Tracy Hazzard - "Binge-Worthy" From Thrive LOUD Podcast With Lou Diamond

As soon as it tells me we're going live. And we are live. Welcome everyone, to another episode of Thrive Loud with Lou diamond, connecting you to the most inspiring and amazing people that are thriving each and every day. We are here in a special Thrive Loud Live catch up episode with someone who's on the program recently because she is a freaking rock star. And we're going to talk, I think, all things podcast today. I think that's what we're going to do. I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do, but she is. If you want to launch your podcast, if you need strategies around your business, whether it's video, audio, getting your brand out there, like in a very noisy digital world, nobody clears it up and makes it cleaner than the CEO and founder of Potatoes Brandcasters. And she's a former Inc. Columnist and she's just pretty awesome. She also hosts a bunch of podcast shows, most notably the Binge Factor, which I was on recently, which was a ton of fun, and I was just talking with her that I probably, probably provided way too much information on that show. So here I'm going to flip the tables and flip the script so that she can provide just as much information. Thrive Loud listeners and viewers on LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, wherever the heck we are, we're everywhere. Please welcome Tracy Hazard to the show. Tracy, how are you today?

I'm awesome. So glad to be here.

I'm excited to catch up. First of all, one, because you're like superstar human being doing like 6,000 things at once. And just the fact that I was actually able to get you at any point in time is amazing. So I think that's a good thing. But let's, let's do this. What are we up to right now in the world of Tracy? Because you got lots of balls juggling in here.

I do. You know, the thing is, is that we're all struggling with this. Like, we're all struggling with this exact same problem that I've got to be the content creator for my business. I've got to be the out there in front of like this morning. I just told you before, I had an investor meeting, right? So I'm out there seeking investment in growth for my business, but I got to be my content creator, too, my chief marketing officer. Like, we're. Even though I have a business with 84 staff members worldwide, I still have a lot of hats to wear. And that's the case so often with the CEOs of all kinds of companies right now.

Tracy, what's your favorite hat to wear? Which hat do you like wearing the most?

I love the interviewer hat. I do. I love interviewing because it, it feeds into my curiosity. I'm so, so curious about people, about how things work, and I'm researching while I'm doing it. All the nuggets that you shared on my show, I'm going to use again and again. Whether I'm strategizing with clients or developing products within my company, I'm going to use that information. I synthesize it into something so that being able to wear that hat actually has huge foundational importance to my business. And it's my favorite one. So that makes it even easier.

What do you think right now is the biggest problem that your clients, the people that you help the most, what is the biggest problem or the most common problem that they are facing today?

They're hidden experts that they all feel hidden. They, they're not voices and getting heard enough, they're not being seen enough, they're not being found enough. This is the problem that everyone feels is I'm, I'm not getting enough visibility and enough visibility with the right people. That really matters to them as well.

Do you think most of your clients even know who the right people are?

You know, I think we have an idea of what we think they are. And in my experience, because I used to develop a lot of products for mass market retail and there's no way you ever knew who bought your product. Right. You had no sense of that. So you had to go in there with this premise of who my right ideal buyer is. But what we forget so often is that they're screened through the platforms that we utilize. So if I were selling to, into Costco, that's a different type of person than who, who is going into Walmart. And if I didn't design my product differently for those two places, I wouldn't be successful. And today we have that same problem where we think we're just, you know, we're, we're putting content out there for Instagram, but is that the right place? And maybe all of our clients are actually over in LinkedIn and what we produce in Instagram isn't really good. When we just Repost it in LinkedIn, it doesn't work. It doesn't land in the same way. So we do have to think about our content as a product, as an output. But we also think, I have to think of the channel that is going through to reach those right people we believe are our audience.

It's interesting because I play around with. I have found, at least for my programming, we have two spaces that our audience shows up the most at. And it's interesting because I wouldn't have thought these two would be comparable. One is LinkedIn, where you're broadcasting live right now, and the other is Instagram, which seems to be a tremendous driver of awareness of our episodes or their stories.

It seems to be the thing that we're able maybe to connect the most frequently or the most casually. I'm not even sure which is the right way of looking at that. And I don't even address the fact that we also do stuff in Twitter and Facebook, even in YouTube as well. So.

To the video and podcast host or the clients of yours that are producing this content, how do you help them figure out the medium that is the best channel for them to target themselves on? Because that's something that everyone is having a problem with, at least in my mind, in my world, it is. You seeing that too.

I agree, I agree. But I think that part of the problem is that we go for a place that we know. So if I'm really comfortable in Instagram, but my clients aren't in Instagram, that's not going to make a lot of sense. So I always look at my existing client base first. If you have one. If you don't have one, then you're going to flip this. So if you have a client base, go and find out what platform they use the most, what one do they log into every single day, more than once a day, where they are constantly using. Also, they might be hosting their own groups. So because I'm a business to business model, so in a business to business model, who, where are they hosting their own groups? Where do they have to play for their own business? Now, they might be wrong about that, but they're already playing in that world, so you want to match yourself to them. So for me, that has always been LinkedIn. It works out really well for us because LinkedIn's my favorite place. So if you don't know who your audience is, go to the place you're, you're the most comfortable and authentically yourself. You actually show up there. You don't have a team who posts there, you show up there and you post. It makes it easier for you to start understanding who that audience is and who's reaching out, who's commenting, who's engaging with you. So if that is over an Instagram, we want to make sure though that that engagement is turning into something with LinkedIn. I find if you're getting direct message. If someone's reaching out to you, you have, you have an understanding that they are there for you. But in Instagram, just because they're commenting and Harding, your, you know, posts doesn't mean they're actually listening to it. So if you're not seeing the boost on the listening side to your podcast, or you're not seeing someone click through to your content and come to your website, then the actually engagement isn't turning into something. And while that's not bad, you want engagement, but is it actually turning into what you're looking for?

I've had this, this argument that it doesn't matter to me if your program has, you know, 20 listeners. And if a good, good percentage of those 20 listeners are your clients, great. Talk to them every single day. It's like having an audience to your pay. And if you had like thousands of listeners and you didn't really know who they are, I actually would prefer the smaller situation. But everyone's always trying to grow. Even you're trying to grow and grow and keep up with the business. Finding that fine line between balancing, between delivering on what you are intended to do with your programming and your communication and connecting to the audience, that is going to give you the most value. I want to flip this to you. You have in it, you have a very wide net of who you help. How do you narrow down how you help the people and the message that you get out there? I mean, my interview on, you know, Binge Factor, you're hitting all these great podcast folks and it gives you exposure. You obviously have a system of all the programs on Potatoes that you, all the, all the shows that are on potatoes that use you for helping to get their content in the right way and getting themselves launched. How are you? How are you?

Do you.

Can you cast as wide a net as you'd like, or do you have an idea of which lanes I need to plan? I'm curious.

So, because we've been doing this for a while, right? I've been able to narrow down and see what works. But, you know, the reality is, is that we could go to anyone, right? So anyone who's thinking about being a podcaster is a lot harder to find, though. So because. So you'd have to cast a very, very wide net in order to get to just anyone who might be thinking about being a podcaster. It's a who easier for me to find someone who's already a podcaster and speak directly to that, because I can find them. They put podcaster in their title on LinkedIn, they typically talk about their show all the time. So. So what I found is that because that's an easier audience to identify, it's also easier for me to structure my content to be tailored to those people. And those people will share my show to the aspiring and so. Or share my content and my company to the aspiring. And the aspiring will find you, naturally. Because if they're sharing and saying, I heard this great tip from Tracy on the binge factor and I'm putting it into my, in my show. Like, if they say that anywhere, then everyone's saying, wow. So this guy who I think is really great and amazing at podcasting, has this person as his. As. As who he models, then I want to know who that person is. And so it cascades into growth in terms of your audience. But for us, you know, I feel like there's a lot of people out there selling courses and like startups and how tos and do all of that. There's a lot of people and it's a lot of junk out there, to be honest with you. It's been there, done that once and I hate those. Right. And so I just, you know, decided at some point in our business we weren't going to speak to that. We were going to go ahead and say, if you're serious about podcasting, if you're serious about video casting, then we're the place for you. And we are going to continue to provide this space, top level content that is going to attract the best of the best. So that when they become our clients and they love what we do for them, and they love what we provide for them, they refer us to someone else. That's where we get our business. 90% of our business comes from referrals from other podcasters. Now, of course, there's a reward system built into our platform for that, but it doesn't really matter. We get them anyway. We get some people who. I'm not your client yet. I'm still working on formulating my show. But I'm sending you these three people in advance of that and they don't even ask, can I have credit for them? Yes, we give them credit for it anyway. But, you know, they just, they do it because they know it's going. They want to pay back the value you've brought them.

I want to talk about two mediums here because you would be the expert on this, and I am very curious to hear the answer on this. Okay. You help with both video programming as we're, we're doing both right now. We are doing the audio podcast and the video stream right now. There is more of this each and every day. And I don't know necessarily if everybody is watching, if everybody is listening as much as maybe they could. So how do you help video and podcasters figure out the space to play in? Even you're trying to figure out the right space to play in as you have content in your programs, on your shows and the ways to do this. Um, what, what's some of the, the exercises that you work with, with your clients to figure out, hey, this is going to be a good way to maximize, grow, change or optimize what you're currently doing.

So, you know, every business is really different and, and so I like to play on multi levels within what is this going to do for my business? And making sure that each level has, is doing something to either take time away so that, you know, you said your time is most optimized, so it's not. It's being efficient with that time. So if I need to fill my website with blogs, then I want to do one thing that gets me that blog at the end of the day. And for me it's also articles. So I look at that, that path as one direct thing. And so how can I do one thing and get as much out of it as possible? So I like to start in video. Not everybody is comfortable in video and that's okay, but there might be a video play for them because what we find is that not a lot of percentage of video watchers actually watch the video. They might listen to it, but they're not actually actively watching it. And that's because most videos that are put out today are talking heads like you and I here today. And they're not necessarily these intense visual, like beautiful, you know, crafted Disney movies. Right, Exactly. Oh, now see, now we're getting fancy.

Now I'm just trying to annoy the viewer here if they're seeing their paying attention, you know.

But no, most people aren't getting, you know, aren't doing things that are dynamic and interesting and, and that's okay and we're comfortable with it, but we just, you know, hey, we've got YouTube on and it's easier to just pop that on and listen to it while I'm working on my computer and doing something else. It's just, it's convenient. And so when we think about that, we don't actually know what they're, how they're consuming it. So why not create an audiogram, you know? It's just an audio wave. There's a static image, and we're giving them it to them, though, in the place that they care about. Right. And that, that's that they happen to be YouTube watchers and YouTube listeners, and that is a thing to be a YouTube listener. But we want them to listen to the content all the way through. That's our goal. And that's where podcasting is amazing, because we have listeners that listen.