Intentional Podcast Promotion Tactics That Set Your Show For Success

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazard, along with my partner, and yeah, I guess you're my husband, too, so I might as well just admit that right out. If you didn't already realize that.

Tom Hazard, I was gonna say your better half, but. Oh, well, I'll get hit later, but yeah, no, that's okay.

Anyway, I thought today I'm getting a lot of this, getting people who are really spread thin and our budgets are contracting for some companies, and you're thinking about, where do I cut? What do I do? And a lot of it might be the focus of how you're spending your marketing dollars or how you're spending your time. And remember, time is way more valuable than money. So I want to make sure that we're considering that. So your time may be spread thin, too, as you're having to do lots more things than you anticipated doing before. And so we need to think about that from a. We're going to talk about it specifically from a podcast marketing perspective, but you can think about it for any aspect of your business, right? Are you spread too thin? Are you doing too much in, you know, in any aspect and any part of whether you're growing or scaling your business. And is it focused? Is it targeted? Right.

Well, and really, when it comes to our podcast, what takes up an awful lot of time with a lot of people is promoting the episode, right? I mean, you're spending enough time recording it, and you got to do that because while we do as much as we can for you when you're working with us, we can't record for you. You have to do that. But once you record and it's published, there's promotion. And the reality is, you know, we. You can incentivize your guests to promote, which we do if you have a guest, but you've got to really do the promotion. But we. And while you want to be promoting, I would say very intentionally and strongly, sometimes promoting everywhere isn't as good as being very intentional and specific about where you're promoting and maybe being more targeted. You know, are you wasting your time and doing more busy work rather than promoting in ways that are more effective.

Right. So I'm going to just talk about this in terms of social media, because I think all of us, because we're here on Facebook doing a Facebook Live, we're also podcasting this through this. Right. So we've got a focus here and thinking about how we're utilizing this, what we're doing, and where we're going with this. So, okay, so we're here on Facebook now. We understand Facebook deeply, but do we really understand how to reach people, how to do the outreach, how to engage, how to do all of those things is a learning curve. These are things that we have to learn about the platform that we're promoting on. Right. So I can say that I have tried really, really, really hard over the years to promote on Twitter. I just. Whether it's a mismatch between my personality and Twitter could very well be. Whether it is the way Twitter functions and works. And I just don't have enough deep knowledge on the algorithm. That could be as well. Right. I haven't gotten advice from the right people on Twitter. So these could be things that are holding you back. If you have to have some deep learning in a particular category in a particular platform, then either take your time and learn one at a time. Don't try to learn all of them at once. Go to, you know, take these social media classes that teach you all the platforms and how to set yourself up. Look, it's one thing to be there and have a presence and another thing to actively be working to promote within that. So we do post to Twitter now. We chose to drop it as a promotion platform. And what we do is we just auto post. Like there's just an Autobot that just posts from our website and sends it to Twitter automatically every time a post is made. I don't have to think about it. I have a presence there. But I'm not purposely promoting on Twitter. I'm visibly there, but I'm not promoting. These are some of the ways you can ease up on what you're doing and not have to worry so much about how you're doing this. But we gotta get deep into a cat in one category. We gotta understand how we're promoting and who we're promoting to. And I think that's the most critical factor when you don't know your audience yet. We get the idea that we just gotta be everywhere at once. Right?

Well, maybe you do it first in order to figure out what platforms are gonna be more Effective for you. Right. And which ones you actually enjoy participating in and get more out of. I remember for years, Tracy, you did engage in Twitter, you were active in it, and it never really produced many returns for us. I think it depends on what kind of promotion you're doing. And the thing about Twitter is it's really there for people that are active and live on the system at any given time. If people aren't active and live, when you post something to Twitter, they're likely not to see it, you know, unless somebody retweets it and they're actively on when that person retweets what you had. Whereas platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, I think, are. While. Certainly if you're not active on Facebook while we're doing this live right now, then you know you're not gonna realize we were live. Right.

Or if you don't understand how things work. So you belong to this group, but you don't click the notifications to be notified when a video is coming or when we're doing these Facebook lives. And you don't remember to set your own alarm for every Wednesday at noon. Right. Like, so these are things. If you're not utilizing the platform to its utmost, then you have to understand heavy users because they're your focus. Because the random users like you might be are barely ever going to see what you're posting. Right. They have to be. It has to be directly shared to them. They have to really search and try to find it. Like, it's not going to be useful to those people. The people that's going to be useful are the people out there looking for podcasts on Facebook. Right. So that's who we're promoting to the podcast listeners who are looking for new shows on Facebook. Now, there are people that are out there doing that now. We want to dial that in. And they may be the podcast listeners who are on Facebook looking for recommendations for new podcasts in real estate investing or in women's empowerment. And so they're also probably likely within the women's empowerment groups, the real estate investing groups. Right. So we have to understand the function of how all of that works in order to get our podcast seen by the right people who are actively there and using Facebook.

Yeah, you gotta raise awareness in the groups that are in alignment with what you're talking about.

But we're not here to teach you about Facebook right now. What we're here talking about is that if that's daunting for you, if that's not something that you're ready for and capable of, then you're not fully utilizing and doing a targeted approach within a platform or within a promotion type. Okay, so I'm promoting on Facebook, I'm posting on Facebook, but I'm just posting is not promotion. I want you to be careful and understand that. Now, paid promotion on organic promotion are two different things as well. So are you going to engage in that? Are you, are you going to engage in something that's paid versus something that's just organic or effort? Right. So you have to go and post into the groups, create engagement, discussion, sharing. Like you have to create that model. So you're either going to spend time or in some cases, some of you are going to go out there and spend money. But here's the thing. If our core listeners, if the listeners that are the most valuable to us are not in that space, then it's not worth the time and effort to learn how to use a platform we're not already heavily a user of or heavily or very comfortable in. So Instagram might be the case. I hired somebody to handle our Instagram because I didn't have the time and I didn't wanna spend the effort to learn how to change up what we're doing in Instagram and make it work for us. Right. I needed someone who understood that from a core basis already and then could tweak our messaging, could tweak our assets, could, could help us bridge that gap and build a higher promotion and engagement. So it took us a while to get the promotions, matching and get the things that we were pushing out there for people to start recognizing it, seeing, liking, sharing, viewing. Right now we're working on increasing engagement within that. So can we get them commenting more? Can we get them doing these things? So you're always tweaking and adjusting these things. It's an art and a science at the same time. It's math at the same time. Cause you're tapping into an algorithm.

So.

So this is a lot of effort and I've paid money to find someone who will work on that and do that directly for us. Because I believe we have a lot of core listeners potential out there and core customers directly resulting from listening to the podcast and then becoming clients. Right. We have that path that's clear on Instagram because we see that in all of you out there. Who are our clients, who are our listeners who are tell us that you are on Instagram already. So we've already sort of surveyed that and understood that. So it says we need to spend some effort and time building Our Instagram, it's been one of our goals this year, actually this whole entire year. And I expect it to take a year for us to get into a system and a rhythm of what's working. And then it's staying on top of algorithm changes, staying on top of Instagram changes. We will level off into where we're comfortable with our messaging and our side of it. But now we have to stay on top of things. Things.

So this is really daunting. And as you can see, when you're trying to do Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, right, and you're trying to do all of them, it gets extremely overwhelming, especially if you're just launching your show or if you're in this fast growth and high growth phase of wanting to increase listeners within your show. So how do we attack that? And here's the thing that I think we have to sit down and understand intimately about our show and find a way to get to that. Why is our show here and who are we speaking to that are the most valuable? And for some people that might be becoming clients is the value or valuable because they're the super sharers. Right. I hate to use the word super spreaders. So we're not using that, we're using super sharer. Right. So super sharers.

Yeah, we used to call them super sneezers.

Sneezers, yeah.

That's also not doing that anymore these days, is it?

Right, we're calling them super sharers. So anyway, that's the word now, just in case you were used to using the other ones. Super sharers are our new word for those that go out there. And so for every one listener we acquire, we get three new ones because they share it. Right. Or 10 new ones, wouldn't that be. That'd be like a mega share. I don't know. But so when we're in that process of doing that, that's our goal, right. How do we get to those people? For others, the goal might be is I know that most of my best guests become my best clients, and if that's the case, I get those best guests on LinkedIn already. Okay, now I need maybe a better LinkedIn strategy because I guarantee you there's probably listeners on LinkedIn that I'm not tapping into. I may be doing this sort of direct messaging, reaching out to people to become podcast guests, and I've got that system dialed in. But am I reaching the listeners in that process? Two, maybe not. Okay, so now I'm going to shift my promotion work to try Working on the posting side of things and seeing if I can get more listeners increasing when I'm totally fine with my guesting strategy. Because wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to interview them, but they became clients anyway. Right. It save a lot of time, save a lot of energy, and I'd be doing even more. So it seems like a likely targeted place to start from. These are some assumptions. We do have to make a hypothesis about what we believe is going to work and then target that and test it. Is this working? Is it having a return? Are we seeing this? But we also have to give it enough time. That's a significant problem with many, many of you who are already spread thin in terms of time and money is that you can't devote yourself to the strategy after you've already just gotten yourself so overwhelmed and so thin everywhere else and you're unwilling to now let go of the other platforms. This is, we find very often is like switching from a shotgun approach to a targeted approach is really, really hard when you're like so afraid to stop posting on Instagram or stop posting on Twitter. Right?

Yeah. But I think, and hopefully this will make sense to most of you listening or watching here is that focusing on one social media platform and really doing that well and getting results, taking a deeper dive into it, mastering that first before spreading yourself thin and taking on a second, a third or fourth, if you just are touching a little bit of each one, you're not really going to be able to fully engage and get the most out of it. I agree with you, Tracy. I think you got to focus on one, then maybe another one. If you can add that, once you've got one really dialed in, then focus on the second and adding it. But trying to be everywhere at once and figuring out how to succeed on all the platforms, I mean, that can be a full time job on its own.

It's a recipe for disaster at the end of the day for you. And that's what I want to point out is that Tom and I learned this in the product business when we were working with clients. There would be a lot of them who liked this shotgun approach. They wanted to bring hundreds of designs and items to the presentation with buyers. Right. And so we started saying, that's great, but that's one way to go, that's.

One way to go.

What if we, you know, wouldn't it be better if we devoted our attention to really doing, you know, a handful of designs that we believed very strongly in that we could bring to A customer and show them, and show them why these are more valuable and because we spend more time on them. Because it's not physically possible to design hundreds of designs. In our particular case, just not enough hours in the day. And you can't pay me enough to design hundreds of designs and put this type of attention and detail into it. Right. Are we starting to see the analogy.

Between quality suffers, your quality suffers?

Right. The approach to it, the why behind it, the messaging in it, all of those things are suffering. And so this is what we did actually. This is how we designed and created the best selling office chair that has been at Costco for almost a decade now. No products, I can tell you this, very few products that aren't name brands that been there for, you know, get that kind of name brand loyalty, like, you know, Procter and Gamble products or Kleenex.

Yeah, Kleenex, or a liquor product, if it's a, you know, a patron tequila or Jack Daniels whiskey or something, would be at Costco consistently for a decade.

A name brand, you don't know. Right. So you know, where we come into this, this doesn't happen. Those products go in and out. Maybe they get two years if they do really well. This is really common in this marketplace. But Tom and I designed a chair that was one of only three chairs we presented to Costco's buyer. Kind of shocked because they were used to seeing a room full of designs and products. We came in there and said, these are the three chairs we believe the most in. Here's why we think your customer, your member is going to love this. And here's what we built into it that is going to give it traction. So there's a nice match between an understanding of the audience, the membership. In this particular case, thinking about the same thing in the groups that you're participating in, in the platform that you're going to, is there a membership match that you intimately understand and are building your product, your service, your podcast specifically for? Right. And when we went in there and did that, that buyer looked at us and said, okay, wow, which one then do you believe is going to be the best seller? And that was easy. We pointed to the right one, to the exact one that is the one that has been there for a decade now. Design slightly changes, the color changes, minor modifications. Because Costco can't be seen as not bringing in new things, but essentially been the same. It's 95% the same chair every single time. Right. And it's never changed its price either. So like a really interesting model of going about it. Well, that sells at about $20 million a year for our client that we design that for. That's an incredible threshold to meet for any given product. And you can imagine if whether you're in real estate and you only have 10 months of tenancy in an, you know that when things go in and out like they normally do, they don't get that kind of reach and they don't get that kind of sales consistently year over year.

And it's not as profitable then, right?

It's not as profitable.

You've got more turnover, you've got more one time costs on bringing something new in. And obviously this is a little different than posting on social media, but the principle is the same.

What we're talking about, the philosophy of how this works and being more targeted, more concerted, more strategic and tactical about this, what we found is time and again, this is the long term higher payout for you in terms of better targeted listeners that will get to you that are going to be higher converting listeners at the end of the day. And that's the focus that we really want to put on you, is that it seems like, wow, I'm limiting my audience. But the reality is that if this targeted approach works, not only is that audience going to actually grow over the long term to being a higher return on investment over the long run in terms of getting you more listeners long term, but the listeners that you get are going to be more active, more valuable to what your purpose is at the end of the day, to what your purpose for doing the podcast is, whether it's building your core business, selling a book, getting more services, or just building a great show at the end of the day. So that's kind of a philosophy that we want to bring to you. And also just imagine the relief of that this is a smart strategy. This is that relief from this fear of missing out that all of you have of I've got to do all of these things because everybody else is doing all of these things instead say no, let's sit back in the mindset of I'm taking the smart, targeted, methodical, long term approach to growing the right audience for my show. Because at the end of the day that's going to be the most valuable thing that I could build.

So yeah.

Tracy, that's great.

Some thoughts about how you can do this and think about how relieved you're going to feel when you let go of some of this. I could tell you the huge sigh of relief when we switched over to the bot and I Never opened the Twitter app ever. I do open it like once a month just to check and make sure nobody messaged me directly. But I have a message actually straight in my Twitter. If you go to Twitter and you check hasdesign design, H A Z Z design and you look at the message, it says, I'm not here live. If you want me go to LinkedIn and go to Facebook. And it says that specifically. So, you know, so anyone who really is serious and like checks out your profile on it goes, oh, okay, I'm going to jump off of Twitter. Or if they're offended by it, they're probably not right for me anyway. So, you know, sometimes I get a nasty message from that, but rarely. But I have to tell you, the huge sigh of relief when I never had to do that every single day and check in on that and feel like I was, you know, posting and feel like I had to work on that was a huge relief. And did I see a dip in listeners? No, I didn't see any change in what we were doing, but pretty soon after, because I was focusing in one area that had a change, right?

So it's about getting focused, getting specific, being less busy, more targeted, more focused, more effective. Right?

And that's really, we always, you know, this is the four hour work week, right, where we're all working towards where our most effective time can be spent. And it's usually spent in the 4% in the four hours. It's usually spent in those small things where we put really concerted personal effort into making it unique, special and working for us that we make those deeper connections that have a long term residual value that are highly valuable. And that's what we want you to think about today. So podcast promotion, it's not all things to all people everywhere out there. It might be extremely targeted and narrow niche approach getting that right and the learnings from that. Now apply it to the next platform that you work on and set the other one on some kind of autopilot.

Or get support and have somebody else do some of that work for you once you've figured it out. And there are even AI and softwares and things that do this for you depending on the platform.

So lots of options there, lots of options out there. Well, some food for thought for today, trying a targeted podcast promotion approach and see if it works for you.

All right everybody, thanks for listening. It's been Tom and Tracy on Feed. You'd brand and we will see you next time.

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