✊ Six types of shows that grow your business
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There are many reasons to start a podcast. Fun. Connection. Curiosity. Masochism. Just to name a few. But if you’re an expertise-based business owner, the big goal was no doubt to grow your business. Most hosts are clear enough on this. What they (and perhaps you) are less clear on, however, is how exactly they can use their show to grow their business. Because growing a business is a complex process, with many distinct jobs to be done to achieve it. Specifically, we can break down business growth into the following four high-level jobs, and 12 sub-jobs within them:
When it comes to using your podcast to grow your business, then, you’ve got options. In fact, there are enough jobs to be done that you’d think it would be pretty much inevitable for your show to achieve at least some of them regardless of how little strategy or focus you approached your show with. The problem is that while most experts’ shows do chip away at many of these jobs, they aren’t focused or consistent enough to actually complete any of them. They start the race, but never reach the finish line. And it’s reaching the finish line, not the time or effort exerted, that counts. Which means that if you want your show to grow your business more effectively than it currently is, you need to:
Of course, every host and business are different, as are the specific ways their podcasts can best help grow their businesses. That said, business-growing shows break down into six archetypes, each designed to do a different primary job. Network Access — A show designed to grant you access to guests, either for direct prospecting, developing your referral network, or simply expanding your guests. Conversion Accelerator — A show designed to rapidly nurture and convert existing audience members who have found you via your discovery channels and are now looking to go deeper. Customer Support — A show designed to complement your paid offers and provide additional value to your clients, often by answering common questions that come up during implementation, providing a steady stream of examples of difficult-to-grasp concepts you teach, detailing case studies of how other clients navigated tricky problems and more. These shows can be either public or private feeds. Brand Builder — A show designed to develop mindshare around a certain ownable idea and establish you as a thought leader and authority in your space. Continuous Education — A show designed to sharpen and expand your thinking, keep you up to date on the latest developments in your space, and provide the research foundation for your future offers and initiatives, especially book writing. Audience Growth — A show designed to get exposure and attract new audience members to you. In general, this is the job podcasting is least suited for and is only a good option when you have a stable, scaled business, have saturated other easier discovery channels, and are focused on long-term influence over short-term growth. Many of these show archetypes can be useful at various stages of a business's growth. But we can create a general timeline of when each is most useful to an expert business as follows: I can’t overstate the importance of understanding this sequencing. Specifically, the fact that audience growth is only a viable podcast goal for a business if that business is already established. The reason is that podcasting is the single most difficult platform on which to grow an audience. Which means if the biggest current inhibitor to your business's growth is lead flow, you should be focusing all your effort on platforms and strategies where it is faster and easier to grow (short form, YouTube, podcast guesting, email list swaps, ads, etc). Where podcasting excels, however, specifically for expertise-based businesses, is as a Conversion Accelerator. This is the Archetype I lean on most often for my shows, with both Killer Concept and Roast My Podcast being classic examples of shows designed to build belief, demonstrate my process, and engage prospects. The reason I, and so many of my clients, reach for these types of shows is that you don’t need a large audience for these types of shows to drive multiple six-figures of revenue a year. Take Killer Concept, which, with one lonely episode and ~455 listeners, has generated $50k+ this year already. At the end of the day, each of these show archetypes is a tool designed to do a specific job. Which means that if you want your show to grow your business, it helps to know exactly what job your business most needs you to solve right now. Sometimes solving it means pausing your podcast to focus on other channels and tactics that are a better fit for the current job to be done. Other times, it means refactoring and refining your show to do what your business needs it to do. Either way, business is a lot easier (and a lot more fun) when you’re working with the best tools for the job.
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