A MORE SOPHISTICATED PODCAST STRATEGY

Christy Maxfield

Host | Entrepreneurially Thinking

President and CEO | Purpose First Advisors

Podcasting is a lot of work and it takes a tremendous amount of time on top of running a growing business. I found my co-host and I lacked the information we needed to evaluate whether to continue to spend the time doing the show and, if so, what strategies to use to better monetize it and grow listenership. I needed to understand how we could make it a win on all levels — from social impact to personal fulfillment to business growth. The listener statistics on our platform didn’t give us insight into exactly who was listening or whether our podcast was achieving what we wanted it to.

Call for Content helped me answer questions I couldn’t on my own. With audience research and analysis, they validated what we did well to reach our audience and deliver content they find valuable. They also gave us actionable strategies to monetize the show beyond our two founding sponsors and to grow the audience. We found out exactly who our listener base is, how they’re listening to us, and what they’re looking for from our show. 

They gave us a more sophisticated strategy for choosing guests to help us take into account not just whether a guest is interesting to our listeners, but also their potential to help us increase listenership with their base of support. Call for Content really clarified what we need to think about when we put the show together — who we’re talking to, what we’re talking to them about, and how we can help enable our listener to take her next step after listening. I also gained an understanding of how Instagram is an important platform to connect with our audience; logically I would have assumed it wouldn’t be important for us because you can’t listen to the podcast on it, and yet it is.

Call for Content has also taken a lot of labor out of the equation and made my life easier with additional support. They transitioned the show from Spreaker to Libsyn and saved me a lot of time, heartache, and real hard costs if I had tried to do the switch myself. They’re helping us take advantage of the enhanced functionality of Libsyn to automatically update our website and social media and to give us better analytics. They’ve taken care of setting up the RSS feed and are handling the weekly posting of the show. They’ve also handled a lot of troubleshooting on the backend of our show; iTunes did not like us for much of the Fall season and that was killing our numbers, so they spent a tremendous amount of time fixing that issue for us.
We’ve been working most closely with Craig, who brings a wealth of expertise and the same level of diligence to the work as if it was his podcast. He’s not just a vendor, he’s part of our team. It’s great to know that he’s got my back — that he’s getting things done and he’ll involve me in the process at the right time.

In a world where a lot of people are telling you they can help you with your podcast, it’s really daunting to try and figure out who to trust. I’ve found somebody I can trust and who does what they say they can do. If you’re really serious about podcasting — if this isn’t just a hobby — then there’s a real benefit to working with Call for Content. We could have avoided some hiccups and headaches along the way had we engaged them earlier. I fully intend to keep them as an integral part of the team and work with them to explore how to build listenership by guesting on other shows and other higher-level strategies to leverage the podcast even further to achieve my goals.

Because of working with Call for Content, I now have the data to make decisions and say, “Yes, carving out the time is worth it because here are the measurements of the impact on my business, on my brand, and on the change I want to see in the world.”