How To Get Your Listeners To Engage And Use Their Feedback To Gain Influence

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Hey everyone.

Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard.

And I'm Tom Hazzard. Welcome.

And we're going to talk how to get listener feedback and win influence, right? And use it to gain influence, right? That's what we're gonna do today. So I want to talk mostly this is like the most common question, Tom, like, how do I get the listeners to give me feedback? How do I get them to engage with me, right? How do I get that? And then how do I get to be an influencer? Right? How do I get to that stage of being an influencer? First off, I'm going to say I really think influencer is a dirty term right now. So be really careful how you use that. Gaining influence in your marketplace, gaining the ability to influence people, to buy, to do things, that's what you want. But being an influencer is a job. It's a specific job now, right? You could be a YouTube influencer, right? My daughter, my 10 year old put out at school for career, like, you know, you had to do a little picture and whole thing about your career. And for her career, she wanted to be a YouTube. I forget. It was a crafted arts and crafts influencer. That was her career plan. Do you remember the birthday card?

She gave you the birthday card? Well, no, not exactly.

So she gave him a birthday card and it said on it, and I will put a picture of it in the blog post for this episode. But the birthday card basically said like lawyer. And it had a salary range. Accountant had a salary range. And it kind of went up and did all these like, CEO of a company and had a salary range. And then it said YouTube influencer, a million dollars a month. And then you open it up on the inside and it says, way to go, dad. Limiting my Internet time. And so it was hilarious. Anyway, but thinking about that, that's not what we're talking about here. So I just want to redefine that. So we're not talking about the job of being an influencer. My advice is completely different for someone who wants to do that. But if you want influence over the community that you have. That's what we're talking about here. Okay, so same word, different use of it.

We talked recently in an episode about how to foster listener engagement and we went into that quite a bit. And that's really. We're not talking about that same thing today. This definitely is.

Engagement's a little bit like how you post and how you do these things. This is about getting a feeling feedback loop going. Because when people get comment when they're listening to your show and then they're actively comment on things or giving you feedback or giving you answers to your questions, like that's a little different level of engagement and that's where we really wanted to get to because it's valuable. But you don't want to stop with just the feedback. Right. So you don't just ask people, hey, let me know about this. And then you get a bunch of comments and you don't do anything with it. That's the worst thing. So how can we use it to move people through the process, to move them through our courses, to move them into our website, whatever our goals are of how we want to influence them more or where we want to have them go to our Facebook pages, join our groups, whatever that is. So customer engagement and then responding to that engagement is really the important and essential part.

So.

So asking for feedback and advice from your listeners is great, right? Do you have some examples maybe from some clients who do that really well? Ask for feedback and listeners, a lot.

Of them actually ask for feedback. Ask them to communicate with them.

Yeah. Not general.

I have a good example.

This is not like general stuff. Like if you just ask for feedback on, you know, if you just say, hey, let me know if you like the show. That's not feedback. It's not narrow and specific. You need to have narrow and specific. So the two examples that I can think of is that there are some that are out there doing live coaching. So they do this on air coaching model and they have a specific invite to people to apply to be their next coaching client. And they tell them that they have to do something like comment on the group about why you would make a great subject.

And what do they do? They hot seat them.

Then they'll hot seat them. Right. And so they make them force them into their group. So if they're not participating in the group, they can't be selected to begin with. You got them to. So if they want to be your guest or they want to be your hot seat subject. Right. Then they have to belong to the group first. And they have to actively participate in that group. Right. So you're training them and everyone else to do what you want them to do in terms of giving you feedback and becoming an active listener. Right. The other one that I can think of is John Levy, which he hasn't done a show in a long time, but he's got a great one. And his show was called the Influencers.

Yeah. Had one of the best ways to foster listener communicating with them, giving them feedback and because he would give them an opportunity to participate in an actual in person event. Because he's very well known for putting on these influencer events all over. They're kind of like in the style of the French salons of a long time ago, where, you know, it'd be a social evening type of thing. And he always has these in like New York, Louisiana, San Francisco, different cities, not only around the country, but around the world. And it's very exclusive. You cannot just go, you have to be invited. Somebody has to know you or you have to been connected somehow and been invited. But what he did with his show is, and this is one of the best tricks to get people to listen to your entire show at the same time, is that he would make it so that he had an interview with his guest, which was always a big influencer, somebody that most people in the country would know. And then the last about five minutes of his episode was a very short five minute portion of interviewing next week's guest. Except it's anonymous. He doesn't tell you who that guest is. He asks them some key questions about themselves.

And then the listeners are invited. If you think you know who this guest is, write in to me at this email address or comment on my Facebook page or send a private message. And if you guess who it is, then you get an invitation to one of my salons or he also does these influencer dinners. You would get an invite to one of those in the future.

Right. And if you kept that really narrow. See, that's the thing is like most of the time we're being too broad when we're asking for feedback. Oh, leave us feedback anywhere. We're everywhere on social media. No, you want them to engage where you're most likely to engage. Whenever I do a shout out or anything like that, or I ask for feedback, I tell them that they must do it on LinkedIn because that's where I engage. But I also know that the majority of my clients or the people who might become my clients, have a more professional outlook on their business. And that means LinkedIn. So that's what I do. And basically if they don't do that, if they don't private Message me in LinkedIn, friend me on LinkedIn, whatever that might look like, as to how they start communicating with me there, then they're not right fit for me and I don't engage back. It saves me a lot of time with the wrong people. So force them into, take John's model and force them into doing the one place, the one thing that you want them to do in order to give you feedback. So we used to do this with WTFF, our 3D print podcast. And so we used to ask them to go and tell us in either the Facebook group or sometimes we would have them do it through the comments section on our website, which is more common to what we did because it forced them into our email list. So we wanted to do it that way. So more often than not we did it that way. But when we were building our Facebook group or Facebook page, we started to have them do it there. And that page was at 3D start point. So it was the same as our website. So we also weren't confusing people with what the terms we were using. So our URLs are common throughout. So that's also a tactic when you start switching up names and other things, it's not good for your listeners. They get very confused quickly and then they don't engage because they're confused. What was it again? It doesn't make sense for them. So they. That's how we make sure that the consistency allows ease of feedback. So, but we used to ask them things like share your weekend projects. Let us know. Hey, we've had difficulty doing this technique with the printer. What have you guys come up with to shorten the time span or to make it easier? And we would get great stories, sometimes tutorial videos like, it was awesome.

Well, and sometimes we would actually pose a question to our listeners because it was 3D printing, it was still a large community of people experimenting with it at the time. And we would ask them, what have you done to solve this problem? And what advice might you have that other listeners could use to achieve a certain goal and by asking for their advice? This is something people don't think about. Asking a listener for their advice is something that really makes them feel important and involved. And it also gets them to show they're really listening and they're committed.

So now you have to follow that up. So now you get the people who did it. So I'm gonna out One of our best and most active and most engaged listeners, Vicki Soma. I remember her name today. And I haven't talked to her in three, four years. Three years at least.

But I'm still connected with her on Facebook and I see stuff from her now anyway, right?

And I always, when she does something cool, I on it still, she got my attention. She was one of the first people. She shared out some great techniques, asked a question, but she shared advice with us in such a great way. And so what you want to do is make sure you do that. Shout out on your show, make sure you thank them for the advice. You tell people what they shared, say, I've put it into the blog post for this episode so you can see the actual image or the video or the quote of exactly what she said. And then you, of course, are naming them in this process. So you definitely want to do that. And if you do an entire show based on someone's advice, that's even better because now when you share that show, when that show comes out, you tag them in addition to thanking them on the show, of course, for spurring and inviting this topic. But you bring them in and they're like, hey, I'm the one who did this. I'm the one who got this going, right? Got this conversation moving. So then they participate even more in the both the sharing of that episode, but also the commenting of that episode. So making sure that you do that next step thing, and this is what I can say is overall, the mistakes that I see going on from podcaster to podcaster to podcaster, is a failure to follow up, a failure to follow up on engagement, a failure to follow up with your guests. Those are the two biggest things that I see that is hurting the distribution of your show, right? The expanse that you're expecting, that reach.

That's part of why we started for our done for you clients, communicating to the guest for them with the announcement that their episode published and giving them the graphics and the links and all that stuff, right? Because we found a lot of podcasters weren't doing it or it was one more thing they had to remember to do. They wouldn't get to it on time, if at all.

But even if you stop there, that's not good enough, right? So I find so often I see a social post out there, even in my own, because we sometimes we have the team push them out. I see it and I'm like, what happened? So they reshared something, but they forgot to tag the guest. And so I'll go in and drop them in the comments or I'll edit the post if I have access to that. But I'll go in and I'll do that. I just did that with Mark S.A. smith this week. Someone had posted in my feed from my team just had put the auto redo. So when I don't get to posting myself, there's always a stream of things that go in there. And it was a great episode I did on the new trust economy with him and he wasn't tagged even though he's my LinkedIn friend. So I thought, wow, that's what a miss. And so I tagged him right in the comments. He got it rolling again. And so thinking about that, you've got to make sure that you're mentioning them, they're appreciative of it and they share, they'll comment back, you'll get it moving. And that engagement helps you in all the algorithms on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever you are when you invite that engagement. So make sure to keep doing that. And if you can't do it in the post because you have an assistant, it's just you're doing it through buffer or through one of these programs. Just do it in the comments. Why don't you check what you post every day? Just you need to check other people's feeds. You check your feed for your friends and your family. Why can't you take two seconds just to go look at your page and see what you post and make sure to tag someone? It takes two seconds. And I do that every morning. Every morning I spend 15 minutes double checking all my posts that have gone out for the day or a plan for the day or were yesterday if I didn't get to it. So I just do it like that every single morning, 15 minutes.

In the spirit of follow up, Tracy, you also need to keep an eye on who has liked your podcast Facebook like Page or maybe you have a business like Facebook like Page, whatever it is. Like we have this brandcasters group and people will comment a lot and you need to respond to those comments or have somebody who's responding for you that you trust. And it's very important to do that in a timely manner. But not only that, like for us in the case of the Brancasters private group, people are asking to join it all the time. And of course we only let customers join it.

Customers?

Well, certain guests. Right. But we have to monitor that and accept them in as soon as possible. So you definitely need to at least one or two social media Channels you've got to keep on top of if you're going to do all this. Getting customer feedback and getting them engaged.

So some people do the welcome thing. Welcome so and so. And they welcome them all to their page or their group. That's acknowledgement at least. But it's not invite engagement. Why don't you ask them and say welcome? Tom Hazard, what advice do you have for our podcasters group? Right. You can make them engaged. Welcome. So and so tell us something about this, about yourself. Right.

Or what's your greatest challenge you're facing right now, you know, that caused you to join this group or something like that. You know, there's lots of ways you can try to get them to actually communicate.

Yeah. So giving advice is something that people just naturally want to do.

Right.

They naturally want to tell you, they want to give you advice, they want.

To be helpful, they want to be heard.

Yeah. So doing that is a great way in any way, shape or form. That's probably the top way that I would do it. And it really, really helps everybody want to engage. So then. And then making it easy, that's the next step, Right? Super easy. Just go in the Facebook group, click join, do it. Now, I know some of you have blocked groups or have groups with questions. Keep it simple. One question. Keep it simple to join. If you need to do that to get people through, that's fine. But keep it really simple and easy. The more frictionless this is in the process to give feedback, the better off it is. That's why I'm not a fan of asking people to rate and review your show. While I know you want to go out there and do it and you should ask for it, the reality is, is that the end of the day, it's not simple. And those of us with Android phones can't do it at all on Apple. You can't, you can't. We can't do it at all. And so people just don't do it. A lot of times. They just. Most people realize it's a waste of time. So they will comment. If they hate it, though, that is one thing that they do too. They will go in and rate it if they hate it.

Honestly, your best way to get ratings and reviews. And we have client who literally just launched on Monday. Yes, on Monday. Brett Swartz of the Capital Gains Tax Solutions podcast. Very niche. Okay. He's talking about Capital Gains Tax Solutions, obviously that's the name, very descriptive. And he got together with a bunch of other podcasters who were launching shows at A similar time and reached out to his entire network and asked people he knew to not only go try out the podcast, listen to it, subscribe to it, but to rate it and review it. And they all these other podcasters launching shows around the same time all rated and reviewed each other's shows, and he had more than 70 ratings and reviews on iTunes in the first 24 hours. That is amazing. And, you know, it was really doing.

It outside of your podcast.

You are doing it outside. You're not. My point of this is you're not a appealing to your listener to give you a rating and review. I mean, obviously you'd like them to do that. Everybody asks for that. The minority of listeners do it, unfortunately. So I think that's something. If ratings and reviews is something you're really trying to do, you might want to make a specific initiative to achieve that goal. And it's not necessarily asking your listeners.

Yeah, absolutely. So the other thing that I want to mention is ask for some unusual things. So, like, if you're a normal guest, like, let's say you're looking for guest ideas. So I have the binge factor. My normal guest is a podcaster who's done 25 episodes or more, has some success tips to share, and is posting consistently weekly. That's my minimum requirement. I like to make sure that they really have a good show before I'll accept them in. But other than that, you know, at least that's the minimum requirement before they can apply. But I was out there talking to Jen Duplaisis, who is maybe watching this right now, and I was saying, the binge factor is growing. I'm really getting some different perspectives. I've brought in some successful authors, some syndicated article writers, like, other things like that. I'm starting to bring some of those things in there. I don't want to do it all the time, but I'd love to get a binge listener. And she says, I've got one. I know it brought her binge listener on my show, and she was fantastic. One of my best interviews ever. And she gave Jen more promo, I think, than Jen would have gotten just by doing my show. And so that in and of itself was really an interesting take on it. And kudos to Jen for thinking that way. But it worked out. So asking someone, saying, what else would you like to hear on my show besides the typical author guest, or celebrity guest or whatever you have? Who else would you like to hear from? And then thinking about doing some hot seating of your clients because of your listeners so we once did bring Vicki Soma on. As we talked about her before, we once brought her on to talk about how difficult. So she had asked me for some advice. She asked me for some advice about where to sell these charms that she had been 3D printing. And they were Mother Child. They were beautiful. They were really nice. And she'd been kind of selling them at farmers markets, and she didn't know where to take it next. So she wrote in to ask me for some advice, and I was like, look, Vicki, I can get on a call with you, but I think you could be a great case study and a great lesson if I brought you on the show. And she said, I'm not so sure, but okay, I trust you. And I was like, don't worry, it's recorded. We're not going to air it live. And so she came on the show and we talked about an Etsy strategy. We talked about some other things, and it was great. It was on air coaching. But she was great because the listeners were like, that's me. And the listeners heard, that's me. And look, Tom and Tracy are helping.

Well, and not only that, our listeners saw over time, Vicki became a little more vocal. And when we posed a question out to our listeners, she had a solution. This is after this story Traci just relayed to you. And she had a solution. And she recorded a video of herself demonstrating her answer to that question and sent it to us. We ended up using it in an episode, referencing it. It was fantastic.

Right? So when you start to get a little bit of engagement and then you engage back and you start to create this loop, you create a commitment between the two of you, and that commitment cascades into other people wanting that. And that's how we're also training our audience to how we expect them to give us that feedback. We're training them to work with us. We're training them what gets positive feedback from us in addition. Right? So we're creating that loop and that chain of engagement, and that's really how you really move to influence. That's how you move to an influence level. And that's how you get from nurturing that listener engagement and then moving into gaining influence. They become your clients, they share you with others. Those others become your clients, Right? So that's how that influence moves around that community and builds through that. And also, the number one thing that I want to say is that it shows tremendous benevolence. It shows tremendous care for your community and your audience. Instead of constantly being about you and remember, that is something I'm not done harping on. I will continue to do that until I stop hearing too much. I, I, I and me, me, me in the podcast and in the posts that follow until you really start to get the idea that if you serve first, the influence comes faster, the influence grows exponentially. So thinking that that's what we want. And so when we show that we're willing to engage and help someone for free within our group, right, we're helping them, we're engaging with them, we're taking advice, we're giving them feedback, they're giving us feedback. We're working in a collaborative way like that when we demonstrate that we didn't demonstrate tremendous care for our community and care translates into high trust. So immediately our trust factor goes up. And that is the number one thing that matters at the end of the day with someone deciding to do business with us.

I couldn't have said it any better. Tracy. I think that could be a theoretical mic drop here.

Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that.

You're welcome. All right, well, hey guys, thank you for listening to Feed you'd Brand. Don't forget the blog post@feedyourbrand.co to get links to any things that, you know, I think you mentioned there's going to be a link for something you're going to.

There's going to be a link for that funny card that I talked about, right?

The image for the card. Definitely. Go check that out. Especially if you're listening to this or you're watching the video, you know, on our Facebook group. And that's it. We'll be back next time with another great episode. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed you'd Brand.

You've been listening to the Feed you'd Brand podcast. We do love to hear your comments on today's show, as well as suggestions for future topics and guests. Visit us online@feedyourbrand.co or on social edyourbrand. Thanks for exploring content marketing and podcast influence with us.