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Stop me if this sounds familiar.
You open LinkedIn on your phone and there at the top of the feed, LinkedIn has recommended a post by the CMO of a huge brand you know your sales team is targeting.
You tap on their profile and figure if you could connect with them on LinkedIn, maybe you could strike up a conversation and build a case for your solution. So you smash that connect button and smile at your cleverness.
But then, nothing happens. Days go by and your request goes unanswered. In fact, none of your attempts to connect with and build relationships with target stakeholders are working.
What’s going on here? Is there a better way to build rapport with target accounts?
That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
Now listen, LinkedIn is an absolute treasure for networking and building relationships. Whether you’re targeting stakeholders to eventually pitch to, or potential partners or influencers you’d like to collaborate with, they’re all there.
The problem is, they’re unlikely to want to connect with you if they don’t know you or, worse, think you’re only interested in what they can do for you.
And I see you in the back, waving your hand because you make it a point to write a charming introductory note every time you send a connection request. Bravo. But you’re still leading with an Ask… an ask to connect.
What if I could show you a way to initiate a connection with someone that starts off by offering them something of real value, something that will potentially foster a real relationship that could lead to a sale or a partnership.
That’s exactly what our guest today, Adrian McIntyre, is going to talk to us about.
Dr. McIntyre is a cultural anthropologist, keynote speaker, and communication advisor. He has lived and worked in over 30 countries, spending a decade in the Middle East and Africa as a researcher, journalist, media spokesperson, and marketing consultant.
Adrian has been podcasting since 2016, serving as a host, producer, or featured guest on more than 300 podcast episodes, and he’s turned that experience into a channel for thought leadership campaigns and B2B podcasts for professional firms. He’s graciously agreed to help me understand how I can use this podcast to further partnerships and sales for Agorapulse, so y’all get to listen to my consulting session.
Partnership Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to Dr. Adrian McIntyre about:
♉️ Why the traditional approach to podcasts is so wrong for B2B brands
♉️ How podcasts actually help build and strengthen relationships
♉️ How to measure success and ROI from podcasts
Learn more about Adrian McIntyr
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Notes & Transcript:
(Lightly edited)
Using Podcasts To Develop Partnerships & Relationships with Adrian McIntyre
[00:00:00] Mike Allton: Stop me if this sounds familiar. You open LinkedIn on your phone and they’re at the top of the feed. LinkedIn has recommended a post by the C M O of a huge brand. You know your sales team is targeting. You tap on the profile figure. You can connect with them on LinkedIn, maybe you could strike up a conversation, build a case for your solution, so you smash that connect button and smile at your cleverness.
Then nothing happens. Days go by and your request goes unanswered. In fact, none of your attempts to connect with and build relationships with target stakeholders are working. What’s going on here? Is there a better way to build rapport with target accounts? That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of partnership unpacked.
This is partnership
unpacked your go-to guide to growing your business through partnerships quickly. I’m your
host, Mike. A
each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer marketing to brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply your own business to grow exponentially.
And now the rest of today’s episode,
welcome back to Partnership Unpacked where I. Selfishly used this time depict the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building. Oh, and you get to learn, too. Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
Now, listen, LinkedIn’s an absolute treasure for networking and building relationships, whether you’re targeting stakeholders. Potential partners, people that you might wanna pitch to, or influencers you’d like to collaborate with, they’re all there. The problem is they’re unlikely to want to connect with you if they don’t know you or worse.
I think you’re only interested in what they can do for you. And I see you in the back waving your hand cuz you made it a point to write a charming introductory note. Every time you send a connection request bravo. But you’re still leading with an ask and ask to connect. What if I could show you a way to initiate a connection with someone that starts off by offering them something of real value, something that will potentially foster a real relationship that could lead to a sale or a partner.
That’s exactly what our guests today, Dr. Adrian McIntyre’s gonna talk to us about. Dr. McIntyre’s, a cultural anthropologist, a keynote speaker, and communication advisor. He’s lived and worked in over 30 countries, spending a decade in the Middle East, in Africa as a researcher, journalist, media spokesperson, and marketing consultant.
Adrian, it’s been podcasting since 2016, serving as a host, producer, featured guests on more than 300 podcast episodes, and he’s turned that experience into a channel for thought leadership campaigns and B2B podcasts for professional firms. He’s graciously agreed to help me understand how I can use this podcast or further partnerships and sales for Gore Pulse.
So y’all get to listen to my consulting session. Hey Adrian, welcome to the show,
[00:03:14] Adrian McIntyre: Mike. It’s great to be here. I love that introduction because who hasn’t been there waiting for the Unresponded to connection request? Oh my God, the pressure is real. [00:03:24] Mike Allton: Yeah, I don’t ever want to go into my pending asks. You could see how many times you’ve asked people and they just are, are ignoring you.
That’s just gonna kill my ego . But I gotta ask, what is a cultural anthropologist doing on this show?
[00:03:41] Adrian McIntyre: I don’t know what a culture anthropologist is doing anywhere, to be perfectly honest with you. I wrote this article a few years ago for a publication that focused on like supply chain, warehousing, manufacturing, that kind of thing.
And they wanted my point of view on relationships and communication and storytelling, and I just couldn’t get over the fact that I’m like, what does an anthropologist even doing here? But the answer is, is sort of obvious. And that is anthropologists are specialists in human being. And the cool thing about the field, why I got into it when I really, seriously lacked direction and purpose in my life was I realized the sort of interesting irony of it.
Unlike any other social science, you are the subject and the object. Of study, you get to be a human being, studying humans, being human. And there’s something sort of neat and meta about that, that I always enjoyed because if we’re not trying to understand this human thing that we. Also participate in by virtue of being here.
What are we doing?
[00:04:49] Mike Allton: No kidding. And that is fascinating and it was one of the things that I just picked up in our conversation when we first, you know, met a while back and knew I wanted to have you on the show, particularly when we started talking about podcasting, not just as a thing that you do, but your approach to podcasting.
So right off the bat, I want to ask, why is the traditional approach to podcasting just so wrong for a b2b.
[00:05:12] Adrian McIntyre: Well, I don’t know that it’s always wrong, but I think we should start with that exact question, and that is what is the purpose of the podcast? And to be quite honest, there’s a lot of really great podcast advice out there, and the vast majority of it is aimed at the indie creator.
You know, somebody who’s got a passion for something they wanna say to the world, and they’re building this show on a shoestring budget. You know, scraping together a few bucks for a microphone. And the great thing about the medium is it’s entirely appropriate for that kind of endeavor. I mean, it’s, the barrier to entry is relatively low.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, that means the quality of their show ends up being also kind of low. But these are things that folks can learn. So for all the indie creators out there, you know the folks who are participating in podcast Twitter, who go to podcast and podcast movement and many of those other things, I see you.
I celebrate you. It’s fantastic what you’re, And most companies or professional organizations are not interested in becoming a podcaster as an identity. They’re not interested in necessarily creating a show that gets, you know, a hundred thousand downloads a month. Although this is really where we do start the conversation because I think most folks think you have to have that for your show to be successful.
When I’m talking to a business owner or to somebody who runs marketing and business development for a professional firm, or even somebody, let’s say, a sort of social media person inside of a larger organization, and she loves podcasts and she wonders, could my company benefit from this? The answer is yes, absolutely, but we need to think through the strategy.
That’s the thing that really matters because it’s not a given that this is the right fit for you or your organization. There’s a great quote from a book. Everybody loves the site, but almost nobody’s ever actually read The Art of War. And in this book, sun Sa, who was this Chinese General, 6,000 years ago or something, probably not that long ago, but anyway, has this quote that says, Strategy without tactics is the long road to victory.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Oh, and this is what I see a lot of. Yeah. When people rush to podcasting tactics without strategy, and then they struggle to produce the results that they want. So here’s where we start. For every business, the investment you make in any marketing program or any business development initiative has gotta be measured at the end of the day in revenue.
The key distinction is what’s the source of that revenue? Where does your business’s revenue come from? Here’s what I want you to understand about most people who are trying to grow an audience for their podcast. They need the show itself to be the source of revenue. They want to grow an audience of loyal followers, listeners, subscribers, so that they can hopefully monetize their show on a CPM basis because they’ve now achieved a certain number of downloads, certain number of unique listens, you know, whatever metric they’re using.
If you’re professional organization would like to grow the business, the good news is you don’t always have to grow a large audience in order to do. Right. So I think we just need to kind of clear the stage a little bit from the pressure most people feel to have some sort of hit podcast that hits, you know, all these great download and subscriber metrics.
Maybe you’ll get there, maybe you won’t, and it doesn’t always matter, just straight talk. I like to talk about what I call the podcast value pyramid, and I don’t have a graphic, so I’ll just use my fingers right here on the screen. . So if you think of a pyramid, The base is the widest layer, right? So there’s three layers to the podcast value pyramid.
The base layer is fans. The middle layer is your funnel, and the top layer is the pinnacle of the podcast is face-to-face relationships. Fans funnel, face-to-face relationships. The interesting thing about this might not be immediately obvious for a business. The value of those layers increases as you go up the pyramid and the number of people required to make it.
Decreases. So we can talk about fans and we can talk about growing a huge audience, but really what I’d like to do is zero in on the middle layer, which is your funnel, sort of the content marketing strategy. I have more to say about that, but I won’t, uh, Talk your head off right here at this point, and the face-to-face relationships, using your show as a way to get long conversations with people that you would most like to meet and get to know and build a real human relationship in the process.
[00:10:16] Mike Allton: I love this. I’m just so excited. I’m gonna pause right there because first of all, everybody listening should be sitting up in their seats right now. Like, oh, this is why Mike brought this guy on. I get it. This is amazing and I’m definitely, I can’t wait to share already this episode with our C E O, my cmo, my boss.
I know he gets podcasts. I know he understands the value. The ceo, I think he’s still a little questionable about why we’re doing this thing. So this is fantastic and it’s a perfect tie into the next question, which was just, alright. We know relationships are important. That’s the core. Of great successful partnerships.
That’s why we have this show. We talk about relationships almost every single episode. So tell us, how do we actually use the podcast to build relationships?
[00:11:01] Adrian McIntyre: The first thing is really counterintuitive, and that is your show can’t be about you. I mean, it could be, but who wants to come on a show about someone else’s expertise?
So the initial work that we do in our strategy consultations is we have. Find a show concept that is going to appeal to. Target prospects. One way to say this, it’s a little counterintuitive, but we’re flipping the audience model on its head instead of being focused on the listeners, which will be there because we’re gonna have great conversations, they’re gonna be relevant to a certain audience.
Instead of focusing on the listeners, we need to focus on the guests. So the primary audience is the person in the. And whether that’s in a physical room, which is fantastic when you can do that, or if it’s in a virtual room like we’re in right now. Mike and I are in a virtual room having a conversation.
But I guess in a way, you and I, listener, watcher, whatever you’re doing, are in a room together. Because here we are for this conversation. So by putting our attention on the people in the room, not on the listeners, we can start to reverse engineer a show concept that’s gonna make sense. And it may not always be the immediately obvious one.
So I’ve often said, you know, some examples of this Arizona. Where I live now, California native, but I ended up here kind of by accident. Arizona legalized cannabis a few years ago, and it’s a burgeoning industry here in the state, the legal marijuana industry. There are a lot of folks, professionals who are interested in doing business with cannabis firms, whether they are the grow operations or the dispensaries or the, all the ancillary companies that are involved in the production and distribution of this product.
They may not be members, participants, if you will, of that field. They may not consume the product. They may have all kinds of opinions about it, but they’d like to do business with those folks. Great. What if instead of being a show about accounting, if I’m a cpa, I develop a show about leadership in the cannabis industry and I invite as guests on my show CEOs.
COOs, whatever the right category is to talk about their experience, their leadership journey, their sense of trends and issues facing that field. Talk about their company, the good work they’re doing in the community, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, we need the show to be about the guest. That’s really the secret sauce coming up with this magnetic show concept.
So when we tell people, Hey, I’ve got a. About leadership. I’ve got a show about sustainability. I’ve got a show about whatever is the right fit for your prospects. It’s come to my attention that you might be a great candidate to come on the show, talk about your company, talk about your experience, talk about the path that led you to where you are today.
Would you like to be a featured guest on my. That’s in a nutshell, kind of the way that you can use a podcast primarily as a networking or high value prospecting tool.
[00:14:24] Mike Allton: And that’s pretty much what you do for businesses now, right? You help them set this up. [00:14:29] Adrian McIntyre: Right. So I work with a lot of different professional firms primarily.
I’m happy to talk to anybody and get them pointed in the right direction, but people who end up working with me usually fall into a few categories. They are in a primarily relationship driven business. They’re already trying to do a bunch of things to reach their ideal prospects. Those things are either sporadic or inefficient or un predict.
So they don’t have, you know, real prospecting system in place. And they also know, kind of intuitively because the nature of their expertise, that the spammy cold outreach stuff that you see every single day on LinkedIn isn’t a good fit for them. They’re not looking for high volume. , they’re looking for the right relationships with the right people at the right time.
So a lot of the upfront work that we do is really in developing and building out this strategy. So they have their own unique blueprint for a show that can help them drive relationships and buy that. Business results, they might choose to have us produce the show or not. Actually, the goal of these consultations is always to leave people equipped to make their own choice.
And in fact, the best option for them might be to find a freelance audio editor in their town who could be their contractor. For the production part of the show. We do produce shows ourselves, but I’m not out here trying to sell podcast production to people. I want them to get headed in the right direction, and sometimes that means giving them the blueprint and sending ’em on their way.
[00:16:03] Mike Allton: This is so fascinating. Is there a specific example of a client you might be able to share? You can name the name, or if you just wanna put ’em in an industry, but kinda help us understand and wrap our head around how this might work. [00:16:14] Adrian McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can use myself as an example. Okay. I mean, I, I have other client examples too, but one very clear example is the show that I operated here and produced almost 130 episodes of.
And the core premise of the show was we were talking about business here in the valley. That’s the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. So with my show, valley Business Radio, I had a lot of executives and corporate leaders, small business owners, partners and principals of professional firms. Come on the show.
So it was a little bit more of a general business show. But why was I doing that? Well, one of the things that I love to do is speak and train on communication and storytelling. Really the fundamentals of how we create meaningful connections through conversation. So I would have these folks on my show.
These are people who wouldn’t have responded to a LinkedIn. Cold outreach message in the typical automated way that people are doing it, they would definitely not have agreed to let me buy them lunch, you know, or some of the other kinds of things. They’re busy, they’ve got a lot to do. But because I had created this show specifically as a way of reflecting back to the greater Phoenix business community, the good work folks were doing in the community.
In the course of about 130 episodes, I had, I think maybe about 400 guests, cuz this was in person pre pandemic. And so I would have anywhere from two to three people together on the show from different industries and different things at the end of the show. There’s always a kind of post show glow.
There’s this, you know, for a lot of folks, this is not something they’ve ever done before. Being on a podcast is cool. They’ve heard about it from their kids, but they may not even listen to podcasts, right? So, but they got invited to be a featured guest on the show. They drove across town. They spend an hour doing it.
And part of what makes this work so well is the emotional connection. That you have when you’ve gone through an experience like this, Mike, you and I are sort of jaded professionals. Like we do this every single day, right? We’re on the mic, on the camera, and it’s like, yep, okay. Got another interview. You know, three minutes ago I was like downstairs, like trying to find pants.
You know, it’s really not a problem. Like we’re just used to this. Okay. I’ve been on the radio since I was, I was five years old. Love.
[00:18:35] Mike Allton: It’s true. This is my third podcast interview today, . Exactly. [00:18:39] Adrian McIntyre: And you still haven’t found the pants ? So I’ve been on the radio since I was five years old because of a coincidence of life.
I was born into a radio family. My dad owned a radio station, and when I was five we started recording a show. This is 1978 for people if you’re trying to do the math. We started recording a show in our home studio that was a kids show called The Happy Day Express. So I’ve literally. Having a weekly show was not a podcast.
We were editing it with a razor blade on quarter inch tape, but I’ve been doing that since I was five, so this is natural to me. It doesn’t have to be natural to the people I’m coaching to host their own podcast. Because here’s the great thing about it, there’s something sort of electric that happens when you’re going through an experience together with another human being.
I often like to say, look, if I could build you this private, Rollercoaster, you know, out behind your corporate office, and it was this exquisite and wonderful theme park. And you could invite somebody to come over and ride the rollercoaster with you, right? It’d be cool. And you’d get in this thing together.
And just before you start, recording is a little bit to connect the metaphor. It’s like the bars coming down. Your guest who has not done a lot of this before, maybe never. It’s kind of like, oh man, here we go. Like this is it. I’m, you know, whether it’s live or whether it’s recorded, it doesn’t matter. You start the show, you ask them thoughtful questions and you listen.
The secret to relationship building podcast is you have to listen more than you talk. I’m doing a lot of talking in this one. That’s, I’m on my soapbox. You’ll notice Mike is soaking it in, right? He doesn’t have to ask a lot of questions and neither do you. Here’s a little bit of how that goes. So tell me, uh, what you’re doing.
That’s really interesting. How’d you get into that? Wow. That sounds like it was a pretty interesting time of your life. What are some of the things you learned in that process? Tell me more about that. I mean, it’s not rocket science. If you actually go back and watch Charlie Rose or Larry King or even Oprah, they’re asking brilliant questions only because it gets the person to say something new, to go one cut deeper, right?
That’s all you have to do. And sometimes it’s as simple as what was that like? So hosting a relationship building podcast is not rocket surgery, as Chris Brogan said a number of years ago. But it does take some thought. It takes some planning, and the goal is that at the end of this conversation, you’ve done two things.
One, you’ve really given your guest a platform to share themselves, to talk about their work, to talk about their organization, the how they’re serving the community, all these great things. You’ve done that without asking for anything. The reciprocity factor here is very, very high. It only works by the way.
If you’re not abusing that, I mean, it never occurred to me to, to say this in a show like this, but I, I think it’s important to say this is powerful stuff. And when your intent is good, when you really do wanna serve this human being, get to know them in a meaningful way, and maybe you’ll end up doing business together, maybe you won’t.
But if you’re able to sort of set that aside, so instead of being such a craven, Kind of, well, you said at the beginning about how it’s, you’re asking before you’re giving. Mm-hmm. . This is the best give I can think of because I’m giving you my time, I’m giving you my platform, and I’m gonna make you look and sound really great.
In the meantime, we’re getting to know each other.
[00:22:15] Mike Allton: Yeah. That’s one of the things I talk about in my approach to influencers when I want to hopefully turn a relationship with an influencer into a brand ambassador kind of relationship, and I start by identifying as many influencers as I can and starting to reach out and foster those connections.
And then maybe relationships and then maybe potentially down the. A brand ambassadorship, but I don’t know that going into the relationship if it’s going to go that way. I just have to be open to the opportunity. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t. Who’s to say? But this is really so fascinating. I’ve loved so many of the points that you’ve been making.
I’ve been taking notes. I’m gonna back, go back and listen to this. I love it. One of the things that we talked about on the outset was that particularly with. Creators who are doing podcasts, let’s just say they’re a little obsessed about downloads and some of these other metrics, we wanna push back on that, or a B2B brand.
So, okay, great. I’m a B2B brand. I’m not gonna look at downloads. At least I’m not gonna use that as my core metric. Right. What would you suggest I look at instead? What would be some recommendations for core metrics? How do I know that I’m getting some ROI out of this podcasting?
[00:23:27] Adrian McIntyre: So I will answer that with a definitive answer, but before I do, I want to create a little context for the answer that helps kind of bridge the gap between the drive for reach.
Right. Listens, subscribers, et cetera, downloads and all that, and the understanding of our primary goal. So the context for this is you have to understand a little bit of the unique nature of podcasting as a medium. Podcasting is essentially, uh, the best way I can think of to explain it is a distributed ecosystem.
There’s no one place on the internet where podcasting happens. Here’s the interesting paradox for any podcast, the paradox is, The primary place where podcasts are consumed is in the mobile apps on people’s phones. So whether it’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, you know, Stitcher Pockets, et cetera, et cetera.
There are a whole variety of apps where people consume podcasts. 87% I read of podcast consumption is not happening on a browser, on a website, however, The discovery of new podcast content is primarily not happening on those apps. People wish it was, but very few podcast apps are optimized for discovery.
Spotify’s been doing some things, try to move in that direction, but mostly podcasts get found through search and social. So you’ve got this whole ecosystem of websites and content pieces and social media channels and the podcast apps where people will primarily consume as a subscriber, regular podcast content.
But you need to be able to navigate through all of that. So we should probably, before we’re done, talk a little bit about post podcast Promot. Strategies cuz that is important for helping you find an audience beyond the person in the room. Mm-hmm. , who is your primary audience. So with that in mind though, with a.
Business podcast. I’m usually trying to do one of two things. I’m either working with my client to build a relationship engine like we just talked about, or to build a reputation engine. Those two things are not entirely separate, but they can have slightly different focus and activities. In both cases, what we’re really trying to look at are the ways in which you are building the most meaningful assets.
That you need, and that includes the content. So I would look at that as a metric. I would look at the number, the quantity of pieces of content that we’re getting out of our podcast engine. It’s not just the episode, it’s many other pieces of creative collateral that come out of that episode. So I look at that as one way of assessing how are we doing here?
But more importantly, at the end of the day, you’re looking at business metrics. You’re looking at. Responses to your invitations, like what are the KPIs for an event? Well, it’s the number of people that you invited versus the number of people that showed up, right? I have found for myself, and your mileage may vary, I think I have to say, but I’ve found for myself that the response rate to a guest who wants to be on my show is very, very high.
It’s actually a hundred percent I, but I’ve literally never, so with 400 plus guests that I have had on my podcast, nobody has ever said no. They may have said, I can’t do it this week. What else do you have in, you know, in the future time? So that’s very good. At the end of the day though, you wanna look at what do we count when we’re talking about human relationships?
Is it the number of people who schedule a follow-up meeting with us? Is it the number of people? Then there’s kind of funnel metrics. That’s that middle layer. You know, let’s talk about people, clicks through to our landing page, email subscribers, open rates, things of that nature. In other words, we can integrate this.
An existing content marketing program or build a new one around it. But we would look at things like that, right? How many people showed up on the podcast? What’s the quality of those relationships? Are we really getting, in other words, there’s qualitative as well as quantitative metrics here. and what happens next.
So rather than understanding this in kind of, you know, really just hard math terms, I’d want us to also look at the meaningful connections that are made. And you know, it feels sometimes a little. Based account them. So that might not be the best way to do it. But look, another thing I should say is, this is important, and I could have said this earlier, A lot of the typical podcast methodology assumes that this is something that you’re now gonna do, let’s say, every single week till the end of time, you know, and you get on this sort of podcast production treadmill, and you just gotta keep going and keep going and keep going.
Again, if you’re trying to build a large audience, that may be necessary. Although most of the large audiences that you’re aware of had an already existing audience that got mapped onto a new podcast, so they didn’t start from zero, but it can be done and there’s lists, there’s lots of podcast marketing consultants out there that will talk to people about how to grow the audience for their show.
So that’s great. I’m gonna leave that to them. What we do is we design and produce seasons. And we like to separate out the temporality of the different phases of that. So basically, in a nutshell, there’s five phases to launching a new podcast. You’ve got your planning phase, your production phase, that’s the recording, your post-production phase.
This is the editing, mastering, you know, and clipping. If you’re gonna be doing that. Then you’ve got your publication phase when you. Push it out into those apps where people listen and your promotion phase where you start to distribute excerpts and other assets on social media. We could talk more about that if you want.
That could probably be a whole podcast episode. In and of itself, what we like to do is compress the production phase into the smallest time possible because people are busy. Mm-hmm. and my clients don’t have, you know, 90 minutes every week to do this till the end of time. So we often do a popup podcast studio.
I either go to them or we do it remotely, and in the course of three or four days, we’ll record 12 episodes. So that’s done. Then they get back to work, and our primary K P I, those meaningful human relationships has already happened. Now there’s some follow up. There’s an elegant way to keep in touch with people to expand that conversation.
I often like to build into our show format a seed question. Which no matter how your guest answers, it will be the door. You can follow through that. I’m not sure that metaphor made sense. The door that is opened in the conversation that you can walk through again later in a follow up conversation. Yeah.
Yeah. Hey, when I asked you about such and such, what you said was really interesting, would you be open to having another conversation about that? So we do plant a seed question that leads. A conversation about possibly doing business together, but it’s very subtle because again, folks aren’t coming on this show to be sold anything.
They’re coming on this show because it is legitimately a show about them and people like them and the things they care about and the work they’re doing. So I’ve gone off script here and sort of talked my way around a bunch of things, but your K P I question really comes down to that. Yeah, measure what matters.
And if reach doesn’t matter, look at it in six months. Look at it in a. It’s not the thing that’s gonna make the needle move in your business anyway. You’re not getting paid for listeners.
[00:31:05] Mike Allton: So true. This is absolutely fascinating. And folks, I hope you’ve been paying attention cause we’ve been talking with Adrian McIntyre about building relationships through podcasting and he’s just spilled the tea on the real reason why brands should be doing this and how to measure the ROI from this channel.
And before we continue, I’ve got one more important question for Adrian by c o Gopaul. Darrell pre, he wants to share how important social media. As a channel and how to measure roi.
It’s the Okta Triumph. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels? Wow. There’s the Arcta Triumph, there’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the move. Those are your channels you’re gonna use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris.
In fact, you’re the CMO of your company product service. So what are your main channels? So I’m gonna. There things like pay per click, maybe trade shows, events, maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1.8% of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment.
HubSpot and Gartner say, social media’s the number one channel to invest in this. Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it. Because you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the mentality, and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You changed the mentality. We’ll give you the tool. We Pulse tracks all the ROI for you.
One place to manage all your social media activity, your number one channel, change your success. Treat social media as a Channel one CMO to another. My name is Daryl. I’m with the Gora Pulse. I’ll talk to.
Okay, Adrian, I promise. Just one more question and you just brilliantly touched on this and foreshadowed this earlier. I want to get into what we do after we’re done filming and I don’t, we don’t need to break out the whole thing. Cause like you said, it could be a whole nother show. But, you know, once we’ve filmed or recorded the podcast and we, we’ve done the editing, now we talked about promotion.
You touched on that and you touched. Specifically ways that you can use the podcast to deepen and further that relationship?
[00:33:22] Adrian McIntyre: Yeah, so it’s important to understand that podcasting for business relationships and for reputation for relationships, it starts. When the person comes on your show for reputation and deepening the relationship, it starts when you publish the episode.
So here’s what’s important to understand. There’s really two tracks to this, and we map this out in our strategy for clients because it’s not the same for everybody. But at high level, the two tracks are what’s happening in publicly and what’s happening privately. All right? So lemme just tackle it like that publicly.
The more you can share. Your podcast content in multiple formats, and this is not new. You’ve probably heard this from other people. It is truly one of the most important things. It’s also hard time consuming, and you need a great tool like a Agora Pulse to help manage the flow of this in terms of pushing it out.
But you need to take that podcast and turn it into microcontent because not everybody wants to. Your 30 minute episode, or let me say it another way. People will wanna hear your 30 minute episode. Once they’ve seen a hint of why they should invest that time in quote cards, you know, a nice graphic with words on it, or a short clip, a 30 to 62nd video clip, or, you know, an audiogram, although you, there’s some debate as to whether or not the time spent making audiogram, you know, the, the picture with a little moving waveform.
I don’t know that people consume those as much. Those of us who spend time making them would really like them to. But in any case, you need to take this large piece of content, the long form content, and repurpose it. And again, there’s a lot of tactics involved there that we can talk about. And then the cadence with which you can share those things on different channels.
You know, the life cycle of a tweet is very different than a post on LinkedIn. So your strategy needs to be a little different for each of those channels. And also, not everybody’s gonna. On all the different places. So somebody who may have very strong Instagram account, for example, ought to really think about how to turn podcast content into reels.
Somebody who doesn’t use Instagram or Twitter at all needs to think about how are we gonna build a LinkedIn strategy in which the podcast content. The excerpts from our longer form podcast become part of our marketing library that we’re gonna cycle through and recycle through over time. So, you know, we spend a couple of days recording a few episodes.
That’s six months, 12 months worth of content as you weave it in with all the other things that your organization needs to be doing. So that’s that in terms of the public side, is we really need to talk about the specific ways your organization is going to use. The. Recording in all of its different forms.
The pictures, the images, pictures and images are the same thing. Adrian , the uh, the pictures and images, the videos if you have them, the audio, and then all the different collateral that you can build around it, you know, and if you’re really smart, you’re thinking about some of the behind the scenes shots that you can share as well as, you know, other things, the transcript that you can repurpose into a LinkedIn article or a blog post.
Yeah, there’s just so much. Alright. The private follow up is what really matters for this audience, I think, because look, here’s what you’ve just done. You’ve, without asking for anything, invested a significant amount of your time in hosting this person on your show. So now what do you do? Well, the first thing is you thank them because.
Did that too. Right? They agreed to come on the show. So a nice thank you note goes a long way. Then you notify them when the episode’s published. By the way, in the public stream of this, every time you share something with a guest in it, you’re tagging them, obviously. Mm-hmm. and their organization. So they’re now seeing.
Their feed pinging and their network is getting notified even passively as you’ve tagged them and they’ve commented on it, they won’t do this on, you know, look, if you produce 20 clips out of a podcast, they’ll comment on one or two, not all of them, but at least in the beginning they’re gonna be into comments saying, oh, it was so great.
Thanks for having me. You know, all this kind of stuff. And then their network is notified that they were on the show because they did that on LinkedIn, is what I’m really thinking of here. Anyway, but privately, you also wanna follow up with them and use the fact that you were very elegant and subtle about how you put this whole thing together to explore the possibility of doing business together, and that requires a very simple conversation.
Using that seed question is, is a pretty good starting point. So after you’ve thanked them, after you’ve notified them, the show’s published, after you’ve given them some additional love on social media, you might circle back a week later, two weeks later. Really depends on the timing of all these phases and follow up with them.
It was so great having you. Thanks again for doing that. People seem to really be loving the conversation, right? If they are be real like and everything else, it’s a real relationship. So you know, don’t be a weirdo, but you say, you know, I’ve been thinking one of the things that you mentioned during our interview was, and then whatever.
They said in response to that seed question, you know, this is something that my company deals with every single day. We offer X, Y, and Z. That solves that problem. By the way, this is why you had them on the show in the first place. Because the strategy identifies your ideal guest audience from companies that you can actually help and would make a lot of sense to do business with.
So now you’re just simply making obvious what is not immediately obvious, which is, Hey, you know, it turns out we can help you with that. Would you be open to having a conversation about how we might do business together or how we might explore a partnership of some kind? Or who’s the right person in your company for us to talk to about whether or not this is a good fit?
Right. And how it worked for me. So I don’t know if I finished the example earlier. Of my show and what I was selling. But I wanna sell workshops and trainings, speeches on communication, storytelling, you know, conversational skills, if you will. So I might say to the c e O, it was so great having you on the show, you know, when we were talking about.
Culture in your company and you know, we had that great conversation about how culture’s made up of the everyday conversations people are having. That’s something that I deal with all the time. I have a program specifically for team building that helps people change the way they talk to each other at work, changes their experience of their job, helps employee retention, you know, all the good things that you would expect out of a culture initiative.
Is this something that we should talk about for your company? Is there a person there? Be the right person to find out if this would fit in with what you’re working on this year. It might not be the executive that was on the show, but they’ll usually say, even if it’s just kind of like, oh, scratch your back because you scratched mine.
You know what? I’m not sure what we’re doing this year, but let me put you in touch with our head of hr. They schedule those kind of training initiatives. Great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And now they’re sending an email ceo. To the head of HR saying, I’d like you to talk to Adrian. I was a guest on his podcast.
He’s got something that might help with X. Would you be willing to do that? And look, it doesn’t mean they’re gonna immediately close a deal with you, but you have now gotten access to the right person to have a conversation about whether or not it makes sense. To even look at doing business together. So that’s a little bit how this plays out.
You know, you need to be, I don’t know, all the things that apply to having real relationships. You know, you need to give more than you get. You need to be kind. You need to be empathetic and really understand what they’re dealing with. Don’t try to help people who don’t want or need your help. Because EW , but using a podcast as a way to start a relationship on a really high note, there’s other people doing it.
I’m not telling you I have this sort of secret playbook, but it’s not that common. And if it’s something, look, how would you know if this is a good fit for you? All right. You need to. Real connections with the people that you do business with. In other words, you know already that this isn’t something, they’re, what you sell is not what they’re gonna buy by going to a landing page, you know, and reading the benefits and features of a product and clicking.
A button to make a purchase, right? It’s a complex sale. It’s a consultative sale. It involves you talking to them and then talking to multiple people inside their organization, et cetera, et cetera. You need a way to start that conversation in a non-salesy way, because as the tools for communication have gotten more and more open, the gatekeeper function has gotten higher and higher, right?
So you can’t just reach out to these people and say, Hey, I wanna talk to you. I mean, you know, you can, the cold email experts will tell you sometimes they are successful in doing that, but maybe that’s not a fit for you. If you want to build real connections through conversation, I don’t know of a better way to do it.
[00:42:37] Mike Allton: See, this is why I have this show, and this is why I bring people like you on, I say in the outset how I selfishly use this time to ask my questions, and this is exactly what’s happened here because, I’ve been doing live video for years. The idea of chopping up the video and turning it into all these other little micro pieces of content, like you mentioned, I’ve blogged about that.
That’s something I, I know how to do. I’ve been doing it, but using the conversation that I have with a guest to deepen that relationship and specifically to take it. To another level. You know, that’s a little mind blowing to me. Like you said, it’s not necessarily a secret, but people don’t do that. I’ve been on countless shows and most hosts aren’t doing that with meme, but you know, we had this conversation before offline.
So I was a little more familiar with the concept, right? So earlier today I had another podcast interview and we had a great conversation. It was very clear during the conversation that his company and their target audience was a lot of overlap with Agora Pulse and Gore Pulse’s target audience. So as soon as the podcast was over and after I’d thanked Tim, We then got into a conversation about how we could actually partner together and it was great.
So I really love that you’re bringing that element to this tactic, as you said, and you’re, and you’re making this part and parcel of how we’re going to approach podcasting. In relationship building. Thank you.
[00:44:04] Adrian McIntyre: It’s very cool. You’re so welcome. I want to just underline what you said there because this is really how it works.
I don’t really like the word pretext because it sort of sounds manipulative, but the podcast is the pretext. So the only way to make it work is that you really do care and you really do want them to succeed, and you really do wanna shine a light on the good work that they’re doing. You really wanna feature them.
That is so important. The best conversation though, is the one that happens right after the magic starts there. The recording stopped. They’re super like, whew. Especially if they haven’t done a lot of this before and they’re, listen, interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people. The number one question that happens right after you turn off the recording is, how’d I do
You know, like genuinely a lot of nerves going on, a lot of energy and you know, you can tell ’em, listen, you were great. It was great. I’m so glad people got a chance to hear what you had to say. You know? Have you had a chance to do something like that before? No, never. This is the first time. Wow. What was that like for you?
And now you’re having a real follow-up conversation immediately after the show and it just naturally leads into other stuff and they say, so is this what you do full-time? Oh no, I. This is something that I do because I love it. I love serving my community. I like sharing the stories of people who are doing important work, and also it gives me a chance to meet people like you.
And sometimes we find there’s opportunities for us to do business together, but sometimes there isn’t. This is why I do it. Love it.
[00:45:32] Mike Allton: Love it. Thank you so much. This has been You are welcome. Phenomenal. I want definitely for you to share where people can find you, where they can learn more about you and take this conversation even deeper if they want to with you. [00:45:44] Adrian McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I said earlier, I’m not the right fit for everybody, so you know, please, if what you’re looking for is to grow a large audience, then you should find a podcast marketing consultant who will do that for most b2. Professionals, that’s not necessary, but there’s a lot of nuance to what we do.
So what I recommend for everybody is if you’re intrigued by what we talked about, start a conversation with me. And the best place to do that is the podcast advisor.com. Go to the podcast advisor.com. There’s a chance to schedule a call and we’ll just have a convers. I’m not trying to sell peoples stuff in those calls.
I need to find out a little bit about what you’re thinking about what your company does and about how this might work, and I’ll make some recommendations for you as to what is the best fit for you. There’s really no one size fits all answer, so I can’t put this into a simple P D F for you to download, but I’d be more than happy to chat with you for a few minutes and you can do that at the podcast advisor.
[00:46:44] Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you so much. For everyone listening, we’ll have that link in the show notes. Just scroll down. You’ll find it right there, and you can tap on it. That’s all we’ve got for today. Friends, don’t forget to find the partnership unpacked podcast on Apple and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think.
Until next time,
thank you for listening to another episode of Partnership. Unpack. Hosted by Mike Alton and powered by I Agora Pulse, the number one rated social media management solution, which you can learn more [email protected]. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Be sure to leave us a review.
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