A Roadmap for Growth.

After launching many shows for businesses and taking a hard look at the commonalities between the shows that succeeded and the ones that failed, we saw a roadmap emerge.

To be clear, this is not a one size fits all plan. This is a roadmap with common elements and how this looks for your show will look different. Ultimately, we saw 7 common factors amongst successful podcasts:

1. Clarity on their audience.

2. Understanding of their audiences problems or pain points

3. A content strategy that solves those problems

4. A clear offer or next step

5. A show that is optimized to succeed on platforms

6. Commitment to understanding analytics and audience behavior

7. Continually repeating the cycle of improvement.

The first four steps make up your podcast foundation, and ideally, you would have clarity on these before you launch your show, but I know how life is…rarely ideal. If you are just starting out your show, this should help you build your Podcast Foundation.

If you already have a show and you are wanting to improve it, jump right in.

The last three steps of Optimize, Analyze, and Repeat come into play after your are publishing content regularly on your podcast.

Below, you will find an overview of each step of the process with some questions to ask yourself.

1. Audience

When a podcast is struggling to grow, the most common issue I’ve seen is a lack of clarity on the audience. I have seen this time and time again where a show grows initially and than it flattens out which at the end of the day means your audience isn’t sharing the show with people around them.

Because podcasts have a global reach, it is tempting to create a show that would be impactful to anyone listening. If you’ve heard the term niche down to blow up. It is true. You’re not the exception (and if you are, please email me, I’d love to know!).

You should create your podcast with 1 person in mind. When you create focused content with a specific audience in mind, that audience will be impacted by the show and guess what? They know more people just like them. When you create impactful content for a focused audience, word of mouth growth kicks in. When was the last time you shared an average piece of content? People share content that strikes a specific chord.

Once you’ve clarified your audience, it’s time to identify what problems they have that you want to solve.

2. Problem

Most podcasters create the podcast for themselves. Great podcasters create their podcast for their audience.

Now that you have clarity on the 1 person that you are creating content for (don’t worry, their are TONS of people like your 1 person), it is time to figure out what problems they are facing that you want to solve.

In the most simple use case, ask the following questions:

• What are the most common questions your audience has?

• What problems are they facing in their life?

• What are their dreams?

• What is holding them back from achieving those dreams?

Now, you don’t need to solve every problem your audience has but when you are launching a podcast for your business, you want to make sure that you know what problems you are aiming to solve for your audience.

This doesn’t just apply to educational or business podcasts either. True Crime podcasts certainly help their audience solve the problem of needing entertainment and curiosity, wanting good stories, and wanting mystery. Comedy podcasts certainly help people with laughter, joy, and taking a lighter take on what’s happening in the world.

Now that you have clarity on your problems, it is time to create the content strategy to help solve your problems.

3. Content

Thinking about your content strategy is the third step, not the first.

Once you have clarity on your audience and problems, your content strategy becomes simple.

Your content strategy should reverse engineer the solutions to your audiences problems.

For shows that are just starting out, we often advise that their first 20 episodes or so are simply providing answers to the questions their audience has. This should be done creatively, maybe by bringing on guests that are knowledgable in the content or creating a solo episode that speaks to an issue.

The main point here is that your content strategy shouldn’t focus around what you want to talk about but rather what your audience needs to hear. You strike gold when those two things overlap and what your audience needs and what you want to talk about come together.

4. Offer

About a year ago, I was onboarding a new client and they had a successful show in a very niche market and also were a sought after consultant in that industry. Business was good but they wanted to see a stronger connection between the podcast and the business. They told me nobody was calling them from the podcast.

I asked a simple question “Have you asked them to?” I think you know the answer.

It is shocking how often podcasters create content and assume that it will help grow their business even though they don’t have an offer or anything valuable to incentivize their audience to actually reach out.

This step in the roadmap is not about selling a $97 product on your podcast or offering a low-value lead magnet that is just a glorified PDF made in Canva, it is about your audience having clarity on how to take the next step. This can look like a million different things. The point is it should be easy for your audience to take the next step and they should be rewarded with something incredibly valuable.

Spoiler alert: nobody wants to sign up for your newsletter. They don’t care about your website. They don’t want to fill out a contact form. They don’t want a lead magnet.

They want your help solving a problem. Position your ask or Call To Action as a solution to their problem, even if it is in the form of a newsletter.

Now that you’ve worked through the first 4 steps of the roadmap you can hit publish and your show will grow, right? Wrong.

This is just the beginning and the shows that succeed don’t stop here but continue to obsess over how their show can get better and help their audience more.

5. Optimize

This step of the roadmap is all about making sure you increase your shows chances to be seen by people and to be consumed by your audiences.

There are some things here that are done once when you are starting your show (or fixing it) and there are some that are an ongoing process of improving your podcast based off of what the data is showing you. I recommend shows always be in a cycle of making subtle (and data driven) improvements and analyzing what worked/didn’t work (the next step).

To start with the optimization process and ensure your show is being seen by the most amount of people possible, consider the following:

• Make sure your podcast is being distributed on as many podcast players as are possible. Even though the majority of podcast listeners consumer podcasts on Apple and Spotify, there are still millions and millions that use other apps. Here is a solid directory by our friends at Buzzsprout. This may seem annoying, but you only have to do it once.

• Unless you have a highly scripted, produced, or narrative driven show, consider recording Video for YouTube. YouTube is a primary place where people are discovering new content.

• Consider publishing Video episodes on Spotify. Spotify favors shows that are using their new features.

• Ensure you have show notes with links to resources mentioned and your websites.

• Have a podcast website or use a platform like podpage.com so you have a Google-indexed page for each episode.

• Make sure you have a Spotify for Creators account and an Apple Podcast Connect account so you can get deeper analytics for those platforms.

• Have podcast artwork that stands out and is easy to read when scaled down to your phone.

• Have descriptive show notes and show titles that tell your audience and the search engines what your show is about.

There are a bunch of things that you could do to “optimize” your podcast but the main thing here is that the industry is constantly moving and the tools podcast platforms and players have are always shifting. You want to make sure your show shows up in as many places as possible.

You may think this is obvious but there are over 1M podcasts on Spotify that are not available on Apple Podcasts because people don’t know you need to push a few buttons to make that happen.

Now that your podcast is optimized, you can actually publish your show, and your journey begins.

6. Analyze

This step in the roadmap is asking one simple question: is this working?

Over the last several years, if you happen to show up to a podcast industry event or ask podcasters what the most important thing is in podcasting, you will often here a one word answer: consistency.

I think this is bogus.

This is only true if what your doing is working. I know way too many podcasters who have been doing the exact same thing every single week for the last 2-3 years and they are confused as to why their show isn’t growing. Simply doing the same thing over and over again won’t change the result of the thing. If it wasn’t working two years, ago with the small audience you had then, it probably won’t work today with a larger audience.

This illustrates the importance of continually asking ourselves “is this working?” This could be related to your show format, to how you introduce guests, how you are promoting your show, how you are packaging your episodes, etc. There are many different data points (beyond a download) that show you whether or not what you are doing is helping you to reach new people.

The purpose of analyzing your content and looking at data should be to make revisions to your content and strategy based off of what you are learning. But how do we do it? What do we measure?

Downloads? Streams? Views? Listens?

Navigating terminology in podcasting is tough, I’ll admit it. But, it is possible to look at podcast analytics in a way that helps you understand your audiences behavior so that you can improve your show around those behaviors.

It is pretty common for podcasters to look at downloads alone and to look every few weeks. If this is you, I get it. Analytics can be overwhelming and podcasting doesn’t have many good central locations to bring all data points together in a way that gives you clear next steps (yet).

To clarify a few things, here are some rules we look at when it comes to podcast analytics:

• Measure things that will change your behavior

• Downloads are important (a lot of people in the industry don’t think they are anymore)

• Downloads are not enough (there are other data points that tell us much more about your audience)

• You (or someone on your team) should be looking at analytics OFTEN

7. Repeat

If you’ve made it this far, the next step is to go back to step 5 and begin the ongoing cycle of improving your show.

As long as you are podcasting, you should be in a cycle of ensuring your show is optimized for growth based off of what you are learning, analyzing whether or not those changes worked, making adjustments, and repeating the process.

I believe podcasting is the best media format for brands to communicate with their audiences authentically, but it is more than a marketing tool. If you want to do it well, you need to look at podcasting as a craft to be mastered, not just a tool to be used.

Podcasting is getting more competitive. It is getting harder. It is a long game. But there is still immense opportunity.

To take hold of that opportunity, be patient and obsess over how you can continue to improve your show more valuable for your audience.