The podcast medium can indeed be a great help to intensify your business especially if you can maximize its value. In this episode, we will share strategies to help you build your business and your brand. We want to discuss what a brand really is as well as help you recognize who your audience is. We want to give you a hand on identifying and bridging the gaps and spending as little as possible on all those things as you set up your podcast and get going.
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We picked a particular subject. We’ll talk about this because I have spent nonstop on the phone with I don’t know how many people talking about their brand and business building. We want you all to have strategies when it comes to business building and brand building. We want you to have a strategy when you come into podcasting and sometimes you don’t have that ahead of time. I’ll try to provide that for any of you that I can. I take on high-level consulting clients and I work with them on the brand and strategy and things like that. I take only a few at a time, but I’ve been working with a couple of right now. That’s why it’s coming in front of mind. I realized that there are so many topics here that everyone needs to understand because doing a podcast just to do a podcast is a waste of time. You need to have a strategy behind it. You need to have a real business purpose for it. It’s who we attract here. It’s what we’re trying to do for all of you, and that is grow your brand and grow your businesses. Whenever I give a speech somewhere, I say, “We’re not a specialist in entertainment podcasts. There are other people out there who do that.”
The drama or fictional entertainment, that’s not our game.
We also are not big fans of news style podcasts. It’s not that we’re not fans of them, but we’re not the right business match for them. We’re here to build businesses and build brands. I’m going to start with a basic definition of a brand. A brand is not what you think you are. It’s not your logo, it’s not the colors you choose, it is not the photograph of you on your website. That’s not the brand. You are not the brand. It’s how you are perceived by whoever listens to you, watches you, or reads you. Whatever they do, that is brand. A brand is a perception. That is a definition that we use here. That is the definition that I use when I strategize with people. You want to put something out there. That’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to influence how they perceive you. You’re trying to message yourself and put yourself in a certain light and bring that out there. At the end of the day, it’s what they think of you that gives you brand value and what they think of you and how they perceive you. That is what a brand is.
It may not be what you think it is. That’s also something that we are big fans of here as well, which is doing some research. Making sure that what you say you are and who you think you are, is how people are receiving you. We’re big fans of market research. We use are our wonderful sister-in-law, Laura Hazzard. We may have mentioned her to you on the show. She’s great at understanding that perception gap. It’s within that gap that either your messaging is wrong or your visuals are wrong. It can be your visuals too. Those things are not communicating what you think they’re communicating. That’s where we try and improve things for people. Do you have a gap in how you’re perceived in the marketplace? Are you enough of an authority? You want to be an authority with other business leaders so you want to get a business-to-business thing going or you want a business to consumer going. Your model of business is part of it also.
Part of that is understanding who your audience is. A lot of times, we start out not knowing who our audience is. Maybe we have a few clients and we think, “I want more of these of people.” We’ve just put it out there and we have a few people who are receiving our products and going, “I like this. It seems good.” We have an idea in our mind of who we think our target consumer might be or our target listener might be, if we’re talking podcasting, but we might be wrong. When we went out and did our 3D print podcast and we talked about that a lot here because it’s the oldest podcasts we have. I have now the fourth one.
She started with the first one where I’m not the co-host. She has another co-host that’s on a whole different genre of blockchain innovation.
There are so many topics that everyone needs to understand because doing a podcast just to do a podcast is a waste of time. Click To TweetIt’s called the New Trust Economy. It won’t be live until November 1st, 2019. When we go out there with our 3D print podcast, we figured we’d be talking to educators. We thought we’d get a lot of teachers. We thought we might get young millennial techies. We thought we’d get that. That’s what we thought. We never imagined we’d get as many retirees as we did. I don’t think we ever imagined we’d get the broad age range that we did. Our perception was that wasn’t the audience on podcasts. It was in our head, which we know is wrong across every podcast. There’s a huge age demographic. We thought we’d have a lot more men than women, which we did. We did have a ton of women as well. If we had structured our whole brand and show specifically to focus on young men who were techies, we would have had the wrong brand. We would have had to revise. We want to put a stake in the ground and do what I call a starter brand.
If you don’t have this information, it is not an excuse to not get started podcasting or to not be podcasting or to not be out there. I know most of you are already podcasters, but I just want to reiterate that to you. It’s who are being attracted to you that is more important. Who are resonating with the message that you’re organically given, that you’re giving out there, that is more important. Matching the brand to that and shifting that later is critical. That’s why I wanted to communicate this with you. This is where we see a shift in ongoing strategy sessions that I host now and again. You may need to have an upgrade to your brand. It’s time to rethink it. Maybe you went into an investment podcast. You thought you’d be attracting investors, but instead, you’re attracting those that want to learn. You’ve got a different level of audience. Maybe your brands or your products need to shift to adjust for that. That’s where we want to go with ongoing business and brand building. A brand is not static. That’s the next message I want to get across.
Sometimes you call this starter brand a hypothesis brand. To me, that’s one of the most counterintuitive aspects of the art of branding as we’ve come to know it. It’s okay to start out with a brand that you think is the right brand. Get some proof, test it, then pivot if it’s not right. We have pivoted this business twice in terms of its brand. The beginning of this company, it was called Podcast Start Point.
We didn’t think it was going to be a real business back then.
We didn’t think it was going to become what it has become. We coined the term of what we do for all of you in terms of producing your episodes and blog posts, Brandcasting. That’s what it all is about. We don’t do entertainment podcasts. It’s about growing your brand and your company using podcasting as a tool. Brandcasting was great and it accurately describes what we do. The dominant brand has become Podetize and we’re shifting all our primary branding to Podetize in Podetize.com. Brandcasting will still be a set of what are our production services are within Podetize on the website. Our email addresses are all BrandcastingYou.com. That’s going to be shifting to Podetize.com very quickly, but everything will be forwarded in any email you have that you ever reached us with. It will still get to us, but we’ll be replying with Podetize.com email addresses. We’ve pivoted twice and we’re living proof that you can do this successfully. Some people get stuck in this permanent potential of thinking they’ve got to have the right brand from the get-go. It’s got to be completely done. I would say, “Get it out there, produce your content, start doing business.”
If you’re not going to spend millions of dollars on advertising and marketing that is not part of the program, then you can shift. Even then, people do shift. Google’s logo is different every single day. It shows you that it has nothing to do with the logo. It has nothing to do with it. It has to do with who they are perceived.
Building Brand Through Podcast: A brand is not your logo, the colors you choose, nor the photograph of you on your website. The brand is how you are perceived by whoever listens to you, watches you, or reads you.
The visual identity of their brand is secondary to their name though.
It’s because they are a dynamic brand and they can be a dynamic brand. Nike, over time, they just use the Swoosh now. They don’t even have words there anymore.
In fact, in a lot of their ads, they don’t even say, “Nike.” They’ll say, “Just do it.” That’s a sales mark.
It’s a shift over time that brands naturally have because they start to learn that they have brand awareness. They are being perceived as they want to be and that shifts over time. The other reason that I call it that is because the proof is a part of my process. It’s part of what we do. We try to get people to spend as little money as possible to prove whether or not they have what it takes. That you can command an audience, that you can get speaking engagements, that you can get coaching clients, that you can do all of these things, that this is the right thing for you. We want you to spend as little as possible on all of those things to set that up and get going. The faster you get going, the sooner you see this, “This is a right fit for me.”
If you shift this and pivot slightly, you’re going to end up in the place at which you can command more business. You can do a brand business build. We don’t want you to spend a ton of money. The more money you spend on those logos and those websites and those designs, the harder it is for you to agree to shift later. It is a psychological thing, but it is so hard. If you go in with this idea that, “I think I’m right, but I’m not sure. I believe this to be true, but I’m going to prove it.” When it comes to being proven slightly wrong, now you have a more open mind to be able to shift that. That’s when we move into that next organic shift of what might happen there.
This is something that I want you to be thinking about going on. If the podcast is not doing what you expect it to do, it doesn’t mean it’s not working for you. It just might not be matching the audience that you thought or the business that you thought. What you may not realize is you may be wrong in that model. You may be wrong in who you thought you serve the best. You may be wrong because you didn’t have a big enough sample size. You didn’t have a big enough market group. You only had a few clients. You’re matched your podcast to it and you found you’ve attracted a whole different set of people.
It has nothing to do with the logo; it is whom they are perceived. Click To TweetThat’s the time for us to have a quick call or for you to jump on here. Ask me questions, ask Tom questions. It’s also for us to help you figure out if there is a shift needed. Is there a pivot needed or are you ready to keep going? It’s going to be just fine. We’re happy to help you through those stages. The one other last thing I want to mention is sub-branding. It’s okay by thinking about this. If you’re an author, if you’re a speaker, you always have sub-brands going on. You have ingredient brands going on. You have book titles, you have book covers. They’re not your brand. They support your brand. At podcast, this is the same way. I am not a fan of matched brands. There are very few cases in which that works.
Do you mean the business name is the podcast name or something?
There are very few cases in which that works. If that’s what you’ve been doing for a while, if you’re on just Podetize and you’re not one of our customers, this is a time to maybe join onto one of our coaching calls and ask some questions. It may be not working for you. What happens a lot of times with that is it seems like a sales pitch. There are times when that works and there are times when that doesn’t. In celebrity brands and some things like that, that’s the case where it does work. For the most part, the sub-brand needs to be more explanatory of the process of what somebody else is going to get from you.
It’s what’s in it for them.
The brand itself is who you are out there. It’s the perception of what you want. It’s the essence of you. It’s the essence of what they’re getting. If I’m going to listen to a show, If I’m going to take time and invest in your show, what’s in it for me to be more dominant. That’s where we do a little sub-brand shift. We try to keep them connected and synergistic, but not matching.
Now there is an opportunity in podcasting though. Let’s say you already have a brand that maybe is the same as your business and you’re not ready to change it. That’s where you can think about your episode titles. Make sure your episode titles are right in the very beginning of it because, in some listings of your podcast, they only show you so much of the title. In iTunes, you’d get six or seven words you can see and it depends if you’re using which app on your phone or if you’re on the website. We’ve talked about this on other coaching calls and episodes of Feed Your Brand. Don’t start out with the episode number in the title or your podcast name in every title. That’s all anybody’s going to see in a lot of those situations. If you can show that episode title in those first few words what’s in it for the listener, then your chances of getting people to click on it and listen are much greater.
Building Brand Through Podcast: The sub-brand needs to be more explanatory of the process of what somebody else is going to get from you.
We do this with longer subtitles to shows as well. There are other ways to go about it. Once people find what your show name is, it doesn’t matter anymore once they’re subscribed. It’s a first find thing. It’s a first impression thing. We can always work around and shift that around. This is the case where your brand shifts over time. You know that we’re not huge fans of having your picture on your cover art. When you’re new to an industry or new to a marketplace or you’re in a high celebrity marketplace, there are times when it works and times when it doesn’t.
There are exceptions.
We’re not a fan of it when you’re just starting out and if you’re one of those starter brands because that’s a waste of visual space in which you could be impacting them for what’s in it for them. You can get subscribers and then over time, you can shift into building your authority that way. We do shift cover art all the time. A lot of times we do it when we start to spin off. When you get to a bunch of episodes and you start to spin up volumes, we’d start shifting the volumes. It’s like, “New season, new cover art.” You can do that. Those are cases in which you need a brand pivot. These are things that I want you to have in your minds. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got on brand building. Brand strategy is critically important so please don’t skip it in the process. The content strategy you’re employing needs to work hand in hand with that brand strategy.
Usually, we have at least a dozen or even up to twenty live, but more people watching remotely. You probably all have gotten the emails, but I’m going to be live for twelve and a half hours now. I had to stretch it and I’m starting to half an hour earlier than that plan because unfortunately, something’s wrong in the booking calendar and we had two people double booked at the same time. I had to open up another slot. In any case, all day long, you can register if you haven’t already to join the webinar. I’m sure you’ve gotten emails. If you’re on this call, you’ve got the email to join. You can either join the webinar or you can watch it live on Facebook. It’ll be on our Feed Your Brand Facebook page all day.
I’m sure nobody wants to sit for twelve and a half hours, but there’s a good line up. I have a new backdrop that I was trying to get, but I didn’t quite have enough time to do that. Thank you for participating for the first time. There’s always a different subject every month. If you have any subjects that you’d want us to address, write into us ahead of time and we’ll be happy to address your issue. Sometimes there’s a lot more little new technical things that have come up in the industry. We’ll address those. Thank you.
If you are interested in an ongoing coaching strategy interim call that’s specifically focused on strategies, I am open to doing an evening group call. That’s specifically about strategies and strategizing on your show. Sometimes, you might get it private, you never know. If any of you are interested in that as ongoing support, we’re looking at opening that up to those that are trying to become podcasters. It will be a mix of potential clients as well as existing clients. If you are interested in that, I would love to know if that would be helpful to you. We can talk about a lot more than podcasting. We’re going to talk about business. We’re going to talk about all kinds of marketing things and other stuff that might be of interest to you. It’s just an ongoing brand building coaching call because I have enough demand for that right now so let me know.
Thank you all. Hopefully, you’re getting something good out of this. We look forward to seeing more of you live on a future one and hearing from you any burning questions or issues you may have that we can help dress with you in the future.