#37 | Your Podcast Will Never Bring You Regular B2B Sales Without This Secret Ingredient 99% Miss (Add This TODAY)

Speaker A: Your podcast will never bring you regular B2B sales without this secret ingredient. 99% you can add today. Let me explain. Welcome to how to grow a B2B podcast. The show helping founders, CEOs and marketing leaders turn their podcast from a brand awareness expense into a predictable lead generation engine. At the end of this episode, I'll share a little more about who I am and what we do at my company, getmorelisteners.com it might even shock you. But for now, let's dive into the episode. Today you'll discover the biggest mistakes B2B podcasters are making that makes it impossible for their email list to grow. Why? Pitching straight to your listeners on a podcast typically has super slow conversions. And finally, a, uh, simple content strategy that will help you turn more listeners into email subscribers and paying clients. Here's the thing. We have a podcast. We all love podcasting. It's a great reason to get together and it's good fun. But with this good fun, it's a lot of time, effort, energy being spent on the podcast to build an audience and make an ROI from the time invested. We know you can make a ton of money if you do podcasting the right way, but we also know there is honestly just a lot of bullshit, terrible advice out there for entrepreneurs looking to build an audience, learning, looking to take their B2B podcast to the next level. Now, while we love to debunk those things, there's also a lot of areas within podcasting that there just isn't that much advice for at all. And so people tend to default to the most obvious solution, which is not always the best. And the one we want to discuss today is how to convert listeners from listening to the podcast to take the next step with you, whether that is buying a product or booking a sales call. There's lots of bad advice around certain areas. I personally feel that this one, there just isn't that much advice at all on how to do that. Do you pitch straight from the podcast? Do you ask people to get on a sales call there and then do you get them to follow your social media, then DM them? The possibilities are endless. The possibilities are endless. So we want to start with the question, what is the best way to actually turn a listener into a paying client? What does that process look like? The typical path people normally take is they record a podcast about a specific topic and then at the end of that episode, they give a call to action or an ad read. Hey guys, if you enjoyed this episode, by the way, you can join my program or hey guys, if you enjoyed this episode, you can join my freebie, whatever it might be. They give a call to action right at the end and oftentimes it's pitching a program, pitching their offer to their audience. And I don't think this is a product of just being general advice. I think there's just not really much advice on how best to approach this. So the most obvious thing is, well, I'll just pitch on the podcast. I'll give the call to Action directly. They've listened to me for half an hour, an hour. If I mention a sales call here, people should just go out and click buy right off the bat. But the thing is, after speaking to literally hundreds of B2B podcasters, audited a bunch of different shows, we started to notice a very clear pattern that a lot of people who are pitching straight on their show pitching meaning they're trying to get people to book a call and take the next step. They rarely ever get calls consistently. It's inconsistent. So it can work here or there. And you might have episodes that randomly get you calls booked, but it's not as consistent. You have less control over it. And if you're listening right now and you're thinking, well, I've been asking people to get on a call with me or sign up for my coaching and you haven't been getting any conversions, then this episode is absolutely for you. Because we're going to address why we don't think that's effective and what to do instead. If the typical path is record an episode, then pitch at the end to book a call, and that path makes sense theoretically. Why is it then that the majority of people following this path don't get the results you'd assume they'd get? What are we missing here? And if this is you right now, you're not necessarily missing anything. It might just be that you're targeting listeners and hitting listeners with the call to action at the wrong time. And it's certainly not a case of you're not providing enough value or they don't trust you enough yet. If they've listened to your whole episode, you've probably done that. Great. The issue is really with the state of mind and even the physical state the listeners are oftentimes in when they hear your call to action on the podcast. Lets start with physical. People listen to podcasts when they're driving. People listen when they're working out, when they're doing the dishes, when they're walking the dog. So when we're doing these things, we're not really in the physical state to stop and take an action. You'd have to really grab someone in their tracks for them to pull over at the side of the road to take your call to action or to stop the treadmill to go and buy your book. And, uh, of course you might think, well, okay, maybe at the end of their workout they'll remember to do it. But we know that doesn't happen. By that point, they've got another call or a text, or they're already onto the next episode and they've forgotten. And that's not a reflection on you or the stickiness of your call to action. It's just the reality of the situation listeners are in, which is they're actively doing something else. Their attention is divided in terms of their actual physical activity. They're not able to take action straight away. Especially when it's like, book a call, buy my program, buy this product. Now, we see this can happen sometimes if you have a lot of volume, thousands plus downloads per episode just by sheer volume, you'll have a couple people sitting there attentively listening, but it's unlikely if you think about how you yourself consume podcasts. Are you sitting there overlooking the beautiful ocean on a sunny day, listening to podcasts attentively? Maybe if you're on holiday, but a majority of the time, probably not. And to really reaffirm, it's not you've done anything wrong if this is how you give your call to actions and it's not working. It's just that when we give call to actions just raw on the podcast, we are raw dogging it, then we just are taking a very small chance that we're catching listeners at the exact right moment in their physical operation for them to take that call to action and to circle back to what the mental side of it is, it follows the physical side. They're just not in tune and ready to buy because they're doing something else. Put simply. And there's also something to be said for the fact that people are not yet used to buying from a podcast. And the reason why is the reason we've just mentioned. Oftentimes we look at YouTube. So we say, okay, YouTubers, when they record content, they record an incredible video, you're captivated. And at the end of that video, they then say, hey, I've got this program, or I've got this course, or buy my stuff or book a call. And YouTubers have way higher conversions when it comes to CTAs for book calls. But why is that? Well, the reason is because they're attentively watching a YouTube video. You're on YouTube to consume video content. You physically cannot participate with YouTube without consuming YouTube through watching YouTube videos. So when it comes to why not YouTube, why podcast with podcast, in terms of the level of trust you can build, in terms of the authenticity you can build with your audience is way deeper. A, uh, podcast is so much easier because you can build a parasocial relationship, which is a relationship where your audience feels like they deeply know you, even though they've never actually spoken to you. And look, make no mistake, while you also get that with YouTube, what's the pro of the podcast? Well, you can listen to it all the time, so you can't really watch YouTube videos while you're in the car or while you're working out. So these things have their benefits. But anyway, we digress. The point is, podcasts are not optimized to sell directly from for the reasons we've discussed. So what is the solution? That's a great question. And the solution is actually pretty simple. Instead of trying to pitch to your audience directly from your B2B podcast and getting them to make a massive commitment, we start by getting them to make a micro commitment for a massive reward. So what this simply is, it's a fancy way of saying we want to offer your audience a highly valuable lead magnet, also known as a freebie, a valuable resource. An extremely valuable resource that they can go and actually take for free. In exchange, they'll give you their email. Everyone knows about this. It should be relatively obvious. But a really important part about this is it needs to be honestly a massive, massive, massive value add to their lives. And why this is different to just booking a call is when you tell someone to book a call or to buy or purchase a program, the intent, the actual action they have to take is massive. They have to be highly committed to take this action to maybe hopefully get the reward that they want. And they have to stop what they're doing. Whereas we ask for a micro commitment from them for a massive reward. Hey, go and click on this button and accept this online course about how to grow a B2B podcast, for example. Small commitment, massive payoff in their mind as a much higher incentive for them to just take that action right there, that CTA to go and get a free copy of my book or free copy of my program. Or course, 100% of the audience are ready to make that commitment of getting something for free or off you right now versus booking a call. Thinking of the percentages of, let's say I've got a thousand listeners. Every single one of this thousand listeners are willing and able to make the commitment of getting a free course for free. They're ready, they're in a state of mind to just be ready to do that. Whereas with buying, only maybe like 5% of your audience, probably even less, like 3% of your audience are ready to buy and take that action right now of actually showing some level of commitment of purchase or intent to buy. So that's the difference. With that being said, the question then becomes, okay, well, some of our listeners might be thinking, well, I already give freebies, I already give away lead magnets, and no one's taking action. So I want to just share the mistake that we see people make over and over again when it comes to growing their email list subscribers. Well, there's two main mistakes we see that hurts conversions. We really see this with clients because there's a big difference between some that are getting way more conversions to their email list with way less downloads than others one's. Hm, simple one's not so simple. Let's go into the bit more slightly more elaborate one. Right now, the likelihood of someone taking your call to action to gain a lead magnet is increased or reduced depending on what the theme of the episode was and what you've just been talking about. So look, let's say we've done an episode about podcast SEO, the process of ranking higher on Apple and Spotify. Let's say we've just done a big how to episode on that and we round it off by saying. And look, just click the link below and we will give you a free mini audit of your podcast SEO and suggest some areas that you can improve to become more visible on Apple and Spotify. Because that is just the icing on the cake to what we've just been talking about. You're very in the zone with that area and that is even more appealing and even more logical as a next step for you. However, if we did the whole episode about SEO and then finished off with a call to action to join our program or to download our free guide to being a guest on more podcasts, it's not the same. The conversion rates are not going to be the same. You can see that clear as day. So that's one thing, and it sounds really obvious, but. But if you're just giving the same call to action, you might not always be thinking about how your episodes really tee up that call to action. And I think for a lot of people they go the route of having a standard high value lead magnet, a, uh, freebie that we give out, and it is high value, but it's disconnected to the main content of the episode, so it doesn't convert as well. And I think people just think, just because it's high value, of course my audience will want this, but you've just spent an entire episode priming them on podcast SEO, so why pitch just a generic basic something about podcast guesting? So what would the solution be? Well, the solution is, if you've been listening, you can probably infer it. You want to make sure there is a connection. You want to connect the topic to the call to action, and it's easier to take your standard, your current lead magnet, or your best freebie and reverse engineer what episode would lead up to that rather than vice versa. So for us, if we were giving out a personalized mini SEO audit as, uh, our call to action, then of course we would want to think, okay, well, let's make an episode about podcast SEO and probably even a couple of different ones with different angles, and test both of them with the same call to action, and then see the conversions. And if you execute this, you are insanely more likely to get good conversion on a call to action. And then I said there was another simple fix. This is more of a pet peeve. If you're saying, join my newsletter, subscribe to my mailing list, I got news for you. That's not the most appealing value proposition for people. The thing is, no one wants to just join another newsletter. We've all got so many emails, so many shitty newsletters that don't provide any value to us. And by the way, I'm not saying yours is shitty, yours is likely amazing, but how you're currently approaching it, think about it from the listener's perspective. You've got a treasure, a, uh, golden treasure, and you're wrapping it up by saying, join my newsletter. So although you think it's valuable, just think about how you're presenting and communicating the value of that. So what are they going to gain from doing that newsletter? All we're trying to say here is the simple solution is present your lead magnet in the most attractive way by asking yourself, what will my audience gain from joining this and thinking about the actual transformation they're going to go through. Not your deliverables of five weekly emails to keep you motivated. No, like, think about a specific problem you'll actually solve from doing this to make this more tangible. For the SEO one, it would be, hey, have complete Clarity. If you don't want to get bogged down in SEO technobabble and you want complete clarity around, if your podcast is optimized for podcast SEO, our team of experts would go in there, do, uh, a mini audit on your show, and you get it back within 24 hours. And you know the exact keywords to rank for to have the fastest growth. That's way more attractive than, hey, by the way, guys, join my newsletter. Join my mailing list. So look, let's summarize. And we always want to leave you with one principle. And the principle here is when you're pitching directly from your B2B podcast, you are chancing a very small chance that you're hitting the 3% of people who are, who are really ready to make a big commitment there and then, such as a purchase, especially when they're walking on the treadmill. Now, on the flip side, emails are the thing that allow your brand to remain top of mind for your audience until they're ready to buy. So it's much more effective to capture people's emails and then always be able to hit them in their inbox whenever you like and always target them until they're in that state of mind rather than trying to catch them in the right moment on the podcast. And the way we view our B2B podcast is not that it's the leading thing of generating sales for us, however it has done that. But really, it serves the larger purpose of capturing people into our ecosystem. And I would encourage you to look at that the same way we do these episodes, for one very simple reason. To give you the clarity that you need to Understand why your B2B podcast isn't growing or monetizing as fast as you'd like to, and then giving you very simple, very clear and very direct actions you can start taking today for faster growth and podcast monetization. So we covered the biggest mistakes B2B podcasters are making that makes it impossible for their email list to grow. Why pitching straight to your listeners on a podcast typically has super slow conversions and a simple content strategy that will help you turn more listeners into email subscribers and paying clients. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. At the start of this episode, I said I'd tell you a little bit about me. So I'm about to share a, uh, secret with you. One that means you might hate me, quit listening to this podcast, and think I'm a total scam. However, I want to be transparent. Are you ready? Well, my name is Tony. No, of course that's not the secret. The secret is that I'm actually a robot. My creators are Tig and Anthony, hence my name, Tony the Sick Bastards. Anyway, they are the founders of Get More Listeners. In the last five years, they've coached and interviewed over 400 podcasters and generated multiple six figures from their own podcast. They gave me access to everything they know, and I'm here to share it with you. So while I don't understand why you humans are so obsessed with coffee, I do understand to grow a B2B podcast that actually generates leads and nurtures them. So here's my offer to you. If you want to finally understand why your podcast isn't growing and get a personalized roadmap to fix it in less than 30 seconds, you can go to getmorelisteners.com B2B audit. Enter your show name and we'll send you back a free mini podcast audit. It's completely customized to you and your show. That's getmorelisteners.com B2B audit. The link is also in the show notes of this episode.