106: Why You Need to Use Your Podcast to Drive the Rest of your Business Marketing
If you’re listening to this show and reading this blog, you probably have your own podcast (or maybe plan to have one in the future.) And if you’re an online business owner, coach, or small business entrepreneur who spends time (probably at least a couple of hours) planning, writing, and then recording podcast episodes, I need you to answer these questions honestly:
What are you doing with that content after your episode is published? Are you using it to drive the rest of the marketing in your business? Are you using it to point back to your business so you can actually grow your revenue?
If you’re not loving your answer to any of these questions, keep reading. I’m talking about how you can use your podcast to make content creation easier and your marketing simpler by using the content you already create each week to drive your business. Let’s dive in!
The ultimate goal of a small business podcast is to grow your business.
Let’s get this out of the way first: the goal of your podcast and the framework we use at Wild Home Podcasting, is that your podcast exists to grow your business. Not to get sponsors, not to find advertisers, and not to make more unnecessary work for you. It exists to grow your bottom line.
You need a marketing framework for your podcast, so that you have a plan for how to point each piece of content back to your business.
The easiest way to ensure your podcast is doing exactly that is to have a plan and a marketing framework that points back to your business with each piece of content. Each episode you produce should have some tangible call-to-action that can further your business, whether it’s advertise a new course, ask listeners to join an email list, or just share a popular episode on social media or elsewhere. If you want to grow your business with your podcast… you have to talk about your business on your podcast.
You can get off the content-creation hamster wheel by using your podcast to drive all of the other marketing in your business.
So you have your podcast plan. You talk about your business and implement your strategy to grow your business with every episode. Then you record and upload and put up one social media post telling people about it… and then that’s it?
If that’s the extent of how you use your podcast, it’s a huge missed opportunity and frankly, a waste of resources and time. If you think of your podcast marketing framework as a triangle, your podcast is at the top and then every other marketing platform – email, social media, your website – can fall underneath.
Offer snippets of your podcast content in all of those places! Pull bullet points from your most recent episode to create social posts instead of trying to create brand new content! Promote your podcast on every platform, because you’ve already set your episodes up to be a funnel and a driver for your business. Don’t spend all your time creating new ads and new marketing for a dozen channels. Utilize the content you already create to simplify your process and free up time and energy to give yourself more ease in your business.
Your podcast can provide your business with content to help you grow indefinitely!
If you’re reading this and you think it’s a great idea, but you’ve never tried something like this before, I have even better news for you. This doesn’t just work for new content and new episodes. If you have a podcast with multiple episodes, you’re already sitting on a goldmine of content and ideas. Podcast episodes can live forever, which means you can always pull themes and topics from them and can even promote older episodes to grow your business. Don’t underestimate the power of the content you’ve already created.
So that’s it, friends! Time to go plan, create, and repurpose all of your amazing ideas, while making your life easier and your business more robust. You can do it! I’m cheering for you!
If you’re ready to make your podcast the cornerstone of your marketing…
but don’t know where to start, how to repurpose your content, or just how to funnel listeners from your podcast to your business…
then check out our Podcast Strategy Intensive.
We’ll audit your podcast and your marketing, help you create a new individualized marketing framework based on your podcast content, and give you ideas for how to better support your business via your podcast going forward. We can’t wait to help you out. Click here to learn more.
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The Transcript for Podcast Your Business:
106: Why You Need to Use Your Podcast to Drive the Rest of your Business Marketing
[00:00:00] Caroline Hull Every action you take with your podcast is going to do something or not do something for your business. And so talking about connection, talking about email, all of these things, they are all connected. And again, that goes back to my triangle visualization, where your podcast is at the top and everything is connected.
[00:00:22] Are you ready to start a strategic podcast for your business and share your message in a way that feels wildly authentic? This is the place. Welcome to Podcast Your Business, where each week I share the strategy behind having a podcast that helps grow your business. I'm Caroline Hull, podcast manager, strategist and consultants, and I've seen the power of podcasts can have for your business. Let's get started.
[00:00:52] When you publish an episode each week for your podcast, do you have a plan for how you're going to share that information, or do you just have a clear bonus points for anybody who can email me and tell me what that's from is really important. If we're going to spend all of this time on developing a podcast episode, recording, editing, writing, shownotes, creating graphics that we actually understand how we're going to share it and how it's going to work in the grand scheme of marketing, not just the podcast itself, but our business. And so today I want to talk about why you need a marketing framework around your podcast and kind of give you an idea of what that can look like. So that way when you publish your episodes each week, you're doing so with intention and you're sharing to the fullest and really helping it get out into the world. So I want to start with why it's important to understand how you're going to share your podcast.
[00:01:55] So in our world and on this podcast, the goal of our podcast is to help grow our business. And one of the kind of bridges or points that gets lost is when we publish the episode and then what happens afterwards. And a lot of time people fall into the trap of publishing the episode, sharing it once and then never talking about it again. And to me, that is a huge wasted opportunity because podcast episodes, I mean, let's say you record a 20 minute podcast episode, it is full of so much that you can actually break down and share in other places. And this doesn't have to be something that you have planned out, like so strict that it has to be done a certain way. But I really want you to understand that talking about a podcast once is not going to grow your podcast.
[00:02:52] So what I like to do is take the approach of having my podcast episodes be at the very, very top of my marketing. So anything that I am doing, anything that is happening on Instagram, wherever I am showing up in the world, is going to somehow be related to what's going on on my podcast. Most of the time, sometimes not always, just depending on the topic, but for the most part I really do utilize the content to its fullest and I want you to imagine that we're in a room together right now and I have a big whiteboard and I draw a triangle, and at the top of the triangle I'm going to write podcast episode and then down the sides I'm going to write like a blog post, Instagram post. And then from that, I'm gonna write Pinterest. I'm gonna write more Instagram post materials, I'm going to write stories, I'm going to write LinkedIn, post, email, all of the things, right? What I want you to understand by this visualization is that everything is coming from the podcast episode.
[00:03:58] I really want you to get into this mindset because this is going to help you understand how you're going to share your episode each week. And here's the thing. If you are creating aligned content that is not only aligned to your marketing and promo schedule and all of that good stuff, but is also super in touch with your ideal client and what they're struggling with, then it's going to make thinking about your marketing this way so much more impactful. And when you share about your podcast episode now I'm not just sharing about my podcast episode, I'm actually sharing about my business in a roundabout way, right? But I'm using the podcast episode as that vehicle.
[00:04:41] One of my other favorite kind of visualizations, I'm really into visualizations today, so bear with me. I may have like five more for you and I'm kidding, just one more. One of my other favorite ones that I like to share a lot in my strategy sessions, because when we're talking about the strategy behind the podcast, a lot of times we will talk about marketing because it gets really. Confusing, right? Like, how am I supposed to share about this? But also, it seems pretty important that we share about this. And so what I tell people is to think about the customer path and imagine that your podcast is like the crumbs, right? We're leaving crumbs. We're leading people to the half cookie, which may be like, I don't know, an opt in or course or something like that. And then that leads to the big cookie, which is like the one on one consultation, right? That's just an example. It's not necessarily correct and you shouldn't necessarily apply that to every situation is unique and different, but I hope that helps you understand what we're trying to do with the podcast and the content that we're going to be putting out.
[00:05:46] And so when I'm talking about a marketing framework, really what I'm talking about is utilizing our podcast to the fullest and making sure that anything that you share is aligned with and directing people back to the podcast so that know and people can go into your funnel. Right. Okay. So one of the things that I love to do and if you're on my email list, you know, this is I share an email whenever a podcast episode comes out, and if you are not doing this, you are missing a golden opportunity. It's a cool opportunity because not only can I be like Haggle, listen to my podcast, but it gives me a chance to connect with my email list. And I can either talk about something that's going on in my life or I can share something from the episode that I found really impactful. None of what I am saying comes to me naturally. So if you're really wanting to learn more about email marketing specifically, I really want you to go back and listen to episode 102 that I did with Liz Wilcox, and we talked all about like how to send an email about your podcast episode. That's not just bullet points, which you know, is something that I fell trapped into, who like I just got in the habit of just sharing, like, here's what's in the episode I hope you enjoy. And instead actually using that moment to create connection, but related to the podcast. And if you go back and listen to that episode and you're like, I still don't know how to send a really great email, I highly recommend Liz's membership. It's only $9 a month and she sends out email templates and I love to use them for my email newsletters and then my other email that goes out on Thursdays.
[00:07:30] But what I'm learning from her templates is how to create a connection piece, right? And that's exactly what we're doing when we talk about marketing or podcast is creating connection. And again, I've done an episode on creating connection with your audience. That's episode one and one. Do you notice how this is all tied together? Like, this is not an accident or mistake. All of this is tied together, and every action you take with your podcast is going to do something or not do something for your business. And so talking about connection, talking about email, all of these things, they are all connected. And again, that goes back to my triangle visualization, where your podcast is at the top and everything is connected. And it's really important to get into that mind frame. So that way, again, you can use your podcast to the fullest, right?
[00:08:25] So that's one way that I share every week is through email. The other way is and you can decide what this means for you, but where do you like to show up every day or every other day or whatever the thing is? Is it LinkedIn? Is it Pinterest? Is it Instagram? For me, it's Instagram. And so for me, what that means because I don't know about you, but having to sit down and write posts every day, create a real creative carousel, I mean, that all gets real frustrating and really tiring really fast. Except that I published an episode this week and I have show notes and I can pull all kinds of stuff from the show notes and from the episode and create Instagram posts. Notice I said posts because again, the trap that people fall in is they only share it once. So next time you publish a podcast episode, I want you to think about one or two things that you talked about in that episode that you can create either an Instagram reel or a carousel from.
[00:09:30] And here's the bonus points part. When you share that thing, right, you make sure that you talk about where it came from. So not only like sharing in the caption the information, but also sharing. If you want more of this kind of thing. Go listen to this episode and making sure that when you are directing people back to your episodes, that we're directing them to our website with our player, but that we also make sure these links are in other places. So your bio like, wherever people can go and click. Right. And so now creating content doesn't feel like we're on a hamster wheel. Because really, the only piece of content that you have to create each week is your podcast episode.
[00:10:14] And I will literally plan my content this way. So I've used a spreadsheet, I've used Asana. You can use whatever tool you like. Right now I am loving air table and I like it because I can click and open and take notes and all these things. But one of the things I do so I have a calendar and each week I put on all the posts that I want to do, not necessarily like what the Post is going to be, but I'll literally say, I'm going to do a reel this day. I'm going to do this, this day, that kind of thing. And I have my podcast episode at the front, right? Because my podcast episodes go live on Monday. You do not have to go live on Monday. This is just an example. From there I can really see as the week goes on how I'm relating my content back to my podcast episode. And listen, if I feel stuck, I will literally just go pull up my show notes and look at the bullet points that my show notes writer wrote and see if there's one that I can create a post from or do a quick reel on.
[00:11:14] And nine times out of ten, actually ten times out of ten, I don't even know why I downplayed that ten times out of ten. When I go look, there is definitely something there that I can use to create a post. And it may even be just expanding on something that I already talked about in the podcast episode or explaining something a little bit more in depth if I want to. And that's really great too. And that can be used across the board, that can be used on Pinterest, LinkedIn, like I said, all the places and I want to say to like a marketing framework for your podcast is not limited to certain places or apps or anything. It really is about where your ideal client likes to hang out and where you feel comfortable showing up. You know, where do you get excited to hang out and be? And for me, that's email, that's Instagram, and that's literally all I do. The rest of it is reshared by clicking a button somewhere else. And we've just recently started really working on Pinterest and I hope one day to talk more about that on the podcast because I think Pinterest is some kind of untapped goldmine that I don't understand. And then of course, you can also think about like, how does YouTube work into this and all of those things they can, but it all works the same, right? Because what we're doing is using our podcast as our main piece of content. So my encouragement to you after this episode is to go sit down and create a schedule for yourself. When do you feel like you can show up? Where do you feel like you can show up and maybe just experiment with a past episode and look at that past episode and think about other pieces of content you could have created that could have directed people back to the podcast episode.
[00:13:05] And what's cool and this is like advanced podcast marketing. What's cool is your podcasts are there forever. So if down the road you're talking about a topic on Instagram, on your email, wherever you may be, and you remember, Hey, I have a podcast episode now you can direct people back to that podcast episode. Oh my gosh. Bonus points, right? So really thinking about your schedule, thinking about and reminding yourself how you're going to use your podcast as your main piece of content and then letting everything drip down from there. And now all of a sudden you have a framework for marketing, not just for your podcast, but also something that really supports the marketing for your business. I hope this episode was super helpful for you today. I have been talking about this topic a lot in my strategy sessions. We've been doing podcast launches and refreshes and this always comes up and so I'm really glad that I got to share it with you today. If you have any questions about this, I will definitely be chatting more about it over on Instagram at Wild Home Podcast. And so come and check out my post and comment. Let me know if you have any questions. I would love to connect over there and I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you for listening to podcast Your business. For more podcasting tips, follow us on Instagram at @WildHomePodcast. If you're ready to launch up level or grow your podcast, head to wildhomepodcasting.com to get started today.
