Special Series: Setting Goals for Podcast and Business Success
If your podcast feels out of sync with your broader business objectives, you might not be maximizing its potential and that’s where part 2 of our series all about getting your podcast ready for the fall comes in.
In this episode, I’m guiding you through aligning your podcast with your business goals—a critical step if you're aiming to see real conversion and impactful results. Whether you're aiming to increase email sign-ups, boost membership numbers, or support a new offer, it's crucial to align every episode with these goals. Listen in and take notes for insights on updating your content strategy to make your podcast a robust tool for your business growth.
Grab the FREE Strategic Podcast Performance Review Checklist here: http://wildhomepodcasting.com/audit
Episode Highlights:
[03:07] The vital role of setting measurable, specific goals for your podcast.
[06:28] A case study on adjusting content to improve membership conversions.
[13:01] Importance of conducting a podcast audit
[13:49] Preview of what a successful podcast refresh looks like.
The Transcript for Podcast Your Business:
187: Special Series: Setting Goals for Podcast and Business Success
[00:00:00] Hello podcasters and welcome to part two of my series. All about optimizing. Your podcast for the fall. And today you were going to talk about business goals because here's the thing. If your podcast is not aligned with your business goals, Then you're not going to see the kind of conversion, the kind of metrics and all the results that you want to see. So in today's episode, we're going to dive into exactly how to align your podcast with your business goals. This is a cannot miss step.
[00:00:31] If you're looking to really create a podcast, that's going to actually convert.
[00:00:35]
[00:00:35] [00:01:00]
[00:01:18] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to share strategize and shine. I'm your Intrepid host Caroline coming at with you after. Having two days of no sleep. Um, My kids are sick. I love summer sickness. It's my favorite. But my middle one got pink eye and has proceeded to spread it to her little sister who has proceeded to spread it to me.
[00:01:43] So. Hopefully that doesn't come across in this video. But here we are. Oh, my goodness. I am so excited to be continuing this series today. All about optimizing your podcast. For the fall. And I feel like this is just [00:02:00] such an important and timely series because the summer is not the time to just like, put your podcast off to the side and relax. The summer is actually one of my favorite times to. Kind of regroup. Uh, look at everything.
[00:02:15] You know, the pace is a little bit slower right now. And so I'm able to step back and say, okay, what are my plans for Q3 Q4? And how can I am podcast support that. And that really brings me to today's topic, which is all about aligning your podcast with your business goals. The reason this is so important to optimizing your podcast for the fall is that if you are not sure exactly what the purpose of your podcast is, it's going to be really hard to know what metrics to look at.
[00:02:44] And when we don't know what metrics to look at a lot of times, we will default to looking at downloads and here's the thing. Downloads do not tell you the whole picture. They do not tell you the whole status of your podcasts and its health and its [00:03:00] viability like is this podcast actually working for me because at the end of the day, you're going to have 20 downloads and have a podcast that converts amazing.
[00:03:07] And you can have a thousand downloads and have a podcast that doesn't convert at all. And so we really want to get clear. On what this podcast is doing for us, so we can make sure that we're measuring and tracking appropriately. Those results. So the first step in this is you got to identify and set. Measurable goals for your podcast.
[00:03:29] I mentioned downloads. But what I want you to think about is like, What is your overarching goal for your podcast? What is your goal for your business and how can your podcast support that? And I'll give you an example. Let's say that you are wanting to get more people on your email list. And one of the ways you want to do this is through content on your podcast. This is something actionable that we can now measure on our podcasts.
[00:03:55] And now we can say, okay, well, my goal is to get more leads. How can I create [00:04:00] content? That's going to support that. A lot of my clients will come to me with very specific goals. Like. I want to book more one-on-one clients. Or I really want to grow my membership. Or. I'm starting a group program. And I want my podcasts to be a nurturing piece that leads into it. And then what we're able to do is set up a way to track and measure this right. So, whether that's by setting up a specific landing page, whether that's by having a specific opt-in. And sometimes you can also measure results just by like, okay, I've done this many discovery calls this month.
[00:04:36] How many people mentioned by podcast? So you can see how now what we're doing is we're taking our business goals. We're taking our podcast, which we were probably only measuring. By downloads and we're giving it more of a purpose. Now here's the thing. Once you set that goal for your podcast, based on your business goals. Now it's time to [00:05:00] analyze your content and say, okay, is my content. Supporting the goal. And the thing is if a two are not working together, you will not see results. So I want to give you a really great example of this. I had a client. She had a membership.
[00:05:16] She has a membership and she came to me. She has a very success successful podcast. Getting quite a lot of downloads. I mean, I'm talking thousands of downloads per episode. But she wasn't seeing any conversion into her membership. And so when she came to me and she said, I want the goal to be. That every time I post a podcast episode, people want to join our membership. So we started looking at her content and we realized that her content was incredibly valuable. But it was almost too valuable.
[00:05:50] It was literally telling people how to do the thing that she was teaching inside of her membership. So people didn't need to go to her membership because they were already [00:06:00] getting everything they needed from her content to go and implement. Her philosophy is her framework themselves. Right? So, what we did is we took a step back and we said, how can we create content?
[00:06:11] That's going to make people feel seen. That's going to make them really identify themselves within her podcast episodes. And so that way they will know for certain that the next step they need to take is to join her membership. And we did a complete overhaul of her content. So we didn't delete episodes.
[00:06:28] I just want to like also say this. You don't need to go back and redo episodes. But from this, from that point, moving forward, she started approaching her content from. Instead of. Focusing so much on the, how I'm going to focus more on the why. The results of this have been that. She said that every time she posts an episode, she gets new people into her membership. That is incredible.
[00:06:51] And that's exactly the kind of results we want to see. But it's really hard to do that. If your content, isn't speaking to people [00:07:00] where they're at in their journey, if it's not explaining to them why they need the thing that you have re. That's really what we want to do is we want to speak more to the why, less to the how, because we are the, how. So one of the things that we need to do. When we're kind of analyzing, okay.
[00:07:21] Is my podcast working for me? Is really take a look at that content and see is this supporting my goals? And if you are listening to this and you feel like, oh gosh, it's really not supporting my goals. Don't freak out. It doesn't mean that your content is bad. It just means that we need to reframe. It a little bit.
[00:07:43] And there's a couple of ways that you can reframe this content.
[00:07:46] One, as I mentioned, like, you know, almost in a like very philosophical way, Look at your content and say, you know, am I speaking to my people at the right time? Am I giving them too much information? Do I feel like [00:08:00] this content is really sharing my message in a way that is impactful. You know, ask yourself those questions.
[00:08:07] The other thing that you can do, and if you have not downloaded the strategic performance review checklist, You can head to wild home podcasting.com/audit and a little pop-up will up here where you can enter your email address and get this checklist. And inside this checklist, there actually is a couple of items that are very specific to content. And one of them is taking a look at your episodes that you've done so far. So in this instance, we are definitely going to use downloads.
[00:08:36] So we're going to go into our RSS feed hosts, export all of our episodes with their downloads. And I like to do this for my clients. I like to do this for myself from time to time. But go put them in a spreadsheet and go through the spreadsheet and highlight the ones that did really well. Whatever that means to you, whatever that means to the level of downloads you're getting. And make a note to the side.
[00:08:58] Why did this episode [00:09:00] do really well? Was it the way that I shared it, was it the content. Was it an interview episode and I had a guest on who shared all over the place. You know, see if you can pinpoint why that episode did really well. And then see if you can replicate that a lot of times when we pick episode topics through pretty broad, right. We think, oh, I need to be a super, super broad. And nine times out of 10, I'll be going through a client's content and I'll be able to take one episode and split it up into four others. And so see if you can do that with the episodes that did really well. The other thing I want you to start doing is to align your content schedule with your sales and promotions. This is so, so important when we start to really develop a content strategy for our podcast, that's aligned with our business goals. We want to make sure that our content is leading to the things that we are selling and promoting. Now, if you only have one [00:10:00] main offer, if you're like the only thing that I'm ever selling and promoting is my membership. Great. I want you to think about why people joined your membership?
[00:10:07] What is the catalyst? Write that down. But if you're someone like me, I help podcasters at different phases of their podcast journey. So I may be talking about launching at certain points of the year. I may be talking about strategy at certain points of the year. You know, it really depends on what I'm promoting. And I do a couple of live launches. Each year. For my membership and my content when I'm promoting my membership is a little bit different than my content when I'm just talking about. Coaching or consulting or strategy, right. And so why I'm sharing all of this with you is because it is so, so important to sit down and look at your sales and promotions calendar. And say, how can I align my content up with this? How can I create episodes around what I'm trying to sell at this moment?
[00:10:56] That's going to lead people into it. And then [00:11:00] from there, you can start to kind of analyze all the other things that have to do with that, you know, your opt in to your funnels. But again, What I really want to drive home. And this episode is that setting goals. Is so, so important for your podcasts setting goals. And having goals that are attainable. And goals that align with your business are really going to change the game for you.
[00:11:24] When you start to measure the success of your podcast. And the first thing I want you to do after you set that goal. Is to see if your content is supporting that goal. So whenever I do a podcast audit, one of the things I have everybody do is fill out an onboarding form. And these are some of the questions I asked them to specifically, like, what do you want this podcast to do from your business for your business? You know, do you feel like the podcast is doing what you want it to do? The reason I ask these questions is when we do an audit from that lens [00:12:00] of okay. If my goal for the podcast is this.
[00:12:03] And I'm looking at it through this lens and I'm auditing everything, including the content. Including the description, including the cover. Art does all of this. Support my goals. And if not, what shifts and changes can I make to help it do that? And so if you're listening to this, if you've worked through the strategic performance checklist and you're like, you know, I don't know that it's necessarily working the way I want it to. But I'm not exactly a hundred percent sure what the next steps are. Then definitely consider an audit with me because. I'm a strategist.
[00:12:38] I'm a content strategist. I'm a podcast coach. This is what I do all day. Every day. Is I help you see the things that you can't see because you know, they're too bright in front of you. It's actually having a whole conversation this morning with somebody about how. It's so difficult for us to share our wins as business owners, because it's often right in front of us. And I feel like it's the [00:13:00] same thing when we're working on something in our business.
[00:13:01] Like, I know that I want my website to be better. But I don't know what that means. And so I'm going to lean on somebody to give me their expertise in support, as opposed to trying to DIY at myself and searching. Google endlessly into the nights and looking at other people's websites and going, oh, I wish mine looked like that.
[00:13:19] Right. It's the same with the podcast. So, if you feel stuck, like don't hesitate to reach out for help. It's so, so important. And I really want you to understand how impactful your podcast can be for your business when all of these things line up and it's really easy to get them to line up. It just takes a little bit of tweaking, a little bit of rethinking your content, setting some really strong goals. And going from there. So don't forget to grab that free checklist.
[00:13:49] Just head to wild home podcasting.com/audit. And in the next episode of this series, we're going to be talking about what an actual successful podcast refresh [00:14:00] looks like. I'm going to be taking you through. What I would do if I was refreshing my podcast. If you feel like you are in a moment of refresh, it's going to be a great episode to listen to. But it also just want to say too. When we are refreshing our podcast, so we don't necessarily have to refresh everything.
[00:14:19] So. Maybe you just seen a few things refreshed. Maybe you need the whole thing refreshed, but I'm going to dive into all of that. In the next episode in the series. So be sure to tune in, have a great week key podcasting and have a great summer.
