#28 - Shayne Brian - 9 ways to monetise your message with podcasts

Shayne Brian (linkedin) is the Director of Voice at Elevate Radio & Podcasts, a company that helps other companies start, run and scale podcasts. And they are good at it :D Shayne was invited to the DMSS 2019 where he talked about how to use podcasts to elevate your message.

If you are interested in to podcasting, here is the FREE offer that he talked about on the podcast, you can join the Podcast Essentials Program for FREE (valued at $197). 

And, check out his presentation, a video recorded at one of his previous conferences.

Here the transcription of the talk we had:

Shayne: Think about some of the big podcasts isn't what they're known for. In fact, the reports just come out this week. The number one podcast for 2019 in every single country is Joe Rogan, then there's also GaryVee, and John Lee Dumas. They all have massive followings because they have shows that's consumed almost daily.

Peter: Hello and welcome to the Time for Marketing podcast. The podcast that brings you the best marketing conference presentations in five minutes directly to your podcast. Every 14 days on Mondays in your-- whatever podcast that you like to use. My name is Peter, and I'll be the host for this show today, and the same way as I've done the previous 27 episodes as this is episode number 28. Of course subscribing, and viewing, and subscribing to the newsletter and everything else that you have to do so that you get the next episodes that we already have lined up. It will be very interesting. Today with me from the other part of the continent, not continent. The other part of the world, is Shayne Brian. Shayne, hello and welcome to the podcast.

Shayne: Hi Peter, and thanks for having me on the podcast. Yes, I'm sitting here in the heat in Australia getting ready for another hot Christmas.

Peter: I envy that so much. I love the snow that we're getting, but on the other hand, I love being able to sit on the-- I imagine you sitting on the beach drinking cocktail and [crosstalk]

Shayne: I'm sitting on a beach drinking beer while I'm talking to you.

Peter: All right, excellent.

Shayne: No, I'm not really, but that would be lovely.

[laughter]

Peter: Shayne, you are the director of voice at the Elevate Radio and podcast company. Tell us a bit what you do, what your company does.

Shayne: We actually help people create podcast, so we help people produce podcast, distribute podcast. I actually started out in radio of being in radio for many many years, and I just love the whole environment of radio. I love music, and that was one of the things that really attracted me to creating Elevate Radio. It originally started as a radio station called Soul Traveler Radio, and we changed the name just last year to Elevate Radio. Over the last three years, we've seen podcast just come out of the woodwork. In fact, five years ago I was trying to convince businesses that they needed a podcast and they're like, "What's a podcast? You're crazy. No one's going to listen to a podcast." And here we are talking about podcast.

Peter: Yes, this is the position where I feel that in your Europe, a lot of companies still sit. I feel that podcast in the United States have blown up immensely, but in Europe it's still going why. This is why I was interested in having you to the podcast to try to talk to companies and all, and why they should do that.

Shayne: Yes. I just want to say, 95% of the podcast at the moment reside in the US, so the US have really embraced it. The other countries are really picking it up Europe and Australia. Don't be surprised if you start to see the podcast really start to become bigger and bigger in Europe.

Peter: If you are one of the podcast, you are one of the hundred thousands. If you're one of the vlogs, you're one of the hundred million vlogs, so the option to get there it's still much better actually, right?

Shayne: It is. Yes, it is. I'll actually present some of those figures in the talk.

Peter: That's good for the podcast because you had a presentation at the Digital Marketing Skillshare, of course 2019, in Bali. How was the conference?

Shayne: Fantastic. Actually, one of the best conferences I've been to. It was pretty funny, because it's very much SEO social media marketing conference. I contacted the lady that organizes it, Lisa, and the gentleman that runs it, Bree, and I said, "You need a podcast, or you need to be talking about podcast at your conference." They're like, "Why? Why are we talking about podcast? It's digital marketing."

Then when I actually spoke, they realized that it's very much a massive part of digital marketing these days, and it can be something that a business-- Well, it's something the business should be thinking about as part of their digital marketing strategy. The conference itself, fantastic. Met a lot of amazing people, a lot of amazing guys. Actually, met the guys from Authority Hacker who are based in Germany. Their whole business that they run is based around a podcast, because the podcast works.

Peter: Yes, and for whenever who is interested in doing any SEO, the Authority Hacker podcast is one of my favorite podcast. That means a lot. Dave elevated their business well once they've started doing a weekly podcast, and really sticking to the schedule of once a week immensely. I've been trying to get them to this podcast, but wasn't really able to get through any of those two guys, but I will get them. I will. All right, your presentation was nine ways to monetize your message using the power of podcast. I think that this is the time and place where we should go to your presentation, so Shayne here are your five minutes.

Shayne: Thank you. I'm actually going to not go too much into the nine ways, and I'll give you a link to the full podcast for the full presentation at the end of the podcast. What I really want to talk about is stories, and I want to talk about the reason why we love podcast so much. Pretty simply, the world love stories. Since the beginning of time, we've actually thrived on hearing stories. What started as stories told around campfires of Gods and monsters. Developed overtime, and yet even with all of the advances in technology at the start of the last century, there we were again telling stories on radio players like the famous War of the Worlds that cause mass hysteria.

Stories can motivate, thrill, scare, or simply portray a snapshot of our lives. A moment in time that our message, our greatest truth hits the ears of our audience for the very first time. The moment when you can hear a pin drop, a heart beating. Out of the silence, comes our story, your story, the story that you've been dying to tell. Now, when I first started in radio. I was told that I didn't have a voice that was good enough. Then for the next 20 years, I hid my voice. I did everything in radio except go on air. It was easier for me to become invisible than to suffer the embarrassment of having a voice that wasn't good enough.

Now years later, I met my wife for the very first time. During that very first coffee date, she said, "Wow, you must be an announcer because your voice is perfect for radio." It took 20 years of hiding, and in one moment everything became crystal clear to me. Something triggered in my brain, and I knew that I had to let the old story that I actually let that old story become my reality, and that I had to now let it go. Now, when I mention it to people, they can't believe that I allowed that thinking to beat me, but that's why I love doing what I do because you can never ever underestimate the power of a story, and the effect it can have on you, and on others.

The question remains why podcast? Well, because it's the fastest moving media on the planet right now. Now we know that everybody loves to hear a story. We can understand that it's surpassing growth rates of social media, and that there's no chance of slowing it down. In fact, 2020 is being heralded as the golden year for podcast. In the last 12 months, podcast consumption growth rate has become so big that the Spotify CEO Daniel Ek set aside 500 million dollars at the start of 2019 to acquire a podcast start-up companies. Now, it begs the question, why would a streaming music services spend that much on podcast?

Here's the truth. The average age of podcast listeners is 25 to 34 with 35 to 44 coming in next. I have to say it's actually becoming an even greater area with 45's to 54's now listening as well. Podcast ad revenue has grown as a result of the increase in the market, has grown 1,000% in five years. Now, if you just think about that for a minute, it's actually staggering.

According to recent reports by iHeartMedia, their digital revenue which includes podcasting increased by 33% in the third quarter in 2019. Traditional revenue decreased by 0.6%, so what does that tell us? Advertisers are placing more faith in the emerging podcast scene. To back this up, Forrester Research has predicted that podcasting will be a 1 billion dollar market by the end of 2020. If you are incorporating podcasting into your marketing plan then that is a massive chunk of income and potential business that you're letting sit by. It's time that your business jumped on board the bandwagon.

According to Statistics, musicsgoomf.com, and also the companies, Nelson and Edison. In 2019, there were 700,000 active podcasts, 29 million podcast episode and the average listener consumed seven different shows per week. To top that off, 45% of the listeners are well-educated and have a high income. Now, think about this for a minute. Not only are they smart, they're spoiled for choice and they listen to a lot of shows. You have a lot of competition and it will only increase in the next couple of years. I didn't mention these statistics to depress you, instead just to help you see that if you really plan out your podcast well it can bring in well-paying clients that are dedicated to devouring your shows every week.

What does that mean? That means that podcasts become a source of trust for many people. Think about some of the big podcasters and what they're known for. In fact, the reports just came out this week. The number one podcast for 2019 in every single country is Joe Rogan. There's also Gary Vee and John Lee Dumas. They all have massive followings because their shows are consumed almost daily. They also have a call to action on their shows. Joe Rogan has special sponsor offers. John Lee Dumas has affiliated links and Gary Vee has calls to action to work with his media agency.

What actually happens is, their listeners become intimately involved with the podcaster not in a creepy stalkers way but in a way that means that they will look up to you as an authority and will trust what you have to say over others. That's what's happening in the podcast arena and what we actually do is we teach you how you can as a business cash in by telling your story and actually ride the Tsunami that's actually heading our way.

We will actually show you how you can leverage both your message and your story to bring in a cash flow for you and it's really important that over the next few years or actually even the next 12 months that you consider podcast as part of your marketing strategy. I think that was five minutes [laughs].

Peter: All right. That was somewhere around there. I will add the links to your presentation to these show notes but If I am a CEO or marketing director of the company and you've just convinced me, I want to do podcasting, just thinking, how do I? What is the first step that should be done?

Shayne: It's really simple. There's a three-step process that we operate with. The first one is to know your story. Everybody in business knows their product really intimately and can build a story around their product, to make it sound interesting. The second thing is record. Get your phone out, buy yourself a Blue Yeti that can plug into your laptop or your computer and just record yourself speaking or record yourself chatting with somebody else about your topic then send the file to us and we edit it. We create the podcast for you and it's as simple as that.

Peter: The podcasting Gimlet Media is the podcasting company that everyone speaks about because they were acquired this year. When I check out their podcast that they are doing for others, it seems that doing interviews with smart people is the solution that they are going with for other companies. Would you agree that this is probably the best way of how to do podcast?

Shayne: There's a couple of different ways and it really depends on your budget. Let's be honest, if you want to do a simple podcast, the easiest way is to interview someone. Why would you interview someone to promote your business? The simple thing is this, if you have aligned yourself with someone who has a similar message to you and who can speak about what your business is about then what's actually happening is you're aligning with their audience as well.

If you're doing an interview with someone, make sure it's someone that has got a lot of following, bringing some good following then they will actually share your podcast. Because they're in a similar business to you, you know that the people that are listening to them are going to be wanting to know more about you as well. That's the first thing that they do and the reason why they do interviews but the other thing that Gimlet is really big on and this is becoming a much bigger. In fact, we're actually in the middle of doing two of these podcasts at the moment.

Gimlet are doing curated podcasts. What a curated podcast is as a large corporation, you could turn around to us, for example, and say we've got a budget of $100,000, we want to put together like a 26-episode podcast series. We don't know where to start. We don't even want to talk on the podcast. What can you do? What we would do is we would actually sit down with them and create a podcast, bring on a host, bring on journalists, bring on whatever it is that we want to go down, whatever path we want to go down.

We're actually doing this with one of the survivors of the Waco tragedy that happened in America and he was actually there on the ground when the place got burnt to the ground and everybody died, David Koresh and his followers. We're actually curating a podcast and getting interviews and putting it together and it's called Waco: The inside story. I think this is becoming even bigger, the curated podcast than just the interviews and that's what Gimlet are really focusing on as well now.

Peter: We are still at the time where it's pretty hard to measure the success of a podcast, right? Different platforms have their different metrics. Is there a modern new way of how we are better able to handle that?

Shayne: I actually have a process that I follow that was taught to me by one of the big podcasters in America called Steve OSHA. I call it the thousand dollar funnel and basically what it is, is this, if you've done a podcast and it's been a successful podcast and people really love listening to you, they've actually started to trust what you have to say. After listening to you for an hour, they are going to want to know more about you so by providing them with the link for a free giveaway or a free offer, you're actually going to be making sure that the listener that has begun to trust you will connect with you.

Now, at that point of that free offer, once they've clicked that button, what he actually does is he has another link that pops up and it might be a $5 offer then he'll have a third link that pops up and it might be a $45 offer. By doing that you're actually creating this flow for people to go through, this funnel for people to go through. Because they've trusted you in listening to that podcast and they've come on and they've downloaded that free ebook or whatever it is that you're offering them, the next step of them pulling out their wallet and actually doing business with you is a lot easier.

That's how we can actually measure the process and the reason he calls that the thousand dollar funnel is because every time he appears on a podcast, he makes a thousand dollars. It's really simple [chuckles]. I think it changes every time but obviously it's something-- that's what he calls it but the concept is really simple and it's a really easy way to measure the success of not just people listening to the podcast but the success of what you're saying, how successful are you at conveying your message to the public.

Peter: Don't use vanity metrics, use metrics that really impact.

Shayne: Don't use vanity metrics.

Peter: That's very good idea.

Shayne: That's for sure. You want to look at the hard figures. I'm going to say that I'm actually going to give everybody that's listening to this podcast free access to one of our programs that will teach you how to prepare yourself for podcasting. It's called podcasts essential. I'm more than happy to offer that to all of your listeners.

Peter: Okay. I think that's it. Shayne, where can people find you do you have any future conferences planned already?

Shayne: Look I actually have quite a few things that are coming up next year. You can find me on Facebook. Just look up Shayne Brian and connect with me on Facebook, on LinkedIn. If you go to elevate podcast.com, that will take you through to our podcast power program. I'm actually going to give you a link, Peter, that you can actually share with everyone that will give people access to our special offer which is the podcast essentials. This is something that we normally sell for $97 and I'm happy to give that away to everyone that's listening here.

Peter: Excellent. I'll put that to the show notes and in the show notes you'll also find the whole presentation. That means that there's a lot of value for you to open up the time for marketing.com website and find the show notes for the podcast. Shayne, it was great. Go and enjoy your beer on your Australian beach that you are enjoying.

Shayne: [laughs] I will. I'll have a prawn as well.

Peter: Excellent. Very good and thank you for being on a podcast and have a great day.

Shayne: Thank you, Peter, it's being pleasure.

Peter: All right, bye-bye.