Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
274: From Podcast to Profit Turning Listeners into Loyal Clients with Guest Carrie Saunders
Are you looking to elevate your marketing strategy and attract more clients to your business? Podcasting might be the secret ingredient you're missing. In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, I sit down with Carrie Saunders, host of the E-Commerce Made Easy podcast, to explore how podcasting can be a powerful tool for business growth.
Expand Your Reach and Showcase Expertise
- Connect with a wider audience
- Demonstrate your industry knowledge
- Build trust with potential clients
Boost Your SEO and Online Visibility
- Improving search engine rankings
- Creating valuable, searchable content
- Driving traffic to your website
Create Meaningful Connections
- Fostering a more personal connection with your audience
- Leveraging storytelling to make your message memorable
- Humanizing your brand in an increasingly AI-driven world
Convert Listeners into Clients
Carrie shares practical tips for turning podcast listeners into leads:
- Crafting effective calls-to-action
- Designing user-friendly landing pages
- Building trust through consistent content creation
We also discuss common podcasting pitfalls to avoid and the importance of embracing imperfection in your marketing journey. Whether you're a podcasting novice or looking to refine your strategy, this episode offers valuable insights to help you harness the power of audio content for your business.
How to Connect:
Carrie Saunders
Website: https://scalewithcarrie.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carriesaunders/
Ecommerce Made Easy Podcast : https://www.ecommercemadeeasypodcast.com/
Ready to take your marketing to the next level with podcasting? Tune in and learn how to make your brand's voice heard.
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Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, kendra Korman, and today I'm really excited to be joined by Keri. Keri and I today are going to be talking about how a podcast can help draw new people to you and your website and then how to convert them once they're there, which part of why you're doing all of this effort right is to convert them and bring them into your business. So welcome, keri. Thanks so much for joining Keri. Thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me, kendra. So talk to me a little bit about how you got into podcasting. Share a little bit about your podcast and how it helps your business.
Speaker 2:So I just had this nudge for probably over a year, honestly to start a podcast, because one of my core things about me is I just love helping others. It's just core to my nature. I just absolutely love helping others and I knew I could reach more people with a podcast than I could like one-on-one client work. So and I love helping people from anywhere from startups to full-blown you know, been in business 10, 20, 30 years and I felt, like you know, been in business 10, 20, 30 years and I felt, like you know, a podcast is going to help reach especially the newbies or the ones like doing it themselves, and so I wanted to reach them too and help them, because I would have loved to have had that help when I started our business. So that's really why I started it and I finally got the bravery to do it and launched my podcast on May of 23. So I've been doing it for a little while now.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Yeah, you're up. You're over 85, almost 90 episodes by now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm getting close, yeah, yeah, about 86 at the time of this recording. Yeah, that is so cool.
Speaker 1:So talk to me. What is your podcast called and what is it about?
Speaker 2:Well, it is called e-commerce made easy, and it's all for online businesses, whether you're a course creator, a coach or a traditional e-commerce. It's all about helping simplify the tech simplify email marketing, social media marketing. I like to try to make things simple and help people be more productive rather than spinning their wheels trying to churn all the things. So that's what it's mostly about, okay so I really like that.
Speaker 1:I like that angle. We can probably talk for hours about all those different parts of the topic, because I am an email marketing crazy lady, I love podcasts and I love making things easy. So we've got a lot in common. Now let's go ahead and jump into talking about podcasting. So how do you see podcasting helping business owners or brands attract new listeners or potential clients to their website?
Speaker 2:Well, I feel like podcasting is a really great way, and especially if you make the process simple, which it totally can be. If you make it that way, it's a great way to showcase your expertise, especially like B2C or even way it's a great way to showcase your expertise, especially like B2C or even B2B people. You can really showcase your expertise on a podcast, and people will usually realize that part. But what they don't realize in addition to that is it can actually help your search engine optimization as well, for your actual website too. So if you have show notes and again you can make this simple you can use AI. I'm sure you can give them great tips about this too, about using AI to simplify the things here.
Speaker 2:But you can use the show notes, too, to bring people into your website, and especially the transcriptions too, because then that's searchable by Google and all the major search engines.
Speaker 2:So it not only can bring people in from just listing, but then you can also get people in via searches on the web, and it's also a great way to send out, you know, make people aware of freebies or some call to actions and how they can work for you too. So it can. There's just several different ways you can use it to really bring people in that you might not think of, especially that search engine optimization part. I think that's usually surprising to people that it can create more content for your website. We actually take our podcast and make a blog post from it as well, so you can kind of repurpose it. It's not the exact same content but it's on the same topic, so you got a couple of different ways you can like repurpose things to make it more rich for your marketing efforts and you're not creating new content for every different thing. You can repurpose one thing and make it multifaceted across different ways that people consume material.
Speaker 1:I love repurposing content because it can save you so much time, right so, creating a blog post, taking the show notes, the transcript, you did all of that right, you did 90% of the work and you just have to take it over the finish line. I used to joke with people I still joke with people about websites and I'm like, yeah, it's 90% done. We only have 60% left, and it's like it's that it sounds funny, but it's that getting over the finish line and wrapping up that last piece, that is just so important and I think that that's really good. So one of my previous guests gave me a tip on search engine optimization and that was to do a Q&A format or Q&A schema. When you were interviewing somebody, that you could take their interview and actually put that into a Q&A schema. I guess my question for you is if somebody is looking to drive some search engine optimization with their podcast, how do they know what keywords to optimize for? Because that's always like the hard part, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, it can be, but it can be simple too if you try to make it simple. So you really just got to get in the minds of your listeners what are they? What questions are they already asking? And then you need to have those questions be in the podcast, be in the repurposed blog post or be in the show notes. You know what specific thing are they searching for and that's going to help you.
Speaker 2:And so if you're getting stuck on brainstorming, you can use things like AI to help you brainstorm and you can just simply search Google and if you notice, when you search Google, more suggested questions come up as you're typing your question into Google, and that can give you some other perspectives of what other ways to ask that same question are, and you can even search the thing that you're thinking of. You know how to make more sales online. I don't know. I just pick some random phrase and then you can search for it and then scroll down to the bottom of Google and it'll give you related searches based upon that too. So you can just use this little bit of mining and really kind of pulling it apart and putting yourself in your client's shoes is really the best way to do. It is just think like them. Think like you're a new person in that industry, not you, who knows more about things already, so you got to put yourself in the newbie's shoes, basically one of my favorite concepts you do not want to share what you have to share.
Speaker 1:You want to share what other people are thinking and meet them where they're at. Otherwise they're not interested, right? That's just so key. So, yes, what questions are they asking? What words are they using? That's really key to identifying how to optimize and pick the right words. So, thank you very much for that. Optimized and pick the right words. So thank you very much for that. Let's talk about podcasting and mixing that with other forms of marketing, because I know that I get people all the time. They're like oh, I listen to your podcast all the time and they feel like they know me right, because they see me, they talk to me, they hear me, they've got all the senses going. So how does, how does podcasting really create those relationships in addition to other marketing tools or beyond other marketing tools?
Speaker 2:Well, I think podcasting and YouTube videoing to go hand in hand here, or even going live on social media. It just brings the human to the material, because you can either see or hear or both the person and it's more like you're in the room with them and they're talking to you, not at you. Because I feel like sometimes a blog post it can be like when you're reading it's more like you're being talked at rather than talked with, or two feels like more of a one way street. But with podcasting, with making videos from the podcast and putting them on YouTube, for example, it's more of a conversational and it's more like you're having coffee with a potential customer or a potential business best friend or something like that, and so you really get to hear the inflection in their voice, get a bit more of their personality from it. It really creates that more human connection. Plus, you can do storytelling, I feel like, more effectively with voice and video.
Speaker 2:When you're trying to do storytelling with words, unless you're a really good creative writer, it's really hard to convey that story, I feel like, in a blog form. But with words and with audio you can really create that storytelling and make it more meaningful. You can hear the emotion in it. You can hear, you know, all the ups and downs of more meaningful. You can hear the emotion in it. You can hear, you know all the ups and downs of the story and it really kind of brings it all together and makes it again a lot more human.
Speaker 1:I feel like with doing podcasting and doing videos with your podcast too, well, and I think human has gotten even more important now, with AI and all the blogs coming out all the time at every turn, the people are just AI generating some junk at times, right, and so we're losing a little bit of that human connection. And I think again, I love AI, don't get me wrong, but I feel like that human connection needs to be there. And, yes, you can AI generate a podcast, but I don't recommend it because you miss out on that, that key connection piece. Now I want to go back to one thing that you had said, which was storytelling. I love storytelling. I really think that people learn from stories and are interested in stories, right, more than just storytelling regular facts and things that are dry. How do you either use it in your podcast or encourage your clients to use it in their marketing? When it comes to storytelling, I will admit for our topic.
Speaker 2:Storytelling is hard. It is really hard for me to weave storytelling sometimes into the Commerce Made Easy podcast just because I'm talking tech typically and I'm trying to make it easy. So sometimes storytelling is hard, but sometimes I will try to equate it to something we can relate to, like the website. Traffic is like the cars on the highway on the interstate highway, and the more cars you get to go drive by your billboard, the more visibility you're going to get. So I try to do something like that, but I will say stories a little bit harder on my topic, and I am actually creating a new podcast that will be easier for storytelling. It's a side thing. This is Brown Sealy. I would kind of talk about this a little bit before we jumped on the call. So I feel like storytelling is going to be easier there. But I feel like for most businesses, though, storytelling is a lot easier than from a tech business perspective. It could be my mindset too, and I just need to figure out how to work it in. But I also have to be careful of our clients. I can't tell too many specific client stories for their, you know, for their privacy. But yeah, no, I feel like storytelling definitely can happen, can we happen? And if it's harder like mine, you know relate it to something that you experience in life, like the highway, in the cars or making breakfast or something you know. You could maybe make it more abstract if you need to to still make it resonate with them.
Speaker 2:And there is a lot of human proof that stories help people remember things so much better. We listen and pay attention to stories a lot more than we do those facts and figures. They can just go in and out of our heads, whereas stories you'd be like. I remember that person told me that maybe somebody remembers that I told them that I'm celiac, right, so they're probably going to remember that, maybe more than some of the facts we might have on this podcast today. But then they might be like oh well, I need to go relist that podcast it was. It was about you know how to do podcasting with business and that was very helpful. Now I remember that because I remember she had Celia. You know, it could be just some random fact that you throw in there, could even be like a little short story like that still brings them back and helps them remember back and help some, remember.
Speaker 1:So I want to say thank you for saying it's hard, it's not easy, like I think we need to say. Yes, we want to keep things as easy as possible. You and I love simplifying things for our listeners and our viewers and our clients. But I think it's hard and we're close to it. So, yeah, it's really hard for each of us to try and weave in stories, especially when we're so close to our own stock right. So the further removed we are, I think it feels easier at times, like I can come up with stories for my clients all day, and then I'm like for me, I'm like, so I am the
Speaker 1:same way, yeah. So thank you so much for saying that, because I really want to note that, because, again, this is what you do for a living. You're building brands online, you're building e-commerce brands, you're driving conversions and you're helping your clients. You've got a podcast and you struggle with it too. So, again, it's not as easy as a lot of just do storytelling. It's like no, that can just do storytelling. We have to think about it. So I think that that is just so important. So thank you so much for saying that, because, again, I think we sometimes try to oversimplify it and oversimplify the effort that it takes, and that's just not fair to us or to anybody that's trying to do it Right. So that's that's very cool.
Speaker 1:So somebody connected with you. They connected with the story. They went to check out your show notes or your blog because they found you on search. Whatever path they happen to take, they end up on your website.
Speaker 2:How do you convert? How do you make them a lead or a client? That's a really good question. So I feel like the best way to make them a leader client is having specific call to actions per podcast episode if possible, like that's kind of ideal, because you want to take them to, really ideally, a specific page on your website For one. You know you can make it simple, let's make it be your show notes because you want to take them to a familiar place on your website.
Speaker 2:If you transition somebody off of a platform podcast, social, etc and you take them to your website and the page that you take them to is jarringly different from what you either heard on a podcast or saw on social media, they're going to be confused and probably leave. So, first off, we need to make wherever we're taking them familiar. So, whether it's your brand name and what you're already talking about, the topic could be like a related blog post, something like that. It's got to be similar in nature so they feel comfortable and they feel like more trust once they're there, and then you want to continually build trust with them on their website. I like to talk about this actually in our course that we have about converting your website better and more of a DIY way of doing it, and you need to make sure that you're really building that trust. When they first land on the webpage, you need to have a clear way to contact you, a really easy way to find more information about you, some social proofs and testimonials. Those are things you want to add in after you land them on a familiar topic or something that they can relate to based on where they came from. And then you need to add in those familiarities and those you know.
Speaker 2:I find that a lot of people miss the easy way to contact you. Like that's like a showstopper. If I go to somebody's website and there's not an easy way to contact you, like that's like a showstopper. If I go to somebody's website and there's not an easy way to contact them, I don't care if it's just email, I don't care if there's no phone available, I want an easy way to contact them. And if they don't have that, then why would I trust that business or why would I trust you know working with them if I can't contact them easily? So that's like number one is having that contact. You know, I like to harp on that one a lot because people miss it. I'm like how?
Speaker 1:do I get a hold of it?
Speaker 2:Because I'm bought from places I know.
Speaker 1:I'm bought from places that I couldn't find. Yeah, I've had people I've been like. I've been like, okay, look at my website and tell me if it's easy to do business with me. And they're like, yeah, no, I've got no idea where I'm supposed to go, what I'm supposed to hit. They're like it's really creative and pretty, but that's about it. And I'm like dang it. So, yes, if you're not sure, if you have that easy way to build it, I'm like phone a friend, have them take a look and say is it easy to do business with?
Speaker 2:Yes, and one call to action too, per page if possible. Like too many options, a confused mind says no, make it make. Each page has a focus. That's very important. It's so easy to try to put all the things on a page that you could ever possibly think a person might want or need, and it's and I admit it. We have pages that we need to redo because there's too many things on it. Completely, we'll admit that. We've got a website that's grown for over 22 years. It needs to go through. Making sure it's got one call to action per page is really important to converting that person. Whether you want them to sign up for your newsletter, download your freebie, just one thing. Maybe you have your newsletter at the footer. If they really trust you have it at the footer.
Speaker 1:They will maybe do that too, but you know, don't bombard them with's in a totally different brand and totally different information and a totally different person. So think that through when you're doing it. I love the one call to action because I have 75 things that I want to share with people on any given time and place, and so we have to pick and choose what is the most helpful thing for them at that point in time. Where can we send them?
Speaker 1:There's a woman that I'm a big fan of. Her name is LaShonda Brown and she has a great YouTube channel, if you want to check it out. But she had a very strong call to action that drove everybody to her tools page and that's where she sent every single person. So she was able to like, really do that. That streamlined piece with one call to action that took her to, took them to their tools and then they could pick what they wanted from there. But again, it was all stuff that made business easy and affordable to do. I think that that clean and clear one call to action really simplifies so much of your marketing and it's really important to think through that, so I love that that's what you should do.
Speaker 1:What are some of the mistakes that people make along the lines, of course, other than like 800 calls to action?
Speaker 2:Right. Well, for one, it's no clear goal. Each page should have a goal, and that kind of alludes back to the call to action. But really each page should have a goal. What are you trying to do with each page? It's like going on a new date with a new person. They just verbally vomit their life at you, like you're going to be, like you're out the door and you don't even eat your dinner. Right? You need to, like you know, one topic per page, one topic per moment in time, if we go back to the date, right? So we need to make sure that we have that clear goal per page.
Speaker 2:And another thing I find is people will, like not publish something very often Say you have a blog If you haven't put anything on that, and like even as little as three months, I'll be wondering if you're in business still and especially, like if it's been six months or a year, you're going to definitely wonder if they're in business. And I really encourage on my podcast too, that you have a piece of content monthly, one new piece of content monthly, whether it's a short blog or what. A new piece of content monthly shows that you're active. One to your customers and two to the search engines when they see new content on your website, they're going to think that you're paying attention and maintaining your stuff and they're going to see you as more important than if your website's been stale for, you know, six months or a year. They're going to start pushing you down in search engine rankings as well, as it builds customer trust seeing that you're still active and doing things. So you know, lack of publishing something consistently is also, I feel, like something that people miss a lot and that's kind of like the main thing is that you just that helps build the customer trust is having new stuff.
Speaker 2:And social media is the same way. You know, I'm not saying you have to be on social media every day, but it's a really good idea to post on your professional pages once a week at minimum. You know, don't have to be on all the socials, but at least post once a week. Once a day would be better, but once a week at least still shows that you're pretty active. So just making sure that you're consistent on your publishing, whatever it is, and make it easy on you. Don't feel like you have to do all the things. It could be, you know, a simple, you know three paragraph, you know blurb or something you know. But make it simple, don't be too hard on yourself.
Speaker 1:I love that. Make it simple but be consistent, because consistency builds trust. Make it simple but be consistent, because consistency builds trust, and I think that that's so true. I mean, do what you say you're going to do and deliver on it. And I mean that's just business basics, and so many times we forget that when it moves over into the world of marketing and social media and all the things right. So I really think that that's important to share and to be cognizant of. But I love how you said it doesn't have to be overly complicated, right. It doesn't have to be perfect. It can grow with you.
Speaker 1:If you don't have a ton of time, that's okay. Take a little tip and build that out into three paragraphs. Have time for like three lines of text. Have AI help you supplement it. You know, again, there's a million ways to do this effectively and efficiently, but you gotta be doing, and I think that that's so important. So I love the fact that you are encouraging that consistency because it is just so, so, so important. This has been an awesome conversation. I love how simple you make things. So definitely everybody who's listening or watching will have links in the show notes to Carrie's podcast and, of course, her website. So definitely check all of that out. But before I let you go, gotta ask you the question that I ask all of my guests. This show is called Imperfect Marketing because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned?
Speaker 2:I would say, always learning and trying what my heart and my gut tells me to do, just like creating the podcast. And I will admit with me, creating this secondary podcast is kind of on the side in a personal podcast Reading that has been so hard, even though I've already done a podcast before, because I'm worried about being perfect with it. So I'm having to tell myself we don't have to be perfect on the first episode because I've already done a podcast before. Right, I need to do it imperfectly and just get it done and get it out there so I can help other people with celiac. And it's the same thing I did with the e-commerce made easy podcasts.
Speaker 2:I just knew I had to do it. My mentor told me I worked with somebody who helps people do podcasts and get them launched, and she was like you're going to go back to episode one and being like that wasn't that great, but you still got to do it so that you can get better and get to that you know, 10th, 15th, 20th episode and be like, oh, that's okay, now I kind of like this, now I'm doing all right. So you really just got to jump in with what you want to do and just do it, and do it imperfectly, and don't be afraid and follow your gut and learn, always learn.
Speaker 1:I love that. Yes, if you go back and listen to episode one of Imperfect Marketing, I would be embarrassed, so don't go back that far.
Speaker 1:You can't watch it because I wasn't recording on video, but it was very different. You know I evolve as I've learned and as I've done different things. But, yes, be progress over perfection all the time. And I love the fact that you know you're struggling a little bit with that perfection because you have a podcast. So it should be better right the second time when you launch another podcast. But it's a whole new podcast, it's a whole new angle, it's a whole new audience and there's so much for you to share there. So, oh my gosh, keri, thank you, thank you, thank you. No-transcript.
