122: 5 Ways to Align Your Podcast Content with Your Business
When deciding what to talk about on your podcast, recording whenever you want about whatever you want isn’t the way to go. Being strategic about how your content ties back to your business is key.
Today, I’m sharing five tips for making sure that your listeners are getting the most from your podcast content. With a bit of planning, your podcast can be a viable tool for driving new followers and new clients.
#1 | Tie your content to your marketing and sales calendars.
Listen, I get it. It feels icky to be super salesy or only talk about your offers on your podcast. And fortunately, that’s not what I’m suggesting! I’m just talking about creating content that is related to and can lead to whatever you’re selling at a given time. If you have a strategy intensive offer coming up on your sales calendar, talk about the importance of strategy and business planning on your podcast (instead of maybe social media or marketing or other topics.) By following your sales calendar, you can make podcast planning easier on yourself – and make your podcast a better lead and sales generator for your business.
#2 | Understand your buyer’s journey.
The people who purchase products or services from you – where are they finding you? What level are they in their business? What problems are they looking for you to solve for them? Understanding this will allow you to tailor your content and calls-to-action more effectively. For example, if your audience is work-from-home moms looking to you to help them become more efficient with their working time, offering advice and a workbook on how to get started in a career right out of college probably won’t be the most useful to them. But a free Google doc that’ll help them time block more efficiently and offering that as a download on your episodes would be a great solution. Thinking through what your audience needs and where they are is going to make your content planning so much easier and more effective.
#3 | Think strategically about which guests you invite on your podcast.
Obviously we want guests who can bring value to our audience. BUT we also want guests who will have thoughtful, meaningful conversations with you too. It’s your podcast. You want your voice to be heard, even if you have a guest. Sitting back and just asking question after question isn’t going to be as helpful or as interesting as some back and forth which can offer even more insight for your audience and allow you to show your expertise as well. Don’t overlook this when scheduling your guests!
#4 | Interview your clients!
This is such an easy, high-value option, and it’s wild that more of us aren’t doing it. Bringing a client on allows you to hear their buyer’s journey directly, including where they were when they found you and how they’re doing now, and also offer them (and your audience) a quick strategy or brainstorming session to help them as they go forward. Your audience gets to hear directly about what it’s like to work with you, you get to showcase your expertise, and your client gets valuable one-to-one time with you. It’s a win all the way around.
#5 | Share what you’re working on.
Share your programs, your services, whatever you have on offer! It doesn’t have to be salesy, and it doesn’t have to be the #1 focus in your episode, but your authority won’t mean much for your business if listeners don’t know how they can work with you. Give them a clear path. Tell them their options. Make sure you add a link in your show notes. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to be available, otherwise you’re missing a huge conversion opportunity.
And that’s it! Go forth and podcast, friends! You can do it!
Are you looking for a partner who can help you align your podcast content to your business? Check out our Podcast Strategy Intensive, where we help you focus your content and get the most out of your small business podcast, or sign up for a Podcast Refresh, where we help you strategize and then implement all the great ideas we come up with together!
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The Transcript for Podcast Your Business:
122: 5 Ways to Align Your Podcast Content with Your Business
[00:00:00] Caroline Hull Don't be afraid to share what you're working on. There is no reason why you cannot share your programs, your services, the things that you are doing on your podcast. If you don't talk about it, nobody is going to know about it, right? And it doesn't have to be salesy. This isn't like, you know, an infomercial on TV, but sitting down and integrating it, incorporating it into your episodes I think is so important and such a missed opportunity.
[00:00:33] 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 Hall, podcast manager, strategist and consultant, and I've seen the power of podcasts can have for your business. Let's get started.
[00:00:59] When you plan your podcast content, are you keeping in mind your sales and marketing calendar year by year journey, the value that you're adding to your listeners? Or are you just picking topics that you want to talk about? Trust me, we all do that. So today I want to give you five ways that you can tie your content back to your business. If you listen to last week's episode last week, I talked about business schools in your podcast and how to have your podcasts basically help you work towards your business goals or how to integrate it, right? And one of the things that I talked about was the importance of having a content schedule. And this is why because when we start thinking about our content for our podcasts, it's really fun to just, you know, record episodes when you feel like it and have on all your best friends. But you also want to make sure that the content, the actual meat of your episodes is tying back to your business and is aligned with the strategy of using this podcast to grow my business, right? We want to make sure that we're not just recording episodes for the sake of recording episodes, but recording episodes that are going to bring value, right, and share our values and share what we're about. Even if you have a guest and we're going to talk more about that.
[00:02:23] So today I'm going to share five ways specifically that you can tie your content to your business. So get out your notepad, get out your pen, Let's take some notes. And as a reminder, if you have any questions about anything that we talk about today on the podcast or that we even talked about last week, you can head to my Instagram and I will be posting a stories asking for questions from the episode. Be sure to ask them, because I will be taking a deep dive into those on my close friends training for the week. So let's start with the first way.
[00:02:57] One of the biggest mistakes that I see podcasters making is not tying their content to their sales and marketing calendars. Oh my goodness. Okay, so this seems like a no brainer, but I think when we start to think about doing that, we get a little icky feeling because we're worried that we're going to be too salesy on our podcast. And we don't want to do that because our podcast is for creating connections. I totally get it. So this isn't about being salesy. This is about bringing in content that relates to what you're selling or doing. So let me give an example. When we are doing a big push for launches, we may do episodes that are specifically about launching a podcast.
[00:03:37] Right now, I'm really trying to build up and share my expertise and on how to create a strategy for having an online podcast. This is all tying in to some offerings we're working on, and so that's where my episodes are really focused right now. And this isn't like a very hard process, you know? Let me share a little bit how I plan this out. So I have a basically I have a couple of Google Docs and one of them has my themes for each month, kind of based on our sales cycle. So when do we usually have new clients coming in for management? When do we usually have new clients coming in for lunches or refreshes? And I've actually written those down in a calendar, you know, just looking at the past few years and our sales, you can also do this with like, okay, I know that in November I'm going to launch this program.
[00:04:28] So at the end of October, I want I want to make sure I relate content to that. So literally just having the whole year mapped out. From there I say, okay, what are my content pillars and how do they relate to that? And don't worry, I am going to bring someone on to talk about that at some point, but we want to think about the values that we have, the things that we love to talk about and have kind of some themes, right? And so I have these themes and then how those relate to my sales process. And then from there, I literally plan out each month's worth of content. And I start with the week and thinking about what the theme is for that wheat and what the podcast episode is going to be. And then from there I'm able to create everything else. So I have a Google doc that has major overview and then I have a Google doc for each month, and then that all goes into my tracker, which is a sauna. And I maybe changing this up a little bit just because we are adding the close friends element. So there's a lot more that goes into that. So I may be going into an hour table or Tunis. I haven't decided yet. Maybe tweaking my asana boards some a little bit. Not sure yet, but that's kind of my process. So starting with like that big picture of my business and what my business is doing and then going from there.
[00:05:41] The second way is to know your buyer journey. So when we created our buyer journeys, it was probably done before we even had a podcast. And now that we have a podcast, I think it's a really good exercise to go back and think about your buyer journey, how they find you, where they find you, the different levels they're at, and where does your podcast fall into that. Because we do not want to necessarily be sharing content, that is for people who are at the end of our buyer's journey. If that's not who's listening to our podcast, and if you're not sure who's listening to your podcast. Like, do a couple surveys, ask on Instagram, send them an email survey, figure out where people are, why they're listening, that kind of thing. And that can really help you determine where they are in the buyer's journey.
[00:06:29] How this is important to tying content to your business is because we want to make sure that the content is relevant to the people in our buyer's journey. That's also going to help us to know what called actions to use and like what what links are we going to give them? What what are we going to ask them to do? You know, if they're at the beginning of the buyer's journey, we may not necessarily ask them to book a call, but we may ask them to download this this free checklist, right, or something like that. Knowing your buyer's journey is really, really important. And I just have a graphic that I created in Canva, and I love it because it's cute and colorful, but I like to look at it and updated every once in a while. But just that exercise of sitting down and writing out what the buyer's journey is is really, really helpful. It's one of those things where we think we know it until we sit down and actually write it out. So definitely take the time to do that.
[00:07:17] Is your podcast Growing Your Business? And if you don't know the answer to this question or you think the answer might be no, it's time to take an audit. Your podcast can be so much more than a hobby. It can be a way for you to attract your ideal client and establish yourself as an authority. But you need a strategy. And the best place to start is with an audit. And I have a free guide that helps you perform an audit of your podcast, gives you my top tips for having a strategically aligned podcast and a playlist of podcast episodes. For more insight, you can head to Wild Home podcasting dot com to download your free audit guide today.
[00:07:55] Number three. So be mindful about the guests that you invite on your podcast. We want to make sure that our interviews that we're doing is bringing value to our listeners as it relates to how they relate to you. But we also want to make sure that we're bringing in guests that we can have really meaningful conversations with, so that way our listeners can hear us as well in the interview. One thing I really just do not love for business podcasters are interviews where they sit and ask a question and then the guest gives a long answer and then they ask another question. The guest is a long answer for me. I feel like there's just so much value when I can sit down in an interview and have a really great conversation about something that I'm working on, my clients are working on and how it relates back to podcasting.
[00:08:44] A really good example of this is my episode with Melanie Lea, and we will put the link in the show notes for that. So I brought her on because we've been working together, but the thing we've been working on is something that a lot of my clients are working on as well. So we were able to have a really neat conversation about it and how it relates to podcasting. And to me that is so much more valuable than just bringing on a guest for the sake of bringing on a guest, because there's still so much of me in that interview. And I think that's really important for people to hear. It gives them a really good sense of how you work with people, how you talk to people and what you what you value. There's nothing like having conversations, right, to to educate people. And so that's why I think being mindful about the guests you bring on is so important.
[00:09:33] The fourth way to tie content to your business is kind of related to number three, but interview your clients on your podcast. Why are we not interviewing our clients? This is one of my top tips. Bring on clients, interview them about their journey, where they are in their journey, how they got there, maybe even help them with a small problem on your podcast. This isn't a sit down and tell me all the things that are wonderful about me in my program. This is a let's sit down and. Talk about, like what led you to working with me and, you know, what are the things we've worked on together and how have we gotten this client to where they are now? I think this is so, so cool. I just love this because it gives your listeners a way to hear how you work with people and how you work with clients. And it also like gives your listeners, I guess is that kind of proof, right, that we use the term social proof? So I don't know, podcast proof, I don't know what you would say, but it gives them a concrete example to refer to of results. A But B, just how you are with somebody and how you work with somebody. And I think that's really important. I know for me when I'm thinking about investing in someone and I find out they have a podcast and they interviewed a client, I will immediately go listen to that. I will go find it, listen to it, because I love to hear them interacting with their clients and talking about what they went through together. I think it's so valuable.
[00:10:57] And the last way to tie content to your business, at least in this episode, is don't be afraid to share what you're working on. There is no reason why you cannot share your programs, your services, the things that you are doing on your podcast. If you don't talk about it, nobody is going to know about it, right? And it doesn't have to be salesy. This isn't like, you know, an infomercial on TV, but sitting down and integrating it, incorporating it into your episodes I think is so important and such a missed opportunity. It's one thing to build authority, but that authority means nothing if we don't give people a place to go after they've established that we know what the heck we're talking about, Right? And so making sure that we are sharing a clear path for them. And, you know, if they're struggling with something and you have an answer to it and it is a program to join, go ahead and talk about it. Go ahead and share it. Share the link.
[00:11:56] Again, this isn't a 30 minute infomercial, but there are ways to very suddenly tie this stuff in and to talk about what you're doing. If you're worried that if you do that, it won't make your podcast evergreen. That's just something I've never really worried about because I feel like if somebody found me three years from now and they clicked on a podcast episode and I was talking about my management services or my launch package and yeah, maybe it's changed a little bit four years from now, but it's still relatively the same. The offerings may be a little different, but they will still know like, Hey, this is what she did, this is how she worked, that kind of thing. I'm going to go ahead and click over. And if they can't find the thing I was talking about, they're going to find other things to talk about. You know, another way to kind of get around this is to do ads in your own episodes, and then you can switch them out or take them out, that kind of thing. But the important point I really want to drive home right now is that as business owners, we have got to share what we're doing on our podcasts because the podcast is there to work for our business. And so we want to make sure that the people listening know what it is exactly that we do.
[00:13:06] So these are five ways to tie your content to your business. Again, we are going to be taking a deeper dive into one of these five ways on my close friends list on Instagram. So if you want to join that, just head over to Instagram. There is a pen to post on my profile and you'll see in big letters close friends. And if you click on that, it'll tell you exactly what you need to do to join my list. I would love to have you. It's a great place for getting mentorship, discussions and many trainings, and it's all going to be about taking a deeper dive into topics from this podcast, but also deeper dive into the strategy to grow your business with a podcast. So I love to have you there. Thank you so much for listening to this episode and I will be back next week with a new one. Thank you for listening to podcast your business. For more podcasting tips, follow us on Instagram at Wild Home Podcasting. If you are ready to launch up level or grow your podcast, head to Wild Home Podcasting Dotcom to get started today.
