When you first meet someone, rarely do they automatically know you, like you, and trust you. Most of the time, just like cooking, you have to marinate them into the goodness. On today’s show, Tracy Hazzard and guest co-host Juliet Clark talk about marinating your marketing. Putting out something isn’t good enough. You’d want to sit down, see how it feels for a little bit of time, and get feedback on it. After all, some things don’t always feel right the first time. You may need to get your collective juices flowing and marinate those ideas.

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Watch the episode here

 

 

Marinating Your Podcast Marketing: How to Perfectly Time Your Idea

We’re excited about the topic because we’re talking marinated marketing, which sounds a little odd when you consider that our mixer is marinated olives, which I understand, Juliet, you may have made.

I love anything olives. It was yummy. I only cook on the weekends usually. By the time we get to this, it’s done. I made the caramelized bacon too. That was so good.

I love caramelized bacon, but I was out of town so it wasn’t in my own kitchen. I couldn’t make it. The marinated olives, I didn’t make them yet, but that’s because know no one else will eat them but my son-in-law, Jonathan. I’m going to make them for him when we get to our skiing later.

You’re going skiing? You’re going to ski?

No. I’m not skiing. I’m going to a place where everybody else is skiing. I’m staying there and cooking.

I feel hurt that you didn’t visit me as you did.

Somebody said that to me. It’s all driving trip this time, so me not being in the car with the girls would be bad.

You’re driving to Colorado?

The shows that grow the fastest are the ones that stayed narrow but deep in their knowledge base in what they cover and what they do. Click To Tweet

Yes, we are driving to Colorado.

Are you going through Utah?

Technically yes. You have to get to the 77 to go through there. I will give an update on the Facebook page. I will let everybody know how my marinated olives turned out. How did yours turn out?

Mine turned out well and I warmed them up a little bit because I love warm olives. I don’t know why. I’ve had them at a couple of restaurants and they’re better warm. I’m excited. I have to mention too, I ordered some of the rubs from Amazon, Marie’s rubs. If you go over to MChef and I tried one of them. It was good. I tried San Antonio.

I’ve tried a couple of them, the Mediterranean one is good. The Provence one is good. There are a few of them that are amazingly delicious. The other ones are the sugars and spices for making the drinks because of holiday cocktails, why not? Anyway, let’s talk about marketing being marinated.

What does that have to do with anything? Do we marinate our marketing? Should we?

We should be marinating it, but what does that mean?

You’re not going to tell them?

 

I was hoping you were.

When you meet someone, you need to marinate them in that goodness. They don’t automatically know you, like you and trust you. Chances are if you’ve met at an event, you’ve pitch-slapped them so they probably don’t want to be marinated.

This is the thing that I think is important that we forget about that. We think this is the way things should be where it’s a hard and fast recipe. Things don’t always taste good. They don’t always feel right the first time. Sometimes they need to settle in and we need to absorb them. We need time to get back to that. That’s where I would like to think like when we build a website or we build a copy, we do anything like title something. We want to do it and then we want to sit on it. We want to get some feedback on it. We want to see how it feels a couple of days from now. See how it tastes a couple of days from now because it may not have been right. We throw something out there. A good friend of ours, a co-client of ours, Merrill Chandler, has got a new book. Here he is, he puts out a book and then realizes that maybe that wasn’t the best title for it as they’re going to print.

The more people he’s commenting about, the more that they thought it meant something different. That’s the case where you get into something and you think it’s perfect. You think you’ve got it all, but you’ve been in your own internal bubble for a while. That’s when we put it out there and we let it sit and marinate in the community, we want to have input into it. We start to hear things back of, “That didn’t feel like what I thought it was going to feel like. That didn’t taste like what I thought it would taste like. That’s not what I was expecting.” You start to get feedback. I also like to take everything like you hold your hands with your fingers open, you let some of it run through. I’m going to say there are some people out there who criticize everything. Not that I know any of them personally. That might be someone who I’m talking to. I don’t know. Their first reaction is always something this isn’t good enough. That’s okay. You can sit back and say, “Does that feel right for me?”

Because of their view of it, especially if they’re not your core client, then maybe you shouldn’t be listening to them. If they say something and it’s still after a couple of days as you’ve been marinating in the idea, maybe they were right. Maybe you should start asking some more of your core clients. This is where we get the collective juices flowing. This is our marination. We’re taking it all the way here. This is our analogy here. This is the thing we want to make sure that we don’t make brash decisions because one person said they didn’t like it. We want to also not make sure that we don’t get caught up in our own thing. You and I have been going through and looking at doing some work together on website copy and you sent me some stuff.

As I was looking through it, the thing that meant the most to me is that we get caught up in our own language for things that we forget that we have to be reflecting the language that other people are using, that the standard community is using. People who aren’t yet indoctrinated in our systems, our processes and our companies. I work with podcasters all the time, but most aspiring podcasters have never heard the term podfading before. I use it all the time when I talk to existing podcasters because they get it, they know it. If I use that term like, “We want to help you avoid podfading.” They’re like, “What the heck is that? I don’t even know what that means.” You want to make sure that your show is going to be effective and you’re going to keep going on your show. You’re not going to quit your show. That’s the language that they use.

Here’s the thing I come across a lot. I’m going to call you cute, I don’t know that whole cute thing going on the internet, but people who make up their own name for things like they try the Bennifer things for their own, like what they do. They will write like first-time copywriters and they’ll write something that they think is cute and nobody else gets it right. That’s when you need to start. Don’t ask your friends because seriously, if you have friends that are yes people, which believe me, I have no friends that are yes people. Sometimes I wish you will all tell me yes. I could go on, but you don’t and that’s good. I get solid feedback from people who would be your clients because you want to replicate and if they don’t understand what you’re doing and they don’t trust what you’re doing because you made up Bennifer, you’ve got a problem.

Bennifer is old. That’s like a wife and two kids, BOGO or something in it and a nanny incident, really old.

When your model is working, you can expand to a new location because the languaging will work no matter where you are. Click To Tweet

Is that the real Bennifer? Was it Jennifer Lopez?

I think it was Jennifer Lopez.

It’s many bad movies ago too.

We are branding. People sometimes get us into this idea. We’ve got to have something unique because it’s got to be a URL and it’s okay. You could URL pretty much anything. I have a guy who’s done thousands of revenue-generating websites and he tells me, “It does not matter what the name of the URL is. At the end of the day, I can send traffic from any ad, from any place to anything and no one will ever look at the URL.” To be honest with you, they never type it in until after they get to know you anyway. The only thing they’re grateful for is if it’s not hard to spell or long. That’s all that they care about. At the end of the day, they’ll type in at that point anything when they know that when they know you and trust you.

Looking at that, we get caught up in that this is where brand new should be, but it’s not in the beginning. That’s where many of you are starting out in your marketing. You’re starting out in the beginning. I get people all the time. We’ve been marketing well offline. You’re starting to enter the digital world and it’s different here. There’s a lot of noise here. Being cute, being special, have a branding thing, it’s costly. That’s the part that most people don’t realize. They think, “Wouldn’t it be great if I branded the name of Amazon? Amazon did.” That was the stupidest name for a bookstore ever. It was ridiculous for a bookstore that didn’t have an Amazon forest worth of books or Amazon jungle worth of books. They didn’t at the time. It does now.

He had a vision for what it wanted to be and he was willing to plot away. Jeff Bezos was willing to spend the money, do what he had to do, make sure that it got out there. He had a plan for that, but look how long it took. I tell people all the time I bought my first book on Amazon in 1998. That was the year after they started. I bought it January of 1998, so it’s a few months after they launched. I’m an early adopter and if I look at my sales, the purchases I buy year-over-year, it kept going up steadily. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I thought their name was smart. I thought it was stupid. At the end of the day, the cute names, all that stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have what you want, you’re speaking my language and that I understand what you’re going to give me. That’s important first.

It’s also important what you talked about those early adopters because you have to get those early adopters excited so that they tell others. That’s what’s important is connecting with those people right away and getting them super excited and feedback to make it better and more mainstream.

This is another thing that I think we forget about so often in our marketing is that we can have multiple personas online. It’s not hard. We’re not printing letterhead. We’re not printing major amounts of flyers and all those things. I have six different formats for my sales sheets. One’s targeted to those who know nothing about podcasting. One is targeted to those who know podcasting, one’s for speakers, one’s for authors, one’s for influencers or celebrities. My language has to be different. I can do that because it’s all digital. I didn’t start with seven of them to begin with. I started with the one that was going to make me the most money the fastest. The one niche area that I knew I could make traction faster. I started there. As I got more clients in the other areas, I added them later.

I want to bring up that niche because you and I are part of The Dames, which I got to spend some time with Megan Connor interviewing. For those of you who don’t know, The Dames is a networking group for six and seven-figure women. What is cool about that was we got to hear the Million Dollar Power Hour. We got to hear a group of CPAs that was so niched that they’ve got on the market for pastors.

I thought that was fascinating. You’re making seven figures off of a tiny little niche of the market that it sounds niche to us, but it’s not. It’s a big niche when you look at it nationwide.

I want to bring that up because that niche, when you were talking about those seven different audiences, those are different niches. You started with the one that was going to make you the most money, the one you could easily monetize, and then moved on from there to the different niches. Where that comes in with the marinating is what you talked about. Each one of those is a niche that has its own unique language.

Its own relationships in its own trust factors. Thinking about that when you’re marketing to pastors, you have to have a high-trust factor. There’s got to be this understanding of the faith-based organizations, in fact they don’t have giant budgets, but they are accountable to their congregations. Understanding those detailed things that makes the reason why you might’ve fired a few CPAs over the years or you’ve burned through some. That’s important. This is where you can get great and deep and marinated in your languaging that you put into that marketing when you understand that super well. What happens when we water that down on our websites, it’s general and for everyone, we lose that. Remember, I have seven different sales sheets, seven different landing pages that go into the communities because your ads should be different. Your marketing should be different. Your outreach should be different. They can go back in and then go to your service pages, which all look the same because technically you’re providing the same services, bookkeeping. The details are the same, but the languaging that draws them in the front end could be different. It sounds complex but it’s so not. It’s super simple.

It takes a little bit of that FOMO out, “What about this group? What about that group?” There’s much fear that you’re going to miss out on 1 or 2 different niches out there when the truth is you have to solidify that primary market first and then move to the 2 or 3 people here or there. Chances are you’ll have a huge primary market, but your secondary and tertiary markets, if you choose to have them, probably aren’t going to be as large and probably aren’t going to speak the same language.

A lot of times we don’t go deep enough into the niche that we’re doing. We cursory touch on it and then we’re like, “I could take this client and that client,” and we spread ourselves thin overall instead of working hard to market to the one group that we can speak to the most. We learned this fast in podcasting, especially in our 3D print marketplace when we were doing that. We learned quickly that being deep in 3D printing meant that we had the specialty. It didn’t matter whether they want to design services from us marketing services from us. They wanted our advice on everything because our niche was we got 3D printing. We understand the tech mindset, we spoke the language of the people. In fact, we simplified the language of the people so it wasn’t too techie for them. It didn’t make them feel stupid, even though some of the vendors were out there making them feel like they didn’t know enough. We were the translators in there and that’s how we made our affiliates. We made our recommendations, our referral partners. We made them successful because we played that role for them because our niche was specific.

What we found is that over time, the shows that grow the fastest, the ones that move into monetization quicker are the ones that stayed tight, narrow, but deep in their knowledge base in what they cover and what they do. It’s at the top. It’s a narrow niche. There’s a lot of advice out there to do it the other way, like go broad and do this. In my experience, in almost every market that I’ve ever worked in, when you do a shotgun approach, it takes you longer to get to monetization and you have to spend a lot more money in marketing. Those are the only two ways to make it work.

We had a publishing company for years that struggled. When we added the assessment piece to it, and we were the only people out there doing it and doing that holistic business book feedback to your audience, it made all the difference. Not only was it a niche now, it was a niche inside of publishing, which is huge. Everybody and their mother is a publisher. It added a layer where we truly were the only people in the publishing industry with that particular niche. That’s why it is important to do something like that, because now we don’t advertise to everybody. We’re mostly on a referral because we’ve worked with those people who needed that other piece that nobody else has. It’s the same with you in the podcasting world. There’s a ton.

As your company grows, you need to rebrand. Click To Tweet

I had a big meeting with a company who had been researching everybody else out there and they kept saying, “You do all that. You’re deep in what you do.” I said, “We didn’t do it from the get-go. We didn’t stand up out there and say we’re going to have all these services. We started out with the services, we refined it and we got it great.” Our clients said, “We’d like more because you’re doing a great job. We like more from you. We don’t want to have to go find somebody else to do this or to that for us.” We would add more and more. Coming up in the next year, we’re adding more. That’s how we kept doing it. As we kept saying we’re going to be obsessively podcaster-centric and when we do that, we know we’re going to provide whatever the deep services that are needed in there. It is that narrow niche of being podcaster-centric that works for us. Do we do videocasters? Absolutely, but our focus is on that audio podcaster piece because we know we can take them through. Do we do websites? Absolutely. All of those things get touched on, but they are not our focus of where we start from because if there’s no content to put in any of those other things, what’s the point? That’s how we learn to do it. It’s how I had been doing it for years.

Everything that we’ve ever done is being deeply niche-focused and understanding that community that you’re wanting to build with. Thinking back to our example of the CPA is working for the pastors, you can clearly see that what would happen is that those pastors would then say, “We want to start a nonprofit spinoff in one of our communities. Do you know a good attorney or a company that could make us a new corporation that’s a social good corporation or something like that?” You could see where you’re now starting to say, “I could add those other affiliate or referral program,” or something to be adding these services because more than one pastor starts asking me for these things because they trust me. They’re going to ask me for recommendations. That’s when you know you should add to your mix. People jump too often to, “Let’s move on to adding more products like. Let’s add more stuff. We’ll sell more stuff.” I’m always careful of let’s make sure our marketing and messaging and all of that is resonating and if we have the ear of that community, they’re going to tell us what they want next.

I want to say about 2014, we had a website where you could ala carte ad to build your own publishing packet. People were confused. They didn’t know what to add. We weren’t getting much in sales. Now we have three products. Take it or leave it. If it’s not for you, have fun at another company. It has streamlined what we do tremendously. We offer three products, we do those three products super well. That’s how you marinate people in what you’re doing. You’re not the jack of all trades, which many companies are trying to be.

That’s hard. You’ve got to have a lot deeper pockets to make that work for you. We see it often go wrong. You don’t get to the stage where you want. We were talking about The Dames before and the 6 and 7-figure women. What I love is that their Denver chapter has 30% or 35% of the women are seven-figure women. They got that because they were focused. They were asking for that. They were looking for those women to join their group. They were looking for how do we move from 6 to 7-figures? We aren’t getting women who barely made $100,000. They’re getting women who are almost to that point of breaking $1 million. That’s their community, that’s their deep niche that they’re working on. I think they’ve done a brilliant job of providing the right services for it too, which is the right type of topic. As you pointed out, you did one of the Million Dollar Power Hours, which when you attend those, what you get is this interesting Q&A about how did you make that? How did you make that leap? How did you change that? What did you do? You can learn from that and apply that to your own business. They also have lots of training, which I wished you can watch on recordings. If you missed one, you can go back and listen to it especially if it happens to be in your product category or in your service category.

Not only that, the way that they curate the members. When I was talking to Megan, they’re opening up a branch. They’re now international in Australia. She asks if I have clients in Australia, which I do in Australia and New Zealand. They’re men though. Would I ask the men if there are women in their lives? That’s cool. I would’ve never thought about asking men about, “Do you have women in your life that are 6 and 7 figures?” Probably most of the men would go, “If I knew women like that, I would have married them by now.”

I’m making a note because I do have one. There is a woman, Australian, Dames chapter. I’m making a note to myself so that I make sure to do that. This is where we start to look at as when your model is working, you can go expand to a new location. Because of the model itself, the languaging will work no matter where you are. When she goes off and to Australia, maybe she’ll have to change some of her languaging, but she’s going to learn quickly because she already has a great starting point of what’s been working here. Maybe there’s some terminology difference. Million dollars? Maybe that’s not the term that they use. Maybe her Million Dollar Power Hour isn’t going to go over as well.

It might be at 5:00 AM and it’s like Coffee Dollar Power Hour.

It would mean term or the title of it maybe isn’t going to be a match over there. Maybe they want something else and that’s important to learn. You’ll be able to expand that. Because you already know it’s working over here when you’re not seeing that same traction over, there you go, “Something’s going on. Do we need to ask about the name? Do we need to ask about the time of day?” How can we narrow down our problems where there are many people that are like, “Let’s throw it all out and start all over again?”

 

That’s expensive. I’m not saying you shouldn’t rebrand because as your company grows, you need to rebrand, but think about every time you’ve rebranded how expensive that is. It’s not a cheap endeavor.

I’m a fan of what I call tiered marketing. We start out with our hypothesis marketing where we spend as little as possible just so we can start having a conversation. Because if we don’t have a conversation, then we don’t get the perception, that reflection back, are we in the right place with our messaging and our marketing? We want to get there in the cheapest way possible to have that conversation. We step that up and we spend a little bit of more money refining that. Now that we have an understanding of what that market thinks of us, is looking for us out there and we refine it a little bit. You do some hard work in there. Get some processes in place, do some things in place. When you say, “In order for us to go up to the next level because we’re going to start taking advertisements, we’re going to be placing advertisements. We’re going to start pushing our push marketing out there. Now we might need little more streamlined brands.”

We’ve done that. We revise our website every six months. We do the same thing. A lot of it is internal work because we happen to have a team that can do it. We’re luckier than most, but it’s still expensive and time-consuming because you have to redo everything when you do that. We do it because we know we’re leveling up each time, but we’re not revamping everything. We might change our colors, we might change our logo, we might change our titling, our messaging of things. We might be positioning things differently. Each time we’re taking off a chunk of it, we’re not trying to undertake and do it all at once because that’s way too expensive and way too time-consuming. Chances are you will go wrong somewhere and you won’t know what part of it went wrong.

I’m laughing because Tracy’s team does my site and I do something different every month. I’m sure they get my email. They roll their eyes like, “Can’t we get rid of her?”

“She’s revising it again.” That’s why we have our website maintenance program. It’s because we want you to do that. We don’t want you to redo your whole site. “It’s time you had a landing page. Go ahead this month. It’s January. It’s time to fix your bio.” I did a whole podcast coaching call on that, “It’s time to fix your bio for 2020. Let’s have a different model. Let’s not forget to fix it on our website, fix it everywhere.” Things have changed. The marketing tone has changed and I have more experience this year than I had last year, so let’s fix it. We don’t have a great system for pulling off my coaching calls and turning them into podcasts, but I insisted someone figure out how to do it this time because it’s such a good topic that we talked about and how to create a bio. We’re talking about creating a bio with a personality flare to it. Thinking about the idea of making it resonate with those that are detail-oriented, those that are passionate, those that want the heart in your messaging. Rewriting your bio with those types of things in it. I put it in a specific order because I found that it works. If you put it in a specific order like, “Juliet, I know you’re a detail-oriented person. You want to get to the point, know what the important stuff is.” That might’ve got you right in a nutshell. Do you want to listen to all the, “Tracy has three girls and a dog.” Do you want to listen to that before you get to the point?

I don’t give a damn about your girls and your dog. I’m kidding.

That’s the point. You want to hit the hard stat thing first. The thing that has that. The second thing you want to hit is the prestige. Because those that want, “You worked with so-and-so clients,” or like me, Inc. columnist, means something. That resonates with my audience. You want to hit that as your second point. Your third point is something warm and fuzzy, but not the personal side of it, like heart-centered kind of thing. You want to impact the world, not that general place but whatever you’ve done that impacts the world in that way.

That’s only for those of you who have a heart. If you don’t, don’t listen to this.

Your bio should give that bigger vision of who you are and what you're doing. Click To Tweet

If you don’t have a heart, forget that. The fourth side of it is to touch on that. A little bit of going back to rounding that out and broadening the statistics to give that bigger vision of who you are and what you’re doing. You’re going in that way because the visionaries will wait until the end. They want to hear the whole picture. They want to get the big picture. They’ll wait until the end to hear that last piece. The relationship piece has to come before and the prestige has to come before that. Before that, you have to hit those details, those stats that make you the most valuable expert.

You’re reminding me of the Crystal Knows on LinkedIn. Those of you who haven’t used it, it’s a Google extension. It’s creepy, but it’s cool at the same time. It’ll tell you how to speak to somebody that you’ve connected with on LinkedIn. It reminds me of that. You’re doing it in their bio instead of on LinkedIn.

It is like that. It is hitting the personality points and we do all our languaging that way because we studied with Bill Stierle and we loved his process of doing it. We find it works. Our entire sales process is built around doing that and understanding those personality types. Why shouldn’t our bios, why shouldn’t our introductions be built that same way because we know it works? This is where we get into that refining and marinating and building it up and getting it to the stage at which it’s amazing. It is a fine wine at that point.

Are we going to go into a one wine cave now?

They sound like they go perfectly hand-in-hand.

Next time is resolution marketing and we’re going to be putting out invites and inviting you to jump on the call with us with your champagne in hand and tell us about what you want to do in 2020. What’s your resolution? How are you going to get there? If you’re shy, drink the whole bottle before you get here. You’ll blabber and join us. We’re going to talk about ours and we’d love to hear what yours are as well. We invite you to hop in and find out what we’re doing. Tracy and I are super busy traveling. I’m going to be traveling. We’re going to have Marie, MChef, on to talk a little bit about her recipes, but we’re going to have a few more guests here and there because I’m sure you all are sick of us.

I want to invite Karen Leland on to come to talk about color and how color impacts because we talked a little brief about that in the past and we’ve got a few interesting comments about that. How a color can affect your sales, how it can affect your power of what you have, what you put out there not just on your website but on you.

I would love to get Scott Carson on before his big podcasting mass media event. You’re never going to hear from us again because we’re going to have a lot of guests.

 

We’ll be touching base with you once or twice a month together for sure. There’ll be one where it’s each one of us, maybe separate occasionally with the guests. We’ll make it happen. We don’t want to miss out because we’re getting a lot of feedback from all of you that you like the topics.

During the holidays it’s been a little slow though. I think Santa Claus is partying more than us.

I don’t blame everybody. I rushed from the mall.

I’m done shopping.

I’m afraid to say it too loud, but we had a Santa incident. One of my daughters decided to tell Santa about something that no one ever heard of before.

For Christmas? You probably were in good company though because the 23rd is officially when men start to shop for Christmas.

Tom was out. I was like, “I’m going to go with you and get this one thing taken care of.”

Thank you. Next time, bring your champagne. Tell us what your New Year’s resolutions are and we’d love to hear from you.

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