The Power of the Podcast: Unlock Your Brand's Marketing Potential

Beyond the Mic: Proven Strategies to Grow Your Podcast and Platform

• Pedal Stomper Productions - Josh Troche • Season 2 • Episode 10

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Want your podcast to break beyond the mic and truly build your brand?
In this episode, we dig deep into growth strategies every small business owner and marketing manager needs to know. 

We start by laying the foundation for growth — with planning, audience identification, and content diversification. Then, we dive into expanding your reach through transcripts, video content, and social media engagement. Building a community, collaborating with others, and launching a newsletter are all key topics we cover to transform listeners into loyal followers.

We also explore powerful monetization strategies — from sponsorships and affiliate marketing to selling your own products or services. Plus, we discuss the impact of emerging technologies like AI and new platforms that can skyrocket your reach.

Finally, we wrap up by tackling a critical industry conversation: What is a podcast today?
We break down insights from the latest Oxford Road and Edison Research white paper, covering the identity crisis in podcasting and why advertisers are demanding better measurement standards.

This episode is a must for anyone serious about building a podcast that supports real business growth!

Ready to get serious about your podcast growth?

Join our Discord Server and let's chat about your podcast https://discord.gg/CWk9aUuNtM

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Book your time in our state of the art studios: https://www.pedalstomperproductions.com/podcast

Join our Discord Server and let's chat about your podcast https://discord.gg/CWk9aUuNtM

Want to read about this? Check the blog!
https://www.pedalstomperproductions.com/blog


We've got two great things this week. Number one, how do you expand the reach of your podcast? You want this thing to grow, right? I mean, it's it's like a garden. You don't put all those seeds in the ground just to sit there and stare at dirt. You want them to grow, but you realize it takes some water, takes some sunlight, takes some fertilizer, takes a few other things we're going to talk about those this week. And additionally, the thing that I'm kind of looking forward to in the second piece of this episode where we get into the news piece. What is a podcast? Have you ever actually thought about that? Well, Oxford and Edison Research dove into that. They got some interesting answers and some interesting opinions, all of which we're going to talk to you about this week. Stay tuned. Oh, I want to thank you for tuning in. This week we are going to talk about making your podcast grow. This does not involve fertilizer. No, you probably aren't going to get your hands dirty if you do. I probably don't want to hear about it. With all that being said, do me a favor. Go ahead, hit the follow button. I want to make sure you come along for the rides. We give a lot of great tips every week to help you in growing your podcast and setting up your podcast correctly. Really, this is all about supporting your brand, be it your brand, personally or your business's brand. We're we're here for that. We are here to help support that. That being said, this goes far beyond the microphone that is sitting right in front of me here. Because this I mean, your podcast is the foundation for building your podcast. And I know that sounds weird. It sounds like this circular definition that my fifth grade English teacher got all upset about when I would use. But it's it's very, very true because your podcast is going to be the foundation for all of these things that you are going to be building that move forward. Now with that, just like when you build the foundation of a house, you don't just slap a couple of rocks down. I mean, maybe you did years ago, but right now you're not just slapping a couple of rocks down on any random spot and saying, I'm going to build my house on top of that. No, you spend the time, you prep the space, you work on things to make sure that the ground is suitable and everything is set up. So that way, everything that you put on top of that is going to be built really well, and it's going to have a solid platform to to base itself off of. Now, that's not to say you can't change later on. You may remodel what's on top of it. Heck, you may extend it. You may shrink it. You can do all of those things. Just make sure that you've got a great foundation underneath it to do that. Now, when I talk about foundation, the key thing about this, there's 2 to 2 key things. And I hammer on this all the time. Identify your audience. There's one person out there that you need to identify. It's that one person. One person. In a lot of cases I always say, if you if you're having a tough time identifying that one person of who the audience is, look at your analytics. It will tell you. But in the same sense, if you're just starting out the person that you're probably going to have the easiest time talking to in the problem that you're going to relate to the most is you go ahead and look in the mirror. That is the person that is probably your audience. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm telling you to go out and listen to your podcast 500 times. What it does mean is that people that look like you. People that do the same things that you do, people that have the same hobbies that you do, people that have the same structure around them as you. Those are the people that you're going to be connecting with. I mean, it's the most obvious target, right? It's the most obvious group of people that you're going to be able to speak to the best because that's who you are with this solid base that I talked about. Like I said, we're building the podcast off of this base. We need to look at content diversification. We want to expand that reach. Podcasts are a great way to get discovered. There are great way to build that SEO, but you want to make sure that there's other tools out there that you can use that will help you with that. So first off, I'm going to talk about transcripts. There is someone that I work with, Elizabeth O'Reilly. She does, a lot of SEO items. She is leaning very heavily into the accessibility side of the internet. A lot of really cool stuff that she talks about with that. But one of the things with that is transcripts are huge because you know what those do. Not only do they increase the SEO because now that's searchable in the same sense. What about someone that's hearing impaired? Now they have a way to find your podcast. They can read your podcast. Maybe it's someone that I mean can hear sounds, but they're missing some clarity. Once again, they can follow along on that transcript. So now we've got a wider audience to go to in the same sense at something else. With your transcripts, you can pull quotes from, you can build best of episodes. I'm going to give another shout out because he loves it when I do it to Bill at the Late to Good podcast, we recently did a best of episode for him. It was the best stories of how people got into motorsports. We took a bunch of quotes from his guests when he is asked similar questions on that, and we got their best of stories, and that episode's done really, really well, and it was really low effort for him when he was in the studio, we just had him say, hey, like three different things. We had him give a front statement, a middle statement and an end statement. So kind of to talk about a couple of things that had happened. What a couple of the podcasts that were coming up. But then he kind of capped it all off. It was something that in terms of recording cut, recording time and his prep time, he maybe had 15, 20 minutes in and got a really good episode out of it. So that's something really to think about with those transcripts. Those allow you to do the things like that. The other piece of, content diversification that I want to talk about is video content. It's increased visibility, it's searchability. It's all the platforms. I say this all the time. YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. I mean, how many times have you looked for something and you just you looked it up and suddenly end up on a YouTube video? You may end up even halfway through it. Guess what got you halfway through that YouTube video? The transcripts I just mentioned? I'm a huge proponent of video. My background is in video, and I came to podcasting from the video world. There's a lot of like old tried and true podcasters that aren't keen on that. I get it, I understand that, but from a branded standpoint, from a business standpoint, if we have another way to access a whole just slew of other people, we have a way to to bring in a whole new fan base. Why wouldn't we capitalize on that just by pushing record on a camera? To me, that is huge. The other thing that I want to talk about real quickly to social media engagement, it makes sure that you are engaging with social media on it. The clips that video allows you to put out. We do photos for some people from a podcast. We'll take a guest shot from that will take clips where we use once again, quotes from the transcripts, and we will put those out as social media posts. Use the social media wisely to help grow your podcast and grow your business in that. Now, the one thing that I always warn about social media it is same as YouTube. It's rented space. And what do I mean by rented space? What happened to TikTok? It went away. It came back, it went away, it came back. What happens is the platform you've built, you've put everything into goes away. You are up a very smelly creek and you do not have a paddle, my friend. With that being said, I mean diversify. And this is why we say this whole section is on content diversification. Find ways to be reached multiple ways. But I want to make sure and this is the key piece to this. I don't want you to lose focus on who you're targeting. It is still one person. It's just multiple different ways to tap them on the shoulder. The next thing that I want to dive into a little bit is building the community. We want to go from just listeners to followers. The thing that there's three big tips that I'm going to give you on this, one of which is interactive con content polls, question and answers, challenges. Hey, the first one that that, gives us a comment or view on this. We'll send them a t shirt or something of that nature. Anytime you can offer something like that, you're you're asking for that interaction. You're you're returning something to, anything that's interactive like that is really good. And it really helps build that sense of community and communities. What takes it from a, hey, I heard that podcast once to look, I tune into this every single week. I it's part of my routine. The other thing that I want to talk about is collaborations or partnerships. Work with other creators, work with people that parallel what you do. I always talk about bringing in experts. You're you're an expert in what you do, but there's someone that's probably a specialist in an area of what you do. I heard another I've used the medical example of this all the time. If your knee hurts, you're going to go to an author pod. If you just want a general wellness checkup, you're probably going to go to your general practitioner. If you have a heart issue, you're going to go to your to a cardiovascular person. If you need knee surgery, you probably don't want your general practitioner doing that. So bring in those specialists and make it a collaborative thing, because once again, there's going to be something that you work on a little bit better than they do. And if they have a podcast, once again, you can help them out in the same sense. Do what you can to become a guest on other podcasts. Once again, it's it's collaborative. It's being a partnership. But be a good guest when they release the episode. Make sure you share it. When they release some clips, make sure you share those. Release a clip or two yourself. Ask for a couple of those clips and say, hey, can I tag you in these? I would love to do that. Be a good guest for this. The other thing build a newsletter. The newsletter is that extra contact point. And once again, it's not rented land, it is you own that you own the way to contact those people. It's not through social media where, hey, that platform could be gone for some reason tomorrow. You never know when someone gets upside down and payments or whatever. We've seen platforms come and go over the years. Email. If you have a newsletter, you've once again have a way to communicate with people in the same sense. You can use that newsletter to directly email a few people. And I tell you, if you directly email a few people with something personal to them, asking them a question about stuff that will really hit home. And once again, because you're building that personal connection with them, you're going to build a follower instead of a listener. They're going to want to just really engage with you because you've engaged with them. Don't wait for people to come to you. You need to go to them. Another way that you need to go to them is with monetizing your platform. There's a lot of people and it always, I guess I would say it's it's tough when I talk to some people like, hey, I want to do a podcast, I want to monetize it. And I tell people I'm like, look, what you see is the monetized podcasts are the the Joe Rogan's, the, the smart less the Mel Robbins. Those podcasts have had it huge. They're amazing. When you look at the number of podcasts that are out there to hit, that level of it is it isn't something that you can necessarily bank on now. It's something that can be very achievable. There's a lot of people that do that, but it's not something that is simple to get to, and there's not necessarily a direct path there. And a lot of cases it takes some luck to get there to and some discovery to get there. That's why I tell people don't bank on the monetization through the platforms necessarily. Sponsorship and advertising are a great way to do this. Now, the two fold side of that is making sure that if you're doing this as a business branded podcast, that once again, you're going to be advertising your business, that that's the whole thing. That is the monetization of your podcast. If you do the podcast for a few months and pick up a few clients out of that, guess what? That is the monetization of the podcast. Some people are like, well, no, I didn't make any money off the podcast. And I'm like, well, you got an email newsletter now that has a couple of hundred subscribers and you're constantly getting customers from that, and they're like, yeah, I'm like, well, what? Why? Why isn't that monetizing your podcast? And like, well, the checks aren't coming in from the podcast. I'm like, yes, they are. That's where the clients are coming from. So realize that is a way to monetize your podcast in the same sense, if there's someone that's parallel. Once again, I'm going to use the Late to Grid podcast because there are so many great analogies with this one. It's a racing podcast. There are race car. People are always breaking stuff. Just ask Bill, always breaking stuff. They always need stuff that that stuff is built by manufacturers. That stuff is sold by companies. Those places want to be in front of people. It's the same thing. Let's say you've got a baking podcast. Those people need pans, those people need flour. Those people need all they need butter. They you can tell that is the extent of my baking knowledge there. But nonetheless, those companies want to talk to those people. Now here's the tough part. Everyone wants to monetize by letting the platform do it for them, which can work. I mean, you can let the platform pick the ads for you. What you have to realize is that the platform is going to pick the ads for you. It may not be exactly something that works for that. If you do that, you know your audience. And like I said, if it's a baking podcast and there's a company that has baking pans, sell that. Don't wait for them to come to you. They're not going to come to you. Go to them and say, hey, look, I've got this great light baking podcast. We're talking to a thousand people a week. Wouldn't you like to talk to a thousand people a week about your baking pans? They're going to be like, yeah, like you're like, isn't that worth a couple hundred bucks weekday? That like, yeah, that is where you're going to find those, those advertisers, they're not going to find you don't think that when you start your podcast that people are going to be banging down the door to come in and say, hey, here's the money truck, I'm going to back the money truck up. You've got a podcast. No, that's not how that works. You need to go out and sell it. So make sure that you spend the time and effort to do that. The other piece to that is there is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing. A lot of people will if they review products, they talk about products, they will put links to that in the bottom of their show. Those can work because then you get a percentage or whatever that sale is. The thing that's tough with that is oftentimes that becomes kind of salesy with it. Like, hey, go click the link below and I'm probably going to make some money a little bit salesy with that. Podcasters typically don't like a hard sell on stuff, educate them, lead them to the fact that, hey, you need what I have, but don't necessarily just flat tell them buy my stuff. Most of them typically are going to look upon that kindly. If you are selling products and or services, realize that those are sold very differently. Service is once again you have to say the benefits and why people need this and how it's going to help them with a product. It's a little bit different. You have to look at that as how how they can use that. And I mean, what is what's that going to do for them. It's slightly different, but it's it make sure that you are looking at it from the right direction. In the same sense, the big thing with products that you have a huge advantage with, with video now, you can show people, from a service side here. I mean, we do we help business branded podcasts. I can't necessarily set up a business branded podcast here on the table and be like, look, check this thing out. It doesn't quite work that way. I'd love for it to. It does not work that way. Video makes it possible for you to set your widget on a table and point out the things and show people what's going on with it. If you have something like that, be sure to capitalize on that. The next thing that I want to talk about with this is I o is has has, has. I been a topic in the news over the past year or two? I'm not sure. Has anyone heard of it? All all seriousness, I is really starting to work its way into more and more, pieces of business every day. We use a ton of AI tools in order to help us write descriptions, write titles. Now, the problem is, there's a lot of people out there that are just like, hey, write me a title for my podcast. Oh, that's, that's that's not going to work all that. Well, AI is going to give you what you asked for, and it'll give you a title for your podcast. That'll probably be pretty generic. We work with stuff to build, props to build GPT that are specific to each, I mean, each client that we work with in order to do this. This is one thing, though, that I always tell people when you're preparing your podcast, use AI tools to help you ask better questions, to help you give the show better structure, to help work through some of those problems that are some of the things that may be time consuming. In the same sense with AI, that can help you look at like, emerging platforms. Because if you're trying to write a different quote for each platform, it's going to be tough. So use AI in order to help you do those types of things. Because one thing that we want to look at with this is in the future, there's there's emerging platforms that are coming out. I talked about a little bit about this with the social media side, but there's that lemonade platform. There's kiasu, there's Mastodon, there's blue sky. There are a thousand different social media style platforms that all do different things. Some of them have great numbers of people behind them. Some of them have a very small number of people behind them. Either way, it's about making sure that you're on the platforms that will give you the visibility that's worth it. What's interesting about this is I get some people that sit there and say, hey, look, my audience is on this platform that doesn't have many people on it. So what if there's a chance you get a couple of customers out of that and a couple of customers are worth it? Spend the time on it. Additionally, because we're talking about AI here, use some of the AI tools to put your data analytics in to figure out what's going on with your podcast. Where are people coming from? What should you be doing to get more of those people? Are those people converting into customers if they're not well, then you need to probably figure out why some of that data can help with that. With all of that, we've covered a lot of kind of like that, that that expanding your reach. How are we going to go out and find more people looking at all those items, going beyond the MC content diversification, build the community because those community people, they will especially they will recommend your podcast to other people, monetize your platform, have advertisers on because you know what? Those advertisers will share your platform. Also, the same thing is, is futureproof it make sure it's ready via I make sure it's on some of the emerging platforms, and make sure that you are looking at the data to figure out what is up ahead. To me, this is the way to expand your reach and to grow your podcast as you move forward. If you'd like to talk about it, we've got our No Pitch podcast consultation. I absolutely love doing those because I get to meet so many new and great people. We sit down, there's zero pitch in it. We're going to talk about your podcast. I need to know what your podcast is ahead of time. I'll go out, I'll listen to a few episodes. I'll watch a few episodes, we'll go over it. We'll give you some advice on it. We'll look at what you can do to once again get that growth strategy to move forward. All that being said, there is some interesting, interesting news that just came out from Edison Research about what is a podcast. To me, I think I know, but do I? We'll find out in a minute. Oh, so in this week's news bit we're going to talk Oxford Road and Edison Research had a white paper called what is a podcast Preserving Its Essence and Structuring for expansion. It's interesting because they're calling it the identity crisis of crisis of a podcast, because recently, I mean, now that video is in the mix. What is a podcast? There's audio only. There's video content. There's I mean, like YouTube, Spotify or trying to like mix the two Spotify. You can upload your video podcast to their podcasting platform and it replaces the audio podcast, which is truly a podcast. There's a lot going on here. What we do know is listener perception. 72% of Americans age 12 plus consider recordings of people discussing any topic, including on YouTube, that are also available as only audio only shows as a podcast, 72% audio or video. They're good with it. They're like, it's a podcast. Interesting, interesting, interesting piece to me. So are we going to let the people decide what happens here, or are we going to try and define this on our own? What's interesting is, is there's advertisers that are hesitant to talk about this. It's inconsistent standards, fragment, fragmented reporting, and there's unclear attribution. Now, there's all sorts of weirdness that comes on in reporting and with many podcasts. Anyways, I always tell people, if you're going to advertise on a podcast, you need to look at the numbers. You need to see the numbers. Where are these people? You need to see the demographics before you just trust what they're telling you. But when they say, hey, we've got a podcast, do you instantly think it's on YouTube? Maybe it's not. Maybe it's just audio only, maybe it's video on Spotify and no other platforms. So make sure you're asking the question like what all platforms are these available? Where all can I download these things in the same sense? This report was kind of it, was it? What was interesting about it is they say that there's an urgent need for a clear, shared definition of podcasting and measurement standards of podcasting, because what I always find interesting is when you look at one measurement and you look at another measurement, the number one podcast that week, maybe two totally different things. Keep your eyes on that. This is going to be an interesting space. So they've got a couple of proposed definitions here. And I found this interesting podcast. Here's the definition an on demand audio driven program featuring episodic content across wide ranging themes and formats, traditionally delivered via open RSS and conversational. It can include platform based distribution and is commonly supplemented by video supplemented. It's not video, but supplemented. Then they put video, podcast and episodic on demand programs centered on spoken word content, where synchronized visuals meaningfully shape the experience. Interesting definitions there. I, there's some pieces there where I think, yeah, I like this. And then there's other pieces where I think I'm not really sure about that. I'd love to get your take on it. What is a podcast to you with that? They're looking at open measurement protocol for podcasting. It's advocating for an industry wide collaboration to develop something. They calling on to ensure interoperable, privacy, safe measurement standards and a clear taxonomy across all platforms. To me, it's clarity. There's there's and as we look at data and as we look at analytics, there's some spaces where it's not really all that clear what's going on all the time. There's, there's some fuzziness and there are some companies that fuzz those numbers in some interesting directions. For us, we want to make sure that we are getting you the most accurate information that we can. We're not out to sell you anything. We're out to show you that you're growing and that you're building and that you're engaging with the right people. That is the biggest thing is engaging with the right people. For us. So all that being said, what's your opinion on podcasting? I would love to hear it. Additionally, that's all I've got for this week. To me, some big news this week. We're talking about growth strategies. We're talking about how to dive into those. We've got some cool stuff coming up next week. Additionally, the other podcast that I do called The Business Fix, I host that with Casey Myers. If you are a small business owner or a business manager, you definitely should be checking it out. Chrissy's just phenomenally intelligent when it comes to this stuff. She allows me to be on the show also, and occasionally I throw my two bits in there. Also, we do have a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. You should make sure you check out the business fix wherever you listen to or watch your podcast. Yes, I just might need that water again. As always, do me a favor. Take care of yourself and if you can, take care of someone else too. I will see you very, very soon. Oh oh, hey, everybody go!

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Josh Troche

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