Why Podcasters are Obsessed with Actionable Podcast Content

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Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. And today we're going to talk actionable podcast content. Actionable content for your podcast, whatever way you want to talk about it.

And we're going to talk about what it means, what actionable content is, and then some examples of some different kinds of actionable content you can create and why, of course, you. You really want to do this?

Well, first things first, I want to talk about what it's not.

That sounds good.

Yeah, actionable content. It's not advertisements. It's not what we think of in our mind. Call to action. Yes, we are calling people to take an action, but it's not that salesy call to action thing. This is not what actionable content is. Right. Actionable content is something that gets engagement. That's what we're talking about, ways in which you can get more engagement with your content that you're creating. Your blog posts, your podcasts, your videos, your social shares. It works for all types. But there's some nuances to it.

Definitely are. And why do we want to get actionable content? Right. Is because here's the thing. You're putting out podcast audio, you're putting out videos. Maybe some of you are, maybe you're recording it as a video, but you do not know who those listeners are, who those viewers are. You don't know. Apple does not tell you anything about who your actual listeners are. And you don't even know how many subscribers you have on the different platforms.

No. This is a question, a rookie question I get from someone who's new to podcasting. They always ask, it's like, well, where are my subscribers? I was like, well, they don't belong to you, right? So how are you going to get people to take action? Because when they take action, now they belong to you. When they engage with you, they now belong to you. Because now you know who they are. You're starting to communicate with them. In most cases on most social media platforms, the minute they engage with you, you're able to see their profile, you're able to see information on you. You can get them to now subscribe to your Things like. That's the next goal, right? Getting them to move to your Facebook page, your Instagram account, friend, follow whatever it is that you're looking for. Yeah.

And so this is also. We're going to talk about not only where you put actual content, but where that actual content is going to bring people to. Because you don't want to leave it on. You don't want to leave them on social media. You want to leave them on the podcast app or send them directly from your podcast episode, that app directly to somebody else's website or some other platform, because that just helps that other website, that other platform, right? So a few things to think about with actionable content.

But the thing about it is that we want to breed loyalty and trust, right? That's like our goal with engagement is to build trust over time, right? And so some of that turns into loyalty, liking and knowing you and wanting to get more from you. And we find that if we do it really well, then what happens is that we get to a stage at which people just ask to buy our stuff. They ask us, where can I get more from you? Where can I have that? Can I have a call with you? Like, they start asking before we put it out there. That's the ultimate goal, right? That they're already out there and they go, ah, I know this person. I want to start a podcast, and I see Tom and Draci all the time. I'm going to go seek them out and ask them my questions. Because they're the source, right? But it's also because when they have a higher level of engagement, they have more likelihood to take that bigger call to action that you're looking for that purchase, right? So we want to have that engagement going on. So what's happening here is that we have a certain trust factor, okay? That takes time. Trust is not built instantly. Trust is built over time with consistency, constancy, which you guys hear us talk about all the time, being consistent and constant with your show, with your posting, with your. That's the number one thing you can do. Because if I show up for you every week like clockwork, what's gonna happen is that you just trust me because you know I will be there, right? So that in and of itself helps. Just build that right there. So that's the first thing. The second part is serving. And some of you don't love that. You want to come out there and you want to just use your podcast to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. And I hear it. I hear it all the time from a Lot of gurus and other people out there going, no, there's no reason you can't sell from episode one. I can tell you. It erodes trust over time. It does not build trust at the same depth, same level, same deepness that gets them to say, I don't have any qualms about what you're charging. I'm just going, right? I'm just going to purchase from you. That kind of trust happens because I'm showing that I deeply care about you as my listener, you as my audience. I deeply care about you out there. And because of that, I'm showing you that I care more about you than. Than I do about selling and doing this pushy sales thing. So that you have to do now, you earn the right to sell. You absolutely do over time, right?

Eventually you do earn that right. No question.

Right.

You may be wondering, well, why is actionable content really important right now? I would say it's actually more important right now than it has been in the past. It's always been important, but even more important right now, especially with a lot of people out of work, maybe sales are down for your business right now. You know, there's just. There's a lot of nervousness, a lot of uncertainty out there in the market, but there is a deep hunger for human connection right now and a deep hunger for people to learn and to be prepared for coming out of this time. So creating actionable content now and serving now, as Tracy said, is so important for later this summer when people are going to be ready to take action themselves and, you know, spend or seek consulting or courses, whatever it is you may have, right?

The trust you earn today from service, from serving, with great actionable content will translate into sales. July, August, September, right? So it takes time for you to build that up. So building up that platform. So I talk about this all the time when I give my webinars and I give my trainings and everything is that, you know, there's an accelerator process to having built a good platform. And that platform underneath you, your website, your blog posts, your podcasts, your videos, like all of that is built into that platform, right? It's a demonstration of your value, your authority, your. Your how much you care, how much you serve. It's a demonstration of that. So if everything out there is sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, and not serve, serve, serve, then sell, right? Like, if it's that, then they see the bulk of what you do is serving them, and then you have opportunities for them to get more, accelerate, do things. So what we Find, though, is over time, that platform has an acceleration factor. So the more content you have in that, the more engagement people are getting, you're putting out there. And the more engagement you're getting from the audience, from people that they do know, the more likely you are to get a higher level of sales and a faster traction into whatever new thing you want to introduce. So this is the problem that I hear from so many of you, go out there and are like, I just built my course.

I just wrote my book and it's launched and it's on Amazon.

But where was engagement before that? Where were you building with the audience? Where were you letting them know? And it's not about my book is coming out. It's not about that. It's about here's a great story that I couldn't wait to share. I can't wait for my book to come out. So I'm sharing this with you right now. Did you hear that? I did mention I have a book coming out, but I didn't do it in a salesy way that says, here's my link, go buy it, go sign up now. That's not actionable. But here I tell a story. What do you think? What's about it? Like, I'm asking these kinds of questions and I'm putting content out there with the opportunity for engagement. Do you think I should include more stories in these books? Wouldn't that be great if you did that back when you were writing it now you would have this community built up who's excited to read this book? They can't wait for it. Excited to take your course, to be your beta testers. Right? They're all hanging on that because they engaged with you and they felt that they had input and they were getting sneak peeks along the way too, that were in service to them because you weren't going to just hold out till you could make nine bucks off of them or whatever. The book sells for eight bucks today, whatever they are.

Not only that, Tracy, I think a lot of people create a book or build a course, create their amazing website that may have all sorts of content on it that is there to serve people, but they create it. And then once they put it out there, they wonder, well, why isn't anybody taking it? Why isn't anybody communicating with you? Why aren't they engaging with it? Why aren't they buying the book? Well, you can't just build it and expect people to find it just because it's there. You know, that's really what the content.

Is all about, you know, this is the thing. It's like, look, when we do products that we used to put in Costco, Costco had tremendous trust, right? And it was a shopping destination source, right? Social media is not like that. Social media is not a shopping destination source. I'm not here to say I want to buy a book. I want to buy a course. If I want to look something up like that, I'll probably Google it or go to Amazon, right? You know, I'm going to do those things where I'm going to go out to the place that I expect to do those in. Not here, not here on social media. So if we're looking for those actionable contents, it's not on podcasts either. When I'm looking for podcasts, I'm looking for edutainment. Something I can learn, but something I can be educated in. I'm not looking to be sold to. I'm not signing up for a webinar. So keeping that in mind, like, that's some of the basics there. Now I want to go into. Tom is like, how do you really create something that's really actionable? And here's some tools that we found. So we've been testing out social media posts for about eight months, nine months, something like that. We've been testing them out with different types of posts for the podcast. So we test out Instagram audiograms. So for those of you who don't know what an audiogram is, instead of using the video, because maybe you don't record a video, you have a sound wave that goes around, something that's going on the screen that's creating a faux video and then captions. So it's creating a video with all of that that we've been testing out those. We test out different types of posts, like the quality of posts. So quote ones, as you guys know, ego bait ones, as we've talked about before, ones where we're promoing somebody else, you know, steps like things like our instructions, like 1, 2, 3, how you do stuff.

Well, see, yeah, that's a really good one that I think a lot of you can do. Obviously, if you're working with us on your podcast anyway, and you're having us create audiograms for you, you have those. You certainly, if you're doing interview episodes, you have ego bait graphics. Your guest is being incentivized to share that with the email they get the day your episode publishes. But now, Tracy, you're getting into other things that you can create additionally that will serve your business and serve your podcast. And I agree with you. Giving people a step by step process of how to do something create content around that. That's not only something you're talking about but it's a step by step process. It's something actionable they can go and do.

Right. So keep in mind these are what we're talking about with a step by step process is a static post. Of course you should do videos and you could do them but if you're doing a static post, just an image, like an image on Instagram or something on Pinterest. Don't have more than three steps. Three steps. Like it's otherwise it's just too busy. We see a lot of them that have all these multi steps but I can tell you they don't get the high engagement. Three to five steps. If you could squeeze in small but keep them really short.

Five at most.

Five at most. Yeah. And if you're going to do a video, you still should keep it to maximum of 7. Like that is like. And that would need to be an hour long video to do seven. So just keeping that in mind so you can videos just to step on that. Videos of any kind, including audiograms, get four times more engagement than any other types of post. Engagement, not four times more viewers. Keep that in mind. Four times more engagement. I think that is because they see you live, they think oh, I can talk back to you. Audiograms don't quite get that same that they still get a good boost in there. Especially if you use the Watch party feature in Facebook or something like that where you're actually streaming the audiogram live, which you can do from using things like we've talked about on the show before, repurposed IO or other things where you can stream out existing videos and do them like a live stream. So keeping that in mind, you want to do that. It's good for you, right? Try to create engagement by doing that. Starting a watch party. I find that the watch parties get the most engagement. So when you see that word starts, send a wave. Send a wave to the people you don't know. Send a wave to the people you do know. Say something. Try to spur the engagement on. So that's one of the reasons why I don't love creating the Watch party at the exact moment that I'm doing the live stream. I like to do it at two different times. And so that way I can watch the Watch party later and have a different level of engagement and have almost like sides. They realize that I'm Actually there I didn't do just set it for watch a party. There's a real human being there. Oh, it's the host, it's the person who is on. You can do that as well and think of it as answering additional questions as they come up. Right. Being available to do that. And so that's always a really good way. So videos and step by step processes, those are two of the major ones that we have found over time. The other one that we have is that, and this is really targeting very specific needs and profit.

Who you think your audience or listeners or. And hopefully that's similar to who your target customer is. Right. What are their needs, desires, their pain points and what can you do to help them take action to meet those needs?

Right. So we've had a few people who have mentioned like, and this is more not our clients, but office side where shows are going dark right now, where there are some shows that are going dark, especially in the real estate world, which seems completely odd to me because now if there's not any time at which I'm sitting here thinking that my house is too small, like I need to get a new one, right. I have plenty of time to get on Zillow and start thinking about this. This is a time to not be dark about my show. This is a time to be out there pushing out and saying, hey, when you can walk outside and go see a house, when you're out of sequestering or out of whatever you might be in, now is the time to go find the right home so that if this happens again, you have the space you need. You have private office area like you now need. This is a perfect time to build trust so that those sales come later in the year by targeting exactly where they are right now. But if you let your content lag, what they see is, oh, you weren't there for me when I needed you most, wouldn't that be sad?

Or there's just lack of engagement and lack of interest. Out of sight, out of mind. Right. I mean, this is a time where I would be putting out more content and doubling down on, you know, serving my community. And we actually are seeing a lot of people doing that. We had Jesse call a business done differently last week. He normally does a weekly show. He put out one every single day of the week last week. That was very timely. Talking about things that are relevant to what we're all experiencing in the economy in our society today. That's relevant to business. And the subject of his podcast. So there are people who Recognize this opportunity. Not only that listenership is way up. And what was it in Nielsen or Edison Research last month came out and said that the largest percentage of podcast listeners, more than 60%, are listening from home. And that was before, for the stay at home.

That was Edison. Edison, yeah. And it was in their 2020 State of the audio content. It wasn't just podcasts. But yeah, most of the listening was happening at home before this and now it still is. It's happening on your computer, not just on your mobile phone. So you have lots of ways to engage. So keeping in mind, like there are links and other things. So right now we have some links to give you. So Tom's going to copy and paste them into the various devices and everything, and I'll copy and paste them into the Watch party as soon as we're done here. So you guys can all have those. But we've got some links for some posts that you can see. So you can go check out some of our Instagram posts. We've got one on booking great guests that has had high engagement that has that every time we circulate it, it gets an additional level of circulation on that. Making your LinkedIn profile stand out. I did an interview with someone and encapsulated ways to make your LinkedIn profile stand out. So that's really great. And the best part about that is for me, because I was based on an interview, every time I do share it, that person shares it as well. Or every time the engagement happens, they're getting the engagement. So you can get your guests involved by sharing their content and their information and boosting them in that process. And then we have one, we have a post that's actually called Encourage Engagement and it's doing really well, too. So we're going to share those posts with you. We'll copy and paste them as soon as we're done with this. And you guys can all check that out and see what's working and try them, click through them, check them out, see what we've done here. See the formatting, see the engagement that's going on by looking directly into the post.

And really, there's no end to the kind of actionable content you can create. Anything that gets people off of their app and onto your website, that could be to get something of value, ideally for free, initially. A white paper, a chart, an infographic. It could be for them to ask a question of you, you know, offering your podcast. Hey, you can go to my website, you can ask a question. There are ways to do that where you can actually ask. They can ask a question verbally and be recorded. So you can use their question in your podcast and you're not doing it live, but they can ask a question and you can answer it. There's, you know, all kinds of ways to create actionable content, but just keep in mind it may be unique for your business, it may be nothing we've even mentioned here, but it is something that you need to do that's relevant to your subject matter and going to, like Tracy said, meet a need for your target listener, your target customer, all kinds of engagement opportunities, no bad ideas. It's just a matter of choosing one, taking action, creating it.

You know, just this thing. I want to reiterate the thing we said at the very beginning, that the trust that you build now, the service that you build now, is how you're going to get the sales later. This is what we know from being on and off the marketing roller coaster. And so we talked about this, we just did a couple weeks ago on Marketing Money Mixer Juliet and I, about the marketing roller coaster. Right? And the marketing roller coaster is that you get really, really, really, really busy and you get great clients. And because you did all of that wonderful marketing that you were supposed to do, you hit the peak and you're like, I've got all these great clients, I've got all these great sales, all of a sudden. And then you step back and you slow down on your content, and the next thing you know, you find out, wow, I didn't have as many clients this month as I had last month. What happened? It's your responsibility and be consistent and constant and show up to keep that steady growth happening. Now, we can't always do it like a launch promotion, which is highly intense and everything. So we want to just make sure that it's at a pace at which we can handle it. Posting consistency about how often we go out there. And so if you can't do every day of the week, that's okay. But keep up your once a week and don't fail on that, because that is going to build you the trust you're going to need to be able to get the sales later. So you're going to come in the summer and you're going to find out you don't have sale.

You know, it's easy to get caught up in when you have done all that marketing and you, like Tracy said, you have a bunch of clients and you have a lot of work to do and you get busy doing that work and you really might not remember. You might forget about, you know, doing the marketing. It's certainly not your highest priority now. Highest priority is delivering for that client that's paying you to deliver. Right. But if you don't take that time and do it consistently, like Tracy said, if you don't market, you're going to find yourself in that steep dive on the marketing roller coaster.

Yeah. And then just the last thing I want to say, because we're talking actionable content, is that making sure that you really understand what that means for you and for your audience. Right. Actionable content, again, is not something promotional, is not something that goes out there and is saying, here's my podcast, listen. That is not action, that is pushing messages out there. This is, here's my podcast, here's why you should listen, and here's the questions that I have for you or here's the lessons learned in this podcast. Now, if you want to take further action, you can listen. Right. Making sure that you're pulling out those wonderful actionable details from what you put out there. Don't waste what's buried. They're not going to give it a shot. When they think you're just pushing a show, they want to know what's in it. That's worth it to them. So demonstrate that by showing them that in your actionable posts.

All right. Well, I think there may be some other things I've seen people making actionable content from. I've seen a lot of this in recent weeks, even months, is people who, depending on your niche, they're doing like a seven day challenge. Right. That's another great way to obviously be creating content that's actionable. Make sure it's done in a way where people are really not only taking action on their own, but engaging with you. I think a lot of these programs do that and I think they can be worthwhile depending on your niche.

Yeah, you make sure that people are sharing back the results, are doing these things or sharing it with others. Right. Those are the actions you want them to be taking in the process. But you know, be careful with the paid seven day challenges and other things right now. They're not working really well. I'm just gonna.

Yeah, no, I wasn't suggesting paid. You definitely you want to be serving first and that seven day challenge, you know, people that participate, that can lead in the future to lead generation for a paid program.

Right. And you could do that if you also have this time constraint. But you happen to have a free week that you were scheduled to go to our conference and you're not going now. So your calendar is a lot more open than it was supposed to be. Why not create a seven day challenge for yourself to go out there and put out actionable content each day and do different messaging than you normally do. And so go on and take that and try and make sure that you're thinking about that target audience making action happen in engagement way, not in a salesy way. And then go forward and build that trust over time so that they will become your clients next month or the month after that.

All right, So I hope this is very helpful to all you that are watching and listening to this. You know, we'd love to hear from you about what other kind of actionable content you have.

We'd like to hear you engage. Right? So don't forget you can go to the blog post for this episode. If you're listening to this on our podcast feed you'd brand. And so you can go to FeedYourBrand Co and you'll be able to see those links to those Instagram posts that I talked about. You'll be able to see what we're talking about in terms of creating actionable content and you'll be able to model us. Right? Because that's always the best way when you can model someone else. And we would love for your engagement anywhere on social media, dyourbrand, you can engage with us and tell us what you think of our posts.

All right, so we'll be back next time with another great episode on Feed you'd Brand. This has been Tom and Tracy. We'll see you next time.

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