Let’s talk about nurturing your audience. I think way too often we think of this as a one-to-one conversation or a one-to-many conversation, but I think it’s entirely possible to scale the way one-to-one feels one-to-many. You can bridge the gap here, and for my money, this has done maybe most effectively in two channels: email and podcasting. That’s because what we do is we show up with them and it’s just us, for at least a little while, so when somebody who we’ve sent an email to, along with 1,000 other, 5,000 other, 10,000 other, whatever people, but the minute they open that email and the second they start consuming it, it’s just you and them, not everybody else in their inbox. It’s not the bazillions of people around you also. It’s just you guys.
The same is true of podcast. When you hit play on this show and I’m in your car, or I’m in your ears at the gym, or on a walk with the dog, or while your kid is at an activity, or whatever the thing may be, when you and I sit here and we talk like this, it’s just you and me. However, and I know you know this, but it’s also me and a bunch of other people, just me and them, right? That’s because when you take the approach, and for a lack of a less cliche way to say this, the values of a one-to-one conversation, and you almost kind of rubber stamp it to bunches of people, it works because now I’m having a bunch of what feels like one-to-one conversations. I’m saying my part and then waiting and then you say your part and then we’re in a conversation.
Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense. I hope I’m making sense because I should as a person who does this for a living. I love this ability, and for me, this is one of my favorite parts of podcasting. It’s the reason that we spent all of last month doing daily weekday emails. We spent all of February doing daily weekday emails, so Monday through Friday, every week of February, anybody on my list got an email from me and I will be keeping that going in March. But for me, it was the same principle as I use here. I wrote that email in the same way I record this podcast. I imagine that it’s just for you and what’s cool is other people get that, too, but I make this just for you, and so it becomes really, really easy for us to get on a call and feel like we know each other because we’ve already been connecting like this.
I want to talk about this today because I think that there are two reasons this works really well and until you nail these two pieces, it’s hard to really get results from the connection. When I say “results,” I mean both results. I mean the result of your listener getting what they need from the episode, solving the even micro problem, question, whatever that they had, scratching the tiniest of itches and you move that person down the customer journey and for you to actually get them to the point where they’re investing, where they’re doing something, opting in to an email list, whatever, taking the action in your call to action. If you want them to do that so that they get the win of actually seeing a change in whatever issue they have, now you’re starting to scratch a larger itch. The only way to get that is to have these two pieces, and so these are the two pieces I really want to hammer home today.
The first one is you have to help them understand the root problem.
I know that sounds soft, and I know it feels sort of hard to grasp, but more often than not, you have a better understanding of what your client’s questions are than they do. You have a better understanding of what their problem is than they do. Oftentimes, our clients come to us with symptoms, not the problem. Personally, in my business, in our agency, we want to get to the root of what’s causing that symptom, not just treat the symptom.
For example, a great example of this is if a client came to us, if somebody came to me and was like, “Hey, I am just not getting enough conversions for my podcast, and so I’ve got to get more people listening so I can make more sales from my podcast. I want to start running Facebook ads,” the symptom there is I’m not getting enough business, so their assumption is that the actual problem is that they don’t have enough listeners, when in reality, the actual problem is they’re not converting the listeners they have, so there is a problem with their show that will not be helped by more people listening to the show.
The same is true of email marketing. The same is true of your social media marketing. The same is true of your sales. If you’re getting leads in and you’re not converting them, more leads won’t help. If you’ve got 50 sales calls a week, but you can only get one client a month, you have a sales problem, not a leads problem. Same is true where your podcast is the sales mechanism, right? You’re not going to get more sales from your podcast by just getting more people to listen. Now, on paper, the number may look like more. 1% of 500 is better than 1% of 50. However, 5% of 50 is better than 1% of 50, so great, let’s keep the same 50 people we have and let’s just convert more of them. That way, when we go and we get 500, now, we’re looking at 5% of 500 or 5% of 5,000. I want you to be looking for that.
I know that because I’m in this all the time because I’m the expert because I do this for a living. The same is true for you and your clients, your listeners. What is the thing that they come to you and they say, “Hey, I need XYZ because ABC,” and actually, it’s LMNOP? That’s the actual problem, you know that. The podcast is a really, really, really powerful way for you to help them see what their problem actually is. This is a really great tool for you to educate so that you can position yourself as the solution.
I don’t mean this in a way of, “Oh, well, convince them that the solution you solve is the problem they actually need solving.” Well, no, we’re not tricking people here. We’re not doing this maliciously. If somebody came to me and was like, “For every hundred people that listen to my podcast, I make 97 sales from the show. I think I need to increase the amount of listeners I have. I want to run Facebook ads. What do you think?” I’d be like, “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Where else can we put it? Let’s make sure our organic strategy is aligned, but other than that, hells yeah, let’s go,” without saying, “Oh, no, no, no, no. I don’t think you should do that. I think you should do this other thing because that’s the solution I want to sell you,” no, but this is about saying, “Hey, get that. What about this as a possible solution before we start to look at that?” and so a big part of what you’re going to be doing is educating them on what the actual problem is.
For the last few weeks, we’ve talked about examples of three kinds of problems, because there are three categories of problems your podcast can have: the purpose, the process, or the production. If it doesn’t fall in one of those three things, the podcast isn’t the problem. We’ve talked about examples of problems that fit into there: How to get more out of your team, talking about your process, the idea that not having a process is a process. We’ve talked a little bit about the purpose and knowing why your show even exists, not just inside of your business, but why does your listener need to bother with consuming it, right? Those, for me, are the categories of actual problems, which are often, I would say, almost always brought to me and brought up on sales calls or strategy calls or whatever as a production problem, almost always is it a production problem: “If I had a team to help me produce, then I would be batching,” and here’s the reality is yes, we help our clients batch, we help our clients get ahead, but the way that they do that is often different.
We ran into this recently with a client where the client’s been working with us for a few months and it was such a different process for them that there was sort of this moment of like, “I can’t do this over the long-term,” and we’re like, “Wait. Let’s take a beat. Let’s look. Here’s what’s happening. Here’s where we are now. Oh, by the way, you’re actually X amount of weeks ahead. We’re good. Here’s some ways this can look. Here’s some ways that you can alter this process, alter your process to get more clear.” Because ultimately, it wasn’t only a production problem that this client had. It was a process problem, and so putting this client into our process and into our system was a big help.
However, there needed to be time for them to realign their own habits so that they could find their new habits inside of the process. They could find their version of the process because we have clients who record four episodes a day, we have clients who record, everything in two days, we have clients who record every week, they’re just recording episodes four or six weeks ahead of where they’re actually going to be released. But for them, batching is not a thing. Batching is not something they want to do. We also have clients who record over like two weeks a quarter and they record for the whole quarter. You got to find what works for you.
But hiring a production team won’t change that. It might make it easier to figure out what your process is because you’ll have a process you’re moving into, but you’ve still got to do your stuff on your side, and so I’ve got to be educating my clients, or my potential clients, that problems fall into these categories, so these are likely some problems you maybe haven’t thought of yet. That’s what I want you to be doing. That’s where this nurture and this education can be scaled build really effectively because I know that lots of our clients have these issues. Lots of our clients have to go through these. Lots of our leads come to us thinking A, when really, the problem is B, and so I’m using this conversation to prepare my potential clients, my leads, for a sales conversation that will actually get them results, a sales conversation that they’re actually ready to have. That, for me, is the biggest part of using this as a nurture tool is I’m using this to prepare you for a sales conversation.
Now, does that mean every single listener who I talk to or I connect with via this show is going to hire us? No, it’s not, because for some people who listen to this, it may be that this was far enough. This was the end of their problem. They just needed to know that their problem they thought they had wasn’t a problem they’d had. They figured out what the real problem was and they can solve that and they did. Fantastic, because those are the things people who share this podcast, those are the people who refer people, and those are the people who hire me and the agency for other things, for strategy sessions, or to come in and talk to their group and do a training, whatever, right?
So, don’t think, “Okay, great, every podcast episode has to come into the preamble of a sales call.” No. What this is, this is education so that when they get on your sales call, they are ready to actually make a decision because they actually have all the information they’re going to need. Most of my sales calls are gut checks. If they’ve listened to this podcast before, it is a, “I need to get on the call and make sure that you on the podcast and you and real life are the same you. Cool. True. All of that’s true. Let’s do it.” That’s not just here, right? That’s for a lot of our clients, too. We have had clients who are putting together programs and that’s exactly the feedback they’re getting on sales calls is, “I just needed to make sure that what I was hearing on the podcast was real.
Now, I know it is. Let’s go.” Cool. Let’s close the show by talking about the other side of this. The other piece that you have to have for this nurture process to be effective is
You have to tell them what’s next.
You have to make the offer. I don’t just mean quickly in your outro being like, “Oh, and by the way, you can hire me.” No. No, no, no. What it has to be is you frequently and consistently making it clear that there are ways to work with you and these are how they work. You’ll notice that in the course of pretty much every episode of this show, I talk about our clients, I talk about how working with us looks like, I talk about why and how we offer the things we offer, and then from time to time, I say, “Cool. If this resonated, this is what’s next.”
Earlier in this episode, I have mentioned email list. I guarantee you, I will get someone who gets on the email list or who DMs me and says, “Oh, I heard you were doing that. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” They’ll ask me about it. I’ll talk about it. They’ll get on the list. I have talked about our production clients, I’ve talked about strategy sessions, so when you hear an outro promo, or you hear me say, “Hey, book your session,” you’re not like, “What sessions are you talking about?” because in the course of listening to this show over and over again, you’ve heard about all of these things, so it’s never a surprise, so when I go to sell you, I am not selling you on, “Hey, this things exist. Isn’t that a good idea?” I’m selling you on, “Hey, remember we talked about the thing and how cool that was. Let’s book yours.”
That is a huge difference. That is a monumental shift from, “Oh, I have to get them on board with this idea,” to, “Okay, yeah, let’s go. The timing is right for me now.” That’s especially true with what we sell, so if you’re selling a high-end service, or a long-term coaching container, or something like that where it’s not a eight-week course that we’re closing the door on and we open them once a year and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, there is no time urgency. There is no, “Hey, I only have to sign up for this in March because that’s when it’s available,” or, “Oh, I only sign up for that in April because that’s when the event is,” or August, or whatever it is, or I buy my calendar in December because the new year starts in January, whatever that thing is. No, it’s all the time, so the timing, it’s right for you, could be anytime, and so I’m always saying, “Hey, you’ve heard me talk about it’s a lot. You already think it’s a good idea. Is the timing right now? How about now? How about now? How about now?”
Now, the good news is it’s wildly less annoying than somebody saying, “How about now? How about now? How about now?” and I’m continuing to build this relationship, connect with you, model these behaviors, and oh, by the way, better educate you around what the actual issue might be and how you can solve little ones in the meantime, right, and so you’ll see how these two pieces both have to be there for either one to be useful or relevant at all, but also for you to shift from nurture to convert all in the course of one place. This place has to be both. That’s how you scale your nurturing is you make sure that you’re nurturing is also your sales. Both things are happening because all of it has to happen for your clients, or potential clients, or listeners, or however you want to refer to them, or wherever they sit in the life cycle right now, to actually move from problem to solution.
I want you to spend some time with this, thinking about this in the context of the episodes you have coming out in the next four weeks. Look at: Do these episodes do this? I’d also encourage you to look at your last four or eight or 12 episodes and audit how well you did this in those episodes. That will help you do a better job in future episodes, all right? If you want to talk more about this, those one-on-one sessions are a great way to do that. You can find all of the podcast sessions over at uncommonlymore.com. If you are interested in receiving those emails, if you head over to uncommonlymore.com, right on the website homepage, there’s an option to get on the email list so that you can be getting easy emails, too. If you have questions or thoughts or things that you’d like to hear on the show in the future, drop me a message either on Instagram or drop an email over at hello@uncommonlymore.com and let me know. Until next time, thank you for listening to the show, and I will see you next week.
