Strategies For Captivating Your Listeners Throughout The Entire Podcast

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works Today.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.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard along with my co host Tom Hazzard, and we are going to talk about ways to keep your listeners all the way through, because this is really critically important. It's. Look, no matter what you want to do, whether it's make money from advertising, make money from your own things, get people to subscribe to you somewhere else on social media. Like, whatever your goals of your podcast are, if they don't listen all the way through, it's not going to work.

That should be all of our goals, to get someone to listen all the way through. And you know what, Tracy, as you're saying that I have a plan for this episode and the suggestions I want to make to our listeners about how to do that. And I just came up with one more I'm going to put out there as a lead into this. I'm going to start here only because I'll tell you, it's something we don't do here at Potatoes. So it wasn't on my list, but I'm realizing as you're saying this, oh, this is like, to me, the number one rookie error in podcasting that you do not want to do. If you want everyone to listen through your entire episode, and that is in your description of your episode or anywhere else you promote your episode or encourage others to share and promote your episode, please do not put timestamped highlights of what's in your episode. You know, where you say, oh, we talk about this at 10 minutes and 32 seconds, and we talk about this at 15 minutes, 45 seconds. Because what does that invite people to do, Tracy?

Skip around, right? Our goal of everything has always been to get people to come off of the podcast and get into your website, come off of the podcast and subscribe to your newsletters to come into your community. That's our goal with everything. But if we don't fully serve them, which get them to listen all the way through and we make it easy for them, which is what people say when they're doing timestamps, actually it's just really lazy. Because the technology out there, the transcription system, already puts timestamps in. It's, like, harder to strip them out and take the time to make it look right. And that's why people don't do it right. Or you get the AI, which summarizes it, and the AI is doing that. It's picking points so that it's proving to you that it went all the way through your podcast and gave you points from every aspect of it. So it's trying to do its job. You know, the technology is not in support of getting people to listen all the way through. Tom and I just really dove into this recently, and everything that happens on Spotify, for instance, is focused on just making sure that somebody clicks on it. They don't have to actually listen to it. They don't count it that way. A play is not really a play. It's just a click and download and listen to 60 seconds, right? Like, that's it. Everything is focused on this download model. So when you're looking at your stats, you're going all wrong at it. You're approaching it from the wrong perspective to begin with. Our approach is if they listen all the way through, they're going to love you, they're going to want to be a part of your community, they're going to want to consume more, and they're going to want to find you somewhere else. So anything we do that invites them to skip around to not listen, to get the recap at the beginning, it's just not useful. It's not useful in that ultimate goal.

I agree 100%, Tracy, so thank you for that. So, look, there's nothing wrong with in your episode description highlighting what some of the key points are of the episode. I would even suggest you don't have to put them in the order that they emerge in your episode, but just letting people know, here's what value you're going to get by listening. But by all means, let's not give them a roadmap to skip halfway through your episode, listen to one thing and not listen to all of it. It's just not in your best interest, and ultimately, I think, not in theirs either. So, okay, so that's a little bonus tip to lead into this episode. And I've got five other points I want to share with you about how to captivate your listeners and keep them listening all the way through. And so to all you podcast listeners out there, I want you to understand specifically and directly for me, the most important thing that you can do is speak to Your listeners.

That's what we're doing here. Right. We know our listeners really well. We know what you're all struggling with. We're speaking specifically to your needs, to your opportunities, and we're actually breaking the wall and talking to you. Right. Like, I do it all the time. Even when I'm interviewing, I'm saying, hey, listeners, don't miss this point. We're always talking to them so that they feel involved in the process and not distant from it.

And that is so important because here in this podcast, for instance, where we're co hosts, a lot of podcasts that have co hosts just have a conversation between the two people. And so you and I are having a conversation, Tracy, and everybody else is really just having a wind of that conversation. That's what I'm saying. You may not want to do. You want to make your listener feel like they're a part of the conversation. This is specifically intended for them.

Right. Because if they disagree or they agree, they're going to listen all the way through to try to, like, get through into that and find out what's going on, and then they're going to reach out to you. So when we involve our listeners in our structure of everything that we do in our content and what we're creating and how we're approaching it, and we have them intimately in mind, we create much more of an involved, engaged process. And that is going to make sure that they don't want to miss anything because they know we prepared it directly for them.

Now, before I go on with the second thing on my list, I want you all to understand you're going to all be pretty shocked probably by the fifth one. You're not going to like it. So just. Just to let you know now, Tracy, what's that called that I just did.

So that's a technique we've actually talked about in the show. I think we did a whole entire episode on it called open looping.

Right, Right.

And open looping is a tactic to get someone to stick around. We do it in webinars all the time. We do it in sales presentations. It's like we're leaving and dropping a crumb of something, or we're saying there's five points and we don't list the fifth one. Right. We're just waiting to get to that one, to the invites them to listen all the way through to get to that point at which we address them. The problem is, is most of you forget you said, oh, there's three things that you get to do and Then you get distracted and you forget to do the third one. You must deliver on the promise of giving them that final item or it's never going to work because then they won't trust you next time. So open looping, though, is a very good strategy of like, wait till the end and you're going to get a payout. Right. We're always creating that, which I think leads into your next one. Right?

It really does. So open looping, I think when we all, well, of those of us of a certain age in grammar school and high school and doing English composition and things like that, we're taught about foreshadowing. Open looping, can a little bit be considered that although you're not always telling people what it is that they're going to get later, you're just letting them know there is something later. Right. That's the open loop. Right?

Yeah. So I like to do that. I like to say, you know, hey, we're going to talk about this later, but I want to. I'll preface it with, like, we're going to talk about this in greater detail and there's going to be some more information that you're going to need to know if you want to utilize it. So I might touch on it and might leave it open, but I'll tell you the story about this or I'll give you the results later. Like, you can do things like that. Give it with that payoff reward coming later.

So that does lead into my third one, which is to make sure that you plan into your podcast episode. By the way, these are strategies we're recommending. You don't have to do all of these in every episode. You could do one of these techniques every episode or two or three of them. You don't have to do all of them in every episode to keep somebody listening the whole way, but to set up early in the episode that there is a reward, there is a payoff, there is some good thing coming when you listen through all the way and then actually give them a reward. Now, there are many different forms. This comes in. Okay. One of the best ones I've ever experienced as a podcaster is not on my podcast, but podcast we produced a number of years ago that always was interviewing some really person that you know. You may not have known who they were, but when you hear about them, you knew, oh, wow, that's a person of real importance. They were always either a celebrity or an Olympian or a captain of industries. I mean, somebody really, really big. And there would be at the end of this episode, a little anonymous interview with the guest for the next week. And you didn't know who they were, they didn't tell you, and you knew it was coming at the end. The host would set it up at the beginning. So later in this episode, don't forget, when we're done with this interview, I'm going to have an anonymous interview with the guest for next week. And if you think you know who that is, you read into us. There was even another reward, and it was a way to get people off the podcast to communicate with the host. And there were a few things about this that were brilliant, but it's one of the best examples of a reward for staying through the whole episode. But there are others.

There can be, yeah, it can be simple. It doesn't have to be like a contest or anything like that. It can be simply. And I do this at the end. Is that as much of a payoff for my guest as it is for my audience? I do a recap, lessons learned at the end of my interview. It makes it more concise, lets my audience know how I'm going to apply what I learned today. So I might discuss how I would use that in context. So that was a great piece of advice. Here's how I'm going to use it. So it's application and tactical, and they're going to get that at the end. But I also don't do it with my guest on the air. So it also is a payoff for them to come back and listen to the episode, which many guests do not. So I'm inviting them in because there's a piece that they don't know and they haven't heard before either. And so what I get a lot back is when they do share my episode on social media, they go, I loved your Aha. From my episode like this was so great that lessons learned. I didn't really realize I was giving out that lesson because usually it's not something that they realize that that was, you know, because it's in comparison to everything else that I do and how I provide that data to my listeners and advice to my listeners. It's across all of it. I'm putting it in context from all the other episodes. That's something you could do. You're giving them and helping them by doing some of the work. That's a reward for them. Right. They don't have to do as much work to figure out what they're going to do with this advice. So these are many, many things you can do to have segments and things that are towards the end, and that's really where you want to do it, is make sure that it's at the tail end.

Absolutely. Okay, so now this next one is, I really enjoy doing this. And actually, some of the most brilliant marketers in America do this incredibly well. You don't even know they're doing it. And it's not that hard to do when you think about it. It is a little counterintuitive, but to introduce an element of uncertainty into what you talk about with your listeners. Okay, now, this is easier to do, I will admit, in a podcast that's not recorded live from beginning to end all the way through, the way you and I are doing right now, Tracy. We're streaming this live on our social channels, and it's coming out as a podcast, but we're recording this in one take. We're not having several different recordings that get assembled in whatever order we want. It's a little easier to do when you do that, to eject some uncertainty, and especially when you have a guest interview, show that maybe you record that interview and then you record an introduction after that. Okay. And maybe like you were saying, Tracy, you record some of your final thoughts or takeaways after that. It also can work better when you do that, but to inject some uncertainty, because if you've already conducted the interview with a guest, and let's say your guest is really controversial, okay, you can talk about that. You can let your people know you. Now, for those of you regular listeners of my show, this wants you to know my guest. You know, you might seem a bit controversial to you, and I'll tell you. And listening to that interview, many of you may wonder, gosh, the host, do I agree with what they're saying or not? Well, come after that interview, I'm going to share with you my final thoughts, and we'll see. I'll share with you what I think.

So I want to reframe the term uncertainty here. I would say skepticism. It's healthy scrutiny. Like, you want to think of it like that, because uncertainty makes people uncomfortable, so we want to be careful with that. Right? So if you want to make people uncomfortable, that's good, but sometimes it makes them bail out at the beginning. So we don't always want to do that at the beginning. Doing it more towards the end can be actually really helpful in terms of soliciting a response from people. Right. So we want to do it in a way that we want them to want to listen but not feel uncomfortable.

Uncertainty can make people feel uncomfortable. It doesn't have to, but uncertainty, you would be shocked. And here's why it's kind of counterintuitive, and I'm recommending it, is that it keeps people hanging on. It really does. Whenever. And a lot of people use this as a sales technique too, when they're selling something, say, look, you know, I'm not so sure you're ready for this yet, but I'm going to share this with you anyway. And usually when you inject, well, that's a little different. That's injecting some doubt, which is actually the last one. But uncertainty, when you say, well, we'll see what happens. You know, you can sort of bait them and say, well, we're going to talk about this today. And, you know, you're going to be really shocked to hear what our guest thinks about this. We'll see what happens in the interview, or you're going to see what happens in whatever. You know, some uncertainty can keep people hanging on. It can build anticipation, making them want to stay and hear the whole story, not just skip ahead and hear the very end.

Right. I think that's what you're really doing here is you're pointing out surprise, you're pointing out counterintuitiveness that might be happening in that. And it's just really critically important that you do it at the beginning to set it up. Because if you don't, they will think, ugh, I've heard this person before. So one of the things that we have is we have a lot of serial guests. And I really want you to be aware of the fact that you think your guest is original. But I guarantee you, I mean, look, we just had a. One of our clients who told us he'd been on 750 shows, holy mackerel.

As a guest, not even his own show.

Right. 750 shows. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, that's really hard to be original. 750 times. Right. And it means that it's very likely that the listeners have tripped across an interview with him before because they're probably in similar circles. Business, entrepreneurship, or health and wellness or real estate or whatever it is.

Right.

And so they're in the same category. And that means that the listeners goes, I don't know if I want to listen to this. So if they start listening and you say, this is the first time this person has ever told this story, or you're going to be really surprised at what they're going to have to say to this or what advice they bring that is going to help lead people through that.

And so I'm going to tie this into the very last one, which is injecting doubt. And that if you know you have somebody who has been a guest on an awful lot of podcasts, I would do two recommend two key things. Number one, listen to some of those other shows before you interview your guests and make sure you're prepared to try to bring something different or unique out of them. Ask them some kind of question they haven't been asked before. And then when you're setting up this show in the beginning and introducing the desk, say, I bet even though a lot of your listeners may have listened to an interview with this guest before, I bet you haven't heard the guests say what their response to one of my questions or, you know, set it up. I bet you haven't heard what this guest said on my show. And you know what? I would like you to write in and let me know. I bet most of you haven't heard what this guest is going to say today. And by injecting sort of that kind of doubt, I bet you haven't heard this, right? That's gonna, whoa, there's a payoff, there's a reward there. I'm curious. And you know, you're setting them up to almost makes them want to stick through and more if you challenge them, you know, you're saying, I want to know how many of you have heard that before out of this guest or something. There's always a way to inject some doubt. And while it can be counterintuitive, especially not just in a podcast but in a sales conversation, in my experience, it always makes people want to hang on more. You know, you want to build curiosity, anticipation, present a reward and inject some doubt and uncertainty. And you usually keep people sticking till the end and wanting to hear it.

So that is also a strategy I employ at the end. And I usually do it in the way that I really doubt that you all can do this, right? Less than 1% of podcasters do this. This guest did it and did it to the nth degree. They do a daily show. And you are likely unlikely to do that, right? It makes them really sit back and think about their success factors. And that's something that I want them to focus on. So if you can get them to focus on the sort of category, topic, area of your show and what it's really about, saying, so mine are the binge factor, right? You want binge listeners. And if you're not Doing these things, binge listeners are not going to come or you're not going to be successful creating this. And so I'm pointing out to them what they just heard, what was good advice, but also in their failure to apply. I'm challenging them to apply it. What it does, though, is get them off of the show and saying something to you. And that's what can follow up next. If you take the doubt injection to the end, I doubt you can do this, or I really don't think very many of you are doing this. I'm challenging you. Right? They're more likely to comment back on that than they are anything else that happened in that show. But it also shows you that they listen through, which is our goal here. Right. We want them to listen through to the whole show. So our goal is to really leave something out there at the end. Now, I want to just point out a couple of things, Tom, because all of those were really great. But here's some things that YouTube has been suggesting which is also really good for podcasting, which is at the end, they want them to invite them to something else, invite them to the next piece of content. So if we want to create listening, we don't just want to create listening in our single episode, we want to create binge listening. That's what I'm all about here. We want to create them so that they go on to the next episode. So always at the end, we want to suggest other episodes. We can do it in the middle if it's critically important. And we just don't want to deep dive into something like we did when we talked about our open looping episode, which Nazanin here over in our chat, because we have our Zoom clients, they're seeing this. All of you in the live stream are not. You're going to have to go to poditize.com to the feed your brand section. You're going to have to look for open loop content as the episode to find it, or go to the blog post for this episode and be able to connect to that. So you're going to have to do a little more work. But the reality is, is if we leave it at the end and we say, hey, you know, when we point to the top corner on our video, we're pointing to the end card where we have that info card or we have an end card that leading to that other episode or that relevant episode, we're helping ourselves and we're helping them navigate through our catalog. Now we're getting even more than getting them to listen through our episode. We're getting to listen through our show. And that's really valuable as well. So we have to create those opportunities. And I learned this really early on from Inc. Magazine. When I would write an article for Inc. Magazine, they wanted us to link to three things in the beginning, because what they found is that people tripped out of an app. They would read the opening paragraph to see if it was right for them, and then they would bump out. And before they bumped out, they'd want them to go, no, no, no, that's what I wanted. And they'd click on to that. So we want to give them something in the beginning. If you're not in the right place, here's where you want to go, right? Like that's kind of something that you would do. But what we always did was link to the next thing in the very final paragraph and final sentence, and that would send them on to the next article that they really wanted to read. And then of course, Inc Magazine always would show up the relevant articles or the relevant next ones that you might want to read that are surrounding that subject. So they were always trying to group them for you. So they were creating relevance on their platform as well. And that's something that you will do over time as your get your catalog is bigger and bigger. You can always propose up the next relevant episodes. You can do it in your blog as well. There's all kinds of plugins and apps for that.

So that's fantastic. Tracy, you know what? Another thing that I want to share which ties back to the very first tip, which is just talk to your listener that I think relates very well to this. How do we get them listen all the way through, especially when we're repurposing content. You know, a lot of podcasters ask, hey, I've recorded a lot of YouTube lives or LinkedIn lives, or I have all these webinars that I've conducted. Can I repurpose any of those as podcasts? And I'm a big fan of repurposing content and getting as much value out of it as you can. So I think it's a good idea. But if you do not talk to or tip number one, talk to your listener. They may not listen to it at all. And we recommend, when you're going to repurpose content, record a two to three minute little introduction that's new just for the podcast listener, or if you're going to put it in YouTube in the same context, not as the original webinar, but as like a YouTube podcast video. Same thing. Let your listener know the good reasons why you wanted to share this webinar with them or share this other piece of content that was recorded sometime before with them. What's the reason right now why it's still relevant and valuable and why they would want to. And then you can still open loop them if you're willing to record another 2, 3, 5 minute piece at the end saying, and after the webinar, I've got a few more important thoughts just for you. Listening to this podcast after that, giving.

It an anchor and timeliness for them. So like say I've got some updates or I've got some additional thoughts that you really need to hear and you're going to bring that in. That's a way to get your old content removed around and utilized again. I don't really recommend it with podcasts that have already published.

That's a tough one.

That's a tough one. You must really have new information you want to add on it to make it really relevant and valuable. It's okay if it's a podcast that's from another. Like sometimes I'll take a feed your brand episode and I'll put it into the binge factor. My binge factor listeners haven't heard it before. I do give it a frame in context to it and tell them why I'm putting it in there. But I don't necessarily worry about it being replay because there's very few listeners that are overlapping both. It's just probably not very likely.

In our experience. Podcast listeners generally don't like replays unless there is something significantly new that's happened and you're giving an update and maybe only airing a portion of an earlier episode with a lot a new frame of reference or a new relevance, that can be okay. But just completely rerunning something so you're putting up something new every week really has diminishing returns in our experience. A lot of very unhappy listeners saying, why are you doing this? It's not why I'm subscribed to you.

And not only that, but this. Remember our goal here is to get them to listen all the way through and they're gonna go, oh, okay, I heard the first two minutes where you said it and then I was like, skip the rest of it. I'm not gonna listen again. And they don't do it, they don't consume it and it hurts your overall playthrough numbers. So it's really not worth doing that. If that's your ultimate goal is to get the playthrough to happen. So I really want to reiterate this one last thing before we go, and that is that it does not matter if your goal is advertisement dollars or conversion dollars on your own stuff. Doesn't matter. This is the same rule you can and Spotify does this and all of these ad companies, Megaphone, all of them do this is they're putting those ads at the beginning because they know so few people actually listen through and they want to just shove them down their throat and. And get the ad played at least. Is that really the best thing? Because they're already frustrated before they get into your show and they go through your show. Is that a way to set up the tone? I don't care. I'm setting the tone saying, I don't care about you, listener. I'm just going to make as much money as I can at the beginning of you because I know you're not going to do what I want you to do.

Right.

Like that's what that says to them. And so really think through carefully. If you're making enough money off those ads at the beginning to diminish the value of a playthrough, are you willing to reduce your audience? Are you willing to give away your audience? The average person doesn't make a hundred bucks.

Depends on how you're monetizing or advertising your show. But yeah, the common ways for sure, it's not that much.

The average show doesn't make $100. And so it's not worth it if you're going to destroy the playthrough. The one thing that is most valuable to your business, to your time, to your investment in that time, thinking through those things, making sure that we're getting the listen through. Do your ads towards the end, do your payoffs towards the end. They're more valuable there and more receptive.

To them then I agree with that. We've actually gotten a lot of feedback about that. We have to do another episode at some point about it's coming up. Talking about ad placement position. Is that coming up? Good, because I know we've got some new info on that. Awesome. So I hope this gives all you podcasters out there listening to this some good suggestions of some things to try and look, it's wonderful you're recording and putting out content. That's number one. Because if you're not publishing episodes, no one people don't have anything to listen to. But as you get into it, as you get better at it, you may want to think about some of these techniques, which are not meant to be contrived, they're meant to be actually really providing value and motivating people to listen all the way through. It's in their best interest and it's in yours.

So thanks everyone for listening. Tom and I will be back next week. We always come live everywhere on social media first. So if you're hearing this in the podcast, we were probably out a month earlier on social media giving the same advice. So join us everywhere on social media. You can find us odditize and you can also go to the blog post for this episode, odotize.com and be able to find all the links, all the other episodes, all the different things that we referred to in our show. You can find it right there. Easy to access. Thanks everyone.

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