✊ Opting out of the podcast rat race
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Hi friends, This week, we’re unpacking how to decommoditize ourselves in the eyes of our market and move from one of many to one of one. The goal: Unlock our potential to charge a premium for our work, build a waitlist to ensure consistent revenue, and engineer more time, profit, and creative margin into our businesses. If you haven't already read the first two parts, you can find them here: Part I: Decommoditize Yourself As a recap, the process of decommoditizing ourselves involves shifting the perception of our work in the market from:
To this point in the series, we’ve talked about how to apply the decommoditization process to your business as a whole. Today, we’re going to talk through how to apply the process to your podcast. Because if podcasting is a core part of your business strategy, you kinda need people to listen to it. And to get people to listen to it, you need a show that stands out from the dozens or hundreds of generic, commodity shows in your space. Let's start off by defining what a commodity podcast actually is. Using our existing commodity criteria, we can think of a commodity podcast as:
Since most podcasts cost the same, we can ignore the variable of “competing primarily on price” from our commodity criteria. Having spent countless hours browsing the bowels of various podcast apps and directories, I can tell you that more than 95% of shows are either:
It’s worth noting that commodity shows are often both well-produced and operating in markets with verifiable audience demand. The problem is that from a listener’s perspective, with little to differentiate any of the commodity shows available, they simply pick one or two based on a gut reaction (or random chance), and then stick with it, so long as it passes their minimum bar of expected quality. The result of this dynamic is that the available listener attention gets diffused across the available shows, leading to a bunch of shows with <100 plays/ep. From a listener's perspective, this dynamic is perfectly fine. They have one or more shows they’re more or less happy with, after all. As a host, however, who is likely investing significant time and money into your show, this dynamic is… less fine. The solution is this: Give listeners one or more compelling reasons to notice, choose, switch to, and keep coming back to your show, and attract a larger share of the available attention in the process. In short, you need to decommoditize your show. The good news is that we can apply the same 6 levers we use to decommoditize our businesses directly to our shows for the same result. Here’s how to do it: 1. Track Record Where you have a track record of producing banger episodes your audience loves and that perhaps even get discussed in your niche. Your track record tends to matter much more for retaining listeners than attracting them. But there are two exceptions:
2. Proprietary Process Where you have a unique and compelling show format as defined by your show concept and Episode Engineering. While this format will likely be based in one of the standard categories of podcast formats (interview, co-hosted, solo, narrative, etc), you will have applied some unique wrinkles to the format that make your show entirely unique, refreshing, and memorable in the eyes of your listeners and market. 3. Counter Positioning Where you make a radically distinct promise to the one most shows in your space make. Perhaps you pit yourself against the flawed but dominant ideology in your niche or industry about the best way to do things… and back it up with a compelling argument for why your point of view is a better approach. Another common option is to seek to "own" a specific sub-topic or idea in the minds of your audience—again, think Apple's recent efforts on owning the idea of "Privacy". 4. Cornered Resource Where you design your show around information or guests that others don’t have access to. Perhaps this is first-hand research you’ve conducted or proprietary data you have access to (ie. my show, Podcast Marketing Trends Explained), or IP you’ve developed that you’re incorporating into the show. Alternatively, you might choose to target a specific audience or address a specific problem that few other shows do, making you one of the only options available. 5. Product Quality/Capability Where your show is objectively (and significantly) better than the other shows in your space. Note that it’s not enough to be incrementally better for this lever to drive results. Instead, you must be head and shoulders above the competition in terms of quality of either content (ideas, insight, flow, pacing, experience, etc) and production. What’s more, this quality should be reflected in every aspect of your show, from your cover art to production, to guest list, and more. As an example of a show that is simply objectively better than the competition, consider Acquired as compared to other business shows. 6. Brand Where your show benefits from your existing brand reputation. This is a huge (if not the primary) lever for branded and celebrity-hosted shows, though it can be effective at a smaller scale if you’ve built up a following on social media, your email list, or within your network, community, or even past client base. Together, these levers will help you design a non-commodity, interchangeable show that funnels back and builds up market share in your space. But let me make this very clear: Your primary goal with your show and marketing is not to build an audience. Your primary goal is to build the belief among your market that your work (ie, offers) is worth paying a premium for. So while you most definitely should strive to decommoditize your podcast, you should do so only so far as it doesn’t detract from communicating and demonstrating your core brand differentiators. It’s also worth noting that with a non-commodity business, your show will naturally inherit many of those traits—specifically your positioning and brand. But… I know many interesting business owners with interesting businesses and interesting offers… that somehow find a way to strip all that interesting out of their podcasts and end up with a show that presents them as just another “me too” show, undermining all the work they’ve done to build a differentiated business. Don’t make this mistake. Don’t hide your magic. Design a show that your best future customers will find irresistible... Which then demonstrates—unignorably and unrelentingly—why your offers are the same. If you're an expertise-based business owner (coach, consultant, educator) with a strong track record of client results but are struggling to charge what you want and get the attention you deserve, hit reply. I'll ask a couple questions about your situation and then share some information on how we can work together to install the systems and strategy to increase your time, profit, and creative margin. If your goal is more time and more money to do more and better creative work, hit reply with the word "Margin" and we'll map out the path to get there.
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