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No B.S. Content Promotion for SaaS Companies​

Promote, Or Die! Podcast EP#16 David Bain on Mastering Podcasting and Building Audiences for B2B Companies

Promote, Or Die! Podcast EP#16 David Bain on Mastering Podcasting and Building Audiences for B2B Companies

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Main Takeaways

  • Start with an audio podcast as a comfortable entry point before branching into other mediums.
  • Consider a pre-recorded video show to get comfortable using a camera and engaging with viewers.
  • Live streaming can be a great next step, utilizing platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
  • Virtual summits and categorized podcast series can provide more extensive and structured content.
  • Transcribe podcast episodes and use the content for books or other written materials.
  • Podcasting is suitable for businesses with long sales cycles to keep potential customers engaged.
  • Utilize a mix of AI and human review for tasks like transcription and content creation.
  • Stand out by bringing your own voice, style, and unique perspective to your content.
  • Engagement and interaction on native platforms are essential for building an audience. Incorporate storytelling elements to ensure listeners feel their time is well spent.
  • Consistency is crucial, but you don’t have to commit to producing content indefinitely.
  • Optimize your podcast by driving traffic through subscription links and utilizing paid advertising on platforms like Facebook.
  • Research topics using tools like “People Also Ask” on Google and trust your instincts.
  • Structure your podcast episodes effectively, summarize key points, and create engaging trailers.
  • Treat podcasting professionally and with the same level of quality as other media channels.

Resources

Website & Social Media Links

Video

Transcript

Alan: hello everyone and welcome to the show, David. How are you today?

David: hello, Alan. Yeah, good to be on with you. I’m very well, thank you. How are you today?

Alan: Yeah, I’m very good. Thank you. And it’s great to have you on the show finally because I’ve been on like two or three Like maybe yeah two I think Two

David: I know

mine, of different shows. I don’t have to stop myself from asking questions as well, because my natural instinct there at the very beginning was to ask you how you’re doing, but I’m going to try and bite my lip and not do that.

Alan: Okay, cool, so we’re gonna talk everything that has to do with Podcasting creating books. This is the main thing that you Do at casting cred. And so I’m curious to see how all of this relates to content promotion and what people can take away that they can use to actually get their content out there.

This can be either in the form of a podcast or a book or whatever. What does content promotion mean to you specifically?

David: Sure. Okay. to me, it is publishing the right quality of content to the right people in the right place at the right time, the right frequency as well. So lots of right things going on there as well. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be things like segments of episodes or segments of shows. I think that if you publish a series frequently enough and in high enough quality that can be the piece of content that is promoted by itself.

Alan: So you mentioned a couple of different and very interesting things here. Mention quality and quantity. So being regular in, like the speed or, yeah, being regular with the way that you put content out there. Why are these things very important for you?

David: So a few reasons, let’s start off with Apple Podcasts. So Apple Podcasts tends to look at the last 24 hours in its algorithm to see how many downloads of a specific episode Has occurred. And if, quite a few downloads has occurred, it will give it more organic reach. It’ll look for keywords within the episode title and things like that, and be more likely to promote that episode organically.

So if you can get to decent download numbers, decent can be maybe something like over 50. If you’re in a relatively small niche, it needn’t be a massive number, but, It’s, in terms of frequency, just to bringing it along to your other point there as well. so Nine years ago, I started a podcast called Digital Marketing Radio.

I don’t actually publish it anymore. but, it did very well for me. It got to the top page of Apple podcasts for digital marketing, if you search for digital marketing and something like 20, 000 downloads a month. and that was doing it seven days a week. So I think back then when there was roughly 200, 000 podcasts in the world, then once a week was fine to get significant organic reach without.

too much external promotion. But nowadays, you’ve got to be in a relatively uncompetitive niche for that frequency to really be effective for you or be willing to hang on for quite a bit of time for it to pay off.

Alan: So in your opinion, is content creation more important or is content promotion more important? what’s the right balance for

you?

David: Yeah. like every great SEO, it depends. It depends on the type of content that you’re producing. Relatively recently I produced this model that I call the 6H content model, that I have at the center of my pump and funnel marketing framework. And the 6H model, is all about, hero hub help, which I got from Google.

Then I added three more H’s onto it, heart, happy and human content. so we can go into those different types of content if you want. I believe that a podcast sits very much into hub content, into episodic content. And if you’re doing the rest of your content, it needn’t necessarily have any immediate promotion directly onto that type of content because it can fit within your funnel.

You can drive your existing traffic towards your podcast, towards your YouTube channel and. If your content as a whole is set up nicely, then you might actually find it more valuable to be promoting your hero content, your big incredible pieces of hero content, to get people then to opt in to your email list and then perhaps from there promote your hub content to people that aren’t quite ready to buy.

Alan: Okay. Yeah, that’s great. So is it fair to say then that a podcast is both creation and promotion at the same time because at the end of the day, you’re, using the algorithm, from Apple or Spotify to get in front of the right people.

David: Exactly. Now, if it’s published in the right way, then it can achieve fairly successful promotion by itself to, to step on the creative foot. You have to do it correctly. So you have to do it in high quality. You’re using a decent quality recording platform here as well. You’re recording both of us in separate tracks here as well.

And that’s a great starting point. A lot of consumers are used to listening to Spotify. They’re used to watching content on Netflix nowadays. And because of that, if you deliver inferior quality content, video or audio, then people are. Naturally going to switch off fairly quickly from that. so from the creative perspective, obviously it has to be structured correctly.

It has to be interesting. there can’t be too much room for silence or for content that the listener, the viewer is not looking for. but then it’s got to be high quality because it’s competing with over two, two million other podcasts out there now.

Alan: And so you mentioned some of them already, so I’m just curious now to dive in into the six steps,that you use to go from starting a podcast and possibly all the way to creating a book from it.

David: sure. So I produce content, I produce podcasts and video shows for B2B brands. So this is, I think, from a B2B perspective, which is, from what I understand, probably even the majority of your audience, which is a good place to start. I think it’s very important, as I mentioned, to position your podcast, to think of your podcast as that hub content that gives people who aren’t quite ready to buy from you an opportunity to consume your authoritative, your educational content.

on an ongoing basis without being sold to until they’re ready to buy. So that being said and where you’re comfortable where a podcast fits in, I think you need to start off first of all with a basic audio podcast. So if you’re watching this on video, I’ve got a Samson QTU microphone in front of me here.

That’s a wonderful microphone to start off with. It only costs about 80 or something like that. I’m not speaking into that microphone at the moment, but the quality really is decent, and that’s a great place to start off with. Get comfortable with speaking past the microphone, with the positioning of the microphone.

Just producing… an audio podcast, maybe producing about 20 episodes or so. It takes 20 episodes or so before you get comfortable with what your standard show structure is like and what your intro is going to be, what your outro, what kind of conversation you want to have with your guests, if you have any, what kind of takeaways you want to have.

So it takes that while to get comfortable with. With hosting a podcast, with interviewing people and using the technical equipment. Once you’ve done that, then you move on to step number two, which I call produce an as live audio podcast. So you’ve got different bumper noises. You can press, you’ve got your intro and your outro and you can do everything and produce it as live.

You’re not actually public broadcasting live. But if you produce it as live, then you don’t have to get anyone to do any significant editing afterwards. Hopefully by now you’re a little bit more comfortable with the kind of phraseology that you should be using, getting comfortable with silence. Getting comfortable with not humming and ah ing too much.

so you’re producing it in a manner that you would be comfortable for people to listen to. So that’s steps to produce as live, an audio podcast. Step number three is a pre recorded video show. So you’re still not doing it live yet, but now you’re doing it on camera. So you’re bringing your camera into play.

I generally recommend a Logitech C920 as a great starter camera, that ideally should be positioned at eye height and it can record in decent HD. It’ll be better than a standard laptop. And you need to get comfortable doing things like at least starting off your show by looking into the camera, saying your intro, saying your outro directly into the camera.

Just get comfortable with using,a video show there, producing a video show there as well. so step number three, Pre recorded video show. You’re still not broadcasting live, but you’ve got a bit more comfortable with using the video camera after you’ve been comfortable with just using the microphone and how your show structure comes along. Then after that’s when you can start live streaming.

so you can live stream to maybe LinkedIn, maybe Twitter, maybe Facebook, somewhere else and hopefully get a few people watching. Hopefully you’ve got a bit of an email list. You can make people aware of when you’ve gone live and then you also need to bring in the. The skill of looking at viewer comments when you’re actually broadcasting live and bringing in that conversation into what you’re saying at the same time as not getting distracted, talking to your guests, thinking what your guest is doing, but not losing the skill of producing of.

talking correctly into the microphone of looking into the camera. so you can’t possibly master all of that at the same time. so that’s why I recommend starting off with an audio podcast, but that’s step four. So you’re a live video show. Step number five, produce a virtual summit. Or a predetermined categorized podcast series.

So what’s that? virtual summits, that’s essentially maybe a four hour long live stream. So it’s like doing six or eight shows all in a row at the same time, getting different guests and getting all the content categorized, getting a logical flow to it as well, and getting comfortable with hosting that length of live stream.

a categorized podcast series. So thinking about the content that you’re producing beforehand and categorizing it in a manner of maybe 12 episodes, that would also work logically from a book perspective. And then you can take this virtual summit content or the categorized Podcast content, have it transcribed, and then that can form the basis of your book.

So that’s what I do for a client called Majestic. I’ll just show to, to, to video watchers. SEO in 2023 is a recent book that I published for our clients. and for the, for them, I actually interviewed a hundreds SEOs on their number one tip for SEO. 2023. Now, you can do that, by producing longer podcast episodes, probably about 12.

You’re looking for a minimum of about eight hours of content, and then getting that transcribed. Now, you want to make sure that, the transcription is completely accurate, and then the next stage after that, I’m afraid, is to rewrite the transcript in a manner that works best for, the written form.

Because people tend to write quite differently to how they speak, so it is quite a significant editing job. Obviously, you can outsource this to someone else if you want to do that, but it certainly works, and that’s the way I produced that particular book, and I think there’s a great opportunity to produce that from a podcast series.

You wouldn’t start off immediately doing that. You wouldn’t say, I haven’t done a podcast before, so I’m going to produce 12 episodes and then we can publish a book from that. you really want to go through that process of first 20 episodes or so, getting comfortable with what you’re doing, with a format that works for you and your audience and then moving on to the various steps that I’ve recommended there.

Alan: Wow. That’s awesome. Literally. Thank you, David, for so much information. So I have a couple of follow up questions for this. the first one is, would you recommend, the six steps, so the live and the book and all of these things for any type of company, or is it there some kind of like criteria that it.

They typically look for maybe company size, the stage of the company.

David: Yeah, I wouldn’t even necessarily recommend a podcast for any type of company at the very beginning there as well. The kind of client that I love and I think podcasting is really appropriate for is a client with a very long sales cycle. So if you’ve got a sales cycle of more than six months, You’re never going to have someone consuming your sales orientated content for that period of time.

They’re going to look at your content. And then if you don’t have an ongoing series that they can subscribe to, then they’ll probably forget about you and go somewhere else. And when they’re ready to buy, maybe search for a keyword phrase and relating in relation to what you do as a business. And then, go for whatever brand is first on that.

so they might, forget about you. a podcast, a video series, a book is a wonderful way, to make people remember you so that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll come back. Now a book isn’t necessarily hub content, I would say a book is more hero content. so that’s the kind of. Initial discovery point that people have.

so they might discover you, your book through Amazon that you might be, at a, at an industry show where you’re, displaying what you do as a business. You’re talking maybe as well. And then you can give away books, which is a great brand building thing to do as a business. if you have an opportunity To do that, then I think that positions your brand head and shoulders above other brands out there.

long answer to your question, which is, if you have a long sales cycle, then that process is worthwhile considering.

Alan: Okay, that’s great. And do you do all of these six steps as a one man band, or do you have other people helping you out? do you use maybe things like artificial intelligence to help you in some of the parts?

David: Yes, a bit of everything. so I, started off,the business by myself, but last year I had about five people working for me and they were focusing on specific skills,that they had from editing to producing video content to editing audio content. So I did have a,specialists helped me out there certainly.

And, I use artificial intelligence a little bit, maybe for the initial version of the transcript, for example. I think it’s important for humans to still review what artificial intelligence produces. It’s getting better and better. I will experiment a little bit with getting artificial intelligence to create a better written piece of copy from a transcript.

But, my concern is tone of voice. Compared with maybe what I would produce myself as well. So it was, it is still probably likely to be an initial version and I’ll closely review the amount of time that it takes to do and maybe any associated costs as well and review whether or not that, that, that is worthwhile.

I think generally in terms of content, when you’re producing high quality content, when it’s. a great quality podcast series, video series, book content like that, then I wouldn’t leave it to artificial intelligence because you need to. Position yourself, differently compared with other brands out there.

And that means reducing the optimum quality content in your industry. And I think artificial intelligence is generally at the moment, used for, probably the written form or. taking some bullet points and expanding them and creating an article from that. I think that as a business, if you’re just focusing on the written form online as a way to drive traffic to what you do, then it’s going to be tough over the next year because there are so many competitors out there that are going to be producing cheap articles that are probably quite similar to what you already do.

Alan: Yeah, I guess it’s similar to the music scene I’ve been playing in a band. And so I noticed like really a drastic change in the music industry and everything. As soon as people was able to start like recording in house, doing their own demos, there’d been so much noise, so much quantity of product that to be able to stand out, you like really need to have your own voice or your own specific style or something that makes you stand out. So is this something that you look out for in the clients that you work with?

David: Look, if they can produce content that it’s obviously personalised in terms of hopefully using their voice and, and getting their face to screen and really relating well to their clients, then But that’s going to give you an advantage over artificial intelligence at the moment. The challenge is that nobody knows is what’s going to be happening with this type of content in three years time in five years time.

And you do have to be aware of opportunities to be more efficient with your time. but it’s even more important because of the vast amount of content that’s published nowadays to find some way of making your content better than the competition. and the answer certainly isn’t just to fire out as much content as you can using AI.

Alan: Yeah, I definitely agree. so artificial intelligence is not going anywhere, but so are humans. I think at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some kind of input or like a creativity that we need to bring to whatever. it is that we produce. And so you mentioned, the pump and funnel marketing model and how these six steps basically are part of it.

Can you expand on this concept?

David: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. so I’ve done a lot of training in the past, so marketing training, digital marketing training, running full day sessions. And. A long time ago, back in 2006 or so, when I started doing my first, full time, full day seminars, I was guilty of just sharing as much information as possible, sharing as many tactics as possible.

This is what you do. This is what you do. This is how this is done. but it’s not really memorable and, it doesn’t necessarily apply to every business. So it took me a long time to realize and come up with a model that I felt. Any digital marketing activity could be applied to, and then the attendee or whoever was consuming the training could go away and take the model and apply it to their own business, but also, more importantly, take any future marketing channel and also apply it to the models.

The model remains useful in the future. So first of all, I thought, okay, what should I be using? What type of, marketing, framework, is appropriate for everything that happens in digital marketing. And really it’s marketing as a whole, but my background is primarily digital marketing and I just came back to content.

content is at the center of. Any successful interaction online, and I was looking online for pre existing content models, and the most popular by far I found was Google’s 3H model, and that’s, hero, hub, and help content, and I thought that was a great starting point, but I was also aware of the more traditional model.

marketing funnel, possibly for BDB brands. And that is awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty and advocacy. And so what I was trying to do was map the 3H content model to this five step funnel. And I found that, Hero help and hub content was very much. Top of funnel. It was very much awareness for hero content.

and hub and help content was very much consideration phase. there was nothing really about further down the funnel. So I was thinking, okay, we need some more H’s. We need some H’s from further down the funnel that I can apply to conversion loyalty and advocacy. so I came up with heart content being the heart of what a business does.

IE sales content. And I really like to explain Simon Sinek’s approach to, the way that people consider brands actually to explain what makes a good sales page. and that is start with wine. and I think that if you look at any absolutely wonderful sales page, I think that Wix, for example, do a wonderful job with sales pages.

Zero Software did do a great job with sales pages as well. I, and they start by, building some kind of emotion in the minds of the consumer. This is our vision. This is where we want to go. And we’d like to take you along the way as well, because you believe the similar kind of thing as well. And that’s how you start off these salespapers pages.

And then how this is what we’re trying to solve here. These are the frustrations that you commonly have. yeah. And this is what we have to offer in order to, solve these challenges that we all know that you’re having here. so come and be a customer or whatever the call to action is.

And I think that really works well for heart content. So that explains H. Happy content is when someone just becomes a customer. And what happens when they just become a customer? And maybe They’re buying a piece of B2B software, for example. what’s the experience like, to educate them on how to use your platform?

do they feel out of their depth? Do they not know what to do next? Or did they have a lovely, Three video explainer series initially of what they should do is their next steps just to get set up. so what’s that happy content that turns someone into a happy customer from someone who’s just signed up.

And then human content, I think is what drives advocacy. So advocacy is obviously someone that is comfortable promoting a brand because they feel that they’ve really got a lot out of it. so what drives an advocate? I think it’s that one on one engagement with individuals inside a business, really feeling wanted, really feeling appreciated.

just going over the top in terms of assisting that customer. so human content is the six H and I think that maps nicely. On, onto those five steps of the funnel, awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, advocacy, and what I actually did, so I call it pump and funnel, because I took the first three stages, awareness, consideration, conversion, and I believe that those three stages are within the funnel itself, but then if you imagine loyalty, outside the funnel, that’s after the funnel.

So I’ve called it the lake of loyalty in the bottom. and then the pump pumps up, advocates, by having those one on one conversations with them, you drive out this advocacy, and then the pump pumps people up into the top of the funnel again, to hopefully refer you new business in the future,

Alan: So yeah, this is very helpful to visualize how this all works. And would you say that for example, pain point kind of content, for a B2B SaaS company is part of the heart, the help. What kind of stage is that?

David: pain point. Content is essentially content that doesn’t exist in a particular age. So I think, this model gives you a good opportunity to analyze the content that you currently have. And if you find that you haven’t got help content, it tends to be content that A marketer maybe gravitates too naturally and perhaps a marketer hasn’t been that good at creating sales pages in the past.

Perhaps a marketer hasn’t been that good at creating help content and answering long tail questions on your blog. to mop up that, hopefully easy traffic opportunity there as well. Or it could be your happy content. It could be making that kind of customer service experience really fluid, really lovely, when they become a customer to begin with.

So I think the pain point from the customer’s perspective is the content that doesn’t. Answer the question that they have.

Alan: So we covered a lot of ground here. so I’d be curious to know what do you think are some of the most common challenges that B2B brands face when they have to develop their content, podcast or videos?

David: Sure. I think that, there are many challenges, obviously. Let’s maybe go to native platform engagement to begin with. I think maybe some B2B brands or bigger brands are a little bit guilty of broadcasting and not interacting enough and It’s important to interact natively on platform.

So if your customer happens to engage with your videos on YouTube and enjoys being on YouTube, if they’re asking you questions there, you absolutely need to be there to respond, to engage, and that engagement will drive more organic reach for you in the future, certainly as well. There’s certainly an opportunity to drive even more audience engagement by doing things like asking for questions and answering questions directly on podcast episodes as well.

And indeed, when you get more experience at doing podcasts, then you can really think about producing a podcast with other content in mind as well. So not only your hero content, your book, potentially that you’re going to be producing in the longterm. or your help content. so you can incorporate questions that you want to answer, as part of your help content within your podcast episodes.

so maybe midway in your show, you can have a couple of questions and you can answer, ask those questions and have specific follow up questions in relation, to that, to get, to dig out all the answers in relation to those questions. You can transcribe that, you can publish that section, within your blog, that small, maybe three or four minute.

Video, the transcript of that video. And that can be a wonderful piece of help content and engage further with your audience because of that.

Alan: What’s the difference in your opinion between solo shows or interview shows? Is there a like right wrong or different use cases for each of them?

David: No, there’s no right or wrong. Solo shows are certainly harder to do, but maybe because you need to have more research, you need to plan them out more effectively. Perhaps it’s higher quality content. Solo shows tend to be a little bit shorter. solo shows tend to be harder to keep on going for an ongoing basis.

Maybe you can have both. Maybe you can start off the first 10 episodes by having a solo show. I’m thinking of maybe doing that in the future and maybe having some kind of show based upon this marketing model and. Talking through the marketing model with people to begin with and maybe doing that for a few episodes and then having guests on to explain where their marketing channel fits into that marketing model in the future.

I wouldn’t tie yourself up to a particular podcast type before you start. you’ll find your niche, you’ll find your most natural way to do it as you move on. so I think the key thing is. Get that decent basic equipment, plan your first three episodes, I would say, and then get started. And then you’ll learn so much more by doing those first three episodes than if you did by just sitting in your office and trying to plan up your whole year’s

content.

Alan: And so can you share maybe any success stories, case studies from brands that you’ve worked with, that have been using videos and podcasts, quite effectively. Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely

David: Yeah, sure. the most recent one that I mentioned was Majestic. They’ve done really well. They’re really happy with the book. They give it away at various trade shows. You needn’t necessarily have a goal to sell thousands of books or to drive thousands of listens to every single podcast episode that you do, because perhaps, ideally, your podcast would be useful, even if you didn’t do that, as in, if it fits nicely into your marketing model and you can drive people from email,To your podcast and you can retain more customers because of it, then wonderful.

but maybe to answer your question more directly,for several months, I haven’t checked recently because we’ve stopped publishing the show quite so frequently, but, so we published SEO in 2023 as a podcast series, five days a week for about four or five months to cover the whole hundred episodes that, we’d recorded.

And within a month or so, we’d managed to get the podcast number one on Spotify for SEO. and that’s a wonderful thing to do. And that was bringing in a real decent chunk of, listeners just by itself. I probably can’t share exact numbers, because I haven’t asked permission to that just now, but I can certainly.

tell you it was a really decent amount of traffic that we got directly from Spotify. And then obviously you’ve got other channels as well, but I think that emphasizes the importance of upping your publishing frequency if you can.

Alan: great. Five days a week. you can really beat that. And what’s your,What’s your view on storytelling in your content creation process? Is this something that you work with together with the clients or do you come up with a strategy yourself?

David: so from a B2B perspective, I think it’s all about making sure that the listener doesn’t feel that their time has been wasted. so you’re not Trying to be terribly creative with what you do, but what you are trying to do maybe at the beginning of each episode is making sure that the listener is very comfortable to begin with.

This is what we’re going to cover today on the show. This is what we’re going to cover. This is what we’re going to answer. This is who we’re going to have a conversation with. Then get going with what we’re covering and then maybe emphasize what we covered. at the end of one of the podcasts I used to host, I used to play some, a little bit of piano music just at the end and actually on the fly summarize the conversation to say, yes, so today the guest covered this and that,and then have a nice outro after that as well.

So I think if you feel comfortable that they’ve learned something and it was what the. Thought that we’re going to learn them and that’s what you should be aiming for from a B2B perspective.

Alan: Great. And, so you mentioned being, consistent with your publishing schedule. How do you, like, how do you think that B2B brands specifically, could Be consistent, especially while working across different mediums, podcasts, videos, content, what are some tips,

for them?

David: I think eventually you’ll get to a stage where you’re thinking of the different mediums and producing content for the different mediums at the same time. So you won’t just be producing your content. You will have your hero content, your help content in mind and be producing content for them at the same time.

So it’s not a case of just thinking. It is a, as a content medium in silo, form it’s, everything’s linked up really as well. It’ll take a while to get to that. I think one of the challenges for many brands is the perception that they’re going to have to commit to producing content on a regular basis for eternity.

And,that’s scary maybe for some people. And the, but you don’t have to do that. I would say, I start off with this three episodes and get going, and then if you get to a stage where you feel that you haven’t got enough time or you haven’t got enough content, you can say, look, that ends series one, where we’re going to be hopefully coming back for series two.

but, That’s on hold for now. And then, give yourself a breather, give yourself an opportunity to maybe plan what you’re going to do next after that. nothing lasts forever. You don’t absolutely have to keep on going, certainly if you can’t measure any significant value from it. but, if you’re going to do that, then hopefully try and make a series of content that will be relatively evergreen and people can come back to it.

forever and it’ll fit nicely into that hub content where if someone discovers your brand’s not ready to buy from you, you can point them towards that 12 episode series, where they can engage with that and they can have more positive vibes about your business because of that. Then it will do its job.

Alan: Speaking again about the publishing frequency, what’s your best strategy, for researching and for example, like podcast on this topic and I want to know what’s the best publishing frequency, how many episodes should I do per week, for example, how do you figure that out?

David: to begin with, it doesn’t matter because you’re not going to have any listeners to begin with really. And that’s a wonderful practice opportunity. Obviously If you want to drive traffic immediately from your email list, then that’s not necessarily the case, but it’s probably the case for the majority of people.

but, in terms of how you find out about what you should be, what you should be publishing about, what you should be talking about, what questions you should be asking, I’m a fan of also asked,the software. I think many listeners will have experienced, people also asked. on Google. if you scroll down a result in Google, then you’ll see a people also asked, and you can click on a question.

And if you click on one of those questions, you expand the number of questions that are listed there. and that’s a wonderful resource because it’s quite long tail. It’s quite lengthy and it’s. it’s. written in a way that it tends to be a question as well. So I think that’s a wonderful starting point.

I think a lot of marketers or SEOs get lost in keyword volume. and a lot of these longer tail questions are quite hard to determine if there’s any significant search volume there as well. But I think you have to go by, Instinct. If Google was suggesting it and you feel that it’s relevant for your business, then it’s a good topic to be talking about.

The only other thing that I would say in relation to keywords is try and incorporate a relevant keyword phrase for the audience you’re aiming for within your show title as well. I did that very well with digital marketing radio. got me to the, one of the top shows for digital marketing with that. So I ideally do that.

Yeah, possible.

Alan: Yeah. So in terms of optimization, what are the basics,for optimizing a podcast?

David: Yeah. and the main thing is letting your traffic do the talking for podcast directories. So if people are listening to your episodes all the way through, if people were being driven to that podcast directory from other sources and sticking and engaging with your show. And they’re doing that within 24 hours of your episode being published, then that’s a wonderful sign for these podcast directories that your show probably should be promoted a little bit more in their platforms.

So what you should be doing is. On your website, incorporating subscribe to links for the most popular platform. So I’m certainly a fan of Apple, podcasts of Spotify. I think an up and coming one, certainly in the UK and U S is audible. so audible is a great one to have on there as well. if you want to get more, focused on, on really driving traffic, to your show itself, then.

Facebook can be a great way to do that. So actually using paid advertising to take a segment of your episodes and then driving, very specific audiences. Who are fans of Spotify or Audible or are engaging to the piece of content on an iPhone, then you can segment those audiences based on that. So your niche plus the device that they happen or are likely to be listening on and then drive listeners to the particular platform.

Based upon that, a two step approach tends to work best on Facebook because it’s quite hard to get people in one go, because people are obviously browsing and just looking at content. So maybe if you can initially deliver that two minute approach. section of an episode. then someone will remember you.

Then after that, if someone’s actually engaged with that piece of content, then give them your, two or three minutes summary of your show itself, your trailer that’s called. So you can create a show trailer for in video form for YouTube, but also in audio form for your podcast listeners as well.

Deliver that trailer is the second step in your. Advertising sequence on Facebook and then whatever call to action would be obviously Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Audible probably.

Alan: Okay, awesome. Great. Love the practical tips there. And so we’re getting closer to the end. so something that I always like to close with, and I hope you prepare this because it’s challenging maybe for some people, but if you could have any eighties movie character, this could be the nineties as well, to promote your podcast in this case, who would this be and why?

David: I had a little thing about it, I don’t know why this character sprung to mind but I’ll have to go with Arnie. And

I’ll be back with more content. Heheheheh,

Alan: Love it. I love it. Yeah. Also got the Terminator. Poster

there.

So

David: superb.

Alan: yeah, that works. Okay. David, thanks a lot for being here. Is there any final tips that you would like to give to the audience?

David: just… Stop treating a podcast like an amateur project. I remember back in 2004, 2005, when I first started figuring out how to build websites and publish content online and things like that. The websites that were published by brands back then,the, they let their schoolchildren produce the website for them and they were full of flashy characters and, they were just horrible and didn’t represent their brand properly.

I think a lot of brands are guilty of treating. Podcasting in 2023, like they used to treat their own website 15 to 20 years ago and not treating it with the seriousness and the professional manner that it actually deserves. You need high quality audio. You need to structure your shows beforehand as well, and really structure the content in a manner that actually works throughout your business.

And not just. Podcasting is an isolated medium. in short, stop treating podcasts like an amateur project and start treating it like a show on Netflix.

Alan: Okay, great. And so where can people find you and do you maybe also have a links or something that we can put in the show notes for all of the things that we talk about, the six steps and the pump and funnel model.

David: Sure, I’m actually intending, so I, about a month ago or so, I recorded, Podcasting for BDW Brands as a training summit that incorporates this. the, these models, as a LinkedIn life. so I can certainly send you a link to that. I’m intending to redo my website and actually publish that as a whole piece of content on the website.

Haven’t quite got around to that yet, but we’ll hopefully do that in the next month or so. the website is castingcred. com. and if you want to reach out to me and you want to talk to me directly, feel free to email me at david at castingcred. com. Those are the best two resources probably to give you.

Alan: Awesome. Cool. Thanks a lot, David. It’s been great to have you so much knowledge and I’m looking forward to connecting again.

David: Thanks Alan, great to be on.