Demystifying Business Podcast Metrics and Strategies w/ Megan Dougherty

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 0:00

This is tools of the podcast trade, where you can learn about the tools and resources you can use to start and grow your Podcast. Tuning a tweet as we talk about the help you need to remove the mystery from Podcasting so you can become a successful podcaster that can reach your audience where they are. My guest today is Megan Daugherty, digital marketing strategist and co-founder of one stone creative and the podcasting for business conference. Welcome, megan.

Megan Dougherty: 0:33

Oh, thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here today.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 0:35

Yes, of course. So before we get into all this stuff that you do, could you tell us who is Megan?

Megan Dougherty: 0:43

Gosh Megan is, I guess, a Happy who is just living the life of a podcast producer by day. So I like to spend time outside, I like to garden, spend time reading just all sorts of earthy, folksy things. I guess this is who I am deep down.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 1:00

Okay, all right, so you're a creator.

Megan Dougherty: 1:05

Do an extent. I like to say that I like to spend huge amounts of time and energy and money Recreating things from scratch when you could easily buy them in any store.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 1:16

Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. It's good to have hobbies. Yeah, if you don't like it the way it is, do it how you like it.

Megan Dougherty: 1:24

Yeah, I've been trying to learn how to make soap the last little while. It's been very interesting.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 1:28

Oh, okay, alright, so I Looked at your profile on Padmach and I saw something that kind of intrigued me because I think the opposite why this could be good. Why doesn't a business need a podcast?

Megan Dougherty: 1:48

Well, I think not. Not every business can really benefit from a podcast. I mean, okay, no, the part I think that we agree on is that lots of businesses can benefit from having a podcast, but I find in most instance instances, a lot of the value from podcasting is a much longer play. You know you're going to see those results compound over time, really grow over time, and there are some businesses at some times they need either results quicker or they need results for things that podcasting can't really do. Sometimes it's important to have higher conversions on the marketing that you're creating. Sometimes it's important to be able to track more effectively what is working where. So just I think, in not every instance, is a podcast the best move for specific business goals?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 2:27

Okay, that makes, that makes absolute sense.

Megan Dougherty: 2:32

And of course, sometimes there's there's. There's just no one at a company who likes it. I think it's important. It's important to at least sort of like podcasting if you're doing it.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 2:41

Yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah, okay, so what got you into podcasting? I mean, some people listen, some people don't want to know and people like us go crazy about it. What's your story?

Megan Dougherty: 3:01

You know, I never actually intended to get into podcasting. I didn't plan on it. I listened to podcasts I did think since early, the other, you know, early 20 teens, when it was starting to get more and more popular. But in 2017, about six years ago, an old colleague, someone I used to work with, who was a dear friend, reached out to me out of the blue. I hadn't spoken to her in about a year and she says you want to start a business together? And I said, okay, sounds fun. And her background was in broadcast Radio and audio production of mine was in digital marketing. So we're like, okay, oh, we can produce podcasts for business owners. And so we started doing that in 2017, with one stone creative. And we are still doing it today.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 3:38

Oh, okay, that's interesting.

Megan Dougherty: 3:41

So I kind of fell backwards into it. I think originally we thought maybe we'll do video, but video didn't work out well for us, but podcasting was a great fit.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 3:48

Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Okay, all right, so let's talk about Um podcast metrics that people get crazy about. You know, hung up on I. I look at the metrics and I go crazy because I hear people say different things. Is it downloads or is it listeners or what? What's your take on that? How important are downloads?

Megan Dougherty: 4:21

Downloads can be important in some cases. For the most part, I don't care about them and it really really depends on the specific business and what the business needs. I don't know a lot about podcasting as a business in and of itself. I don't know anything about podcasting for passion, because of a hobby, but if you're podcasting for a business, then the only thing that really matters is that the podcast is bringing value to your business in a measurable way. So what does your business need and can a podcast do it? If your business needs more relationships, if you need to have more people coming into your orbit, podcasting is great for that. So track the number of people that you meet, by having them as guests or by connecting with them. Otherwise, if you need more attention, if you need more authority, how often are your podcasts linked to by other people? What are your backlinks like? What are your invitations to speak at events and to join networking groups things like that On your website? How is your traffic changing because of your podcast? Are your SEO rankings going up for your keywords? Are you able to save time in your business and save labor costs by having podcast-related resources available for your team to distribute or to use in your sales cycle. So, depending on how you're leveraging a podcast within your business, I think that's how you should decide what metrics are the most important. And downloads they can tell you how many devices are downloading your show. That's not necessarily a useful business metric, so I tend to recommend people don't worry about their downloads for the most, unless they get tons and it's a bragging number in which we tell everybody. But otherwise it doesn't matter, because if you have 100 downloads a month, maybe, but you know that each month your podcast is going to bring you two new referral partners for your business, it cares how many people listen to it, that's not what matters.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 6:01

Yeah, it makes sense. It's just like having a funnel that lots of people click on but nobody buys, as opposed to, people are buying but you don't even know how many people clicked on it in the first place, right?

Megan Dougherty: 6:13

Exactly. Yeah there's just so many things like there's so many benefits that a podcast have that are not as tangible as downloads. But if you can figure out what the actual value to your business is in ways that you can track, then you can see if you're spending your time and your energy in a really good way.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 6:29

Yeah, absolutely, Thank you. All right. So I had this conversation with someone yesterday because we were talking about what are the advantages and disadvantages of having a guest on your podcast as opposed to a solo podcast. What's your opinion on that?

Megan Dougherty: 6:49

It depends again on the goal. So if you're a company that has a lot of intellectual property and you really want to get it out there, or if you want to really establish thought leadership, then it might make a lot more sense to be a solo and make sure that the focus is on the knowledge and the intelligence that you and your company brings to the table. But if what you really need is to be connecting with others and to be having conversations with other experts and connect with more people who can bring value to your business in different way as leads, as referral partners, as maybe collaborators Then you've got to have guests, because you're just talking to nothing and you're not actually achieving any, any of your goals. Yeah and then you know, like was, if you already have a big audience of people who are like hungry for more content from you, then I think that's in that case you can go either way on having guests or not, as long as you're providing that content and doing that engagement. But it you know, it really comes down to why is my business podcasting or why am I podcasting and support my business. And you know a lot of people, I think, have guests, because most podcasts have guests and you know it's a really common and it's it's often easier to have a conversation with someone than it is to Stare at a blank screen and have a microphone and just you and try to talk for 20 minutes. It's hard. So there's a dynamism to two-way conversations that can be a lot easier, especially for beginners, right, but, and I think most businesses benefit from more relationships there are very few businesses that are just like actually no, we don't need to meet any more people, we're good, we haven't. For that reason guests are often really, really popular. But if you know the priority is getting your own intellectual property out there, then more solo episodes could make a lot of sense.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 8:25

Yeah, yeah, good, good thought, good thoughts, thank you. All right, so you talk about being a strategist and your podcast marketing strategist and and I also notice the word conference Can you tell us how do you, how do you market your business or your your clients business, using podcasting?

Megan Dougherty: 8:57

Let's see, well, our own business. We're almost entirely referral grown, so most of the clients that we have right now were referred by someone else that we've worked with. Okay, of course, it is probably the most gratifying and pleasant way to Get new businesses by being referred by by someone who you have a good relationship with. And in terms of how our clients use their podcast to market I'm sorry I'm gonna sound like a broken record but that varies again a lot from individual to individual. So a lot of the podcasts that we create really are relationship driven and so the marketing that happens is more on the internal side. We've got a lot of shows who use their episodes within their sales funnels or within their discovery process to kind of shorten down the time it takes to develop the knowing, like and trusting needing for them to do business with their own clients. Others that are much broader in focus and they're really serving a much larger, larger audience and community. And for those types of shows the most important thing is, you know, really consistently delivering a really high quality product. Because you know, a friend of mine, tom Fox, always says you know, your podcast is a promise that you're making to your audience and it's really important to be fulfilling on that promise really consistently and on time All the time, because you know you said you were going to, therefore you that's. That's a matter of integrity, so that's a form of marketing as well, I think right and it's that's sort of part of the fun of starting to work with a new client, at least for me is figuring out Okay, what is this going to be doing for you and how can we make sure that it's doing it and how you know? What changes do we need to make? What do we need to optimize for to make sure that it's, you know, serving this really useful function in?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 10:24

your life Okay, and what exactly do you do for the business?

Megan Dougherty: 10:32

We do the pretty much full service podcast production. So we either take over management of a show that already exists or we help develop a new one. Okay, and so we do the audio editing, we create graphics, we write show notes. So we consult on strategy. You know how the podcast is going to be used. Any kind of coaching support as required. I love newbies, so I'm happy to hold someone's hand through the process, and we track all the stats that are relevant as well.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 11:01

All right, and how can we get in touch with you?

Megan Dougherty: 11:04

Well, I am always over at onestonecreativenet. Any contact form on the website goes directly to my inbox, so that's the best way to get in touch with me.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 11:13

All right, Thank you. Okay Now. So let's get to the fun part.

Megan Dougherty: 11:20

This wasn't the fun part I'm having fun, all right.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 11:25

So what is Megan grateful for today?

Megan Dougherty: 12:49

Oh, I am grateful for having a healthy body. I have had an injury earlier in the year and it was difficult to be in my body before and I'm just so grateful to be mobile and able to go out and do things and be in my body.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 13:02

Yes, yeah, definitely. That's something to be grateful for. Okay, All right. Okay, so you do? You have a podcast?

Megan Dougherty: 13:13

I do have a podcast. It's called the Company Show. Okay, and I talked to, I do some solo. It's a mix of solo and guest episodes, as we've been talking about, so some are just. You know our theory and philosophy of podcasting and then I also talked to other experts about different areas of podcasting to leverage show in your business.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 13:31

Okay, all right. And what are the business podcast blueprints? Is that something we need to know?

Megan Dougherty: 13:39

about. I think it's something you need to know about or maybe that your audience would be interested in. So, you know, as we've since 2017, we've been working with businesses to, you know, develop podcasts that are valuable to their business, and we found out that there are really four main types of you know podcasts that work in businesses, and we call these the business podcast blueprints. So the they are thought leadership, which is where the main purpose of the podcast is to you know, get known, get authority, get your name out there and become recognized as a leader in your space. And there are the relationship building podcasts, and those are the ones where you know making connections with other humans is going to be the most powerful driver of the podcast for you. Audience engagement is another one where you're connecting with an audience that you already have. And the last one is content. There are plenty of podcasts that exist just to generate content and it's a perfectly legitimate reason to podcast. So when you know kind of what this is like, the um, you'll forgive me getting a little nerdy here. The prime directive of your podcast Is going to be one of these four things and then within you can use that to make strategic decisions about your show, like you know Should I have guests or should I have sponsors? How long should my episode be? That these kind of filters can help you decide it. Is it going to help achieve that primary directive? And I kind of nestled within each of them are all sorts of like little things you can optimize for and you can mix and match and all that stuff. But most really effective shows have one or you know maybe one and a half of the blueprints, so it can be really useful when you're trying to make strategic decisions about the show.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 15:04

Okay, so we talked about what you do personally and as a business for your clients and we talk about different aspects of podcasting. Can you tell us and I think you may have touched on this a bit Can you elaborate a little bit on why? Why would a A part a business podcast, a person in business with a podcast, have a guess like when and why?

Megan Dougherty: 15:36

So there's a couple of good reasons to have a guest and you know, one is that we touched on a little is having that sort of two-way dynamism. And then there's also, you know, the the strategic approach to having guests. You know, who do you want to have on your show, who is going to be useful to, you know, build a connection with, because there's there's one thing Especially if you're in a really like relationship driven industry, where a lot of it is who you know, getting to know the right people can be really challenging. A lot of people are very protective of their time and their calendars and there is it's a very nice way to begin a relationship is hey, I think you're great and you're really smart and you're doing excellent stuff. Would you come talk on my podcast?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 16:12

Mm-hmm.

Megan Dougherty: 16:12

That is very often yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 16:14

Yes.

Megan Dougherty: 16:15

And so when, when you get the opportunity to invite someone to your podcast like this, someone who's you know you know I'm gonna be another leader in your space or someone you'd like to know, but you get the invitation, you get the Preparation email that you send, maybe even a prep call, you get the call itself, you get the thank you notes, you get the promotional materials and then you get to connect them on social media. That's nine different touch points that you have with a new person. That's a really good foundation to build a new professional relationship on. You know, if you're using and optimizing each one of those really really well. And so you know that might be a really good reason to have a podcast and to have guests on it, because you get all of this, this FaceTime and all of this communication time with people and you know, on another angle, save, you've got a more audience engagement style podcast where you're really trying to bring information to to an audience. It doesn't necessarily have to be information that you're providing yourself. There are other people who know things that you don't, or there's a lot of people that know things that I don't. So if I know my audience Wants to know about copywriting, for example, I'm no copywriting expert. I can interview a copywriting expert and get all of this wonderful information for my audience so that they can benefit from it too, yes so there's like the personal benefit or the personal business benefit, and then there's the audience benefit and you can really marry both of those Really, really elegant.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 17:25

Yes, oh, awesome, thank you. I I wanted to do a lot more, so I have another podcast and I wanted to do a lot of um solo episodes on that podcast but it turned out that I have more guests than I can manage. But then I realized after more than five years of interviewing guests that I know a lot of stuff that I didn't know when I started my podcast. And, yeah, and I love these, these um guests are coaches and I feel like I'm being coached for 20-30 minutes each interview so it benefits you the host, as well as as well as you know your audience.

Megan Dougherty: 18:10

It's so true and I love hearing that. Like when I'm listening to a conversation between someone, I love when the host is just like all right, I'm going to shamelessly pick your brain about this thing that I'm very interested in that you're an expert in. Like I love it because you're getting like this real. It's such a relatable thing, you know, and it's just like yes, let's learn, let's use the knowledge and yeah, getting the information and the coaching from people is yes, yes, and that's why I don't like these.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 18:36

Um well, for business, I guess it could be slightly different, but I don't like these frameworks that are so immovable. You know, you have to ask the question that way and you have to ask this question, and I don't like those. I am Piscian, so my creative and I will mess the thing up, you know, because I want, you know, I wanted to talk, you know. So, yeah, so, yeah, okay.

Megan Dougherty: 19:01

I think that can come with with practice too. Right like the, the more comfortable you are as the host and directing a conversation, the easier it's going to be to kind of go off the cuff. Yeah, I find, especially when people are really starting out, it's just like I know I've got my questions and I'm nervous already, so I'm gonna go down the questions yeah, as you get more and more comfortable. You can you know you can do follow-ups and yeah, more details and, and you know, you can be a little not rude. Rude is not quite the right, but you could be more forward and more aggressive about asking questions on a podcast than you can like at a cocktail party right, yeah, yeah.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 19:35

Well, I'm not, I'm not like that.

Megan Dougherty: 19:37

I don't want to make my guess uncomfortable but if someone's not giving you enough information, you know as the host you can be like oh no, actually can you. Can you answer that more? You asked me to follow up. That was really good. You asked for more information. I think that was excellently done thank you.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 19:59

So how can we get in touch with you? Did I ask it?

Megan Dougherty: 20:02

before you did. I'm still at one stone creative net. Or if you're interested in the podcasting for business conference, please find us at pfbconcom okay, and what's the conference about?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 20:13

is that something you can share?

Megan Dougherty: 20:15

it is, it is. I'm very excited about it. So this is the second year that we're running it and it all came about because I was at one of the big podcasting networking events. It was a very good one, had a great time, but I realized my audience, like you know, the people I serve as, as you know, clients, as customers they don't go to podcasting conferences even though they have podcasts, because they have, jobs they have whole companies that they need to run. So I decided with that, with a friend I was there with you know we should do our own thing. That is for people podcasting for business. It's gonna be all virtual, all online, it's all gonna be recorded, because people aren't gonna be able to attend everything. That's completely fine. So we did it last year For the first time. It was a great success. It was a ton of fun. Just the most amazing information was, you know, shared between the speakers, between guests, in each other. It was amazing. We're doing it even more. We've got more speakers, there's more networking and it's it's gonna be a really great time. So if you are a podcasting industry professional or if you're podcasting in support of your work at any industry, you should come check it out. It's gonna be a great time.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 21:15

Okay, so we'll have a link to that, right.

Megan Dougherty: 21:18

Yes, definitely.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 21:18

Yeah, okay, all right. How much time and money should a business plan this is one of your questions. I'm gonna how much time and money, because we get a little bit Frustrated with the monetization situations in podcasting how much time and money should a business plan to invest before seeing results?

Megan Dougherty: 21:48

I Typically recommend or I take politically advise people that they're going to be their podcast is gonna be a line item expense For up to a year before they really start seeing a return out of it. That can depend on the type of podcast that you do and the type, like, where in your funnel a podcast fits. But most of the Like return on investment for a podcast is indirect, not direct, unless you are going to sponsorship monetization route. So it's good to expect that. You know you're going to be investing a certain amount of money and you know production costs can range from, you know, a few hundred dollars an episode up to thousands of dollars for an episode, depending on who you work with and what they're providing. But I think it is a good idea to plan to be Investing as if it were any other kind of business expense for a pretty significant amount of time. Because it takes time to build traction in a podcast yes, a new one. It takes time to integrate it into your systems. It takes time to develop the relationships into you know, referral partnerships. It takes time to get your, your whole team, on board with the fact that you have a podcast and how it can be used. So it's not a small investment in either money or time it takes. Even when you have like a great third-party service provider for your podcast, you've still got to prepare for calls. You've got to find guests, you've got to record them, you've got to you know, at least manage the editing and promotion. It's a lot of work, yeah so, basically it's if you're going to do it, do it well, plan to invest in it for a while before you see anything out of it.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 23:08

Okay, all right, and picture in the podcast, in a business, especially you know, maybe a slightly larger business as something akin to an employee working group, that you know it's not really making you any money but it's keeping your money makers happy.

Megan Dougherty: 23:28

Could well be to like. I've seen some really fascinating use cases for podcasts, like there's one when it was an internal podcast. It was not for the outside world at all. Yeah used to help train new team members so they had examples of sales calls, example of customer service calls. On this internal podcast brilliant. Yeah, it's repurposeable, evergreen live example training. They never had like. Great time and cost saving, great way to increase customer culture. But is it a direct revenue? Are they see, like not? necessarily you know huge value, hard to measure in terms of dollars and you know against the expense of creation, creating it.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 24:06

Okay, all right, thank you. Okay. So I'm going to let you go, but I want you to give us a couple of tips for aspiring podcasters. These are not, you know, multi-million dollar businesses, necessarily, but they may want to be, so give us a couple of tips.

Megan Dougherty: 24:26

Okay, a couple of tips. First one is be a guest before you try to be a host. Find out what you like about the process. Look at what you know the experience is of being online. Can you stand your own recorded voice? That's a really important thing to figure out. Some people just cannot tolerate it and there's no way to improve if you're not willing to listen to your own episodes. So that's really one of my big tips Get. You don't need a really expensive mic, but you should have at least a decent quality one. So you know, plan to spend probably about $100 on a good mic that'll last you years. And when you're recording, wide, flat, blank spaces are your enemy. Minimalism is completely bad when it comes to podcasting. You want soft, you want fluffy, you want curtains, you want sound panels. That's going to make you sound so much better, no matter what mic you have. And finally, the last thing is track everything you know in excruciating detail. If you start podcasting and if you're into it, you do it for years. You want to have a really good record of what you talked about and when, where all the links are, who the guests were, what their contact information was. You're getting all of these resources, the content, the relationships, the content like the details. Keep it all in a place where you can find it, and that place should not be your brain.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 25:40

That place should not be your own brain.

Megan Dougherty: 25:43

Oh it should be written down somewhere else. No one should ever have to ask you about your podcast there should be a place where they can find out the information.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 25:53

Yes, yes, that's pretty good advice, thank you. What's your opinion on unique listeners? Because you track metrics and that's why I'm asking you this Unique listeners, what's the significance?

Megan Dougherty: 26:12

So different kind of platforms can use these terms slightly differently, but for the most part, a unique listener is a listener who, to the best of all available knowledge, has not listened to an episode of your podcast before. So it's not someone who's maybe subscribed. It's not someone who has listened to all your other episodes. This is a new listener for the first time and that can be a heuristic for how your podcast is growing and how your reach is expanding. But it's definitely on my don't really worry about it list. It can be interesting to know and if your goals are really growth-focused and the point of your podcast is to grow the podcast, yes, it's something you'll want to pay attention to, just like downloads you want more of them. But yeah, it's someone who has never listened to an episode before and is listening for the first time.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn): 26:59

Okay, awesome. Thank you, Megan and Dorothy, for coming and talking to me today. I really appreciate you.

Megan Dougherty: 27:05

It's been a pleasure, and likewise I appreciate you too. Thank you for having me. Thank you.