by cpdigital
Want to get people hooked on your podcast? The Holy Trinity of Hooking tells you how (in our trademark style, because if your mind went there, you’re our people). On this episode of 🎙The 4am Report🎙 we dive into the 3 ways you can make sure your podcast is memorable:
🎧 Tune in for more! 🎧
by cpdigital
For this episode of 🎙The 4am Report🎙 we bring you (🥁drum roll🥁) a panel of experts on content audits. Yes, most people hate the idea of a content audit. It can feel like a lot of work. But these bright minds in the world of marketing all agree that a content audit is crucial – not only does it help you figure out what content your customers are consuming, it saves you time and energy as you can repurpose content – ultimately, amplifying your reach👏.
Together with Will and myself, on this episode we have Amber Khan, founder of Amplifyology, a repurposing content marketing agency in London; Romina Buchle, marketing manager of a B2B lead nurturing firm in Zurich called Aioma; and Kira Tchernikovsky, an international marketing consultant based in Toronto.
We started off speaking about our pet peeves and how they keep us up at night. Mine is the sheer amount of new content out there.
In most cases, without there being any kind of plan for that content.
Kira agrees that creating content for the sake of content isn’t a great strategy. ” If you know why you’re creating content and audit and repurpose content, you can measure it and do what needs to be done to achieve your goal.”
For Amber, what keeps her up at night is when people use content out of context. “If we don’t start from a place of context, it’s basically saying, well, I’ll just throw something out on the web, and hopefully, it will work, hopefully, it will get you the kind of attention you want. And maybe you’ll gain some followers. If the clients come from a non-marketing background, it’s hard to explain to them that the audit is required in the beginning to select content that is contextual. And then work with it, create your goals, repurpose it, whatever, but start from there.”
“A lot of people think content auditing is just one thing they do one time and then they forget about it,” Romina added. “They don’t do the work afterwards; they forget about the actual things they created and about all the rough diamonds they have that just need to be polished a bit” 💎.
Here’s four content auditing things you should be thinking about according to our worthy guests:
It is tempting to be all things to all people but targeting your ideal client profile is crucial – and an audit can help you narrow down your focus. Romina tries to go into each stage of the customer journey. “I want to see how I can optimize this stage or go into different topics and how I can really nail the touch points in the topic area along the journey a customer takes.”
“ICP is very, very important.” Amber related. “I feel that a lot of times we are writing, or the companies are writing, for so many different ICPs. And it gets confusing. For example, they might be targeting pet owners, but they may also be targeting cat owners. So first you need to figure out the ICP, who is it speaking to, then you have to figure out the topics for that ICP. And categorize them.”
Kira suggests choosing two or three ICPs to run tests on to find the best performing audience. “You have to nail the journey for that specific ICP, be it pet lovers or cat lovers, because otherwise you won’t be able to measure.“
According to Amber, running ads are a great way to establish patterns and find audiences. “In our case we run Facebook ads for a particular piece of content from a webinar or training. It’s long form content, an hour long at the minimum. By running ads, we figure out very quickly if the concept and topic resonates with our client’s audience. And if it does, we take that big piece of content and repurpose it, not only for different types of content, but for various spots in the customer journey as well.”
Kira feels that a content audit can also include looking beyond your own content to repurposing content from people who have published in your field, in the public domain. This can include auditing the news to include relevant content (aka newsjacking).
“I’ve started to do third party relevant content lately. Say we’re talking about digital transformation. There are these sources, like Boards of Trade here in Canada, for example, who run webinars with amazing experts that are publicly available. If it’s an hour-long panel discussion, why can’t you take that and do a quick bulleted post? It will be so helpful to other business owners, as they don’t have to go through the whole hour. And you don’t have to create that content, you just repurpose, it is publicly available.”
According to Romina, it’s important to think about auditing the content from within a company. “A lot of companies have so much content flying around in different departments, and you can use all this content for your marketing, of course. So, I feel like the first step you need to take is going internally and saying, ‘hey, I need to know stuff, guys’. And really also checking how you can get the content from your audit departments and then repurpose it. There is a lot of potential just lying around.”
For more on the specific strategies and tools these experts use, you’ll have to 👂listen to the episode👂.
Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.
You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!
by cpdigital
Welcome back to 🎙The 4am Report🎙. We have a Mara Svenne back on the show to talk about the benefits of Stand Ups🧍♀️🧍️. Not the funny ones (usually).
Disclaimer: We love funny at c+p digital, so don’t be scared to use a little bit of humour to make Stand Ups fun. Some of our Stand Ups have featured onesies and terrible puns(ies)🤣🤣🤣.
With our shifting workforce and the likelihood that we’ll continue to be virtual or hybrid for a while still, team Stand Ups (aka short, focused, and productive meetings) are incredibly useful right now.
Let’s face it, it’s so easy to miss emails or forget to respond to something. A Stand Up is a collaboration tool that reduces emails in your inbox, and helps teams work better and more efficiently. We use Stand Ups as a productivity tool for our team at c+p digital.
Mara is an agile coach and facilitator, who works with many software and management leadership teams. We worked with her on a large content audit a few years ago, where she introduced us to the value of virtual daily Stand Ups to help manage the multiple moving pieces of the project. Here’s some of the key benefits of Stand Ups:
Short, sweet, and focused
According to Mara, a Stand Up is a daily 15-minute planning meeting of what’s going to happen and how to help each other. “It’s not a status report, it’s, ‘here’s what I’m working on, I’m making good progress’. ‘Or here’s where I’m struggling’. ‘Or I might need somebody to help me with this, because I don’t understand this area of the work’. ‘Or I’m missing something, can you help me get that information so I can continue’. The idea is that you’re continually checking in with each other to see how the work is going.”
Keeping things moving
“Ideally, you actually stand up. because it forces the time box to be 15 minutes because nobody wants to stand up for an hour. And it gives the energy in the virtual room because you’re all standing up.” As Mara relates, key decision makers and executives are present to move things forward. And if somebody has an idea, you park that for after the stand up. “So right after the stand up, you say, Will and Susan need to meet with Mary, the rest of you can go to finish your work. And you guys stay behind to talk about the question or challenge or ideation in depth.”
Getting your priorities right
“What’s important about today that you want to accomplish today. This is about going through a whole project plan for the next six months and when this is happening.”
Multitasking is a myth.
“Even women cannot multitask, no matter what they say! Your brain can only do one thing at a time. So, finish that and get to the next most important thing. It’s worth saying, ‘I’ve got two things. I can’t get both done today. What’s the priority?’”
In this episode you’ll find out why you need to lay the groundwork and establish team norms to build that trust within the team – so that you have each other’s back.
You’ll also learn some key time management tips used in Agile, like Scrum and Combat (for more on Combat listen to Getting Sh!t Done with Mara Svenne).
Tune in to learn more about how to support your team, build relationships and prevent burnout by making extra time to talk and be there for each other (often before or after the Stand Up).
And if you need more convincing before you hit play, Mara talks about how focusing on the things that are closest to being done, gets things done. Along with the value of retrospective Stand Ups, so you can “inspect and adapt as you go along”.
Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.
You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!
by cpdigital
Surprise! The good kind…because we’re talking about podcasting again. Susan has put together a framework for how to come up with endless amounts of episodes and formats to keep things interesting. 12 formats that will help you hook your audience, cut the clutter, and may even make your work a little easier.
We’re going to talk about a few and hopefully, get you so curious and eager to hear the rest that you’ll feel like you have no choice but to listen to the podcast!
This very podcast is a great example of a potential episode arc. We could do a separate podcast on every one of these points. So that’d be a 12-parter! Long live long-winded content✨!
5 and 4. Another way to really turn the traditional podcast upside down is the podcast cohort, basically getting a panel of experts together to weigh in on something and how this amplifies your audience (we spoke about this here). There’s show & tell which is profiling a case study or use case on your show. This can also feature two or three people talking about something you’ve achieved and how you did it.
So, that’s a sneak peek into newsjacking. For more on why newsjacking needs to be agile and quick, you need to listen to the episode. And you’ll also find out why this helps you jump on the topics that people are searching for (aka more traffic) and can even show you care🤗🤗🤗.
9-12
Let us summarize points 9-12. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose, and repurpose again! From combining podcast episodes or repurposing and clustering them together, to rolling out episode highlights or bringing together themes, repurposing can be as easy or involved as you want it to be. You can also repurpose events, like your mastermind / live event or zoom recordings and make these into podcast episodes… And guess what? This is when the podcast flywheel starts to work for you because it just gets easier and easier to get that volume and promote the hell out of yourself👏👏👏. Plus, nobody gets bored with it because they haven’t heard it yet.
We ♥ that so many people love podcasting. So, let’s all pick it up a notch by 🎧listening to this episode🎧 and learning how to entertain and engage your audience with a bunch of great formats.
Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.
You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!
by cpdigital
Welcome to The 4AM Report. To start, we’d like to share a quote:
“I’ve always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds and views. A working mother; a professional in her 30s; a young woman just starting out; and then somebody who’s done almost everything and will say almost anything.”
-Barbara Walters
If you haven’t watched The View, which kicked off in the late 90s, each episode started with Barbara reading this. The show, which was revolutionary for its time, featured 5 different women who joined this panel on daytime TV to talk about politics, social justice and share their expertise.
We keep talking about The View because this show is what we’re trying to do with podcasting. We’re replicating the idea of people coming in and sharing different perspectives with a wider audience. And we’re doing it by creating podcast cohorts of five people. Here’s a sneak peek into the five key reasons you should consider a podcast panel:
When you’re in a mastermind or in a cohort, you tend to get things done purely because you don’t want to be the person that shows up and says, ‘I didn’t get it done’.
The first resistance we hear when it comes to creating a podcast is ‘I don’t have the time to do this’. Especially if you’re working solo. But if you’re working with podcast cohorts, you’re cutting your bandwidth by creating syndicated content. You’re releasing similar material that’s now going out through four or five different feeds, which are going to be cross-linked. It’s going to give you good Google juju. That’s how you can do the same amount of work for an incremental amount of output.
Creating a podcast cohort is a really meaningful way to amplify your networks, especially when you’re not necessarily doing as much in-person face time on stages and panels. For us, creating a podcast cohort has resulted in a minimum of five times our regular traffic. Then there’s the mastermind side of it, as some of the guests on the panel form relationships and end up working together. It’s also a way to collate information, bringing together different perspectives or expertise so that your audience doesn’t have to sift through five or six podcasts from different specialists to get the information they want.
Just like The View brought women together, a podcast cohort brings people together, often to discuss serious topics, but also to bring some fun and levity to the show. We’re big fans of the entertainment quotient and it’s why we use metaphors like ‘what Barbara Walters did for daytime TV back in the 90s, we want try to do for podcasting in 2021’. And it’s easier to people to get (and resonate with).
‘We are better together’ is a value that came from the pandemic, it became a hashtag and people use it to tell their stories. But when it comes to podcasts, it means that if you use a cohort or a panel you can feed off each other, amplify each other and just create better content than you might flying solo.
If you’re even a little bit intrigued by the above, 🎧listen to the episode for more🎧.
Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.
You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!
by cpdigital
Ah, we continue to social distance.
The gap between our expectations and reality, as far as this COVID thing goes, is the requisite 2 meters, some might say.
In this time, one of the biggest changes I’ve made to how we do business is this:
(And yes we continue to do business. If you’re saying that’s not possible or has been cut way down, and you have transferable skills to the interwebs, you’re wrong 🙂 And you need to do this.)
Pick up the phone.
Here’s who I am. Someone who likes to hide behind my screen. There are very few things in my world that can’t be achieved from behind a screen.
But EVEN with that generally outlier view to life as a 40-something, I’m finding this shut down hard.
Nobody ever likes to be FORCED to do something.
And that suspension of life and liberty is a tempting little place of loss in which we react much like we do in times of grief. At the end of March, the Harvard Business Review published an eloquent piece titled “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief“.
In a creepily foreshadowing-ey move, 2 years ago, we at c+p digital came up with a change management model for communicating in times of (generalized) crisis.
In this moment, the name we gave that model, which we trademarked by the way, seems deeply tone deaf. (Its #FlipIt2TenX – named for it’s massive ability to convert 10 times as much as your current CTA conversions. Obscure. Weird. But fucking effective. Like a lot of what we do.)
But that’s not the point.
The point is while we probably will not use that name for a while, the model is this.
All change (and crisis) brings resistance.
Your mind likely reacts with fear because it perceives the change as a loss of life and liberty in its current form, in some way.
So it reacts like it does when it’s grieving.
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance!
That’s how we think all crisis (or change) communication works. And we put our time and actual dollars into developing that thinking.
Emotionally intelligent thinking.
Then a year ago, we started a podcast. A digital marketing firm that came to the party a decade too late, or so we thought. So we had to bring something special.
The something special was a hook.
We called it The 4 am Report, and we asked marketers and entrepreneurs, ‘what keeps you up at night?’ Dude, is that ever a loaded question right now.
And we’ve lived up to that emotionally intelligent responsibility as well.
Why?
A deep understanding of headspace.
That comes from years of mental health issues that were never understood.
From being dismissed, on multiple levels.
From knowing quite clearly what we didn’t want, even if we had no clear clue
what we did want.
When you start with the acceptance, emotionally intelligent communication gets very easy. (That’s what our change management framework was all about.)
And then demographics and psychographics start to MEAN something.
Here’s Will’s example. So you say your audience avatar is a 40 year old mom of 3. She’s obviously employed and had a particular kind of life up until very recently.
NOW that’s completely changed.
That same lady is homeschooling her 3 kids.
Failing on multiple deadlines.
Trying to cook and clean and second guess whether delivery is entirely safe.
And probably discovering she doesn’t like her partner very much as a person 😉
That’s a whole other person.
Does your marketing get that?
Probably not.
Figure out how to make it happen. Emotionally intelligent communication is all that matters in this moment.
