podcasting Archives - The Drew Blog

Creative marketing outlets are ripe for the picking. Seemingly every big company has its own blog, as do countless small and medium businesses. Many organizations are also finding ways to reach thousands upon thousands of consumers through podcasting. Although it’s easier than ever to create content through these mediums, the market for blogs and podcasts has become fiercely competitive. Thus, the path to monetization can be tricky to find.

That’s where marketing expert Dorie Clark comes in. Clark—who is an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, a professional speaker, and a bestselling author—preaches patience and perseverance when it comes to content marketing. As she points out, the average podcast only lasts 12 episodes. Similarly, a high number of blogs run dry after a handful of posts. So while the creative marketing field is crowded, it becomes considerably less cluttered once an extensive base of content is established.

On this episode, Clark shares her experiences in the content marketing arena. She discusses insightful dos and don’ts of web media, while also explaining how to know it’s time to reinvent our marketing strategies. You can listen to the episode here.

Here are some sample Q&As from Clark’s interview with Drew Neisser:

Drew: How do you create a blog today, particularly if you’re a CMO or an aspiring senior marketer who wants to cut through?

Dorie: A lot of people who may be in the early stages today look back and they say, “If I had started in 2007, then great. It was open terrain then.” But now, it’s gotten filled out. It’s gotten crowded. Let me share two thoughts. The first one statistically comes from the world of podcasting, but it is very relevant to blogs as well. There’s actually a study that I quote in Entrepreneurial You, which was a longitudinal look at podcasts between 2005 and 2015. And what they discovered is yes, it is true there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts, but what they also discovered is the average duration of a podcast…is 12 episodes. When we look out at the field we say, “Oh it’s so crowded! I could never compete!” But the truth is, yes, if you’re at the starting line, there’s huge numbers of aspirants. But if you literally can keep it going past a dozen episodes, the field thins considerably. All of a sudden you’re not competing against 300,000 people; you’re competing against 3,000. In some cases, depending on what field it is, 300. In many ways, it is a persistence game. It is a longevity game.

Drew: What is your second thought?

Dorie: The second thing that I’ll just mention briefly is that it’s absolutely true that in the early days of any content creation that you’re doing (podcasts, blogs, whatever it is), you’re not going to have an overnight success. You’re not going to have millions of readers. But it’s really important to think about the interim metrics. And what I mean by that you won’t be successful if the only thing you’re looking for is wide scale. However, a blog can be incredibly successful for you—even if you have a hundred readers or fifty readers—if you write a post and it enables you to close a deal. In the early days, understanding how your content creation factors into your sales process and aligning those very closely saying, “I’m going to write this post” that lays out the answer to ideal clients’ problems, and being able to share that in a targeted fashion with them, often helps expedite the decision-making process when somebody is saying, “Which company should I be going with?”

Drew: How do you create direct business value through blogging and podcasting?

Dorie: It’s likely to take a while. I’m not a podcaster, but in terms of my blogging, which I’ve done quite seriously, it took me two to three years of consistent blogging—and by consistent, I mean 10 to 15 times a month—in order to literally get any clear value in terms of inbound, unsolicited inquiries. Now once you cross that threshold, now I get a lot. But it took two to three years before I saw anything at all. That’s the dark period…where people are worried that it’s not happening. It’s not going to happen for them. You have to plow through that in order to get to the other side where the competition is scarce.

Drew: You really are a connector of people. How do you recommend others grow their networks?

Dorie: One of the things that I’ve studied over the past number of years, especially with my book, Stand Out, was the question of “How do you become a recognized expert in your field?” And what I came to discover through my research is that fundamentally there are three key pieces that you have to keep your eyes on. One is content creation, which we’ve just been talking about. The other is social proof, meaning what is your perceived level of credibility? What affiliations do you have that give people confidence in you and your ideas? The third is your network. Your network is critical for a whole host of reasons. One is that they’re the people who can speak to you honestly. They can tell you what’s a good idea and what’s not a good idea. Another is that you’re kind of judged by the company that you keep. Your network is part of your brand in some ways. And then also, your network, if done right, they’re the people who often want to be your earliest evangelists.

More and more brands are recognizing that consumers are people and have human needs. When customers raise questions and concerns, businesses should be swift with helpful responses. Dan Gingiss, Senior Director of Global Media for McDonald’s, champions customer service as a major component of the brand experience. Satisfied consumers can be invaluable assets, he believes. Since people are becoming increasingly accustomed to having their brand questions answered via social media, it’s crucial to maintain a strong and efficient platform presence.

As a published author and podcast host, Dan understands the power of communication for engaging audiences. The right approach to starting brand conversations and addressing customer issues depends heavily on the technology and manpower behind it. In some instances, Dan finds, AI provides communication solutions. In others, however, it’s necessary to provide clients with a human representative. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.) You can find Dan’s book, Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media on Amazon.

On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Dan provides expert customer service insights. He also offers podcasting advice, explaining some of the challenges and successes of his show. You can listen to the RTU episode here. These are some sample questions and answers from Dan’s interview with host Drew Neisser:

Drew: What is your podcast about?

Dan: The show is called Focus on Customer Service. We interview brands that are doing social customer care really while we don’t talk a ton about marketing, but it is all social media and it’s all focused on the “how do you engage with customers?” piece of it.

Drew: Tell me about an episode or two that made you go, “Oh my God, that was just so great!”

Dan: Two of them surprised me. One of them was probably one of my favorite episodes. Definitely top three out of 51 was a guy named Scott Wise who owns Scotty’s Brewhouse. If you read Jay Baer’s book, Hug Your Haters, he’s also in that book. Scotty’s Brewhouse is about a dozen or more pizza and Brewery kind of places in Indiana, and I think he’s expanded into Florida. When I asked Scotty what business he was in, he told me he was in the customer service business. That surprised me so I pushed him a little bit and I said, “Well what do you mean? Like at your own restaurants, are you telling me that customer service is more important than the food?” “Absolutely!” he says. Like not even a question. “If you have a restaurant that has amazing food and crappy service, you have no customers,” he said. “But if you have a restaurant that has good food–great food–and incredible service, you have loyal customers for life.” He focused his entire brand on this is the place you come for amazing service. He follows through on that on social media. He told some really funny stories about people even tweeting while they were sitting at a table and he answers the tweet basically by calling the manager of the restaurant and saying, “Get over to table 48 and solve this problem!” So he was doing it in real time, which I thought was amazing.

Drew: What was the other episode that surprised you?

Dan: One other example that I really loved was the guys from Spotify. The reason I love this example is that they integrate their product into their responses. If you tweet at Spotify, oftentimes what they’ll do is respond back with a personalized Spotify playlist that when you read the titles of the songs from top to bottom are actually the answer to your question. They’ve built their own proprietary algorithms so they can sort of type in the answer and it spits out the songs. But I thought that was so clever and such a great use of the product and so I started looking. There are some other companies that are doing a nice job of this as well, integrating in their product in some way to sort of show that personality and to frankly differentiate from all the other companies out there.

Drew: When you were at Humana, you focused on generating real-time responses to customer questions. How did that translate into perceptions about Humana among customers?

Dan: Let’s all be honest. The healthcare industry is in a difficult spot in the United States and healthcare companies are not exactly the kinds of brands that people wake up in the morning hoping to engage with during the day. Frankly, I think it’s important to acknowledge that. I acknowledge that when I was a discoverer as well. Nobody wakes up wanting to talk to the credit card company. They do because they have to or because they need to. I think it was important to acknowledge that and then to acknowledge that when people need help and it pertains to their health, it’s a very sensitive personal situation that is emotionally charged. It was really important that we train our agents to understand that and to know that it isn’t really about that we declined a claim. It’s about that somebody has an illness and needs some service from a doctor and their insurance is saying no. That’s an emotional moment right there. A lot of times the reason why a claim was declined because it was the wrong code or it was some stupid thing that you could fix. I think the expectations were low because we were in this industry that people love to hate.

Drew: What happened when people tweeted at Humana?

Dan: When people tweeted at us or posted on Facebook and we responded, I think you could tell it was a pleasant surprise. A lot of times people would tweet you–almost could tell from the text that they didn’t expect us to respond. I do think that was successful in changing perceptions in that way.

Tag: podcasting

Supersizing your Customer Service Techniques