Podcasting (along with the rest of the world) is in the midst of a rapid shift.
A shift in what listeners want from podcasts, how we define podcasts, and how podcasts can best grow your business.
This week—the 6-year anniversary of Podcast Marketing Academy—I’m reflecting back on three major shifts in my thinking around and approach to podcast marketing over the past 6 years (and more broadly, the 10+ years I’ve been working in podcasting).
Let’s hop in.
Optimizing Your Podcast For “Decision Point”
In the first Podcast Marketing Academy cohort, back in 2020, I dedicated a decent amount of time to differentiation and packaging. The idea of developing show premises and concepts wasn’t even on my radar.
Looking back, I treated these topics as important but boring to check off and push through so we could get to the growth tactics…
The stuff I knew everyone really wanted to learn, and that I was excited to teach.
But with every year that’s gone by, I’ve found myself dedicating more and more time to packaging and concept development… and less and less time on growth tactics.
The reason is that after a year or two of helping my clients implement the growth tactics with mixed results, I had a pair of realizations:
- The exposure tactics are the easy part…
- But they only work when you have an attractive, differentiated show.
Think about it.
As consumers, we all encounter thousands of products, creators, and content channels every single day.
And yet, we note (let alone engage with) a fraction of a percent of them.
Clearly, exposure alone isn’t enough to drive consumption.
This is especially true with a long-form medium like podcasting, which requires a significant time investment—and thus opportunity cost—to sample a new, unproven show to decide whether it’s for you.
Over time, I realized that the shows that grow are the shows that win at the “Decision Point” — the few seconds in which a listener encounters a show and decides whether to press play or pass.
Because the reality is that no matter how great your content and how much exposure you’re able to get, your ability to grow your show comes down to just the handful of touch points a potential listener is faced with at the Decision Point:
Your show title.
Your cover art.
And the one sentence description of your show that describes your show concept.
In fact, I would argue that, really, 90% of growth (or stagnation) can be attributed to how compelling your show’s one-sentence pitch (ie. your concept) is.
If you can’t get potential listeners curious and/or excited by that sentence, for the most part, you’ve lost them.
The ultimate bottleneck, in other words.
And the most difficult part of podcasting.
Which has, for me, also become the most fun.
Because if you can unlock that one-sentence pitch, you win the Decision Point.
And when you win the Decision Point, your growth starts to snowball, the sales start to roll in, and podcasting gets very, very exciting.
Podcasting Has Shifted from a Growth Channel to Conversion Accelerator
There was a time—back in the old days, pre-2020—when podcasting was a genuinely effective way to grow an audience.
But even then, podcasting has always been a better nurture channel than a growth channel.
The simple reason is that when people find a show they love, they spend a lot of time with it…
We can think of this as Consumption Concentration, where the total amount of time a typical podcast consumer spends listening to podcasts is distributed among a small number of shows.
When it comes to content mediums, there’s no question that podcasting has the highest level of Consumption Concentration, which has two consequences for us as Founders and creators.
The first is that once we earn a new subscriber, they’re more likely than other platforms to spend a lot of time with it, rapidly developing a strong sense of affinity and trust in the process.
The second is that because subscribers concentrate their available time on so few shows—shows for which they have a high level of affinity and trust—they have limited bandwidth or desire to sample new shows.
More than a lack of discoverability, this lack of available “shelf space” is what makes podcast growth so hard.
In fact, studies have shown that the typical podcast listener consumes just three regular shows.
Compare that to TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, where the typical user consumes content from dozens if not hundreds of different creators every single day.
As a podcaster, this means that to win a new listener, your show has to displace an existing show they already know, like, and trust.
This dynamic is one of the frustrating realities of podcasting.
But it’s also podcasting’s biggest superpower, especially as a business owner.
Because if you can secure one of those slots in a listener’s feed, they’re more likely than not to go down the rabbit hole and rack up a whole lot of Time on Platform with you and your ideas.
And when it comes to converting clients—especially high-ticket coaching or advisory clients—Time on Platform is the metric you want to optimize for.
Because $5k, $50k, and $500k purchases aren’t made lightly.
The result is that a well-designed show can cut the Average Time to Conversion from 12-19 months (very typical for coaches, consultants, and advisors) down to a matter of weeks.
Over the past two years, my three podcasts have reduced my Average Time to Conversion from 18 months down to 8.
More clients, faster, in other words, with fewer missed opportunities with perfect-fit leads.
As I’ve observed this change with myself and my clients, my default approach to podcasting has shifted to wholeheartedly embrace this role as a Conversion Accelerator.
This shift has been driven by seeing the typical approach—ie. build a big audience and then convert them into clients—fail time and time again.
What I’ve seen succeed, for myself and my clients, is the opposite.
Build a highly profitable business with a tiny audience, and then use that cash to accelerate growth and blow up your audience.
With the right show and the right offer, the typical coach can build a mid-six-figure business with a show that gets just a few hundred plays per episode.
And there’s no better medium than podcasting to unlock it.
You just need to work with its platform dynamics rather than fight them.
Optimizing For Your Marketing Ecosystem Instead of Your Show
Everyone wants to grow their show.
But for most of us, a bigger audience is the pathway to the thing we really want:
Revenue—most often via client conversions mixed in with some highly-aligned (and highly profitable) brand partnerships.
When it comes to unlocking that revenue, most hosts imagine the solution is simple: Grow the audience, grow the revenue.
And if you have the right back-end infrastructure set up—the right offer, conversion mechanism, positioning, etc—it is.
But…
What I’ve realized in working with hundreds of clients, is that few business owners—and pretty much none of the ones doing less than $300k in annual revenue—actually have an effective sales and marketing system dialled in.
Instead, most people have less of a marketing system and more of a collection of disparate marketing assets that don’t talk to each other or work cohesively together to drive growth and conversions.
The result is that no matter how much they optimize any one asset—their podcast, for example—the upside is limited.
This situation is encapsulated in one of the most common phrases I hear from new clients:
“I have all the pieces in place, but I just feel like I’m having to work way harder than I should.”
They’ve got the podcast. The email list. The proven offer. The social following. The YouTube channel. They guest on podcasts regularly. They’ve developed a reputation in their space.
And yet, it feels like they’re constantly having to hand-crank 5 disparate machines to keep the lights on.
Having spent 1000+ hours auditing their shows and marketing systems, the problem almost always comes down to:
- Problems with their brand level messaging and positioning that get amplified and repeated across every one of their content channels, making each of them harder to grow and convert.
- Content channels that lack specific, well-defined jobs within their larger marketing and sales system.
The result?
Instead of a symbiotic ecosystem where each channel and asset serves a specific purpose related to growth, nurturing, and conversion…
They are heavily over-indexed on some essential jobs with glaring holes in others.
The most common manifestation of this is folks who have 3 different content channels dedicated to audience growth and none dedicated to building buyer beliefs about their unique methodology and demonstrating their expertise and process.
Which, for coaches, advisors, and experts, is precisely the stuff that converts.
Often, these businesses and shows look great—impressive even—from the outside.
But on the inside, they’re struggling to drive the results they should be, given the host’s level of expertise, track record, and reputation.
Seeing this play out time and time again—and as someone with a natural disposition for systems thinking—my belief now is that it is impossible to do meaningful work on the podcast without also addressing the rest of the marketing system.
If your podcast is going to drive results, in other words, you need to dial in the core brand positioning and messaging, define the specific, limited role the show is playing in the marketing ecosystem, and understand the offers the show is moving listeners towards.
This reflects one of the core tenets of systems thinking:
That the most effective and efficient systems are optimized around the system, rather than the individual components.
When it comes to your marketing, this means that rather than optimizing your show, social strategy, or YouTube channel around the best practices for those channels…
You should optimize them around how they can be most useful and effective within your unique marketing system.
Otherwise, you’ll end up with a vanity show that might build an audience, but will never drive meaningful conversions.
