This week, we’re doing a series of deep dives into the 6 components of the Podcast Growth Engine.
The framework is designed to help you engineer the most efficient, effective marketing system around your podcast possible.
The result: More sales with less effort.
How does it work?
By creating a set of core marketing assets that work seamlessly together as a system to communicate your core sales messages, positioning, and proof points a potential customer needs to hear before buying…
All on as near to autopilot as you can get.
Last week, I introduced the model in its entirety in a live masterclass (check out the replay here), and this week we’re digging into each of the components of the system in more depth.
Yesterday, we started with the Cash Cow Offer your system is built around and discussed how the wrong offer can doom your business to either failure…
Or worse, an eternity on the marketing hamster wheel.
If you missed that article, you can find it here.
Today, we’re digging into component two: Your Podcast.
The Purpose of Your Podcast Within The Podcast Growth Engine System
Before we dive into the specifics of how to design the most effective podcast for the Podcast Growth Engine system, it’s important to understand the role we’re designing it to play within the larger system.
Your podcast’s job is not as a top-of-funnel discovery channel, but as a mid-to-bottom-of-funnel Conversion Accelerator channel.
The reason?
Podcasting is the single worst discovery medium.
And it’s the single best trust-building and time-spent-on-platform (for you as a creator) medium.
By using your show what it’s naturally best at rather than by trying to shoehorn it into a role that requires you to work against its natural strengths and limitations, you improve the efficiency and effectiveness both of your show and the system as a whole.
People will still organically find your podcast, of course. Perhaps thousands of people.
But we’re not leading with the show as the singular front door into your content ecosystem.
Instead, you’ll lead with one or more ultra-attractive, low-friction audience magnets that are easier to get people to subscribe to as a first step…
Which organically and automatically lead them back to the podcast from there.
This is where the magic happens.
What Your Podcast Needs to Do
Podcasts are perhaps the single best Conversion Accelerators.
In what other medium can your audience so quickly rack up dozens of hours with you and your ideas, after all?
A well-engineered podcast can reduce your customers’ Average Time to Conversion from 12-18 months down to as little as a few weeks.
I know because that’s exactly what my shows have done for me and many others I’ve worked with who have similar high-ticket offers and long(ish) consideration, education, and nurture phases of the sales process.
But the Conversion Acceleration process doesn’t happen by default.
For one, your show needs to be outwardly Attractive enough to compel your ideal customers to click play in the first place.
Once they’ve clicked play, the content—both the ideas themselves and how they’re developed, explored, and presented via the structure of the show—must be engaging and useful enough to not only listen through their first episode but keep coming back.
Finally, even if you’re able to get listeners to come back repeatedly, your content must consistently communicate your core sales messaging.
We can summarize the jobs your podcast must do, then, as:
- Attract
- Retain
- Deliver sales messages
Now, to clarify, when we’re talking sales messages, we’re NOT talking about blatant, heavy-handed pitches for your products or services.
Your podcast is not the place for those.
What we’re talking about are the underlying messages a potential customer needs to hear from you before they even enter the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey.
This includes messaging around:
- Helping them identify the real problem that they’re dealing with and diagnosing why it exists
- Presenting and debunking other potential “solutions” or approaches they’re likely considering that you know won’t serve them
- Highlighting the opportunities and potential on the other side of solving the problem
- Demonstrating your unique POV on your topic and your methodology for solving the problem… and offering proof that it works
- Ensuring your audience knows exactly what you do, who you help, and how it works
- And more
Perhaps a more approachable term than “communicating your sales messaging” is “Belief Building”.
Specifically, building the unique Chain of Beliefs that every one of your customers must hold before they’ll buy.
Building your audience’s Chain of Beliefs—about themselves, their situation, the alternatives, your approach, your offer, and you—is the whole purpose of content marketing.
And yet almost no one approaches content this way.
There are two reasons why:
- Most content marketing education is taught by people who—frankly—have no business teaching content marketing, because they don’t actually understand the underlying mechanisms themselves.
- A large percentage of education around content is teaching content creation for Creators… which is a vastly different approach and strategy to content creation for Business Owners.
The difference between Creator & Business content can be summed up as this:
The job of content for a Creator is to get as many views/impressions as possible and do whatever it takes (including giving away all the proprietary information others keep locked up behind paywalls) to get it.
The job of content for a Business Owner is to capture and hold attention long enough to build affinity, trust, deliver the core sales messages, build the required beliefs… and then deliver an ongoing series of focused Sales CTAs or invitations.
In short, we can think of content for a business as a kind of incubator:
An attractive, enjoyable, useful destination your audience seeks out to pass the time while (subtly) building affinity with you, consuming your sales messages… and thus building the beliefs that move them closer to the consideration and ultimately purchase phases of the buyer’s journey.
Knowing the three outcomes your podcast needs to achieve then, (Attract, Retain, Deliver sales messages), the next question becomes:
How do you engineer your show to achieve those results with as little ongoing effort as possible?
The answer lies in a specific type of show I call an Infinity Loop style show.
Engineering An Infinity Loop Style Podcast
A couple years ago, I stumbled—entirely by accident—onto the idea that would eventually become the Infinity Loop.
I first noticed it while bingeing Ramit Sethi’s Money For Couples.
Then, I realized I had accidentally designed my own Infinity Loop style show with Roast My Podcast.
Then, I started recognizing it in a number of shows I knew did brisk business for their hosts.
I’ll be sharing more about this concept over the coming weeks and months, but for now, we can summarize the show as follows.
An Infinity Loop show is a show that:
- Has an infinitely reproducible format…
- With a concept and episode engineering designed specifically to seed & reinforce your business/offer’s core positioning…
- That highlights (and leads organically and inevitably back to) your core IP or framework…
- And is equally valuable to both customers and non-customers
Now, there’s a lot more to unpack here, including the specific mechanics of an Infinity Loop show, the prerequisites, examples & inspiration, and more.
With that in mind, I’ll be doing a whole workshop walking through the specifics of designing and implementing an Infinity Loop style show next month.
But in the meantime, I’ll say this:
Over the past year of helping my clients who run expertise-based businesses (coaching, consulting, online education, etc) re-engineer their shows to fit into the Infinity Loop model, I can safely say that when it comes to generating sales, this is the most efficient type of podcast a business can create.
And even better, it can be applied to any business that has a core methodology, philosophy, framework, or IP (which every business can, should, and will develop over time).
Podcast Criteria
The Infinity Loop model is the anchor for your podcast strategy within the Podcast Growth Engine system.
But to ensure it’s fulfilling its jobs of Attracting, Retaining, and Delivering your Sales Messages, it must also meet some additional criteria, including:
- Attractive, Defensible, Infinitely Reproducible Show Concept — That is novel, refreshing, and distinctive within your space, and to which your ideal customers can instantly see the value in by hearing your one-sentence pitch.
- Low Lift, High Value Episode Engineering — Resulting in high-quality episodes that are easy to make, easy to market, and which have been structured to organically deliver your core sales messaging without you needing to think about it.
- Distinctive, Legitimate Show Packaging — That catches your ideal customers’ eyes, communicates your positioning, and screams that the show will be worth their time.
- Ultra Attractive Hook Stack — Consisting of the 21 unique hooks—both external and internal—that get people to click play and keep listening. Like velcro, the more hooks your show contains, the more likely a listener is to get stuck into it.
- Inevitable Outcome Content Strategy — That is designed to do one thing and one thing only: Convert cold audience members into piping hot leads and customers… and show them a good time in the process. If you’ve nailed your show concept and Episode Engineering, you generally won’t even have to think about this.
- Idea Generation & Development System — Ideas are the fuel that your show (and your marketing more broadly) runs on. And the lower-grade, more generic, commoditized fuel you use, the less efficient your system functions. The good news is that once again, if you’ve nailed your show concept and Episode Engineering, you generally won’t even have to think about this, either. Nice.
- Refined Host Skills — Including vocal delivery, storytelling, creative intuition & instincts, interviewing, etc. Ultimately, you are the instrument of your show and marketing and as such, you need to be optimally tuned.
With these pieces in place, your show will be set up not only to convert more listeners into clients and customers, but attract and retain more listeners in the first place… all while taking significantly less time and mental bandwidth to boot.
The result is a substantial boost to the value, effectiveness, and efficiency of your show.
