There are few marketing channels as versatile as podcasting. It’s a great way to connect with people and build relationships; it’s easy to promote your services as you build your brand; there are multiple ways to repurpose podcast content; and starting one is simple. But there are some things you need to know before you decide to go live.
On this Elementality, Reese Harper explains how to get a podcast started and offers a few tips he has gleaned from his experience as a host and guest on how to succeed. Podcasting offers a unique way to engage with your audience. And you can tell when someone has been nurtured by a podcast as they know you—they have heard your voice, listened to your expertise, and made a connection.
Podcast Transcript
Reese Harper:
I really see podcasting as a top of funnel. It can be really top of funnel fun audience building. It can also be middle of funnel technical, like we do here a little bit more.
Abby Morton:
Sprinkle those in here…
Reese Harper:
Yeah, we might have a story here and there. It’s not like totally dry, but the closer it is to the top of the marketing funnel the more fun it can be and the possible audience can be larger and the more you want it to be a middle of funnel or bottom of funnel podcast. Closer, you’re gonna be covering things that are, probably in my view, best suited for copyrighting and short form from marketing material. I like leaving the podcast at an audience building level. It just seems to be more effective.
Jordan Haines:
Welcome to Elementality. Each episode, we will explore the challenges and the opportunities faced by financial advisors and how advisors can use elements to grow their business and serve their clients better. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementality everyone. I’m your host today, Abby Morton, here with Reese.
Reese Harper:
Hello everyone.
Abby Morton:
So again, marketing activities and how are we using assessments to make them powered up and even better than before. So something that you’ve always done since I think the very early days of Dentist Advisors and if I remember correctly I even think you thought this marketing tactic wasn’t going to be that great of an idea. And it’s ended up being one of your best funnels by far that is podcasting.
Reese Harper:
Oh, yes the podcasting.
Abby Morton:
The podcasting. Let’s start back at the early days of… I think you started podcasting. Do you even remember the year you started podcasting?
Reese Harper:
I think it was 2014, might have been 15 but…
Abby Morton:
Okay. But that was early days of podcasting.
Reese Harper:
Yeah, I’m not like the OG or anything, but I didn’t have any friends that were at the time doing a podcast for financial advice and I wanted to go after a narrow kind of occupational vertical. I wasn’t the one that said it wouldn’t work at least initially. I did say it wouldn’t work after about six months of no one listening to it. But I remember saying, let’s do a podcast, it’s gonna work and Ryan, one of my closest friends and the first financial advisor ever at DA, he was really skeptical of it working, and I think he was annoyed that I was wanting to do it, because I was gonna rope him into being on the podcast with me.
Abby Morton:
Weekly, it’s a weekly commit, right? It’s a big commitment. You gotta go every week.
Reese Harper:
It’s a big commit. I remember him… He’s now the biggest fan of podcasting ever. He’s better than me at it and he’s doing awesome.
Abby Morton:
He’s even started his own second one. He’s all into it now.
Reese Harper:
But we started early. I think I was part of almost to the 300th episode. So it was seven, maybe seven years or something like that, or six years of just every week and I didn’t think it was going to work at month six because it was still, I think it was just like my mom and a couple of friends were listening still.
Abby Morton:
Maybe your close client who already believes in you, right?
Reese Harper:
Yeah, there was a… The first while I’m like, okay, maybe this organic sharing thing may or may not work. And I had to find some different ways to get my… It turns out we really did have a great podcast and it kind of took off, but I think we had to figure out how to get it circulating or get people listening to it, get them hearing about it and distribution of your content is a whole different challenge than just creating it in the first place.
Abby Morton:
Totally. Totally…
Reese Harper:
I think a lot of people can relate to that. You probably have created a lot of stuff that’s really great, but sometimes it just sits in a personal journal or it’s in a notepad or on a word processor somewhere and you never push send.
Abby Morton:
Well, it could be scary to push send, number one, right? But even if you do push send, you publish this podcast, you’ve got to get it more than your 10 followers that you have.
Reese Harper:
Totally. And I don’t know what lessons we can derive from the first six months of me not really seeing a lot of growth, but I do think it’s fair to say, well, you just started recording a podcast, you kept putting it on all the Stitchers and were hoping for organic sharing to occur, that does work. And organic sharing will happen. But if you want to accelerate your podcast distribution, there’s a lot of ways to do that. Some are bootstrappy kind of ways, and some of them involve spending money. The first thing I’d probably say is I remember feeling like, okay, I want to get my podcast to be talked about on other people’s podcasts. So I was like, I’ve got to go to people that are speaking and have a podcast and already are talking to dentists and see if I can get on their show.
Abby Morton:
Already have a following, right?
Reese Harper:
And then I’ll put them on my show. Or what if we go to events where there’s lots of dental speakers and I ask them to come over to my booth for 15 minutes and I host a podcast recording booth and…
Abby Morton:
Maybe live at the event.
Reese Harper:
Do live at the event and then we can dice up the podcast from people at the event, so I’d go to events I’d have 10 or 12 interviews that I’d knock out 10 or 15 minutes a piece and then be able to use those as a way to get the other person to mention me or share me on their marketing resources, sometimes they would have a podcast. And when people had a podcast, that’s when I would notice the biggest growth in my podcast. So if somebody on another podcast says, hey, you should listen to Reese’s podcast, people are already in the Stitcher, they’re already in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, they just type in your name while they’re listening and add you right then. It’s something they can do really quickly. I thought that the podcast call to action that would be really powerful, if I was on someone else’s podcast, I’d say, like, book a consultation or come talk to me or come talk to us. We’re doing great. But it turns out the best conversion rate came from me on someone else’s show saying, come listen to my show.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, so for example, I think I remember, I think everyone will recognize the name too, Travis Hornsby, the Student Loan Planner guy, right? He had a podcast, I think I remember you were on his, he’s talking to you about everything you do at Dentist Advisors and that’s what you’re saying. You mentioned on Travis Hornsby, Student Loan Planner podcast, hey, if you’re a dentist, hey, come talk to me, come listen to my podcast. They find you in that way.
Reese Harper:
Yep. I worked really good. There’s a lot of lessons from podcasting I’m curious if you’d want me to go into anything specific. I think that was the first lesson is distribution is more important than creating.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. And at least initially right you have to have a following if people are gonna listen.
Reese Harper:
I mean, lesson two, if we want to go into this it probably be, should you do a podcast? I think that’s an interesting question and I don’t think everyone should.
Abby Morton:
Why? How do you know if you’re that person that should or shouldn’t?
Reese Harper:
Well, if you… Podcasts are to some degree, they’re entertainment. They’re really actually not… The ones that perform well with consumers aren’t highly technical. A lot of them are driven by story. This podcast, for a financial advisor audience, we tend to be a little bit more brass tacks here.
Abby Morton:
We’re straight to the point. Keeping it short.
Reese Harper:
But you think about our context, we’re also not trying to just grow a massive podcast audience. We’re actually trying to use this as a resource for us in customer success and growth, and it’s a way for us to circulate our own ideas and collaborate as a team, share content in between our team that’s all spread thin. There’s lots of reasons to do a podcast. If you’re trying to do a podcast for consumer clients and it’s not entertaining, it’s gonna be hard to get circulation, because financial information and things that are technical…
Abby Morton:
It can be heavy.
Reese Harper:
It can be heavy and it’s hard to process it. If you start using numbers and saying, if you add 100 to 400, you get five minus three. It’s like you’re… Some people, the people that are interested in that technical content, that’s a very different consumer than someone who’s just trying to delegate this job. And so if you think about who am I going to go, who am I talking to?
Abby Morton:
Now you really have to set up who’s the audience, right?
Reese Harper:
Who is my audience? How big is that audience? Because if that audience is 10,000 people, unless… If that audience is 10,000 possible clients, it may not be the best use of a podcast. You might find webinars or even direct mail or in today’s world I’d say sadly you gotta have one of everything. So, for most people, podcasting, it’s a good thing to do, but it does have to pass the sniff test of entertainment in my view for it to be really effective. And most of us struggle to be entertaining. We’re not…
Abby Morton:
I’m a little dry myself personally, but you like definitely funny.
Reese Harper:
Yeah. Both financial advisors on average, well I can be not as much as some of my colleagues and some of my colleagues in the industry who are even more entertaining for a variety of reasons, it doesn’t have to be funny, but just entertaining, it would be dynamic, it would be a storyteller. You have to put together artwork and think about this as… Radio was always storytelling in the mind and I just think it’s a different thing. I’ve seen people kind of go on a podcast for four years and just not growing an audience, if your audience isn’t growing there’s a chance you’re losing an audience because it stays on their phone and auto downloads and shows up in the podcast data as a growing number even if people aren’t listening. So you got to be growing pretty consistently to know that it’s moving the needle.
Abby Morton:
But I think you also need to give it time like you said, after six months, it hadn’t done anything, then you started getting on other shows.
Reese Harper:
Is everyone’s scared to not do a podcast now? Am I scaring you enough?
Abby Morton:
So I’m just saying, I think sometimes we as human beings, you try something or you invest a small amount of money and it doesn’t work out and you give up on it forever. But what I keep hearing you even in other episodes say is, it takes time and it takes energy and it takes tweaking and modifying and changing and sometimes you do.
Reese Harper:
That’s what’s tough.
Abby Morton:
If you’ve been four years into a podcast, I would say four years that feels like a good heartfelt effort.
Reese Harper:
Yeah, its a lot.
Abby Morton:
Six months feels like…
Reese Harper:
Not enough. Not enough. I agree.
Abby Morton:
Gotta keep chugging along.
Reese Harper:
You’ve probably seen me and we we’re talking about this in another episode, written content and blogging and copyrighting, it’s a different genre. And there’s a lot to learn there about what it does, but I think that you have to push past your comfort level in terms of volume with podcasting. Go a little longer than it’s comfortable, keep pushing it for a while, eventually it just becomes part of your DNA. The hardest part about any of these content outlets is just developing the machinery, the muscle memory, the machinery to practice and keep repeating it.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, so that leads right into tip number three and I think this comes up for a lot of advisors is like, how do I know what to say for 52 weeks, for a whole entire year? I don’t even feel like I could come up with that many topics. So do you feel like you have any tips of how to come up with the content, what you’re talking about?
Reese Harper:
This is easy. This is easy.
Abby Morton:
Okay, for me, I feel like it would be really hard, but for other people, it might be easier.
Reese Harper:
So, as long as you’re telling stories, then it’s good. But if you stop telling stories and you start talking topics, because see, people don’t remember your topics. They don’t remember. They just remember your stories. And in my experience, you could tell 10 stories about one topic and it’s always interesting because it was the story that you showed up to hear. Humans are wired for stories. They’re not wired to be talked at with data and charts. And so I think that people get overwhelmed by their topics and they really shouldn’t. They should just be constantly looking for interesting stories in the world.
Abby Morton:
Even stories that are happening with their clients day to day, right?
Reese Harper:
Yeah, it could be a story about your client going on a camping trip and what financial lesson that you want to tie out of that. It could be a story about something in PR that’s coming out today on the news, and you’re going to cover that topic. It could be a story about an industry topic. It could be a story about an unrelated issue, like a dentist, one of our dentists that we were interested in was going on a really long mountain running expedition. Another one was doing something really cool with snowboarding. It’s just finding stories to tell. This isn’t my biggest strength. People like Ted was helping us produce the podcast for a long time. He did some incredible work on identifying stories. Ryan’s an excellent storyteller, so he was always finding stories. I wasn’t the one that actually found all the stories. I just loved hearing them and participating. I tend to lean…
Abby Morton:
It did make it entertaining, like you said.
Reese Harper:
Yeah, it made it entertaining. I just think people underestimate… It doesn’t have to be like, oh, you told this amazing story, but people are more interested in feeling out the podcast than they are just showing up to listen to it. So tip number three, is that what it is?
Abby Morton:
What are we on? This is three.
Reese Harper:
Story. Tip four, don’t read a script. Don’t read a script.
Abby Morton:
But why not?
Reese Harper:
What’ll end up happening is it loses that dynamic entertainment kind of value. Bullets…
Abby Morton:
I think you can turn into a robot because you’re reading the script, right?
Reese Harper:
Yeah, you wouldn’t know how that goes. You’re always great at this but the rest of us, if we see bullets and if you find yourself being the type of person that’s uncomfortable shooting from the hip, from a set of bullets, podcasting is gonna be really hard. That’s okay that you don’t do it and it’s okay that you might just have to practice shooting from the hip a little bit. That’s what people want, is the authenticity of you making it up as you go. And you’re not going to say something they’re expecting. So it’s more about varying your energy level, your cadence, listening. If it’s monologue, which is what Elementality ends up being a lot, it’s a little… Because you’re interviewing guests. You’re giving them space, guest interviews aren’t as interesting as sparring wars between people just because it’s…
Abby Morton:
You never know what you’re gonna get in a spurring war.
Reese Harper:
You never know what you’re gonna get when people are sparring and fighting on voice, it’s awesome. So I really see podcasting as a top of funnel. It can be really top of funnel fun audience building. It can also be middle of funnel technical like we do here a little bit more.
Abby Morton:
Sprinkle those in here…
Reese Harper:
Yeah, we might have a story here and there, it’s not totally dry but the closer it is to the top of the marketing funnel, the more fun it can be and the possible audience can be larger and the more you want it to be a middle of funnel or bottom of funnel podcast, you’re going to be covering things that are probably, in my view, best suited for copyrighting and short form marketing material. I like leaving the podcast at an audience building kind of level. It just seems to be more effective.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Well, I remember as an advisor my early days of DA just trying to start finding the people I was gonna serve. Those that came on to talk to me in that initial consultation said oh, yeah I’ve listened to the podcast. It’s like they knew everything about us. They could almost sell my job. They’re just like, tell me where the dotted line is to sign, whereas those who had never listened to the podcast and just had some big financial pain that just happened and they’re like, oh, okay, I just Googled who works with dentists. Okay, I just clicked the button and I’m talking to you and I have no idea who you are. It’s like those sales were so much harder to make than the ones who would listen to the podcast forever. And so it is amazing how, I think there’s some statistic of, like that person has to interact with you seven times before they’ll even call. And a podcast is a great way for them to add a high level, check you out, scope you out, who are you, what are your personalities like before they are ready to pick up the phone and be ready.
Reese Harper:
Well, I think it’s fair to say that all seven of those, in some cases, could come from seven podcast episodes, right?
Abby Morton:
Exactly.
Reese Harper:
And we’ve seen that where…
Abby Morton:
100%.
Reese Harper:
And I think your cold conversion, you can feel when someone’s been nurtured by a podcast. You could totally tell, because the way they’ll approach you, their style, the way they’ll talk.
Abby Morton:
It’s like they’re your friend.
Reese Harper:
It tends to be more informal. Because they now know you and they made some assumptions about you. I love that. And you can’t get that same, like writing is a whole different beast.
Abby Morton:
Okay, but we’re not talking about writing today.
Reese Harper:
And we’re not talking about that today, but I’m trying to distinguish. Writing is, writing leans more intellectual for most people. Just the activity where podcasting leans more personal and so just don’t assume that podcasting is the same… Creating a podcast is not the same as making a video. It’s not the same as writing an article. And they just serve very different functions. So I think everyone should have a podcast. The last tip on it is, remember that for the most part, your clients are not listening. Okay, so for the most part once the delegator buys you the service provider and says you’re I want you to be my planner.
Reese Harper:
They’re done hearing what you got to say on your podcast. Now there are podcast clients, there are clients of ours at Dentist Advisors today that still listen to the podcast. But after a while, your goal with most podcasts is either you want to keep learning forever with this host, or you’re trying to make a decision. And once you’ve made your decision, sometimes you turn off the podcast. Alternatively, you’re there to learn forever. Most customers, most clients of financial services firms are not there to learn. They’re there to buy and move on. Just keep in mind that even though you’ve got a podcast and you’re thinking about, Are my client’s listening here. It’s unlikely in my experience, that your clients are listening more than prospects. Some clients will and you’ve got to keep that audience in mind, but it’s a shrinking part of the whole and the growing part of the whole is people that are probably unfamiliar with you on the episode they’re listening right then. Don’t forget, some people don’t have the context of anything before.
Abby Morton:
It’s hard to keep that in mind as a content creator of like where’s everyone at in the timeline of our podcasting and trying to always bring it back to make sure everyone knows.
Reese Harper:
I think it’s really it’s important. Definitely.
Abby Morton:
Well, thank you so much. I think some great tips there in terms of podcasting, if you should or if you shouldn’t do it. What are some things to keep in mind?
Reese Harper:
I think everyone should. Everyone should do it.
Abby Morton:
At least give it a try for four years is what…
Reese Harper:
Because you don’t know, right? You don’t know. If it gives you energy and you’re excited about it and you like it and it makes you smile and it makes you enjoy yourself, do it. If not, find someone in your firm who can give you a whole body yes to that and love it because people can feel how you feel and they want to be around people that are podcasting who are enjoying what they’re doing.
Abby Morton:
That’s fair, good point.
Reese Harper:
So anyway, do it if you love it, do it if you’re excited about it, do it if it’s giving you energy and we can work out the details.
Abby Morton:
Love it. Thank you.
[music]
Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality…
Rohit Argawal:
The dream was can we build an autonomous engine? That if an advisor has a client on SOAR, eventually can we be just running in the background and eventually always have you in the same way that a portfolio rebalances based on rules, can we do the same thing on your debt side? I guarantee you the best deal whenever you’re taking out a new loan and it’s very seamless, then constantly monitor those loans to try to find savings.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about Elements, go to getelements.com/demo. Elementality’s executive producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one!