Building Market Trust: How Podcasting Helps Brands Accelerate

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hello everybody, my name is Scott Kelly. I'm your host and the CEO and founder of Black Dog Venture Partners and I am really excited to be hosting this webinar on podcasting and we've got two phenomenal guests joining us today. I want to first of all introduce Eric Huberman, Founder and CEO of Hawk Media, highly successful marketing agency known as your outsourced CMO. He's helped 3,000 brands worldwide and has been in all kinds of honors and awards including Forbes 30 under 30, CSQ's 40 under 40, Inc. Magazines top 25 marketing influencers and many others. He's a well known writer, thought leader and been featured in all kinds of publications like Rolling Stone, Forbes, Business Insider and Entrepreneur and the recent author of the Hawk Method, which I hope he's going to share a bit about in just a few moments and throughout the day. We also have Tracy Hazard podcasters. She is a seasoned media expert with over 2,600 interviews from articles in Authority Magazine, Buzzfeed and Her Inc. Magazine column and as well as a top ranked video podcast and video host podcasts such as the Binge Factor and Feed your brand and one of CIO's top 26 entrepreneur podcast. As I mentioned, she is the founder and CEO of Potter Ties and All in one podcast production, hosting and valuation company known for its podcast or centric technology and service solution focused on getting host and their guests seen, found and heard and rewarded in this noisy digital world. So now what I'd like to do is just go over the first of all the logistics of our webinar today. So I'll be moderating and going through the Q and A with directly with both Eric and Tracy. We will have Q and A at the end of the session and we'll be handling Q and A via the raise hand function. Or alternatively you can do it through a question in the chat box and I will moderate those Q and A. So again, two favors right off the bat. Make sure your microphone is muted and please don't put anything in the chat until instructed to do so. So with that let's begin. So Brand Marketing must do a lot of heavy lifting nowadays, moving through awareness to nurture trust and engagement at warp speed. Clients, buyers and investors look to your brand digital footprint to gather numerous points of information quickly to access trustworthiness. So my first question to both of you, you both chosen to represent your brands through podcasting as your media of choice. I'd like to ask Eric and Tracy, what are your reasons for choosing podcasting and tell us about your experiences as a podcaster and I'll let ladies go first. Tracy, why don't you start and then Eric, we'd love to get your feedback.

Thank you, Scott. Love being here and so glad to be here with Eric and hear his thoughts on this as well. Podcasting was, I think, an easier choice for me. It's eight years ago that I started my first show, geeky little show on 3D printing called WTFF. And I started it because we really wanted to create a connection point to our listeners, to our audience, to our list of people. And what we wanted to do is express our brand in thought leadership model. And so it was this authority building method that we thought of and we really looked at it and said, this is going to be a long tail content creation process. And at that time, livestream wasn't really big. So now we do video, but we didn't back then, so it just wasn't the thing. So podcasting just seemed like a little bit easier media method to be able to utilize and do what we wanted to do. And for me, it worked out really well. It's how I got my Ink column writing on innovation and disruptive technology. It's how I got speaking engagements without even thinking about it. We built a audience of a hundred thousand listeners per month in five months from starting that show. And everyone came to us and said, well, what are you doing and how are you doing this and will you do this for me became the next logical question. And that's how I ended up in a podcasting business. But for us, the whole approach to podcasting was looking at it as how do I create this deep connection point and, and voice is just such a good way to do that. It touches into people's emotions, builds trust faster, and that's why we chose it.

Fantastic. Erica, I'd love to hear your experience and why you chose podcasting and your experience as a podcast.

So to me, when it comes to media in general, like meet people where they are and you said it chose as the medium. I wouldn't call it the medium. We pretty much leverage every medium and so one of the mediums we were missing when we decided to do this was podcasting. But the real motivation for it was thankfully, over the past 15 years of being in the tech space, entrepreneurial space, I've met a lot of really cool people, and not all of them have anything to do with my business, but a lot of them are great connections and great people to know. Celebrities, high achievers in their different categories, et cetera. And I was always fascinated by, like, how do you become the top person in your field in this or that? And it might not have anything to do with marketing or the stuff we do, but it really was the impetus of it was, I have all these cool connections. I want to sit down and talk to them about where they came from. Like, as a. On a selfish level, I want to learn about them. I want to understand what it takes to achieve in any category. And if I asked one of these people on my podcast, you want to grab coffee so I can just talk to you for an hour about where you came from? No, but you throw in the word podcast, and they're very willing to do it. And so you put an audience behind it and then realized pretty quickly. The selfish reasons that I started it were also reasons why people want to listen. They want to know these same stories I do. And so it kept perpetuating. Now, I've been doing a couple years, yeah, just interviewing some of the great people I come across and sort of my travels and my business, and anywhere from the guy that was the first person to walk by himself across Antarctica to NBA all stars and NFL all stars and celebrities, Gary Vaynerchuk, top entrepreneurs, et cetera. So I've tried to keep it pretty diverse, and it really turned into understanding what it takes to be successful. And what I've learned after doing almost 100 of these is there's no clear path, which I kind of like. I thought there was going to be some consistency across them, and the answer is, there wasn't. So, again, started as a selfish reason. It turned into another medium. And then I. We talked about this a little bit offline. It also became, I realized, a great brand alignment where, like, our job as a business is to grow businesses, to help people achieve their dreams, to get people to a certain goal. And basically my entire podcast is about people achieving their goals and dreams. So.

So we titled this webinar Building Trust. And so Eric and Tracy maybe kind of give your perspective on in what ways do you feel that podcasting can build or accelerate that trust? Tracy?

To me, there's Lots of people talk about know like and trust. And I actually like to look at podcasting as the opposite of that. It starts out in trust. I trust my app that I listen to that there's going to be great podcasts in there, right? So I already trust the portal. If you want to go it the access to those podcasts because it's a listing, it's a directory, I already have a bottle there. I also understand that no one's going to be accessing me individually. There can't be marketing to me, there's no emails that go out. Podcasting is a blind thing. So as a listener, I get to choose what I'm doing. So I already have a high level of trust in where the content exists. That is a real benefit. When we look at wanting to market ourselves, wanting to get ourselves out there, we need to be in the place where our audience is. And if our audience is listening and they're doing it in this passive way, that's okay. We want to be there. That's why we choose to promote on social media, go to TikTok, go wherever we need to to make sure that we're reaching those audiences. But in the case of podcasting, it's a pull. They're pulling into you, I'm not pushing out to you. It's there and it exists and it's ready for them. So there's a higher level of trust automatically and that they don't feel sold to or marketed to from the beginning. That's why I love podcasting so much. But over time, the reality is is that our voice has a different connection point with people. So when we connect with voice, we get into their head faster, we get into their hearts faster. They hear the emotion in our voice. There's a lot more connection than it is reading captions, which a lot of people do on video. And so we are seeing that expressed in the numbers. So 70% playthrough is the average of a podcast in video. Every single minute that you go, you lose about 70% of your audience. So there's very different model of consumption in there. So if they're getting your whole message, they're building trust faster as well. So that's why podcasting to me is such a richer, trust building media. But the main thing is, is that trust doesn't come if I don't show care. If I don't show that I care about you or about this topic or I care about making sure that the world's a better place, that we're creating independent Entrepreneurs who make more money or whatever it is that our goal and our mission is. I'm demonstrating care because I am putting out this podcast and it is costing me time, energy, money to do it. So I'm instantly showing that I care for you. The second thing that I'm showing is my integrity, because I show up week after week after week producing this podcast for you. So those are ways to accelerate trust faster. And so we go through that, know like and trust extremely quickly.

Fantastic. So, Eric, you work with literally thousands of brands on an annual basis, and I'd love to get your feedback on how those brands have used podcasts to build their brand and their business. And at the same time, maybe share a little bit about your new book, the Hawk Method, and maybe how those principles might apply to podcasting.

Yeah, has to be sitting right here. Yeah. So basically the book is about what we've done for a decade in terms of marketing and how we build brands and our way of looking at marketing and the. It's about three principles of marketing. Awareness, nurturing, and trust. And so that trust is one of the three pillars. We talk about it as a tripod. So awareness is basically what do you do to introduce your company to a new potential customer? Nurturing is what do you do to take that from awareness to actually a customer? So things you do to nurture them as well as post customer, how do you get them coming back? And then trust. 75% of people won't buy from a company they don't inherently trust. And early on, that trust comes from third party validation. Because I don't know who you are. You can do all you want to tell me how great you are. I don't know who you are. So it's coming from other people, other sources, PR influencers, et cetera, testimonials, reviews. And so with podcasting, the way it builds trust is kind of twofold. It builds trust because you're having other people on the podcast and by nature, they validate you. Something that we've talked about with our own podcast. Look at all these celebrities and all these people that are coming on and talking to us. And like Gary Vaynerchuk sitting there talking on our podcast about how we're basically the same and we do the same things and we're one of the same kind of thing. Like, yeah, that's a validator to people that didn't know we exist. We have a decent brand in our space at this point. But if we were just getting started and I got that comment, I would have probably run ads behind that little clip. Like it's. That kind of validation is huge. The other piece, it does, and Tracy alluded to this in a lot of ways, they hear you, what you're about, they hear your inflections, they hear what you're passionate about. You. They hear how you comment on certain things, the questions you ask. I was trying to be delicate about it, but I had Jordan Belfort on my podcast and I had to ask, like, any remorse on screwing a bunch of people over. When someone hears that, they go, oh, so that's how you don't view Jordan Belfort as I want to be him and I want to screw everyone over to make a bunch of money too. You actually wanted to question that. And so it's things like that that depending on the audience, they're going to start to understand who you are and they're going to. Trust, to me, is not necessarily always a positive thing. And I think that's important to say. Trust can also be negative meaning. I see trust is synonymous with your brand. It's what people trust they're going to get from you. That can include the negative meaning, oh, well, if I held Jordan Belfort in this amazing light, they can probably trust that I will probably try to screw them over if I can make some money. Like those kind of things, that that's still trust. And so by being on a podcast, being consistent, talking about the things that are important to you, you end up attracting the people that that fits with because there's other people that don't care. They want a grinder that's going to go make money hand over fist and don't care if they have to wash their back about it. And then there's other people that care about that integrity and they see, oh, this guy cares about integrity. This aligns with my values. I feel more confident working with this person. So it's all those little things about what you talk about, how you present yourself. And podcasts. I don't know what the average length of a podcast is, but let's say it's 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour. Whatever it is, it's a lot longer than the 2 second ad you get on Facebook or even a piece, a blog post you get someone to read. You get a lot of someone's attention. And as Tracy mentioned, hearing someone's voice goes a lot further than reading something they wrote.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting, Eric, you touched on celebrities. I was going to ask this question. You hear a lot about celebrity podcasters. Joe Reagan, Joe Rogan, Rather Green Brown and another of our celebrities, and you mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk and, and even Mr. Belford, who actually I did the deal with him many years ago.

Regretfully, I was gonna say, did you get paid?

Yeah. Well, that'll be another podcast story. I guarantee his credit.

He worked with us. He did pay us, but it was.

But you know, we don't. Obviously celebrities get a lot of buzz when it comes to podcasting, but we don't hear a lot about businesses and brands being successful in podcasts, so. So Tracy and Eric too. Why do you think that is?

It's really interesting that it's also a problem. When I wrote my column for Inc. Magazine, they wanted me to write about Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. And I was like, I can't interview them, I can't ask them questions. And your readers are the nitty gritty in the trenches founders who are trying to grind out a startup or trying to move it to the next stage, trying to get to that eight figure business. Right. It's just not the right audience for them to follow the advice of Elon Musk. They don't have his billions. It's never going to work for them. So I go against that and say I really want to find the podcasters. The ones that are grinding it out are really doing the work, who are really making money for their businesses, for their brands and doing that. And so that's part of why I have the show the Binge Factor, so that I can interview them, ask them all these questions about how they're being successful and what I found and I've done now over 150 interviews on the Binge Factor is probably like my third podcast. So I've done thousands of interviews now, but 150 on that show. And what I've gotten from them is that they are not looking at download numbers. The industry, the pr, the thing that's out there, that's what they use as a metric to say, if you're not getting 11 million downloads like Joe Rogan, then we don't want to write about you. We're not interested in you. And the reality is that I find businesses that are making millions of dollars. I find investment podcasts that are getting investors and hundreds of thousands of dollars investment from just listening to the show and deciding to invest in a company. So all of those things are working and that is all happening. But we can't look at it in this traditional media ad monetization model that says if you're not making ad dollars and you don't have millions of downloads. It's not working, it's not successful. So redefining what I call alternative monetization success is going to be the need going forward. So I look at it as we need to split the industry. In its view, the media broadcasting model is one thing. A brand awareness still goes into that model. Like, you need to do some of that, have a great show, have a great message like Erica's talking about, make that happen. But if we're using this for business purposes, let's have a different definition of success over time. And I think that's really going to make the difference. But I could name podcasts that maybe have thousands listeners a month that make millions of dollars.

And Eric maybe touch on that, because obviously you both mentioned. We've all mentioned some celebrity podcasters. Eric, do you have any stories specifically for some of the founders, maybe even investors that you've worked with over the years and how podcasting has been successful for them?

So I've seen it used in a few different ways in terms of, like, being the driver of success. I think there are people that, I mean, Joe Rogan, that is what drives the success. That is his success, is his podcast. So there are people like that. For most people that are building another business, it's just a piece of the puzzle. And I think that's important. It's not like that has been the. I haven't seen a lot of people that their podcast is what built their success. There's people that have successful podcasts that. That is true, but they're usually a podcaster first. It's not usually. They're building a business and podcast becomes the thing that drives that business. It's a thing. And I think that's an important distinction. I've seen it used in different ways, and Tracy's alluding to this. There's sort of just media outlet, like the way we're using it, frankly. And I think it's important to know that, like most media these days doesn't create that much awareness. It's more middle of the funnel. It's not like you get a piece of press or you get on a big podcast and you get all that. You get a flood. The Oprah effect is virtually dead, so to speak. I was on Adam Carolla's podcast. I was on the Drew Barrymore Show. I was literally on live TV with Drew Barrymore. I can tell you basically did nothing for me from an awareness perspective, like, virtually nothing. So, but I posted about it, I talked about it, and now all the people in the funnel go, oh, wow, that's legit. There's again, it's back to trust. He must be legitimate if Drew Barrymore is having him on his show and Adam Carolla and all these people are validating him. That's interesting. So that's where, like, the celebrity come in. That's one way of doing it when we're talking about another way that I've seen it work. And you have to be really careful on this because it's a. It can feel like a bait and switch to the audience. But a lot of people are using podcasts to be like, hey, come on my podcast. They open the door with that person and then they use it as a way to now have a relationship and start talking to them about business and things like that. If done right, that can work. Well, I had someone do it very wrong the other day, and it was really frustrating where they interviewed me for, like, 15 minutes. You could tell they didn't care about the podcast at all. And then he started pitching me. I was like, like, send me an email. Like, you just asked me for an hour, my time to be on a podcast. I said yes, because part of my job at my company is to spread awareness for it. And so I came on. But now I can tell this isn't going anywhere. And you're. It was a bait and switch. I've had that a few times where it's like. Because I frankly say yes a lot, that you have to be careful of how you leverage that. But that's definitely a pretty commonly used tool.

Yeah, we see that a lot with, like, FINRA regulated. And they're FINRA regulated, so they can't have a podcast about investment advice, but they could meet CPAs who are their best referral partners. So, like, we do see that sort of guest. We call it the guest model, where you're using your guests to leverage it. But if you don't do it in relationship building, Eric is completely right. It totally backfires. It's a funnel, and it's very obvious to. To people. It's actually really obvious to me in the form that you fill out when you're guesting, because I've done this so much. Right. So if you're filling out a form and it's asking you all these questions about your business and other stuff like that, be aware. This is probably a funnel.

Yeah. Good example of this. We're talking about right now, sort of little inside baseball. We have a venture fund. We just raised our second fund. We've raised 25, 50 million. It turns out I know tons and tons and tons of CEOs and operators, but I don't know a lot of money managers. It's not been my network, it's not been what I built in. So raising a fund has been a grind. The second one, actually, we raised half of it in a week because we built some relationships. But now I go to the second half and I go, I don't know what to call. It's not what I'm doing all day. And so we talked about my partner who runs the fund launching a podcast, interviewing family offices on how they're managing money, how they're allocating, et cetera, figuring that out. And so that is an option. Like, we're not going to go in and be like, so by the way, do you want to invest? Like, that's not the strategy. The strategy is to create content around this, build some relationships, and maybe over time actually build a network in that. It's a long tail thing.

Well, yeah. And speaking to what Eric was saying before, when you have that strategy and then you're utilizing that content in a repurposed model. So in this case, I would highly recommend blogs would be the case of what I would do for their if I were helping them with their strategy. If you're adding those blogs and then interviewing those family offices, all those names associated with you are really going to show up as being a part of your social proof at that point. And so whether you're going to get any mileage from the family offices that you've interviewed or. Or the ones who say, I want to be like that family office, and if they have a relationship with a hawk venture fund, then I better join that. Right, and so that's actually how it's going to happen.

Yeah, that's interesting you bring that point up because, you know, in my career, I've raised billions of dollars and worked with a lot of entrepreneurs. And I'm constantly telling them, if you ask for money, you'll get advice. If you ask for advice, you may get money. You know, act accordingly. So I really appreciate that feedback. And as I mentioned before, everybody, we're going to do these questions at the end, and I've got one that a couple that I posted up in chat, I'll be sure to go through them first. You know, Tracy, we've had some conversations in the past about podcasts that fail, and there's an industry term that's called pod fading. Maybe you can share a little bit more about what pod fading is. For everybody listening in.

Absolutely. Pod fading is when you quit your show without telling your audience. Like this is what happens. It's like all of a sudden you stop recording because most podcasters record in advance. So you might, you know, I might have be recording up through September, but then all of a sudden I get busy in August and I don't record and so I don't have anything to fill the pipeline. And then all of a sudden I can't get back to it. Like it's, it's. So we call that pod bidding. When you basically forgot to tell your audience you were done podcasting. Now some people do tell them in that process, but podfeeding is about 73% of the market. So if you want to think about it, it's like attrition, right? It's quitting your show. And the points that it quit is three. So they really didn't get started at all. That's a false start as far as I'm concerned. 11, which is usually a short season, and that typically ends up being the entertainment style podcast that end up only at 11 shows and then 23, those are the numbers where the most drop off happens on shows.

So you're saying I made it.

Yeah, you made it. Right, exactly. If you make it past 20 to me, if you make it past 25, and if you make it past 100, then you really have a right to stop your show whenever you want. You've given enough catalog of information that you've certainly given it out to people. But podfading is a huge part of it. So we have two and a half million podcasts out there, about two and a half million, and only about 385,000 of them are actively posting new episodes every single week. So when we look at those numbers, podcasting is a really small pond and only 20,000 new ones are joining each month. So we get 20,000 new ones launching each month as we go through this year, which is really low. It's three times lower than it's ever been. And so that's really significant. You're building a marketing method, a tactic you're utilizing in a space that has more listeners than ever and yet not more people launching shows. So this is a great time to start podcasting because that pod bidding is happening.

So Eric and Tracy too, but let's start with Eric. Obviously you've got to a wildly successful business and you're extremely busy. How do you avoid pod fate? And how would you recommend, and this is for both of you, that podcasts should be more successful and avoid that pod fate. Eric.

It's a huge pain in the ass if I'm being blunt. But yeah, I mean just to be honest, it's work like anything else. Like it is. You have to be dedicated to it. And it's doing the hour podcast a week is not the work that's hard. It's getting people scheduled, finding the right people. And we took a few month break here recently because frankly our producer dropped the ball. I was trying to chase it down and just was like I don't have time to do what I'm already doing and chase down our production company. So we had to find a new one, et cetera. So we're relaunching. I think I'm going to wait to October 1st. As the two co hosts here know, I'm having a baby any day now. So going to be out for a month, so going to relaunch.

Understandable. Timeout.

Yeah, I think I have like 10 in the can ready to go and so we'll be relaunching soon and having while I start to build it. But yeah, part of it is like I have to be out and about meeting people and building that network and finding people. We tried to do like cold outreach and it's so hard to just like that's a full time job in and of itself. So in it frankly it's not that lucrative. Podcasts don't make that much money until you get to huge scale. So we get tens of thousands of views a month. Doesn't mean we're or download. Excuse me, but we're not. That's still like we have now a sponsor, but it's more because they want to be a part of Hawk Media, not because they care about the podcast. And so yeah, you just have to be disciplined about it and know why you're doing it. Because the other thing is I think a lot of people do it and it's not really utilized. You are just burning time. Like you're just, you're grinding to do something that doesn't benefit your career or benefit you that you don't enjoy. Then don't do it. Like there should be very solid, clear reasons why you're spending the time on it.

Let's touch on that, the roi. Because I think obviously we've talked about podcasting as a supplement or as a branding tool. Tracy, you work with podcasters all the time. Maybe give us some feedback on how a brand company entrepreneur can get the most ROI from a podcast and then I'd love to get Your feedback also, Eric, from the marketing standpoint, I think.

If we took it ROI as the return on investment out of our time. Right. That's as important here because of how time intensive podcasting can be, that we look at it from the time, not just the money, but both things go hand in hand here. So for us, what we did a research when we realized how high the industry pod fade rate was at 73%. To me, that's ridiculous. It's like seven out of 10 product, consumer products fail. It's a number that's out there. We have eight out of 10 and lots of venture funds fail. To me, those odds are terrible. Why do I want to do something? I want to flip the odds whenever I can. And lucky for us, on our platform, we have less than 7% pod fade rate. And we said, why is that? That we have something very unique that's opposite of the industry. What are we doing that's different? And there were three things that came about. The number one thing is the strategy. So if I'm incorporating and I have a strategy behind my podcast, the strategy of who's going to be a guest on my show, I know exactly who they are. They're dialed in. There's a list always being generated, maybe because it's the same list that my business development person in my company needs to utilize. So we segregate that list. And for us, it's podcasters with a hundred episodes or more who have a business style podcast. So meaning they're building a brand or a business from podcasting. It's very simple. So we can go through the list that they generate and we can pull out the people who we think is never going to have a phone call with us. And my team will send that to me and I will reach out personally through direct chat and LinkedIn or I'll have my assistant do it. And it's just a sick. It's a part of the business process. So it's all lined up to function and it is a part of my job as the CEO of this company and the representative of it to make this happen. Then while I'm interviewing, I'm getting new ideas. It's research for me, it's input, it's relationship building. All of it ends up working. So what we found over time is that we have, out of the four interviews I do a month, and I only do four, we were getting half of them becoming clients. And these were people who would then bring many, many people that they influence. And so that was translating into the podcast Its return on investment is extremely high because it was strategically based. And then the second big part is that we have support built into our system. So you need support when you're launching a podcast. It's very different support that you need than when you're 100 episodes in and you need to think about, is this still working for me? Do I need to dial this in? Do I need to make a pivot, a refinement? But the fact that we provide support all along the way, no matter how much money you spend with us, we provide that makes a big difference. And those are the two critical factors. The third one is just alignment. A lot of times, if your podcast and your business or your goals are not aligned, that's where the mismatch happens, and it's just time to make a switch. It may not be podcasting that's the problem. It's the content, the message that you've decided to put out. It's just a mismatch.

So, Eric, on roi, I constantly watch your success stories on social media, and there seems to be a general theme about marketing roi. So maybe you could share maybe in generality's marketing roi, and then maybe if you have this example about podcasting. Patrick?

Yeah, I mean, I think this has been a big topic recently, especially with the Apple Facebook war going on, because it's been highlighted as something. It's funny, in my book, which I wrote basically two years ago, before iOS 14 changes, there's a section called ROAS is return on ad Spend. It's a network trick. And I'm trying to. We're going to be putting out an article about this. Like, we're really trying to spread the word on this a little more. And why I say that is because the way people measure the efficacy of marketing is completely broken and ignores generally one key principle. There's like one factor that nobody talks about. It's obvious. Everyone here is like, yeah, of course. But when you go look at your way, you're measuring your marketing, I guarantee it doesn't have any place on any one of your dashboards. And the idea of that is a purchase cycle, really simple metric. It takes time from when someone knows you exist to when they buy. That's why nurturing is one of the three pillars. Except for when you're measuring your roas, your return on ad spend, you're probably measuring, how much did I spend this week and how much did I make, by the way, that's literally how Facebook reports it. So, like, except for we know, because we have data on Tens of thousands of companies marketing that the average purchase cycle on on the Internet is somewhere between three weeks and three months. So if I'm measuring a week, but the average is, let's say four weeks, well, by nature it's underreporting massively. And this is just when you can actually directly track it, let alone when you can't like the efficacy of a podcast. So when you can directly track it, everything's broken already. We have that and we've just launched our new software platform called Hawk AI. Hawk AI that's trying to solve a lot of this and plugging this in the other piece. There's other two factors of this. It's benchmarking. Knowing like, how am I doing against the industry is something people completely miss because like you might think you're doing poorly on your conversion rate on your site. Turns out you are outpacing 95% of the market, but you think it's bad. Like that is another issue. Third issue, marketing is not a science always. It's an art too. And what we talk about the all the benefits of podcast. My way of trying to figure out the ROI of a podcast is can I get to a baseline where I can assume it's paying for itself and then everything else is gravy. And that's a lot of how I do marketing. And then I try to based on sort of anecdotes and like touchy feely sides of marketing. Do I think this is where I should spend my time based on kind of the feedback I'm getting? It is as simple, honestly as we signed a client. They say they love your podcast. Perfect. I now know that money came in partially because of the podcast. That's one thing, it's little anecdotes that help drive this stuff. But what I try to do is baseline it as does it pay for itself? Is it worth the time? Like, can I think about it and go, you know, I've done this podcast for two years, spent an hour a week on it on average. Does that. An hour a week plus booking. So like has that actually been worth it? Well, I've made these relationships, I've closed this business. I have this many listeners. Yeah, probably like I don't know what I out, like what should I have replaced that hour with? No, that's probably worth it, but it's not a science and I think that's super important. Everybody wants like a cut and dry yes or no answer based on data and most of the time that ends up screwing you because you end up ignoring, let's say, 90% of the benefit, just like Facebook is doing right now. They are literally telling you to ignore 90% of the benefit of your Facebook ads so that they can at least report against it. And what it's telling everyone is this is failing. So now Facebook's revenue is down for the first time. Shopify sites on an average down 15% because everyone thinks their lifeblood is broken and it's actually just a reporting problem. So when you're looking at marketing and ROI in general, you have to be more nuanced. You have to treat it like both science and art. Inform yourself as close as you can that is it working? Is it worth it? And we do the same thing. And I'll stop ranting after a sec. But when we talk about the value of going to events, it's a big part of our business. We are acceptable cost to a customer is about 2,500 bucks for us to acquire a customer. So I go, I tell my team, if we're going to spend $2,500 sending you an event, the ticket, the travel, all that, get one customer. Anything above that's gravy. Just get one. It paid for itself. You're fine. Now go do whatever you want to do. And it's the same thing with a lot of how we look at it. Can we baseline it acceptable and know that there's other benefits?

That's awesome. So for everybody, I threw in chat the full title of Eric's book, the Hawk Method. And obviously, I encourage you to pick it up at your favorite independent bookstore if available or online. And Eric, give this a direct link to purchase the book through you.

It's on Amazon. That's fine.

Fantastic. Fantastic. So, Tracy, we've got some folks on this call, and people are going to be listening later on, and they're new to podcasting. They don't have a clue. They're probably like me. How do they get started and be on the right path to be successful with their brand and successful in their business through podcasting.

So I think the idea of starting podcasts, people get a little caught up in, like, what microphone should I have? And like the tech. Like, that's always the first question. And I always cringe. It's like, I don't know. I want you to ask the question, should I podcast before we go? What does it take to podcast? The what does it take? Is easy, to be honest with you. And I know it seems daunting to those people out there, but there's courses, there's Microphones. There's like books on this, there's videos on this. I have a free course, like, we have a free bootcamp we put in because we didn't want people to have to worry about this part of it. It's so simple. But should I podcast? What is that strategy for me is this. Do I need to achieve a lot of things with my company? Do I need blogs? Do I need social posts? Do I need video clips? Do I need these things? And can I get them out of doing podcasting as the only content production so that I don't have to pay more money to have somebody write them, create them, do them? That it's actually coming in my voice, that authenticity is coming through. That can be done if we have that mission and that method that we're going to utilize. So that's what I really like to look at, is I think, getting advice, getting strategy, bringing someone in to look at that as this critical piece of marketing, using it as the vehicle to get all your marketing out there and using it as a part of that strategy, making those dovetail together is going to make this smooth for you from the beginning all the way through. It also isn't something if you've already gotten started. The thing that I love most about podcasting is it's flexible. I can change my feed, I can change my brand, I can change the name of the show, I can change everything. And tomorrow will be in the apps everywhere. Recreate it. So if you got started but it felt like a false start, don't give up, don't pod fade. Come and talk to someone. Please message us. We'll be happy to talk to you. Talk to someone about the strategy behind it because you can leverage the audience that you built and not lose all of that time energy that you put into it. If you've quit already, there's still value there.

Fantastic. So we're going to jump into questions in just a moment. Like I said, either throw them in the chat or you can use your raise hand function. I'll call on you and I'll moderate that. But before we do that, Eric, Tracy, I'd like to get any final thoughts, piece of advice, any inspiration on podcasting that you can share. Eric, go ahead.

Sure. I would say, like everything in marketing, you don't have to do everything. So don't take this as a pressure, like, oh, I guess I have to start a podcast. I get that a lot where it's like, what else do you do? And do I have to do this? And you have to Everybody has a different path to success. It's literally what I've learned from my podcast. So don't do it unless you are going to enjoy it too. Like, there's got to be a part of this that it's like, I want to do that. And I think you can do. Like, I hear it all the time because I have a decent personal brand. Do I have to build a personal brand to be successful? Absolutely not. There's tons of successes that never put their name out there that you'd never know that are way more successful than me and a lot of other people. It's more like, what are you going to do to drive? And that's one way to do it. So I think when you're thinking about a podcast, there's two parts of it. One, is it something you want to do? And then two, do you actually have an offering that's unique and different? Like, are people going to want to hear this podcast if that's why you're doing it? If you're doing it the biz dev version, that's different. But if you're doing it for the media reason, like, are you actually creating value in your podcast? Are people going to get something from this? And is it something you think is missing in the market? Because don't go copy someone else's podcast and start another one. You're. Frankly, I'm seeing this a lot with a lot of comedians now. They're all trying to do podcasting and some of them are not that great because it's just like, they're funny, but like, these are great comedians. But now they're just shooting the that. You're like, why am I listening to this? Even Joe Rogan. I got to be honest, sometimes I go, like, how can I? I can listen to it for like 30 minutes. I'm like, this is a three hour episode. Like, who is doing this? So anyways, point being, make sure you're creating value in everything you do. Don't just do it for the sake of doing it.

Fantastic. Tracy, final thoughts?

Yeah, so I so agree with that. I love the idea of dovetailing those two things, right? Making sure that you've got really a great, entertaining, and I like to call it edutaining. If that's what you're. You're, you know, if you're educating about your business or about your industry, make that happen. And then make that also work with your business strategy, your marketing strategy. Make them go hand in hand because it's going to be easier for you to do this long term. But as far as my final thoughts on the podcasting industry and where things are going, Eric really touched on this earlier is that the numbers are junk. Like they're terrible. The IAB statistics and what they forced and IAB is the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the way that they force the play numbers are actually dumbing down our statistics on it. So even our downloads and our plays aren't good in terms of being accurate to what's really happening. Because a play is a play is a play. I can see it on my back end when my client gets a play. They're actually getting a play and it's happening and you can see the playthrough. But they're making these numbers sort of generalize and fitting the ad model of impressions and other things. So the industry is not actually working in favor of the independent podcaster. So we have to look at the statistics differently. We have to look on that return on investment and the valuation. It's part of why we built our platform POD listser that's coming out this fall is because we wanted to really look at the art and science of the numbers here and look at what's really going into that. And then Scott dropped into the chat here. The audits that we do. The audit that we do is actually the same thing that we do it right now in a manual way that is going to be coming out in our valuation platform Pod lister. And so you'll be able to actually see how your show is doing compared to your neighborhood. We call it the Zillow podcast. So that it's looking at it as here's what I did. I upgraded my bathroom and I upgraded my backyard and I have a pool and. And I'm in this neighborhood of financial management podcasts or real estate podcast podcasts. And I'm being compared against them instead of constantly compared to Joe Rogan or constantly compared to a serial. A show that has nothing to do with the type of listeners that are going to come to business podcasts. So we're comparing them that way and I think that's going to really change the view of podcasting. Do I want to be a guest on this show? Do I want to advertise on this show? There's going to be more what we would call topic and keyword alignment than ever before is going to be obvious. And I think that's the big change that has to happen is this split in the market between old style media broadcasting and digital marketing version of podcasting. Like they're two different distinct things.

So, again, thanks for that feedback. So let's have a couple questions again. Either throw it in the chat or raise your hand. And while we're doing that, feel free. If you have a podcast, throw it in chat. We're going to be recording this and we'll be broadcasting this out and blogging about this going forward. So, Kristen, you had a question. She wants to get feedback from both Tracy and Eric. They're interested in both of your takes on podcast host Red ads vs dynamic automated ad insertion. So why don't you jump on that first And Tracy. Yeah, jump in.

Yeah. Red ads are going to have higher efficacy because basically this goes to more of an advertising thesis. But the idea is, if you have an ad coming from the trusted source that they're listening to, like my podcast listeners are listening to me. Like, they're coming back. They're coming to listen to me and my guest. If I then put my brand on someone else's product or service, by nature, it's going to be more compelling because they're there to listen to me. They trust me. Again, it's a trust thing versus just like an inserted ad, it's like, it's effective as any other ad. Like, if it works, it works. It doesn't, doesn't. But having me read an ad, it's way more effective. It's basically influencer marketing meets advertising versus just advertising.

Yeah. And most often, what they're referring to as dynamic automated ad insertion is like what Spotify does, anchor does, which is basically streaming ads on the front and back of your show. And when they stream on the front, that means there's like sometimes two minutes worth of ads that might have nothing to do with your audience and your show before they ever hear the introduction of your episode. That's why we built our system so that you don't have to do it that way, because I think that's awful. It's awful customer service. You're going to take ads which are going to give you, what do they pay, 10 to $20 per thousand listeners you have, like, it's nothing. You'll be paid pennies for those listeners, and you're going to lose listeners in the process because they're so frustrated, because they can't skip them. They can't get through to your show yet. So that's why I'm not a fan of those dynamic ad insertions. I think ad insertion is a fantastic method, but let's not make it this automated streaming thing, it's not serving the audience well. It's not Serving the hosts well. And at the end of the day, I think it's not serving the advertising brands either.

Fantastic. So, Jim, I got your hand raised. Why don't you unmute yourself and give us your question?

Okay. Yes. Bottom line podcasts talk a lot about building audience and kind of your reward because you're in the podcast business. But as a business, and I want to market my business, how would podcast affect my bottom line as far as increasing my customer base? Or right now, as Scott knows, I'm trying to secure funding for my business. How would that help me achieve that objective? And then once I have my funding and I launch, how is podcasting going to affect my bottom line as far as getting more customers and getting more net profit out of my business?

What's your business?

I'm in fintech, basically payments and E commerce.

Let's not speak in generalities. What's the business? I want to be specific so I can give you specific. And by the way, if you're raising money and everything, be specific. If you just say fintech, you just got every preconceived notion about what they think of fintech.

Okay, well, there's three areas that my business involves. One is establishing a new monetary system whereby we have a stable coin that's 100% guaranteed by gold.

I got. Okay, cool.

Yeah. So second part of it is an E commerce platform so that our end users can use that e commerce platform. And thirdly, an enterprise system that allows the end user to manage everything, connect everything in an enterprise functions dashboard. Right now, all your different enterprise functions alert, fragmented. For the small business user or the consumer, you have had multiple apps to achieve all your management functions. So we're tying all the management functions together into one dashboard.

So then I can tell you, I can answer this easily. One of the most important things, so the crypto world, the coin world, is so full of snake oil and bs, your challenge is going to be showing why this is actually trustworthy. Like that is in a nutshell. Whether it's investors, whether it's customers, users, whatever you want to call it, all of it is going to take people going. This is the real deal. One way to do that. If you're asking how to leverage podcasts, it's not a bottom line thing. It's in middle of the funnel thing where it's, you need to show credibility. Best way to, One great way to show credibility is go start a podcast, get credible people to come talk to you about why you're building this and what you're building get people from the Fed, get people from all walks of finance. Like, like, don't just get crypto people, they love to hype this stuff, but get people that are actually going to validate this from a place where people will go, oh, that person's actually talking to this guy. This is interesting. This guy has an interesting network. This could be trustworthy. You get Mnuchin or something to interview like that. Those kind of people, like, go get credibility. And if you can get them talking about what you're building and actually acknowledging that it's a good idea, you can. That'll raise you money, get you customers. You use all that as assets to show, like, listen, we have some of the biggest financial minds in the world talking about what we're trying to build here. Assuming that, again, I don't know enough about your business, I'm assuming you're building something great. And so if that's the case, go put it in front of the people that are going to be the biggest critics. Have them go, yeah, no, this is great. That's what I did early with Hawk was I tried to get the biggest marketers out there to try working with us and go, no, they do good work. Like, that was my goal, both for myself to know that I was actually servicing something, but also for credibility. Like, I can point to Red Bull, Verizon, AHP, as three of our first clients. The CMOs there thought we were great. So are we going to be able to help your business? Probably. And it was that same idea here. If you can go communicate and have a discourse about your company with those types of people, that can create a lot of trust. That would be how I would look at it.

And Web3, like in Web3World, there's a lot of fraud. And so being associated with things like Continuum Market and other third party validators who are really looking at your process and everything can be critically important. And so that's where they look at cred trust and adoption. They want to see that over time. And because you have a podcast, you can actually do that in a more accelerated way. You can, you're building it over time. But when you come in and get an investor, you can say, I have this episode, this episode, and this episode you might want to listen to. It's going to answer your questions where I can't do that in a quick way when I'm doing a fast pitch or something like that. Right. So it gives you the ability to have that longevity. The other thing is that I personally have a podcast that isn't a private podcast for my investors only. So I do that on a weekly basis. I'm giving them updates, I'm giving them access to me. The investors know how to log in and get that podcast. It's not publicly available to my competitors, but it's giving them the data that they need and the information about they need. And when I say it, instead of sending them an email that says here's the financials for this month or here's what we just did, they're hearing it with my excitement, with building trust in the fact that I'm a great communicator. I'm going to tell it like it is. I'm going to share that with them each week. So it's also a great follow up model model for you as well. And you may find you want to do a spin off. But I think the most important thing that especially in your industry when there's so much fraud going on is creating that digital footprint for you and making sure that you're blogging these things, you're putting them out on social so that everywhere you go, if I Google you and your company, I'm going to find out that you are everywhere. That makes you much more trustworthy than the next person I might want to put my investment dollars in.

Going to take two more questions. Eric, you mentioned a really long podcast from a comedian, so I'd like to get both of your feedback on this question. What is the ideal length of a podcast? How long is too long and how short is too short?

My opinion is as long as it takes to deliver a good product. If it can be three hours because it's great. And again, he has the biggest audience in podcasting. It's hard for me to say, oh, he's an idiot. Joe Rogan's doing great, but I can't listen to a three hour podcast. Apparently I'm not his audience. I don't know if the assumption is some people listen to some or they listen to it over time or whatever. I don't work with him, so I don't know the actual assumption. But then I personally give me something 20 minutes and I love it. I try to keep mine 20 to 40 minutes, but if someone's got a great story and is going on, I let it go. And I always balk out an hour. But I try not to go over an hour because as an audience member I wouldn't want that's too much of a commitment. So that's my own view, that's for my audience. But I have a Busy audience. Some people are doing this more for long term or want a longer period of entertainment. So it depends on the goals of it too.

I think that's a good point, is it's audience related. So marketers in general, if you were like sending a podcast for digital marketers, the Buffer Company Buffer app, lots of people use that for social posting, has a podcast and they originally did it with the advice of an hour long podcast and it was not growing like they thought it was. They switched it to 10 minutes because they felt that their audience were marketers who needed one thing. Get it in, get it out. I say sometimes digital marketers have the attention span of a gnat. So like you gotta, you know, you gotta play to your audience. But they switched to 10 minutes and it took off, so you really need to play with that. But on average, what we find on over our platform and we've launched over a thousand shows, so we have kind of data of what works and what doesn't we see. Anyone who goes over an hour tends to have lower statistics in terms of listen through and just actual download numbers across our entire platform of hundreds of thousands of episodes we produced in the last five years. And so when we look at that, we say, okay, an hour's a tipping point. We want to stay under an hour. And so we recommend to our clients 20 to 30 minutes. If it's a solo show or you're, you and a co host are chatting about a topic and if it's interview, about 40 to 55 minutes, somewhere in there is perfect amount of time to make sure that you get 30 good minutes of your interview and maybe 10 minutes of you just giving a post and a discussion and an introduction. Right? So that's the sweet spot that we found.

So we are right at 57 minutes. So we're going to keep this under an hour based on Tracy's recommendation. A couple things, Tracy, Eric, if you want to throw into chat how they might be able to reach out to you and learn more about you, feel free to do that. And first of all, I want to thank both Traci and Eric being a part of this podcast. And like I said, we're recording this and getting this out to everybody very soon. And, and as I always end these things, if you didn't like it, tell me. If you love it, tell everybody else through my contact information there. So again, Tracy, Eric, thanks for your time and thank you all for being involved and I wish you the very best of luck. And I am currently in Tucson checking my son into college. So with that, I will end this with bear down. Have a great day.

Absolutely. Thank you all.

Thank you guys.

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