How to Use a Podcast to Fill Your Programs with Katie Krimitsos of Biz Women Rock
Episode 167: Show Notes
Today on the show we have the amazing Katie Krimitsos! Katie is the founder of Biz Women Rock, which is a community and education provider for women entrepreneurs around the world, a.k.a, everyone listening. She is so helpful and an absolute open book on how she has found success in her corner of the world. Inside this episode, Katie shares a ton of incredible strategies. Not only are we talking about how to use a podcast to fill your programs, but really how to promote your podcast in order to get the most traction out of it.
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Now, if you’re not a podcaster, don’t you worry! All of these tactics and strategies can really be interchanged with things like Facebook lives, Instagram posts, email market strategies and growing a Facebook community. So listen up! We have a lot of super specific strategies you can try right away to start selling more, more often. At the end of the show, we also talk about how you can join Katie’s Private Mastermind Community, so if masterminding is something you might have on your horizon, be sure to get inside her group!
Is a Podcast Worth it for Your Business?
Katie has been podcasting for almost four years and even after these four years, she still gets people reaching out to her based on the topics and guests specifically from her podcast. Now it absolutely is NOT something that is as easy to track as conversions or sales stats. So instead, Katie approaches it as a marketing and branding strategy where she is simultaneously doing her best to be specific about how she is making calls to action so she can try to see the flow of how people are engaging and knowing that it’s still hugely vague as well. One of the main ways Katie keeps track of her stats is how things are being shared and talked about on social media. There are a couple of different platforms where her podcast is linked to, so she is constantly making sure that all the platforms are engaging with each other in order to better track how it is received and shared.
Converting Podcast Listeners to Paying Clients
When it comes to getting listeners to buy into your programs, Katie is constantly experimenting. As far as structure goes, typically Katie will have an ad in the front-end of the episode about the program she currently has going on. Generally speaking, if she can organically talk about the program during the podcast, she will also talk about it there. This is a great, flow-y way to be able to shed some light on that particular program. Then at the end, Katie always does a call to action to her private Facebook group to join the program. Her private Facebook page is a safe space for her community to come together with other women entrepreneurs where they can really be part of the listening community. The Biz Women Rock group was started right after Katie started the podcast, so it has grown together with the show.
Creating Engagement For Your Podcast
Often times inciting engagement about your podcast episodes can be tough. Katie uses several strategies and the first is that she constantly tries to change up the look of the actual post within her Facebook community. Sometimes she creates a link to the actual show notes page, which will automatically bring up a different graphic than if she was using the original graphic. Other times she will just create a whole new graphic, do a Facebook Live session or pre-recorded video about the episode with the link added. She also sometimes grabs the direct episode link from Libsyn, again, always switching up how it looks. Quite often Katie will link back her show notes to previous conversations that they have had inside the group and even tag people who were part of the conversations. The beauty of this is that it forces those members into the conversation and makes them feel important in a group of 5,000 or 17,000 other people and it’s exactly the content they needed to know, totally wired in with the conversation.
Putting Out a Consistent Brand Message
In the space of working with women entrepreneurs, it’s important to keep putting your message out everywhere. The chances of these women getting interrupted in the middle of a reading your blog post of listening to a podcast episode are so high that having a constant message in more place than one is key. This comes back to having your podcast work as a branding strategy, consistently putting out your brand message. A great way to track how each is working is to put specific links and ask for feedback from your community, and really drilling down into where they heard about a program, what worked great about your messaging and whether or not the information provided was consistent across all channels. Keep in mind, there is no one, easy answer for how to gather data on this; it comes down to understanding your audience, and aiming for that consistency within your brand messaging wherever you put your content.
Cross-Promoting Your Podcast Through Email
Every time a new episode of Katie’s podcast is released, she sends out an email to her list of subscribers. A good thing to keep in mind when creating this email is that people ingest content in different ways at different times. Now, here’s the trick — her email does NOT look like a podcast. The email basically has the title of the podcast episode, using it as a headline to attract her readers to open their emails or click on the link. Then on top, she puts a screenshot of the podcast player, which is also linked to the show notes page. Finally, she adds in the copy of the show notes and whatever call to action the episode has for the promo she’s got going on. There are also a few other links to the actual show notes throughout the entire email so subscribers can either read the whole thing inside the email or click through to the episode. Again, the key is that it doesn’t look like a newsletter but rather that it looks like a content email.
Social Promotion of Your Podcast
When promoting her podcast episodes through social media and other platforms, Katie posts everywhere! She posts on her business Facebook page, on LinkedIn, and on Twitter even though she does not enjoy being on Twitter, personally. When it comes to her personal Facebook profile, she really doesn’t post there often because she is very aware that it is personal, not business, and the same is true for Instagram. As a general rule, once every four episodes she will share a personal story behind it. Now as far as requiring your guests to share, Katie feels like she personally shares things more often when it’s out of her own free will and not because she is required to do so. Therefore, she takes the same approach with her own guests and audience members as well.
Creative Podcast Promotion Strategies
Some of the more “creative” promotion strategies Katie uses are off the beaten track and a little outside the box. For those providing coaching services or any sort of one-on-one strategy or consulting services, one of the things Katie implemented was to start a live coaching series. She strategically posts on all her platforms, giving her listeners a chance to be featured on the podcast and get a free 25-minute strategy session. Those live sessions then go on the podcast as a live coaching session, which builds a pipeline for people who want to work with her. It gives her content for the podcast and the audience members can identify with the problems that these sessions solve. Another thing she does is any time there is a new program, Katie will crowdsource answers of questions that have to do with the particular episode or series for the podcast. She then tags these ladies, who loved being featured on the podcast and absolutely shared it everywhere. This is what Katie calls “full circle marketing”.
Quote This
I feel like my job is to continually share my message and when it resonates, it’s going to resonate.
—Katie Krimitsos
Highlights
Learning to use your podcast as a marketing and branding strategy. [0:05:06.1]
How to convert audience members into paying customers through the community. [0:09:20.1]
Strategies for creating engagement amongst your community about your podcast. [0:12:26.1]
Using your podcast and other platforms to create a consistent brand message. [0:18:58.1]
Cross-promoting your podcast episodes to your email subscribers. [0:24:03.1]
Social media promotion strategies for getting your podcast out into the world. [0:28:55.1]
Creative strategies for using your podcast to promote a program. [0:31:20.1]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:41:45.6]
Highlight people who have already bought from you, in creative ways that are authentic.
Insert more calls to action in most of the content that you put out there.
Be clear about and educate people on what you are actually offering or selling.
The Whisper Campaign: be willing to show up in a non-automated way with a totally authentic purpose of helping people one-on-one.
Tell your story.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Katie Krimitsos
Biz Women Rock
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Katie Krimitsos is the Founder of Biz Women Rock, a community and education provider for women entrepreneurs around the world who want to leverage their businesses as a vehicle to live a life they love. She is a business coach and growth strategist that provides virtual and live education to help purpose-driven and action-taking women so they can get the tools they need to fulfill their business dreams! Her podcast Biz Women Rock provides personal business interviews, pertinent topics and actionable information that help her community thrive in their businesses. She is a lover of travel, animals (she has a pet parrot, Sammy!), the water and is amazingly in love with her daughter, Sedona, and her husband, Chris.
KEY TOPICS
Branding strategy, Converting listeners to customers, Podcast engagement, Consistent brand messaging, Cross-promotion, Social media promotion, Promoting your programs through your podcast.
