Our Guest:
Drew McLellan is the owner of and has run Agency Management Institute for 21 years. His agency is a support system/organization that teaches marketing, PR, and digital agency owners how to run their businesses better. He and his team help optimize agency operations and teach agency owners how to run the backend of their business in order to be more profitable.
A Quick Preview of the Podcast:
- How to find ideal, qualified guests for your podcast
- How to construct an effective podcast marketing strategy
- The exact tactics used to generate $100,000 in profit
Tim Paige: Podcasting has proven itself as a viable marketing channel. In fact comScore did a study of 2000 US respondents ages 18 to 49 that have found that two-thirds of listeners have acted on ads that they heard in a podcast either by researching a product or service or by actually purchasing something that they heard about in an episode. By the way thank s to Adweek for that info.
That’s really huge. So podcasts work but there are certain things you’ll need to do to get result from them and Drew McLellan has seen at least $100,000 in profit coming directly from his podcast. So he’s here to share exactly what he did to get that result. I’m Tim Paige, the Senior Conversion Educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.
All right so let’s start with the results because I know we’re going to talk about podcasting which is something, obviously, I’m excited about. But can you tell us the results you’ve been able to get using this?
Drew McLellan: Yeah, so originally my intention was just really about building of, furthering my position of thought leadership and authority and trying to sort of spread the reach. But the results have been much more tangible than I would have anticipated. So they have been everything from…I probably have increased my attendants on other people’s podcast by about 500% so…
Tim Paige: Nice.
Drew McLellan: Doing podcast gets me more guests to podcasting which of course is a beautiful cyclical thing. It has put new butts in seats in my workshops all over the country. It has generated consulting gigs. So I would say it’s probably…and keep in mind I’ve been only podcasting since October so I’m not even at the year mark. But I can easily attribute, I’m going to say $100,000 or more of pure profit to the effort. So it’s certainly worth the effort.
Tim Paige: Yeah, absolutely, that’s awesome. Well, why don’t you give us a sense of kind of who you are and what you and your company do?
Drew McLellan: Sure, so as everybody hopefully knows, my name is Drew McLellan and I run a company called Agency Management Institute. So we are in essence of support system or an organization that teaches agency owners. So marketing agencies, ad agencies, media buying shops, PR shops, digital shops those kinds of folks, how to run their business better. So I’m not teaching them how to buy media smarter or how to build a brand but I’m teaching them how to run the backend of their business so it’s more profitable.
Tim Paige: Got you. Okay much needed for sure.
Drew McLellan: Yup, yup absolutely.
Tim Paige: I love it.
Drew McLellan: Most agency owners are accidental business owners. They’re really good at the frontend but one day they woke up and went, “Oh crap, I own a business.”
Tim Paige: Yeah, got you. All right so with that in mind, can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve been able to use podcasting to get these results. I mean it’s more than just hitting a record and publishing to iTunes.
Drew McLellan: Absolutely. I mean I think it starts obviously… as you know it starts with having interesting guests and being interested in what they have to say and being really targeted. So I think with podcasting the more narrow your audience focus, the better the podcast.
And so for me my audience is agency owners and if other people listen that’s great but I’m really producing the content for them. So I’m really clear about my intention. Then I am really clear about the kind of guests that I attract and if they can’t help someone run their business better, they maybe lovely people but they’re not good for my show. So really vetting the guests well and then I go into it with a really curious mind. So I listen carefully. So I not only run Agency Management Institute but I still also own my own agency which I’ve had for 21 years. So it was pretty easy to ask them questions that agency owners care about because I am one, right?
So I think part of it is that and then it really is about the promotion and it is about getting the podcast out in front of the people. So we worked really hard when we launched the podcast to get on all of the iTunes list, the new and noteworthy and all those sort of things which were like sort of kind of pulled with us.
And then we’re creating contents for blogs and websites and agency posts and other agency centric publications where we’re tying the podcast into that. So I’m not counting on just podcasting getting the word out about the podcast but I’m creating a lot of content and a lot of social shares around not only my podcast about a good podcast. So that I become a resource, a trusted resource for great content including my own.
And then we work very closely with the guests to get them to share it with their network. We do things like we send them all a gift so that hopefully they’ll share that on the social. So we’re doing a lot of things to try and get as much buzz around each episode as we can. And with podcasting as you know, a big part of it is consistencies. So we are without fail publishing a new episode every week. So that means having someone to can in case life happens and you can’t get one recorded of that week. So it’s also about planning it for out in advance and thinking about the topics that I think are going to show up well on search and things like that .sS I’m really trying to have a very holistic marketing strategy around the podcast.
[0:05:31]
Tim Paige: Yeah, this is one thing I think that a lot of people get wrong with their podcast when they’re using it as a marketing channel for their business is that they don’t look at it as a content channel like they would with any other content channel. If you have a company blog, you’re going to think about whether that’s going to rank. You’re going to think about what people are searching for it. You’re going to think about if it’s laid out in a way that gets people that want to take action afterwards or in the middle. And I think a lot of times with a podcast because it’s so easy to just get behind the mic start talking and hit publish, I think a lot of the times we forget that it is a content channel that can get results. What I’m wondering is, you know, you said you’ve been able to get this people to go to your workshops and that kind of thing. How do you transition listeners into customers?
Drew McLellan: Well, you know, throughout the conversation in the podcast I will reference, “Oh we know talked about that at this workshop.” It’s not purposeful quite honestly. It’s just part of the conversation and then obviously we have an open and a close that drives them to our website.
The other thing we do is we then transcribe every podcast and then put it as a blog post. So we put those audio link but we also put the transcription on our website as a blog post. So again that helps with search. But a lot of it is just I think people…what I’ve been told is that people start listening and then they…you know, people binge everything today so which is weird to think that they’re binging on us. But they’re on a two-hour car ride or whatever so they are listening to several episodes. And after that I think they get curious about who is this guy if they’ve never heard of me before. Or maybe they want more contents so they drive to the website and the website puts the workshops pretty prominently and we run…we cut into the middle of the podcast and we run a little call to action, you know, 30-second spot about if you’re interested in our live workshops if you like this kind of content, go to this URL and then we also drive to some online courses that we have so.
Tim Paige: Got you.
Drew McLellan: Lots of different ways, right?
Tim Paige: Yeah, I love it. It’s something that I’ve talked about many times is the benefits of using the podcast not just for thought leadership but as a business generation tool. So I think this is great. Thanks for sharing these tips with us. We really appreciate you coming on.
Drew McLellan: Oh my pleasure, thanks for having me.
