Decommoditize Yourself: The Real Goal of Your Podcast Marketing

Here’s a quick bit of trivia to pull out at your next dinner party.

The word salary is rooted in the Latin word “sal” for salt.

Why?

Because in the days of the Roman Empire, salt was so valuable that Roman soldiers were paid a portion of their wages in salt, as a perk.

Nowadays, of course, we’d be incredulous if a client offered to pay us in salt.

Because far from being rare and valuable, today, salt is a commodity.

While we might still value (and perhaps even need) salt in our lives… we can pretty much get the same quality salt at any supermarket or corner store… all for next to nothing.

It’s not worth driving across town—let alone joining the army and marching off to war—for.

This cycle of valuable resources degrading into commodities has played out countless times throughout history, from salt, sugar, and spices to phone lines, computing power, and internet connectivity.

As consumers, we all benefit from the low costs of these useful—if not essential—commodities.

But as a producer—of products, services, and content—selling a commodity is about the worst place you can be.

Which means that when it comes to marketing, offer development, and sales, one of your biggest goals is to decommoditize yourself in the eyes of your audience and your market.

We’ll talk more about what that means in a second.

But first, let’s break down a few of the traits that define commodities—from copper to content, salt to services—which include the following:

• Abundant — It’s not hard to find the thing you offer.
• Interchangeable — Your customers can get pretty much the exact same thing you offer from any other producer or provider. If they try your stuff out and don’t like it, they can easily find something virtually identical elsewhere.
• Price Driven — Customers make decisions based almost solely on price… because “they’re all pretty much the same”.

It’s worth noting that it doesn’t matter whether your offers and content literally match these criteria or not.

If a casual browser, follower, or outside observer deems your work to meet most of the criteria, your fate has been sealed, and you’ve been locked into a race to the bottom, where all you can compete on is price and efficiency…

Which is precisely why—if your goal is to build margin (time, profit, creative) into your business, one of the central goals of your content (including your podcast) is decommoditization.

Said another way, for emphasis.

The point of your content is not to grow an audience.

The point of your content is to capture the attention of a slice of your market and show them why you are the best option for them in that market… and worth paying a premium for.

Referring back to our list of commodity criteria, this means your content should demonstrate clearly how what you do is:

1. Scarce — People can’t easily find many similar options to choose and compare between.
2. Non-Interchangeable — Meaning there is literally no one else who does exactly what you do in the way you do it for your particular ideal customer. Typically, this will be driven through a unique combination of your brand promise, narrow targeting, and a proprietary process (framework, IP, etc).
3. Worth paying a premium for — Because you understand their situation better than others, consistently drive better outcomes, and have a process that all but guarantees success.

Hmmm.

As you can probably tell, this isn’t how most shows (and content more broadly) are structured.

There are a few reasons why:

For one, this goal requires an in-depth understanding of the alternatives (other podcasts, content, service providers, coaches, consultants, courses, etc) the market is already engaging with.

Then it requires the host to have a clear understanding of how and why their stuff is different and/or better than those competitors.

Then, it requires them to be able to present that argument in a cogent, compelling way.

Finally, it requires them to design their content strategies around the consistent production of content that communicates this argument.

In practice, this means building their show concept around that argument, designing their Episode Engineering around that argument, and basing their topic and guest selection around that argument.

Most shows (and most businesses) check precisely zero of these boxes.

Which, of course, explains perfectly why most businesses get only little to no return on their content marketing efforts.

This is why, for every new client, the first thing we do is spend several weeks excavating, exploring, and then piecing together their core brand argument in painstaking detail.

Because this argument is the key that unlocks their ability to name their price, pick their customers, and develop a higher margin business.

One new client, Alice, joined PMA in November with a $4k offer.

After a couple months poring over her core argument and then re-packaging her offer around it, last week, she sold the first of her new $30k offers.

All for a market that she (and everyone else) thinks of as “cheap”.

Hmmm.

It’s worth noting that to this point, Alice hasn’t restructured her show or content strategy around this argument.

That’s coming down the pike, and will no doubt increase her sales momentum considerably.

As a test though, she did publish one single episode designed around one of the three core sub-components of her brand argument.

The results?

5 new sales inquiries as soon as she published the episode.

Clearly, Alice is onto something.

And it all started by getting clear on precisely how she is different and better than the other options available to her people…

And then putting that difference on display.

6 Premium Pricing Levers

By now, the benefits of aggressively decommoditizing yourself should be clear.

The next question, then, is how exactly do you do it?

In general, there are 6 ways to decommoditize yourself:

1. Track Record

Where you have clearly (and publicly) demonstrated your ability to get your clients and customers the results you promise to the point that buyers feel you are the safest option in the market.

2. Proprietary Process

Where you have a unique methodology, framework, etc—likely packaged into some named form of IP.

A proprietary process is most powerful when paired with a strong track record of results achieved via applying that process.

That said, a well-developed and packaged process clearly signals to the market that you’ve invested serious time in understanding the nuances and minutiae of the problem you solve—which is a strong signal of confidence even in the absence of case studies and testimonials.

3. (Counter) Positioning

Where you make a (perhaps radically) different promise to the market than your competitors.

Perhaps you target a different audience segment (ie. SEO services for local dentists).

Or perhaps you claim ownership of a different variable the market cares about (ie. Apple’s focus on privacy, which has little to do with the actual privacy features of their devices and everything to do with directly attacking Google, Facebook, and other data-hording tech companies).

As in the Apple example, the most effective counter-positioning occurs when you stake out a claim that your competitors simply cannot credibly emulate without hurting themselves in other ways.

4. Cornered Resource

Where you have access to a resource that none of your competitors do.

In the case of an expertise-based business, this might include proprietary data you’ve collected through your own research, IP you’ve developed, and, of course, you, your brain, and the specific way you work.

Note that for the cornered resource of “you” to be effective in decommoditizing yourself, you must consistently demonstrate what exactly makes you and your thought process different, and why that difference is beneficial to potential buyers.

5. Product Quality/Capability

When your product or offer is technically better than the others available.

This is a tough lever to pull for most expertise-based businesses, though it can be relevant for agencies and freelancers who might decommoditize themselves through a unique (and valuable) blend of capabilities.

6. Brand

Where, all else being equal, people will choose to buy from you based on your reputation and their existing relationship with you… and perhaps even pay a premium to do so.

While I’ve listed Brand as a distinct lever to decommoditize yourself, it’s worth noting that your Brand is essentially the sum total of the previous levers and is impossible to apply in isolation.

With the exception of demonstrable product quality/capability, every one of these levers can be applied to most expertise-based businesses.

And in fact, they should be.

The more of these levers you apply, the fewer direct competitors you’ll have, the less interchangeable you’ll become, and the more you’ll be able to charge for the right people.

Of course, developing these differentiators is just the first step.

As we discussed in part 1 of this series, your differentiators must then be demonstrated constantly, baked into the DNA of your brand, show, messaging, and more.

Because gaining attention only matters if you make use of it.

And when it comes to growing a higher margin business, that means communicating as quickly and compellingly as possible why you are the best (if not only) credible choice.

Opting Out of the Podcast Rat Race

To this point, we’ve talked about how to apply the decommoditization process to your business as a whole.

Today, we’re going to talk through how to apply the process to your podcast.

Because if podcasting is a core part of your business strategy, you kinda need people to listen to it.

And to get people to listen to it, you need a show that stands out from the dozens or hundreds of generic, commodity shows in your space.

Let’s start off by defining what a commodity podcast actually is.

Using our existing commodity criteria, we can think of a commodity podcast as:

1. Abundant — A show that covers the same general topic and addresses the same general audience as many other shows.
2. Interchangeable — A show that addresses that topic and audience in more or less the same format as other shows. It covers similar topics, features similar guests, has a similar point of view, employs a similar tone or vibe, etc. As a result, it is hard to explain what makes it meaningfully different from other shows available.

Since most podcasts cost the same, we can ignore the variable of “competing primarily on price” from our commodity criteria.

Having spent countless hours browsing the bowels of various podcast apps and directories, I can tell you that more than 95% of shows are either:

1. Too weird, specific, and/or poorly produced to ever grow a significant audience — Usually, these are the shows developed by hobby podcasters who primarily want to make what they want to make… with little thought about what an audience might want or enjoy.
2. Commodity shows that are too similar to other shows in their space to ever grow an audience — Think “expert” interview shows, co-hosted buddy shows that primarily operate on vibes, or personally branded “thought leadership” shows where the only reason anyone would listen is if they already knew and loved the host.

It’s worth noting that commodity shows are often both well-produced and operating in markets with verifiable audience demand.

The problem is that from a listener’s perspective, with little to differentiate any of the commodity shows available, they simply pick one or two based on a gut reaction (or random chance), and then stick with it, so long as it passes their minimum bar of expected quality.

The result of this dynamic is that the available listener attention gets diffused across the available shows, leading to a bunch of shows with <100 plays/ep.

From a listener’s perspective, this dynamic is perfectly fine.

They have one or more shows they’re more or less happy with, after all.

As a host, however, who is likely investing significant time and money into your show, this dynamic is… less fine.

The solution is this:

Give listeners one or more compelling reasons to notice, choose, switch to, and keep coming back to your show, and attract a larger share of the available attention in the process.

In short, you need to decommoditize your show.

The good news is that we can apply the same 6 levers we use to decommoditize our businesses directly to our shows for the same result.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Track Record

Where you have a track record of producing banger episodes your audience loves and that perhaps even get discussed in your niche.

Your track record tends to matter much more for retaining listeners than attracting them. But there are two exceptions:

1. When your track record translates into a steady stream of glowing reviews and word of mouth recommendations for the show.
2. When a new listener opens up your feed and sees that nearly every episode on the screen is an “immediate must listen” for them based on either the guest or topic selection. In some sense, we can think of this as demonstrating a “track record of taste”.

2. Proprietary Process

Where you have a unique and compelling show format as defined by your show concept and Episode Engineering.

While this format will likely be based in one of the standard categories of podcast formats (interview, co-hosted, solo, narrative, etc), you will have applied some unique wrinkles to the format that make your show entirely unique, refreshing, and memorable in the eyes of your listeners and market.

3. Counter Positioning

Where you make a radically distinct promise to the one most shows in your space make.

Perhaps you pit yourself against the flawed but dominant ideology in your niche or industry about the best way to do things… and back it up with a compelling argument for why your point of view is a better approach.

Another common option is to seek to “own” a specific sub-topic or idea in the minds of your audience—again, think Apple’s recent efforts on owning the idea of “Privacy”.

4. Cornered Resource

Where you design your show around information or guests that others don’t have access to.

Perhaps this is first-hand research you’ve conducted or proprietary data you have access to (ie. my show, Podcast Marketing Trends Explained), or IP you’ve developed that you’re incorporating into the show.

Alternatively, you might choose to target a specific audience or address a specific problem that few other shows do, making you one of the only options available.

5. Product Quality/Capability

Where your show is objectively (and significantly) better than the other shows in your space.

Note that it’s not enough to be incrementally better for this lever to drive results. Instead, you must be head and shoulders above the competition in terms of quality of either content (ideas, insight, flow, pacing, experience, etc) and production.

What’s more, this quality should be reflected in every aspect of your show, from your cover art to production, to guest list, and more.

As an example of a show that is simply objectively better than the competition, consider Acquired as compared to other business shows.

6. Brand

Where your show benefits from your existing brand reputation.

This is a huge (if not the primary) lever for branded and celebrity-hosted shows, though it can be effective at a smaller scale if you’ve built up a following on social media, your email list, or within your network, community, or even past client base.

Together, these levers will help you design a non-commodity, interchangeable show that funnels back and builds up market share in your space.

But let me make this very clear:

Your primary goal with your show and marketing is not to build an audience.

Your primary goal is to build the belief among your market that your work (ie, offers) is worth paying a premium for.

So while you most definitely should strive to decommoditize your podcast, you should do so only so far as it doesn’t detract from communicating and demonstrating your core brand differentiators.

It’s also worth noting that with a non-commodity business, your show will naturally inherit many of those traits—specifically your positioning and brand.

But…

I know many interesting business owners with interesting businesses and interesting offers… who somehow find a way to strip all that interestingness out of their podcasts and end up with a show that presents them as just another “me too” show, undermining all the work they’ve done to build a differentiated business.

Don’t make this mistake.

Don’t hide your magic.

Design a show that your best future customers will find irresistible…

Which then demonstrates—unignorably and unrelentingly—why your offers are the same.

5 Commodity Signals Devaluing Your Work

Finally, let’s take a closer look at a handful of Commodity Signals.

Ie. Audience-facing touchpoints that unwittingly signal that your show and brand are generic, undifferentiated, and not worth paying a second look… much less a premium to engage with.

We’ll break these Commodity Signals down in a minute, but first, let’s talk about why this matters.

We all know first impressions carry enormous weight.

A bad first impression digs us a hole we must now work long and hard to dig ourselves out of.

A good first impression builds us a pedestal we must work to lose our place on.

In other words, our first impression might be the most high-leverage touchpoint we will ever have with our audience, capable of swinging their opinion of us more widely than at any subsequent point in their experience with us.

So of course, we want to get it right.

But what exactly do we mean by “right”?

Sure we want them to think of us as legitimate, professional, and knowledgeable.

But these are table stakes, and there’s no reason our first impression should fail to communicate any of these.

Beyond these pre-requisites, then, perhaps the most important impression we can give is that we are different than the alternatives.

Here’s why.

Most of your potential buyers have already been actively engaged in the market for anywhere from months to years.

In that time, they’ve consumed anywhere from dozens to hundreds to thousands of hours of content across podcasts, YouTube, newsletters, blogs, and social media.

They’ve read books, bought courses, hired coaches and consultants, and maybe even hired people, services, and products to help them implement.

And yet, they still haven’t found the solution.

If they had, they wouldn’t still be in the market after all, and they wouldn’t be looking for a show or business like yours.

So…

If we assume that nearly every one of your future customers has already consumed all the standard commodity content and advice, and it hasn’t solved their core problem…

Why would they be interested in engaging with another show or business that appears (on the outside) to be more or less the same as all the stuff they’ve already tried?

They wouldn’t.

Instead, what these people are looking (if not outright ravenous) for, is something different.

A different perspective.

A different approach.

A different method.

A different promise.

In short, they—frustrated as they are with the other options on the market—are looking for someone who thinks differently.

Which is where you (hopefully) come in.

And assuming you do, in fact, have a contrarian POV, strong counter-positioning, a proprietary method, and a track record of results…

The worst thing you can do is package your brand to be indistinguishable from the other (lesser) options on the market.

Remember, the goal is to create a process, offer, and business that is non-interchangeable.

Which is exactly what all of your audience-facing touchpoints should communicate.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the Commodity Signals your show may be unwittingly sending.

Causing potential listeners and buyers to gloss over and devalue their work before they ever experience it.

1. Commodity Show Concept

In podcasting, everything begins and ends with the strength and originality of your concept, so it’s no surprise that one of the clearest signals of a commodity business is a show structured around a commodity concept.

The most common of these are undifferentiated expert interviews, buddy chatcasts, and solo thought-leadership shows.

As we’ve already discussed, it’s not that interviews, chatcasts, and solo shows are inherently ineffective at differentiating you and attracting an audience.

It’s just that they’re the absolute most basic foundation of a show that you must then layer with one or more differentiating wrinkles to make the show both more interesting, distinctive, and marketable.

Without it, your show comes off as just another me-too show, hinting at a me-too business behind it.

2. Commodity Cover Art

The two most important jobs of your cover art are to communicate relevance and legitimacy.

Beyond that, however, your cover art plays a massive role in near-instantaneously communicating the tone, vibe, values… and a whole lot more about your show and brand.

As with all touchpoints, your cover art should be designed to communicate and reinforce your counter-positioning against the generic, status quo shows and ideologies of your niche…

Which means you need to do your research and think hard (or better, hire a good designer) about how to communicate a different message than listeners are getting from other shows they’re seeing.

The test for your cover art is simple. Make a grid with the cover art of the 10-20 top competitors in your niche and place your cover art among them.

Then, for each, choose 1-3 words to describe the feeling, vibe, or ideas each cover gives off.

If your show overlaps with others in the collection, you’re almost certainly blending in, and have some work to do.

3. Commodity Title

Along with your cover art, your title is one of the first and most important touchpoints your market has with your show, and it has the power to immediately attract or repel listeners.

When it comes to the characteristics of commodity titles, the most common culprit is clichés, either within the industry or more broadly.

For example, within the entrepreneur space, there are dozens if not hundreds of shows with titles along the lines of:

• The Inspired Entrepreneur
• The Driven Entrepreneur
• The Heart-Centred Entrepreneur
• The Holistic Entrepreneur
• Etc.

On their own, none of these titles are inherently bad…

But when viewed together, it quickly appears as though the hosts have all copied and pasted the same podcast playbook… quickly placing them (and the businesses behind them) in the category of commodities in the minds of their target market.

4. Point of View

We’ve already talked about the importance of possessing a distinct POV, but we’ll revisit it briefly here.

A distinctive and potent POV your business is built around might be the most important marketing asset in your toolbelt.

Think of great companies like Patagonia, Nike, and Apple, and its clear that they all have a strong and well-defined POV that not only guides their decision-making around products, marketing, and content… but is in and of itself an attractive force to their core audience.

In order to de-commoditize yourself, you’ll need to do the same.

Your goal is to develop a strong, unique, and defensible POV describing what (real but non-obvious) core problem your audience is facing, the reason why their past attempts to solve it have failed, and what to do instead (ideally a novel approach that no one else is talking about).

The trick is that this POV must be different from what other shows and brands are promising, which makes articulating it both devilishly difficult to dial in… and radically rewarding when you do.

5. Commodity Languaging

We all hate “corporate-speak” for its bland ability to say a lot without saying much of anything… while also being entirely interchangeable with nearly any other company.

And yet, we creatives tend to fall into our own set of generic communication tropes.

Take those various “The _________ Entrepreneur” shows we mentioned before.

Having spent many hours browsing and studying this genre of show in multiple niches, I can say with certainty that if you were to take a closer look at any of them, they would all sound nearly identical in the language they use in their show descriptions, on their websites, and across their social media.

It might not be corporate jargon, it might even be fun, personal, and “authentic”. But it’s still generic.

There are additional Commodity Signals beyond the five we’ve discussed here.

In fact, every touchpoint your market and audience can observe and interact with is an opportunity to communicate something about you, your work, and your brand—from your theme music to website to personal appearance, vocal delivery, and more.

But the signals above are among the first and most prominent your market will encounter… and thus most worth thinking deeply about.

Now, before we wrap this series up, a couple of final notes.

First, you might have noted that throughout this series, I’ve regularly referred to “your market” as opposed to “your audience”.

The reason is that your decisions around your show, brand, products, etc affect how people perceive you, even if they never engage directly with your work.

There are shows (and the people behind them) that I’ve never listened to but have recommended broadly on the strength of their concept (and often the accompanying title and cover art).

Similarly, there are countless shows that might be great… but I’ve written off (along with the person and business behind them) as uninspired and generic, again based on a small number of external touchpoints.

Finally, it’s worth noting that nobody ends up with a commodity show or business because that’s what they aspire to or is all they’re capable of.

Instead, they simply fall into them as they follow the path of least resistance.

It’s easier to emulate what’s been done before, what you see every day, what you assume is successful for others…

Than digging deep to discover and articulate where everyone else is wrong…

Or misguided…

Or taking the easy way out…

And then doing the hard work of developing something original.

And yet…

Doing something hard but original is where the juice is.

Where the audience is.

The profit.

And maybe most important, the fun.

Because at the end of the day, developing a fresh take on a stale topic, genre, or medium is exactly what art, creativity, marketing, and business innovation are all about.

In other words:

Whether you’re a bleeding heart artist or a profit-at-all-cost capitalist, your job is the same:

Do the hard work to do something notably different than what’s already been done.

Finally, the artists and the capitalists (and all those of us stuck with a foot in both worlds) can agree upon.

Most people don’t have businesses that afford them generous time, profit, and creative margins. And they’re not on the path to ever achieving them.

Which means if these margins matter to you, you’re going to need to do something different.

Then, make that difference unmistakably obvious across all your market-facing touchpoints.