Fox on Podcasting

Mastering Business Podcasting at The Podcasting for Business Conference

Join Tom Fox as he explores the world of podcasting and get ready to be inspired to start your own podcast. In this episode, Tom sits down with Megan Dougherty for an in-depth discussion on leveraging podcasting as a strategic business tool through her ‘Podcasting for Business 2024’ conference The Podcasting for Business Conference, which Megan founded, focuses on enhancing sales, brand awareness, and relationship building through podcasts. Learn about optimizing podcasts to align with business goals and hear about new voices and innovative strategies discussed at this year’s conference. Key topics include the critical role of show notes for SEO and relationship building, integrating social media marketing, and boosting discoverability via video. Megan also shares exciting developments in AI, such as creating chatbots with podcast content and the importance of efficient production processes in the era of video podcasts. Don’t miss this episode for valuable insights and a preview of what’s to come at the Podcasting for Business Conference 2024. Key Highlights: Podcasting for Business 2024 Conference The Unique Needs of Business Podcasters Measuring ROI in Business Podcasting Integrating Social Media Marketing with Podcasting Exploring AI and Chatbots in Podcasting Conference Details Resources: Megan Dougherty on LinkedIn One Stone Creative Podcasting for Business Conference Tom Instagram Facebook YouTube Twitter LinkedIn

Duration:: 18m
Broadcast on:: 01 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

Join Tom Fox as he explores the world of podcasting and get ready to be inspired to start your own podcast.

In this episode, Tom sits down with Megan Dougherty for an in-depth discussion on leveraging podcasting as a strategic business tool through her ‘Podcasting for Business 2024’ conference

The Podcasting for Business Conference, which Megan founded, focuses on enhancing sales, brand awareness, and relationship building through podcasts. Learn about optimizing podcasts to align with business goals and hear about new voices and innovative strategies discussed at this year’s conference. Key topics include the critical role of show notes for SEO and relationship building, integrating social media marketing, and boosting discoverability via video. Megan also shares exciting developments in AI, such as creating chatbots with podcast content and the importance of efficient production processes in the era of video podcasts. Don’t miss this episode for valuable insights and a preview of what’s to come at the Podcasting for Business Conference 2024.

Key Highlights:

Podcasting for Business 2024 Conference
The Unique Needs of Business Podcasters
Measuring ROI in Business Podcasting
Integrating Social Media Marketing with Podcasting
Exploring AI and Chatbots in Podcasting
Conference Details

Resources:

Megan Dougherty on LinkedIn

One Stone Creative

Podcasting for Business Conference

Tom

This is Tom Fox, and welcome to the latest addition to the compliance podcast network. After having recorded, produced, hosted, and guested in over 5,000 podcasts, I decided it was time to have a podcast about what else, podcasting. With a series I will visit with podcast hosts to learn about their love of podcasting, what they have been able to achieve through podcasting, and why you need to consider starting a podcast. This series will be fun, witty, chatty, the dash of jwadevi for both entertainment and education. I hope you will join me as I explore the world of podcasting. Today we have back with us Megan Doherty from One Stone Creative to talk about the podcasting for business conference. If you have a business podcast or want one, this is definitely the virtual conference for you. Megan highlights who's speaking and why you should attend the podcasting for business conference. First a word from the sponsor of the compliance podcast network, Ethico. As I mentioned at the start of this podcast, the sponsor for the entire compliance podcast network is Ethico. Well, Ethico has a great new offering this month for you, a toolkit for middle managers. This is something that you, as the compliance professional, can use to move your compliance program forward by giving middle managers the skills necessary to answer a call for speak up or when someone comes in their office and raises a concern. I can't think of a tool that will be more valuable for you in the current era of enforcement. Hello, everyone, this is Tom Fox back for another episode and I'm absolutely thrilled to have back with me, Megan Doherty. Megan, welcome back. Oh, thank you so much, Tom. It's always a pleasure. Megan and I have a lot of history with podcasts together in a variety of areas, but today we're going to talk about one of Megan's passions, which is podcasting for business. Not the book, not the report, the conference, but we may talk about some of those others. So Megan, with that incredibly audacious introduction, tell us about podcasting for business 2024, the conference. This is another event that I'm really excited about, of course, we've been running the podcasting for business conference since 2022. And it's the only conference in podcasting of its kind where it's really designed for people who are leveraging podcasts specifically for their businesses, rather than as a passion project alone, or as a business in and of themselves. And the needs of people who are, we call them company podcasters, are a little bit different than other kinds of podcasters because they do have other work priorities and other demands on their time, and a podcast needs to be really profitable right from the beginning in order for it to be a project that can continue. And so we gather experts and speakers and have events and networking kind of all gear to help making podcasting more efficient and more effective for business owners. So you really do have a lot of passion around this and you do an annual report, which we might touch on. And obviously just written a book that we had a fabulous podcast series on. Why is it that this is the only podcast conference that focuses on this topic when it would seem to me that businesses would be one of the largest consumers of producing podcasts? I mean, I think as well as I do that many businesses do produce podcasts and are leveraging it as a tool. But I think a lot of the broader podcast community, which is wonderful and welcoming and diverse and really engaged in helping people perfect the art of podcasting and the craft of podcasting, it really is passion-based for a lot of these events and it's about the joy of podcasting and the community and the art of it and the skills that go into it. And for a lot of business owners, those things can be great and those things that they can appreciate, but you know, there's a bottom line, there's an ROI that has to be generated. And so this is kind of the event that I don't think would replace any of the other podcasting conferences or events that go on, but I do think it's a nice compliment to really focus specifically on the unique needs of a business owner who is podcasting. So the ROI of podcasting, that is in many ways the question, but can't ROI be a variety of different answers? It can certainly be sponsorship dollars, it can be sales, it can be engagement, it can be relationship building, it can even be thought leadership, imagine where those came from. How do you help someone think through how to measure those? Are those the right measurements for your podcast and if so, how do you execute a strategy around those? Yeah, my favorite topic and you mentioned earlier my book. So if you are interested in getting into deep detail about that, pick up a copy of podcasting for business, but the most important thing to do as a podcaster or as a business owner who's thinking about also becoming a podcaster is to start with your business and what it needs rather than with the idea that a podcast is a podcast and it's got to be done a certain way to do certain things because for a business owner, a podcast is a tool that can do all of these different things, everything you mentioned and more. And if you start with what your business actually needs, whether that is more sales, whether it is brand awareness, whether it's SEO or whether it's relationships, you can optimize a podcast to do that kind of specific work within your business and you can really rigorously track how well it's doing that work to make sure that the investment you're making is paying off. And so it really comes down to what does your business most need? Is it connections with people? Is it to nurture an audience you already have? Is it to build your thought leadership and reputation? And once you kind of figure that out, you can work backwards and develop a plan that's going to do exactly what you need without having to worry about all of the other stuff. Megan, in prior iterations of this conference and in other conferences, we've seen some speakers talk about some of the topics relevant to business podcasting and I think they're fairly well known. What struck me about this year was some new voices on our topic of business podcasting for businesses, could you maybe talk about that, some of the new voices that you're excited to hear at this year's conference? Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up because there are the big voices in podcasting who everyone knows and who do really amazing work but there are much smaller or newer creators who are also doing really interesting work too. And I think one of the privileges of running an event like this is getting to find those people and provide a platform for them to share some of what they're working on. So one of the things I'm most excited about this year is we've got a whole panel of experts talking about voice, like the instrument of the voice as used in podcasting. So we're going to be hearing from Mary Chan, Andrea Clunder and Brienne Hennessy all about different ways to protect your voice, to use it with more variety and to really kind of challenge some of the ideas we have about bad voice practices like filler words or vocal fry. And so I think that's going to be really interesting. And we've also got a few other podcast producers. I've run One Stone Creative, we produce podcasts, but there are lots of other production companies that are doing really interesting things too. So I've reached out to the owners of a number of them so they can talk about their strategies and how they're helping their clients who are also business owners do different things with their podcasting, just kind of broaden the scope of what we can all do with our podcasts. Megan, I think it was earlier this week you had a some type of article on a show notes. I did. And I'm always intrigued by this topic because I'm not exactly confused, but I've used a variety of different styles for show notes, sometimes long form blogs, sometimes bullet points, sometimes a combination of both, sometimes a paragraph. And frankly, I've not found one bullet, silver bullet, I should say, for show notes are show notes really almost what the podcaster wants to put out as opposed to what the consumer might want. And maybe are we looking at it the wrong way because of that? I think a little bit. So I think there's kind of the idea, you've got a podcast and show notes come with it. But as you pointed out, there's so many different kinds of show notes and they can really do different things. So coming back again, as I always do to the business goal and the outcomes you're trying to create with your podcast. For some goals, having really long lengthy robust or even a few paragraphs of show notes doesn't matter that much because it's all about who's listening, maybe what's happening on YouTube or other places and it's just not so much about the written material. But then you've got other types of businesses who have other types of goals. Let's say I have a podcast and my main goal is to let people know about my book and to get people to buy my book and for me to have more readers. Then for me, if I want to convey that information to someone, I don't really care if they get it because they hear it or they see a video about it or they read something about it. I want to make sure that's available for all people so that everyone who's potentially interested is going to get the information that I want them to have. And so I might do more robust show notes in that situation. And at another point for a long podcast, my show, The Company Show is mostly a networking show. So I use it to get to know people and have some time to chat with them. And I want to create a good relationship. And I've found that really long show notes that have a lot of transcription elements and really let me share a lot of what the guest shared on the episode. They love it. The guests I have and it makes a better kind of touch point for the relationship. When they see, actually, we did a whole blog post, multiple sections and lots of great quotations from you. People are really pleased to see that much effort put in. So from a relationship building standpoint, it's an awesome move also for SEO. But then there are other shows where, if you're, say, directing clients or leads to listen to something really quickly to learn something, they probably just need to hear it and the notes aren't going to be so important. So I'd think about always what is the goal of the show and how are your notes supporting that? Megan, how do you help a business owner think about integrating the social media marketing aspects that come from podcasting into an overall marketing strategy? Because I still find a lot of business owners, they may understand social media marketing or may not, but they don't understand how to integrate a podcast into that. And is that something you will touch on at this conference? We've got a little bit of conversation about social media in terms of creating, in terms of the discoverability more than anything else, because that's like the great white whale of podcasting, right, is how to get your show found by other people. And there are strategies that you can use to make your content more engaging and to get more people kind of interacting with it and hopefully clicking through to whole episodes. So we've got some experts who are going to be talking about using video content to do this, some who have specific strategies for creating virality, and some who have strategies to get your guests acting on your behalf on social media for how to get more listeners and more engagement. But yeah, we're going to be covering that a little bit at the conference, which you should definitely be coming to. There's some of the presenters and speakers I really wanted to highlight because their names that are well known to me, I think their names that are well known to the industry are perhaps not as well known yet, they are great in their subject matter expertise. But I want to start with Jeremy ins. And I find Jeremy to be incredibly knowledgeable, but he as important is he's able to communicate his strategies and his tactics in a way that I think most people understand. But what do you hope to get or hear from Jeremy at this conference? I'm always so excited to hear from Jeremy because he brings the data. And I think it was last year, maybe it was the first generation, he's a third-time returning speaker at the conference. He had an Eisenhower matrix for how you should prioritize work that you do on your podcast. And I was just like, it's amazing, but this year he's going to be talking about word of mouth growth. So this is kind of related to what we were just talking about, but he's going to be sharing some strategies for how to make the content that you put out, something that people want to talk about and tell other people about, which I think is something that we all want to do with our content. We all want to make stuff that's interesting enough that someone's going to say, "Hey, you got to hear this." Or, "Have you heard? You got to check this out." And so that's what his presentation is going to be focusing on this year. And I can't wait for it either. So with, you do have one woman who I've heard and I think is just fabulous. And that's Fatima. Fatima Zaidi, and what is Fatima and Alison Osborne, her co-presenter, going to talk to us about this year? They're actually also going to be presenting some research. They have been doing work in branded podcasts, podcasts up and by larger companies that are branded with that company's name and what they've learned from working with these companies at their production company and hosting company, so Quill and Co-host. They've put together all of these data into a wonderful report. And so they're calling it the, oh, they're not calling it, it's called the branded Cubcast Blueprint. So they've coalesced these different learnings into some actionable advice that we're going to be able to use. So I think that's going to be a huge interest to everybody that's attending. Megan, one of the most ubiquitous topics in business today is open AI, chat, GPT, bots, and other strategies around those tools. Will you be able to talk or will we be able to listen to presenters on a variety of AI topics this year? There are. We've definitely got some AI content coming. And one of my favorites or one of the ones I'm most excited about is from longtime friend of One Stone Creative, Hazel Anne Butcher, who used to be our show notes writer. And her business in working with AI tools and developing new uses for them got so big she had to drop One Stone Creative as a writing client. So it was with warm hearts, we said goodbye, so she could start pursuing this business more. And she is going to be teaching everyone in attendance how to create a chatbot with your own podcast content. So you can basically talk to your own podcast and your listeners can talk to your podcast. And I think that's going to be really cool. It's got so many interesting use cases. Megan, in addition to your passion around a variety of topics, your and data, you're a complete geek around tech and process. So we have some of the typical sessions we've seen in the past around process to help make your process, your production process, your pre-production process, or even your podcast recording process more efficient. There's going to be a little bit around that and specifically in the area of video. So as video podcasts are getting more and more popular, we're seeing more and more of them. And so we've got a couple of video experts who are going to be coming in to talk about how to create content that is going to look better, sound better and be easier for your production team to handle, then maybe an off the cuts, zoom recording. So there's going to be details about lighting, how to prepare and how to promote your video content and all of the process and structure that goes around that. Megan, if someone wanted to get more information on podcasting for Business Conference 2024, what would be the best place for them to go? They can get everything they need at pfbcon.com. So that's pfbcon.com. You'll be able to see the speakers, get details about their individual presentations, plus all of the networking events and other good stuff that's happening. And of course, get your tickets. The other thing that I find incredibly interesting you do is this is over three days, but it's not all day every day. Could you talk about the cadence of the conference? Yeah, so this year we've got about two and a half days of content planned for everyone who's attending. But the expectation is very much that you're not going to be able to attend everything. This is the podcasting for Business Conference. So if you're thinking of attending, you probably got a business to run or a job that you need to go to. And so we've really tried to arrange everything so that every day there's going to be a couple of things that you are able to go to live and then other things that you're going to catch on the recordings. And so we don't differentiate with the tickets between getting the recordings or attending live. It's all just one ticket. It's all included. And it's set up so that you can attend what you can, engage with what you can and then catch everything else on the other side. Megan, I, for one, am greatly looking forward to it. I'm honored to speak again, but some of the topics and particularly speakers who I have not heard before are what's attracting me the most this year. I'm sure it'll be great. Any final thoughts for our listeners? Yeah, it's if you have been thinking about having a podcast for your business, this is going to be a great event to attend. You're going to hear lots of use cases and lots of really smart people talking about really interesting ways to use podcasting. And if you are already podcasting, then you're going to get a chance to meet those same experts, maybe meet some new guests in their networking opportunities or even a new partner to help you get to the next place where you want to be. Basically if you're pod curious or podcasting at all in the context of your business, I think you should go. I'm going to ditto that and I'm greatly looking forward to it. Thank you for taking the time to visit with me. Thanks so much for having me. And see you soon. This is Tom Fox again. As I mentioned, Ethico is the sponsor of the compliance podcast network this month. And they've got a great new resource, a manager's toolkit. It allows you to help managers understand their role in a speak up culture and more importantly in listen up culture. Check out the Ethico manager's toolkit linked to the show notes for this podcast. This is Tom Fox again. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fox on podcasting. You've enjoyed this episode. I hope you'll subscribe right in review wherever great podcasts are listened to. Fox on podcasting is a production of the compliance podcast network. If you've got a podcast, I'd love to talk to you about your experiences in podcasting for this podcast, Fox on podcasting. Or if you're interested in finding out more about podcasting, give me a shout at tfox@tfoxlaw.com. Thanks so much for listening. We look forward to visiting with you again. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]