Make Sure Your Podcast Strategy Aligns with Your Business Goals

Does recording your podcast ever feel like maybe you're just screaming into the void? Yeah? I get it. I've been there too. Every single client I've ever worked there has been there too.

And that's why I built today's episode. That's what we're going to talk about because it's far too common and really, really unnecessary. So let's get into it.

Welcome to the More Profitable Podcast with Stacey Harris. I'm Stacey, and this is the spot to learn more about the strategies, tactics, and tools you need to build your More Profitable Podcast. My team and I work every day with podcasters like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of your sales team because your show should be built to generate and convert leads.’

So let's get into it. This feels like an important time to have this conversation because we've sort of hit that point in the year where the newness has worn off, right? The realities of what this year will be have settled in. The realities of our capacity has met the dreams and excitement that we ended the year with of what our capacity may look like.’

All around, and I'm going to guess you feel this too, we're getting just smacked around by life in the world. And so it's really easy to fall into the, why am I doing this? Should I keep doing this? I think even for new podcasters who maybe just launched their show at the start of the year, this can already be catching up with you of like, oh, I had a really good idea and now I'm not sure this is such a good idea. And I think this is one of those feelings that happens with some sort of cadence, some sort of repetition in your podcast.

It will happen more than once. And it's a really good indicator. It's made time to make some kind of change.

And oftentimes we feel this way because we're just, we're not getting the return energy, right? We're not seeing a result from the output that our podcast is. And most often that's a straight up lack of sales. It is a straight up, like there's just no money coming into the bank via my podcast, or I'm not getting any kind of feedback from my listeners.

They're not talking about anything. People aren't sharing it. And oftentimes we put this down to our listeners and we put this down to podcasting as a whole.

When in reality, the problem is really just a lack of strategy or a misalignment of strategy, because I'm going to go out on a branch here and say, we have all done this at some point, but sometimes we outgrow our podcast, not in the sense that we need to put our podcast down, but we sort of set a strategy. We set a content plan. We put our podcast in this container that it talks about this kind of thing, or it serves this part of my business and we never revisit it.

And so as we are sort of in parallel, making changes to our offers, evolving our ideal clients, shifting our messaging, we don't always check in with the podcast plan to make sure that's still in alignment. And so oftentimes it really comes down to the fact that you've just sort of been running your podcast in parallel to your business, instead of tied together, instead of them having moments of connection. And that, again, it comes down to a lack of strategy.

And so I want today to be a checkpoint for you. I want today to be an opportunity for you and I to sort of think about your show and talk through what is the purpose of your show? Are you building your show in alignment with that purpose? I also want us to be looking at, let's call them speed bumps that can come as we're evolving our strategy. And last but not least, we're going to talk a little bit about our podcast strategy intensives and some of the choices we've made in building that out to help you sidestep some of those speed bumps, because I don't want you to get derailed as you start making these shifts.

Let's start by assessing where we are now, because too often I see business owners who are looking to build a sales-driven podcast falling into advice and even support containers, frankly, that are really geared towards hobbyists or people who are looking to use the podcast as their business model. Meaning they're looking to create content for the sake of audience growth, because they want to do sponsorships, maybe merch, that kind of thing. They're not looking to monetize their audience by way of selling them a service or a product.

And I think this is a really important distinction, because again, so many business owners are taking content creator advice. And you're not a content creator. You create content inside your business, but your job is not to create content.

Your job is to generate sales in your business. That's it. That's our job.

I don't care what you do. I don't care if you're a coach, consultant, service provider. I don't care what your expertise is.

Your primary job is sales. Same thing for me, babe. My primary job is sales.

And that's one of the reasons I love my podcast, because it allows me to leverage an asset to help me do my job more effectively. But when we are taking advice from folks who are supporting mostly hobbyists, or folks who are looking to monetize via sponsorships and merch, etc., we often end up pulling our show in a direction that does not serve us. And what we end up doing is we end up building something that has no clear goal and no clear direction.

We have inconsistent messaging. Our episodes are going to feel more impromptu and vibey. Right? We're sort of just talking about what we want to talk about.

A really big red flag that this is where you're at is if you sit down to record next week's episode or whatever, even if you have some lead time, the next episode you're going to create, and you're asking yourselves, what do I want to talk about? Or you're asking yourself, what do they want to hear? You're probably not building a sales-driven podcast. Because you are not going to be asking those kind of questions if you have a clear audience journey. If you have a clear understanding of what you need them to do after they listen.

This is why when we're building strategy, and I talk about this all the time, we could turn this into a drinking game probably, a very dangerous one, but that's why we are sitting down for our podcast strategy intensives, or we're sitting down with our production clients. I'm asking first, what are we selling? We start with that because that's how we are reverse engineering that path. We start knowing where we need to get them so that we can build the road.

If you're sitting down to record your podcast and you have an understanding of not just what you're going to say, but why you're going to say it, you're in a much better position of alignment with a sales-driven show. If your content aligns clearly with your offers, and your sales cycles, and your launch plans, you've got a sales-driven podcast. If you know exactly what action you need your listener to take and you make it clear inside your show, you've got a sales-driven podcast.

I want you to be really honest with yourself. When you look at your content, what are you really seeing? Are you seeing a show that is a sales-driven show? Is there a clear call to action and a clear rhythm and rhyme for your show and the episodes that go out? Or are you feeding the beast? Are you just checking the box of having gotten your episode done? Because that is not enough to get the sales you want. What it is enough to do is burn you out.

I can't be more plain than that. I can't make it more clear than that. That is a fast path to burnout.

Because this is a lift. This is a whole to do. After I finish recording this today, there'll be a transcription made, show notes written, and edits that have to get done, and graphics that have to get created, and scheduling that has to happen.

That's just to get it in the podcast player. That's not factoring in the marketing of the episode, the emails that have to get written, the social posts that have to be created, the scheduling that has to happen, the links that have to get updated. All of these are steps.

None of those steps will get you to your goal if you didn't take the first step of building that plan, of figuring out that why. And when you look at your episodes and you sort of are like, yeah, I don't know why I talked about that. Or you're jumping from one offer to the next, when you are making calls to action.

By the way, big red flag is if you're not making calls to action. But if you're jumping from one offer to the next and there's no real clear path, it's time to make a change. And this is a great time, completely coincidentally, this is a great time.

Often the pushback here is if I'm making offers in every episode, if I'm building episodes just to sell them something, am I going to come off as too salesy? And to that, I say no. Spoiler alert, no. What you're going to do is come off across as clear and position yourself as a thought leader and an expert, which is the goal.

But that's exactly what we talked about earlier this month in the podcast newsroom. So if you want to hear more about that, if that's a fear that's coming up for you, as I really hammer in the idea of being sales driven and reverse engineering from that end result of the offer you're trying to put them in, make sure you go to thepodcastnewsroom.com, sign up, go listen to this month's episode because it's exactly what we're talking about in that episode. And of course, make sure while you're there, you submit a question on commonlymore.com slash AMA so that I can answer your question in a future episode.

Do you see there? Right there. Call to action. I always like when I can point it out right when it's happening for you.

Let's shift talking about some of the speed bumps that come up as we are building our podcast strategy alone, because I talk a lot about how important strategy is, but I don't do a good enough job, full disclosure, in talking about why it's so valuable to do this with somebody else. Because when you are DIYing your strategy, there are some things you need to watch for. Now, full disclosure, yes, it is absolutely possible to DIY your strategy.

I DIY my strategy most months. I'm also a professional. I also do this for a living all of the time.

And I still sit down with my coaches, with my, I call them my board of directors, the people in my life who have a really good insight into my business, who know the inner workings, who ask great questions. I talk to friends and colleagues who are also in similar spaces. So even as somebody who does this all day, every day, I get help on this sometimes.

Because when we're DIYing, it's really easy to do things like plan one episode at a time. Oh, I'll just plan this episode and I'll get it recorded. And then, then I'll sit down and build out a plan later.

And you keep saying that week after week, month after month. Again, as a professional, I am guilty of this. I have absolutely fallen into times where, you know, cobbler's shoes, mechanics cars always broken down, that kind of thing.

Where I was just like, okay, I don't have time today to do a whole plan, but I need to get these episodes done. Full disclosure, when this happens the most is when I hit the end of the year. And I'm looking to get like meaningfully ahead.

And then I do. And then I come back and it's time to get into episodes again. But I've had some time off.

I've had some time out of my routine. And I'm like, I'll just get this one planned, recorded, then I'll deal with the rest. And then it's like two months later.

And I'm like, man, I've got to sit down and record some episodes. I've got to first take a step back, build my plan, and make sure everything is consistent. Make sure everything is cohesive.

Because it is exhausting to be constantly in a sort of reactive relationship with your content, instead of a proactive relationship with your content. And that's what happens when we're looking at making these decisions and these plans one episode at a time. But it's really easy to do when you're DIYing, because it's just you.

There's no one sitting there going, okay, what else? There's no one sitting fleshing out ideas into a series or into a larger sequence of episodes. And so watch for that as you're DIYing. The other speed bump I see happen a lot, and again, I might occasionally be guilty of, is you can really often end up creating content for you, instead of for them.

We have a whole episode, you and I talked about this before, where we talked about it is, your show is not for you. Your show is not about what you want your show to be about. If my show, if this show was about what I wanted to talk about exclusively, I'm going to be real honest with you, we would be talking about Sweet Magnolias, which is on Netflix, by the way.

I got really into it over the winter break. There's a new season coming soon, and I'm stoked. I think I'm going to read the books next.

But like, that's like my entertainment hyper fixation right now. Or I would be talking about books, because I've been reading a ton lately. That's not going to be super helpful for you.

You probably don't want to hear me talk about that. And maybe you do, but that's a different show. It's not what you came here for.

I'm being a bit dramatic here. Even when we're talking about this in the context of our expertise, we end up falling into the trap of creating content for colleagues and not clients. We end up creating these jargon-filled, high-level, intellectual conversations about the theories of what we do.

Marketers are great at this. I'm just going to raise my hand. Marketers are great at this.

We, better than maybe anyone else, create content for other marketers. For other marketers to be like, yes, I say that to clients all the time, and I wish they understood it. You're saying it in a way you want to say it, not in a way they need to hear it.

And so this is an important part, an important piece that you need to be watching for if you're DIYing your strategy. Because even if you are currently building a plan and you have a strategy, if you're running into the frustrations we talked about before, it could just be that you're trying to read the label from inside the jar. And you need some perspective.

You need to be creating episodes that allow your clients to nod along. That allow your clients to be like, oh yeah, I screwed that up. Or, oh yeah, I'm excited.

That's what I want to do. And I just couldn't articulate it. I couldn't put it into words.

Because our clients, our potential clients certainly, often can't verbalize what they want from us because they don't know what's possible. I have this great example of this. I was working with a client over some time in the last couple of years.

I cannot remember when this happened, but it was recent-ish. And we were talking about dynamic ads. And we got on the call and they were like, I really just wish there was a way that I could add a snippet to the show to talk about the launch coming up.

And I was like, well, we could use dynamic ads. And they were like, I don't know what those are. And we built out a whole dynamic ads plan.

We tied it into the content. It was done beautifully. It was very exciting.

But it was something they just, they couldn't even articulate. They certainly didn't know the dynamic ad. And if I stayed in my jar and I created content about what I wanted to say, I would create content that speaks to other people who know what I'm talking about, but is not going to speak to somebody who can't yet verbalize what it is they want.

Because there's still a gap between them and the solution in their understanding. And this happens a lot when we're DIYing. The third and the final piece that can hang us up, can trip us up as we're moving through building our plan is we're so afraid that we're not making enough calls to action, that we start called actioning everything.

And by this, I mean, where you sort of have a listicle of things that they could sign up for. And frankly, most of these tend to be all at once. So it's, we get to the end of the episode and it's, you could go here, or you could go to this offer, or maybe this might work.

And make sure you sign up for. And next thing you know, there's six calls to action. And by the way, a confused mind does in no, it's, it's, it's creating confusion in an effort to not withhold any options from them.

But what's actually happened is you have not created a clear destination you were trying to move them to. And, and therefore have not created content that supports that journey. And so at the end, you go, none of this is going to drive you anywhere.

So I better give you 45 places you could go next. And that's going to lead to confusion and inaction. And so we end up frustrated.

And then you sit down with somebody like me and you say, I don't know what you're talking about. I put calls to action every episode of my show. We actually had this come up with an intensive we did at the end of last year.

We sat down with, or I sat down with a client for an intensive. And they were like, I know you're going to check on my calls to action, but I have calls to action in every episode. And they did.

They absolutely had calls to action every episode, but there were like six of them. They had two lead magnets, two engagement points, and two offers in every episode. Yeah, it was a lot.

And I was like, yes, you have nailed calls to action. However, we need to give them, I say, no more than two options, one free, one paid. The only time you will see something different from me is you might see one free and two paid.

If there's an option for like, if you're just looking for the strategy, let's do an intensive. If you want the strategy and the work after the strategy done, that would be production. But I can do that because my offers are so tied together, right? My offers are two pieces of a whole pie.

And it just becomes a matter of whether you also want production or if you're just looking for strategy. And so I can get away with sort of doubling up that sales calls to action because they're tied together. Where I see this creating confusion and being a bit misguided, and this is where it was with the client I mentioned earlier, is it comes down to, you can do my group program or you can do done for you services.

And although you may be talking about the same thing, what you do is what you do. For me, it would be an example of like the profitable podcaster mastermind or production. Those are different kinds of clients.

If I've created an episode where both of those calls to action make sense at the end of the episode, I have not been clear enough in the goal for that episode because I've not really targeted it to who it's for. Whereas when I am building an episode like this one that is built to sell a specific offer, spoiler alert, it's podcast strategy intensives, it would be weird for me to also be talking about a group program and also be talking about production. Because the people who sign up for those three things are not necessarily the same people.

Now there's a ton more overlap for folks who sign up for intensives or production, but when we start adding in my group program, we start to be talking to a different audience. We start to be talking to a different segment of my community. And that's where we get muddy with too many calls to action.

And this is why I built the podcast strategy intensive, because you cannot see the label from inside the jar. I live outside of your jar. And this is why we start with an audit.

I built that so that I could get an unbiased look at the client's show. I could get a clear picture of what's happening now, what's working, what's not, and where the gaps are. I do that before the call so that I can come on the call and we can run right through this.

That way we can spend the bulk of our time together really digging into your content, because that's often what we're using to fill the gaps. Because that's generally where I find the most gaps is in the fact that I'm like, okay, I listened to four episodes of your podcast, and I'm still not totally sure what you sell. That's a real thing that has happened.

I want to have as much time on our call for you and I to be talking about what you sell, who you sell it to, how you sell it to them, and what questions they need answered before they're ready to buy. Because that's what we're going to build your plan from. That's what we're going to build your 12 plus week content plan with.

That's how we're going to align your episodes with your offers, with your audience needs, and with your sales goals. More and more I'm shifting from talking about this as a content plan and shifting towards talking about it as a sales plan. We're delivering via content, because that's the difference.

That's the shift I need you to make, and that's the shift that I find people struggle to make alone. The final component is 30 days of email support. And that exists because, again, I don't want you to get stuck in the jar unable to see what's outside.

One of my favorite moments in these intensives is not actually in the call, but it happens as they start to be creating episodes after the call. So often the feedback I get, the emails I get, are I've been making content so much harder than it needs to be. I had a client tell me that she finally understood how her podcast could sell without feeling like she was selling all the time, because we sat down and we figured out the levers that needed to be pulled.

And it meant she didn't have to constantly be running around looking for levers and just pulling stuff, because she knew what lever to pull and she knew when to pull it. And that's the difference that happens when you have a plan. That's the difference that happens when you are strategically tying your offers to your content all the time.

Again, I get that there's a fear of this feeling salesy, but what it does is it positions you as an expert, because it positions you as the person who understands where they are now and where their frustrations are. And again, this is really difficult to do alone, because we are so close to it. We are so inside of it.

There is so much information in your brain that you're not accessing about your clients, because you cannot ask yourself the questions someone else will ask you who doesn't know. Because I will ask a client in a podcast strategy intensive questions about their offer and they're like, oh, that actually comes up in sales calls all the time too. And I'm like, great, that's an episode.

Like, let's build a whole piece of content that answers that question. Because now when you get DM after DM after DM asking you the same question I just asked you, you just send them the podcast episode. And now we're having a leveraged sales conversation with all of these people who are flooding your DMs asking you the same question.

But because you're in it, you don't even think about it. It's just a question you answer all the time. It becomes part of your routine.

And so I want to encourage you to sit down with me and build your sales plan we are going to deliver via podcast for this next quarter. Let's sit down this month and let's change what your podcast looks like for the next 90 days. Let's build you a better sales machine for the next 90 days so that you can be seeing real and meaningful results from your show.

Not just from a sales perspective, but from a capacity perspective. Because guess what? The other sort of gravy benefit of a strategy is it makes your recording and production so much easier. Right? I want this for you because I want you to know how effective this tool can be when you use it as a tool and not just a hungry beast you have to keep feeding.

Head over to uncommonlymore.com slash intensive to get your spot booked. And let's sit down and build you your better, more profitable podcast plan. See you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the show. Remember that content consumption does not make changes. So commit to doing something from today's episode.

Maybe it's taking action on what we talked about. Maybe it's reaching out to me and learning more about podcast strategy intensives or what podcast production looks like with our team. All of that is over at uncommonlymore.com. And if you haven't yet signed up for the podcast newsroom, I want to remind you, that is a great next step.

If you're not really sure what comes next, hang out over there, get those exclusive private episodes. That's over at podcastnewsroom.com. And the last favor I will ask because social proof is endlessly important for sure, is to leave a rating or review for the show. If you go to rate this podcast.com slash more, that's the easiest way to do it.

But I would love to hear what you thought of the show, what you think of the show, and if the show has been helpful for you. I can't wait to chat with you. So this is just the start of the conversation.

Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon.