that I would do is just double the amount of other stuff they were doing in their content ecosystem. Go from one email a week to two, go from one social media post a day to two, start posting on YouTube, publish twice the amount of podcast episodes per week and promote that there's new podcast episodes available. If you increase your surface area on the internet elsewhere, you're going to do two things. You're going to increase your lead generation. So more people start finding out that you exist. And since you're showing up everywhere, more people are going to consume your stuff and slowly but surely move their way down the funnel and be like, wow, I really like this person. I should consume more of their stuff. I should consider buying their stuff. And then they're in the podcast listener zone. And they're like, you know, I want to dive deeper with this person. Let me start listening to their podcast or resume listening to their podcast. And this happens all the time. And what's cool about that is people are like, wow, I didn't have to do some new fangled growth strategy in order to grow my podcast downloads. I just needed more people to remember that my podcast exists. Okay, so the next question is, what do we do about this situation? Well, the reason that my client had this problem was because all of her content, all of her audience activities were siloed. So she has Instagram over here and she has one person doing her Instagram. She has another person who is doing her email list. And that person is also doing Instagram ads. So she's got two people doing Instagram who aren't talking to each other. She's got one person who is doing both her YouTube and her podcast. And this person is doing the editing. And then in the middle of all this, there was her who was like kind of making some of the content, but she had all of these people who were not talking to each other working on these different things. So the podcast was over here, not really getting much downloads. Instagram was not growing, but content was being published. And you know, you had people who were opting into the ads and going into the funnel, but all this stuff was completely siloed. All these experts were not talking to each other. They were just kind of doing their own thing in silence. There was no cohesion behind it. And so what I said is what we need to do here is you need a cohesive audience ecosystem. You want all of these things to be working together where you've got your YouTube and the podcast. That content that you are making is driving social media content right because you're talking for an hour and saying all kinds of stuff that would be great social media content. You've got ads which are feeding into your sales funnel and your email list. But also when people opt into the email list, you're sending people to go watch the YouTube videos and listening to the podcast. Likewise on Instagram, you're sending people to go watch the videos and listen to the podcast and you're getting them onto your email list via lead magnets. And all of this stuff is sending people into your funnel. And the key behind this is that you've got a team who is all working together on making this system go. They understand how these pieces all work together and they are there to make it so that again your input is the podcast which then feeds your social media content and feed your email list. And all of that gets people to not only start into your funnel but steadily and surely it designs a way for them to go down the funnel stay engaged stay down the funnel and eventually buy. And again, when you do it this way, your input is just that one hour podcast episode or YouTube video a week and the team handles getting the rest of the stuff done so that all this stuff is cohesive. And then when you do this right what you see is with time not only does your audience grow exponentially but your podcast downloads is growing too because this is the amount of warm people that you have. And if your business is truly growing, then the amount of warm people that you have grows each and every month. Okay, so my hope is that all of this helped you to understand how your podcast actually fits into your funnel and into your audience ecosystem. You want these things to be as cohesive as possible you want to have one strategy that goes across long form short form email and sales funnel and when you do it that way not only do you not have to pay a bunch of people to be in silos. You probably don't need foreign people for this but you'll also get more ROI from your team in the first place because you don't have all these platforms out floating by themselves not growing and instead you have one audience ecosystem that's growing every month on an exponential basis. So once again, I hope this helped you if you have any questions let me know in the comments on YouTube or on Spotify or you're listening on Apple or one of the other apps send an email at success at growlesshow.com have any answer your questions. I have two things for you before I let you go number one real quick if you've ever gotten any value from the show please if you haven't yet leave us a five star review I get a notification every single time reviews come through and they almost always make my day so please please I would love to hear from you it really really helps us. And then the second thing is if you are a podcaster who needs help with production if you are struggling with all the time it takes to make these things and you haven't yet definitely set up a conversation with podcast boutique they are the team that I've been working with for five six years there my most trusted production agency. And recently they added an incredible service that you're going to want to hear about they call it record and forget I've been using it for months it is amazing you just record your episode and send it to them. They do the content editing for you they create titles show notes they can make it into an amazing YouTube video clips and of course high value production so the content in peace is the thing that I know people have been asking for for a long time it is unbelievably good all I do is record I send it off to them they handle the rest. And by the way they are also closely in lockstep with me so anytime I deserve something that is working to grow and monetize a podcast I immediately share with them we work to implement it with my show and then they implement it with the other shows that they work on so if you're spending time yourself doing any of the editing or production or if your current post production team isn't cutting it maybe they're an internal team that doesn't know what they're doing or they're an external team that's either too expensive or does not keep their promises which is very common. Check out podcast boutique you can go to podcast boutique.com let them know that I sent you all right I'll see you in the next episode.