Why Do We Use The Rule Of Three As A Measure Of Podcast Marketing ROI?

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 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 Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy. Today we're going to talk about the rule of three according to Tom and Tracy for it's our rule of three. It's our rule of three for assessing how to measure marketing roi. In particular, about your podcast, Tracy, why don't you take it from there? Cause I know this is really your brainchild.

Yeah, look. Periodically throughout a year, I will check our ROI on things. Sometimes when we start something brand new, I usually give it a six months and then I check the return on investment. And I have a preconceived notion of where I think the value is going to lie. What I don't do when I start something brand new, when I don't have an experience with it, when it's not already something we've done, like when we first started podcasting is a really great example. Six months in, I set a return on investment review for myself, an internal review to see where things are. And I'm using a premise, as I said, so a hypothesis of where I think the value is going to lie. It might not be that. I do have to do some investigation to determine what that return on investment was over the last six months. Because I might be wrong. And just because I said, you know what? I want my podcast to have 10,000 listeners in six months and it doesn't achieve. That doesn't mean I should quit, because my hypothesis might have been wrong about where the value lied. We joke about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Is this common term right? Very often people say, this is what I want from podcasting or this is what I want from my marketing. And when it doesn't happen, they just quit.

They don't realize even though that one thing that they wanted may not be what they got, there may still be tremendous value in what they're doing. They just didn't realize that value was gonna present itself in a different way. Isn't that right?

There are these people who have a clear outcome in mind, and then when it doesn't achieve the outcome, they're done. They're decision makers. They just go cross, I'm done. I'm not doing this. It's a waste of my time. I didn't get what I wanted from it. When they throw that out, sometimes they throw out something that could be the key to getting them what they really wanted. It just isn't doing it in the path they imagined or as directly as they imagined. And that's why I have my rule of three. And it's specifically related to return on investment for something new or something that is difficult to measure, like marketing. Because sometimes marketing, branding, marketing, like all of those things, sometimes it's not always a clear cut of they click the link and bought. Not everything comes from that, maybe one percentage of it. It's the same thing with listeners. Not everything is clearly if I have a podcast listener, I sell a product right? Or I sell a service, it doesn't necessarily not a straight line. That doesn't mean that my podcast listeners are aren't buying is just not a clear cut link because I can't clearly identify that listener to this purchase. That's why we look at this. So my rule of three is simply this. There needs to be one tangible return on investment, something I can measure. That's why I call it tangible. It doesn't necessarily have to be what I thought I should measure, but it does have to be something that is measurable. And it could be just growth measurement over time. It could be. It doesn't have to be a specific number that I hit, but it has to be something that I can measure over time. I could look at from that point forward on maybe a monthly basis or every 90 days. Whatever it is, I will determine that metric. But it has to be measurable. One thing and two things that I consider to be personally fulfilling but not necessarily tangible. The intangible. I look at it from that perspective because at the end of the day, if doing Facebook lives or doing podcast or whatever it is in marketing that I'm doing, it's an effort and it's costly, it's time consuming. Like all of those things will happen if there's not something personally fulfilling for it. If it doesn't fill a need for me, I won't stick with it. And that's why I measure those other two things and hopefully they do have some outcome measurement at the end of the day. So for me, networking is a huge fulfilling thing. I love people, I'm an extrovert. I love to be around people, I love to interview them, I love to connect with them. And over the last few years, obviously I'm not doing that live and in person as much. So getting it through my podcast has been personally important to me. And the fact that I've created better relationships each year as I've gone through my podcast and I'm refining the right type of people that I want to connect with. And all of that is occurring into this great ecosystem of network that I building through that says that this is not only intangible and personally fulfilling, but it's now measurable. And so I've turned it into something tangible. How many of my guests from last year have become clients and or partners? It's high compared year over year.

And I think this is why it's so important. And I know you talk about it as one tangible and maybe two intangible. And that's one way to look at it. The way I see this may happen for most people and what I think has happened for us time and time again with different podcasts and different businesses we've had even before poditized is that they may all be tangible, but just may not have been the ones you were expecting. You couldn't have predicted it, and maybe that's why you're calling it intangible. But I think that it could be a tangible, measurable result, just not the one you expected.

I'm going to say it may be less direct. So in other words, that I got in the beginning when we first got our speaking, I got a lot of speaking engagements from our podcast. Speaking engagements are not a direct path. I didn't get a listener who bought from us. I got a speaking engagement where I might get someone in the audience who then buys from us. So it's a little less direct and that's why it's harder to have a more direct measurement to it. But it doesn't mean I can't measure the number of speaking engagements I got from that. So you're right. It doesn't mean there's not something measurable. But at the end of the day, those speaking engagements are very personally fulfilling and the results from them build our business. Those things happen. I got my ink column from my podcast.

And you definitely didn't see that coming.

I didn't see that coming at all. I couldn't have predicted that was going to be something at. But then I wrote 400 articles from Inc. Magazine, but I would say that I didn't get a single click through sale that I can attribute to Inc Magazine. But did INC Magazine make it easier to close clients? Absolutely. Did it get me speaking engagements that close clients? Absolutely. Today it still gets me people who will connect on me on LinkedIn because it says in columnist in my profile title. That's it. Like, it has huge indirect benefits, but it's not something that I could have set out and said. That's my goal for doing a podcast.

This reminds me of something which an often misunderstood part of podcasts, that it's a little bit related. This isn't directly what you're talking about, but I do think it's related and it's worth mentioning. Cause I was just speaking with a new podcaster about this morning before we're recording this, which is that they were not wanting to have what they thought were some of their better guests on the very first few episodes because they thought, well, I don't have an audience yet. They don't want to be on my first few episodes because they want to know that I have a big audience. And I'm like, no, you're thinking about this in the wrong way. Your early opportunities, don't undersell that, don't hide the fact that. Or try to apologize for the fact that you don't have an audience yet. Your guests who are gonna be on anywhere in your first 10, 12 episodes or more, that's a unique opportunity for them. And I say, you wanna sell that as they can be one of your premier guests on your show, be in one of your premier episodes, because historically, what happens even when you're 50, 100 episodes down the road, people are gonna listen to your latest episode or two, decide if they like it. And they almost always go back and listen to the early episodes, at least the first 10 or 12, and then they may skip ahead. So you have some in there that maybe not everybody will listen to. But statistically, when we look at the download stats of every show, the earliest episodes have more downloads per episode than any other.

That's right. It always happens. There's always a spike in somewhere in between. You might get a great guest and you get a spike in there. But the first 10 episodes typically have the highest listener base out of all shows.

To me, that is one way that I think a lot of people, they start to assess. They say, oh, I want to look at how many downloads my show is getting, how many people are listening to my episodes or downloading them. At least if you're not able to assess playthrough, and they think that first month, second month, oh, my early episodes, they're not setting the world on fire in the very beginning, you May feel that way, but you've got to give it time and look at it from a different perspective down the road, a couple months and then eventually you'll see this happens with just about every show as long as you stick with it. Shows that pod fit after don't even get to 20 episodes, then you really can't evaluate that for very much. But you stick with it past 25 episodes, you get to 50 and beyond, you're going to see this as almost universally true.

Here's the thing. When we look at return on investment for podcasting specifically, Tom and I have some key areas that we know are pretty common for most people to achieve. There are what we call authority values, authority, return on investments, and like me, getting more speaking engagements, those are less direct. But authority, return on investments, and absolutely growing. Your website is an authority. If you're getting more keywords, you're getting more organic traffic, you're getting all of those. That's an authority builder, what we would call domain authority or web authority. Right. Online authority you're getting that matters. You're not getting it if you're not doing the blog side of it. I'm just going to be really clear. Just because your podcasting doesn't give you website authority doesn't happen. But if you're doing all of it, you are getting it there. That's something that you want to watch, you want to keep it. That's why we put that stat into our potatoes ecosystem, was because we wanted people to be able to watch the value that they were creating, because it wasn't always so front of mind for podcasters. We think listeners as the number one metric, and I can say to you is that listeners is not the number one metric across it. I've never seen a show where having more listeners really got them more. Having the right listeners gets them more every single time. So more just doesn't make more. And that is a huge difference. I see shows with 50 listeners do better than 50,000 listeners.

Really depends on what your goals are for your marketing, which your podcast is one piece of. Now, certainly, 50 listeners may not be viewed as success by some people, but 500,000 listeners may also not be success for some people. It just depends. Now, don't get me wrong, everyone listening and watching this larger number of listeners is usually the goal for most podcasters, no question. And there are lots of good things that come from that. All we're saying is for most people that are podcasting in service to their business or to market and grow their brand, the listeners is only one piece of the puzzle and usually is less beneficial from a tangible perspective than the web traffic that results from your podcast. If you do it correctly, that web traffic actually leads to more listeners. But you get the web traffic first in most cases, right?

Yeah. Web traffic grows, then listener base grows. That's how it typically goes. Because somebody has to find out about your show and the listening apps stink at it.

They really believe bad search engines. And as much as we optimize every new show we launch for that, that it comes up in as many searches, there's always going to be more people searching on Google first. And it's a much, much better search engine that will have people find your podcast than even Apple podcasts or Spotify or any of the listening apps are. That's really unfortunate in this industry.

It really is. Needs to get better. Authority is the number one measurement that I say most people will get first. They get more. But that's the first thing that you'll see grow. If you're doing it right, if you've got a good show, if you're right in your niche, if your brand is on message with the audience that you're trying to seek, if you get that, the authority growth will happen first, that's the easiest return on investment. There's lots of measurements you can take against that. Like we said, you can measure web traffic, you can measure speaking events, you can measure things that are related to that authority growth. And you should see listener growth at a consistent pace. Follow up at some point after 25 episodes. It will be inconsistent prior to 25 episodes. But beyond 25 episodes, you should see some growth trajectory that you can measure. And I don't even want to go into why it said 25 episodes. I think we did a whole podcast episode on that. At some point in the speed you'd brand. We talked about the Magic Number of 25 episodes. If we haven't, we're going to do it. So if for some reason we haven't.

I'm sure we've talked about it.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

Be covered again. But no, it is critical. The point is, you can't just dip your toe in the water of podcasting and expect to measure success. You've got to commit to doing this for a period of time because the benefits build on each other and not only in listenership and audience growth, but in all the other benefits that come from this content marketing that you're doing, which is really what it is.

Authority happens first. Then the second thing that happens is In a business growth side of things, are my leads more qualified? Are my leads closing faster? Like, these are the things that will happen before you say more leads, right? Like, so everybody wants more leads and they're trying to put that first in the whole ecosystem. But you haven't earned the right yet. You haven't gotten through the trust factors, you haven't built the authority. You. You haven't gotten to the stage where more leads actually lead to more. Anyway, you're not there yet. We look at that conversion rate type things like qualifications of the leads, are they more qualified and are they converting faster into a sale? So do I have less conversations with them? That's the third thing. So sometimes it takes a year and a half before we're measuring them more. And that's why I like to look at em in six months chunks or one year chunks, whatever it is, depending on the pace of which you're podcasting. For us, when we started podcasting and we were podcasting five days a week, we could have a earlier review of these things and have them quarterly, and that's what we did. But when you're really only doing one a week or anything like that, you really can't do a review more than every six months because there's not enough of a shift in authority, a shift in trust, a shift in what's happening with your listener base. Until you hit 25 episodes, 50 episodes, a hundred episodes, you've got to hit those metrics.

Just takes a little longer to move the needle. And it is a marathon, folks, not a sprint. What you're saying, Tracy, what you said there was so true. 25 episodes, 50 episodes, whatever period of time that's over really doesn't matter as much. But those are good benchmarks for a volume of content to move the needle in measurable, tangible ways so that you can evaluate.

Look here. I look at this not just in my podcast, but we do this review every six months on social media as well. So our social media marketing is that. And I measure something new different than I measure something that we've been doing and established for a while. So if I'm brand new to TikTok, my measurements for TikTok have a lot more of those two intangible items. Am I having fun doing this? And is it having some kind of indirect benefit like I'm getting some new blood or the different types of people into our funnel that we can experience, have conversations with, start to learn how to message to them, find out if they're right or wrong that might Be. It's measurable, but it may not be measurable from the moment that I discover that it's my thing. TikTok is one thing, now Twitter is another. We quit Twitter from a active standpoint three years ago. It's the happiest place I've ever been. Like, not having to actively post on Twitter made me so happy. I never go into it. I never respond to anything I don't have to. But it took us two years to discover that our audience wasn't there. It seemed like it was as we had a lot more of our.

There was activity going on. You evaluated that activity. Was it producing a tangible benefit for us? And our determination was no. And I think this is very important, Tracy. Everybody needs to determine for themselves. And that's why there are tangible and intangible things to measure here and to.

Evaluate, direct or indirect. You can think of them that way.

Success, roi. And I'm going to just give you a couple examples because all these have come up in the last week with customers. We have. For some of them, the tangibles and the benefits are their podcast is a content marketing machine for their website. Their keyword rankings have grown steadily. And I have one that I was just reviewing this morning climbed over 10,000 keyword rankings on their website. Some of these keyword rankings any entrepreneur, business owner would kill for. It all comes from their podcast content. There's no other content on the website that's being created and that's leading to over 20,000 unique visitors to the website every month. So that's success for one type of individual. Another one has a Facebook group that is the key to their lead generation and success. 14,000 people in this group and growing by 200 members per week. That's another way that they're measuring success from all the content they're creating. And other people have LinkedIn and they're getting more and more connections there. And LinkedIn is where they're wanting to do the most engagement. And their content they're putting out through their podcast is going out on LinkedIn and leading to more people connecting with them. Everybody has a different way of measuring it. And all we're suggesting is you keep an open mind, keep your eyes open, and yeah, have some goals, have some things you want to look at and measure. But be looking at these other things and decide before you assess, hey, the podcast is working for me or it's really not working for me. Maybe I should put a bullet in this thing and be done with it. Before you do that, just make sure you're looking at all of the tangent measurements and benefits may not realize that you're going to.

And that's why I assign a couple of personal ones because I have to say that I actually, I personally really dislike doing lives. I love being here for all of you, like doing this live and live streaming it, that's no problem. But this idea that I gotta pop onto TikTok and do a 30 second live just, I cringe at it. So am I gonna go into that and am I gonna be consistent about it? It's not gonna work for me. So now I have to come up with a model that can. Because it's just not gonna happen. It's just not gonna stay consistent. Understanding those as well, really understanding what's personally driving you. And it's like, oh, I have to create content for my website. I hear that from people. Oh, I gotta write an article. No you don't.

Oh my gosh. And so many people, they'll come to us even if they don't have a podcast yet. I have all these videos, I've been doing all these live streams, I have all this video content and it's still relevant today. Great. Those should all be podcast episodes and should be blogs on your website. Done the right way, you can repurpose all of them and don't necessarily have to do more work.

Yeah, and this is the thing is, look, if this isn't working for you personally, it's not gonna work out in the end. And then you will lose your direct tangible benefit. Figure that out. And that's why measuring that early on and then coming up with that and maybe diving deeper into that. So if my network matters to me, which I told you it does, then I need to dive deeper and maybe develop some greater criteria moving forward into the next six months to get even better people on my show. Right. To dive that in and dial it in and refine it and make it even better for me. When I figure out what's working for me, I need to double down on that and try that for the next six months and see if I can make that even better for me. Because that's going to keep me going, that is going to then keep my tangible benefit moving for me and keep it happening and I'm not going to lose momentum and I'm not going to lose interest. So that's why I tie them together. And the reality is that, look, we get so busy and that's why I say two personal benefits to tan. And my second one, I will tell you. So my first one is building the network. I love that. It's why I won't give up the binge factor. But I love getting to have time with Tom and getting to have some mind share about our ideas on the marketplace and this helps us refine our advice to our clients and do all of that. So if I don't get to have the opportunity to have these conversations with Tom, then it's not going to happen because we don't have time outside of making time during this part of the week to do that. Us building this episode for you, us building the coaching call for you in preparing for that, that's our time to get our mind share in the same place for the business. And so it's actually critical to the growth of the business. But it's also something that is one of my favorite things to do to have mindshare with Tom. What we do really well together and so we carve it out.

Yeah, it is one of the things that we do really well together and that's why we not only been married as long as we have, but we've been working together for so many years and we haven't killed each other yet. It's because we actually both feed off of this sort of shared mind share in figuring out what works and innovating on that to help other people benefit from it too. I think even as, what was it, New Year's Day observed Monday this year, early in January, we spent half the day talking about these sorts of things and brainstorming because it was a day when there wasn't a lot of work going on, not a lot of meetings.

And that's so rare in our normal week that we've had to carve out the time for that. And so that's why, look, I can say not enough of our clients show up on these calls. If we measured it in how many people showed up on the calls. If we use that, we would never have a coaching call. But there are three reasons we keep the coaching call. If we look at the return on investment, the clients that we have that show up on this call succeed more and refer more people than the rest of our client base. So from that, it's like getting to help the early adopters, getting to help the fast movers, getting to help the high refers. And so making that happen, it has a bottom line benefit for us. Even though it's small, they're the ones that do the most for us. Secondly, and some of them are our longest podcasters too, right? Like Scott Carson, who I'm sure. Right, Exactly. So they've been podcasting with us the longest, so they stick around. Longevity number two, it's actually a great part of the sales process when we say we have live calls and live assistant, even though they don't show up to it, it is actually a driver for them to choose us as a hosting company over another one that doesn't even have a phone. It's a really fun fact.

Just for those of you listening to the podcast and you're not hearing this live because you haven't been invited to be on it live because you're not a customer yet, even if you just host with us, you don't have to do the more costly done for you production. Just host on potatoes. You get to be a part of these calls live and get it first. But the other reason, and you're probably gonna mention it, and I'm sorry if I'm giving your thoughts here, is that we do this because we're for a portion of our weekly client coaching call. We're recording an episode of our podcast.

And filling our blog, building our domain authority. And our growth rate is so significantly high that there's no reason for us to stop that. But if we had to set time to sit down and write a blog, it would never happen. Or if we hired somebody to write it for us and it wasn't in our viewpoint and in our voice, it wouldn't also be expressing and helping to close people faster through the sales process. Because everything about how we approach our business, everything we about how we approach podcasting, everything about how we assist you is right there on our website. Actually, anyone could consume that and learn it now. They got to go the long way. They got to read it all or listen to it all. Like, it's a lot more work.

But we also have a really good text search database function among all that content. So if there was something specific you're looking for, you don't have to go hunt through a zillion blogs. You actually just click into one of them and there's a nice search bar. It's really well done. You can look for, hey, have they recorded something about this? Have they talked about that? You'll find it.

Yeah, absolutely. That piece of it is not an intangible. There's a measurement on that. But the fact that we're constantly filling that is the intangible part, right? It's that in that doing it consistently and constantly is rewarded by the digital system, the digital authority system. Us making sure that happens is critical. But too often When a company gets to the size that we are, the people who have the viewpoint, the people who have the brand, the people who have the messaging, the people who have the knowledge aren't participating in the process anymore, and it drops off a cliff. But the mere fact that Tom and I are participating in the process and we're forming new collaborative ideas are intangible that we get from that is really keeping us so that we are serving our clients today, not with stuff that we learned yesterday. That's why we have a rule of three and how we review everything that we do. And this, the beginning of a year is exactly when we really do rethink everything that we do and we make some decisions, because we cannot do it all. We cannot do every single social media platform at 100%, it's not possible. We need to make sure that we are deciding where our time is being best spent and where it should be best spent moving forward. And as we refine this down, we share this with all of our clients. We tell them what we've chosen to do, what changes we've made. I have a meeting today, later today with our social media team, and we're going to look at measurements. We're doing something right on Instagram, and I almost gave up on it last year, and my team talked me into the intangible to the fact that something was going on. And now we are seeing some engagement that we've never seen before. We're going to analyze that, we're going to figure out what it is so we can share it with the community and let you know what we're doing finally on Instagram. And it might not be us at all. It might be something that shifted in Instagram that is now working for us. That's also something to remember that just because you cut it out and gave up on something doesn't mean that you might not want to go back and do an experiment again. I'm about to go back and do an experiment with Twitter spaces, not with Twitter spaces, because it fits into our livestream model that we're going to be adopting coming forward. So I'm actually giving Twitter a chance again. These things I think about as we talk about, because I always like to do something that when I evaluate and say what's working and what's not, when I cut something out, I add something in. That's an experiment.

Well, we have to keep experimenting and testing and figuring out what's working, because it does change. Nothing lasts forever. And we've seen other businesses, I guess I'M thinking in my mind. But I think you can even think of your podcast as a mini business. At least it is a part of most of people's businesses. But we've seen businesses fail who really didn't innovate fast enough, didn't figure out what that next thing was, and they got complacent on one thing that was working usually with social media. I'm thinking of one company in particular with Facebook that was making money hand over fist for a while until Zuckerberg got hauled into Congress to testify and all of a sudden that Facebook paywall came down the way it was back, what, four years ago or five years ago, and their revenue stream got shut off overnight. Obviously a bit of an extreme example and talking about business revenue versus marketing success with your podcast, but I think the same things can apply here, is that not everything's going to keep working. Algorithms shift. Last year we were getting big into LinkedIn newsletters and I still see those working. I think people are getting a lot of value out of LinkedIn newsletters. If you have a big LinkedIn following, that's one way you can use your podcast content to serve people and be found by new listeners. But what is it gonna be this year is Twitter space, Is it? I'm interested to see.

Yeah. And I have to say that if I looking at it from. I haven't. Like I said this afternoon, we'll be diving into the numbers on this, but I'm actually seeing a decline in LinkedIn for the first time in 10 years.

Wow.

And in quality results. And I believe it is all due to the fact that it's been inundated by a bunch of companies, oversel LinkedIn services and too much of the bots coming into the chat. And now it's not working as much.

We may actually at our company be seeing some indicators of that. Actually, I've gotten some in the last 48 hours. In fact, with some things we're doing in LinkedIn, we've had some indicators that things are shifting a little.

Yep, exactly. So this is the case. Like we are always having to be on this and understand it. And if you're not measuring it, if you're not reviewing it, you're not going to be in a place where you can decide, is this worth my time, my money, my energy? And that's really the whole point of our rule of three and marketing roi.

I love it. Tracy, awesome. Thank you for sharing. It's really your vision. I'm jumping on the bandwagon and I really enjoy all of working with you and that mindshare and pushing the edge of our envelope. Thank you for that. But definitely this topic. The rule of three, you had this planned out. I'm like, yeah, okay, which rule three are we talking about today? And then once you told me, like, oh, yeah, sure, boom, let's do it. But I'm glad we can share that with everyone. Hopefully you all got some value out of it. And if you're new to the podcast, this is the type of thing we do every episode.

And we're going to be back this month and going forward with some really cool and interesting topics. We're trying to keep the podcast and this area into some of the more cool, advanced things we're going to be talking about. ChatGPT and a bunch of other things coming up, things that you might be curious about, things that are in the marketing side of podcasting. We definitely found that those were working over last year, and we're going to be diving deep into some of those. And every so often we'll be throwing in some 101s and some things that you might need to get back to basics on because you've lost that in the process. We're definitely going to hit on those, too. Be looking for some cool new episodes coming forward.

All right, thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back next time with another hopefully engaging and valuable episode for you. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed.

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