If you put all the effort into creating, setting up, running and marketing a podcast, you’ve succeeded in building an audience. Well done! If you’re running an ecommerce business, your podcast’s success is a feather in your cap. But now you’re sitting with two brands. A podcast and an ecommerce website. What’s the point if one does not feed the other?
Enter circular marketing, a system that feeds itself. There is no other way to create a sustainable business where your efforts in one area sustain your livelihood in another.
Homing pigeons
There’s a reason why most websites call their primary landing page their ‘home’ page. It’s like an airport’s landing strip where everything arrives, departs from and always returns to. That’s where you distribute content, send people shopping, and talk about your customer service. That’s also the page where you should market your podcast. Although it makes sense to have a dedicated podcast page where you list all your episodes and related blogs, there should also be a click-through on your website’s ‘home’ page to your podcasts.
So you should ask yourself how your website can drive traffic to your podcast first. How can you create excitement about your podcast on your homepage? And how can you then drive traffic from your podcast back to your website?
Connecting the dots and customer journeys
Customer journeys are much more than the process your clients go through when they want to buy your product. It’s everything concerning your brand. From the moment people become aware of your existence on social media to the podcast they listen to and the blog they read. Everything forms part of the road you walk together. Let’s look at an example.
Say you run a gardening ecommerce business. You have a podcast once a week, talking about everything gardening. Industry experts share their knowledge about planting seasons, hybrid plants, organic gardening and the like. In a nutshell, insights gardeners would battle to get somewhere else. In the podcast, you mention pruning and talk about pruning techniques. You’d agree that it’s difficult to explain exactly where to prune a plant or a tree without showing it. That’s where your blog comes in. You refer to your blog page and tell people where they can find detailed pruning notes, videos and other information in your podcast. Anybody serious about pruning will go there and follow your instructions.
Give it away
If you want to hit a double whammy, you’ll mention in your podcast that some pruning tools are better than others and tell gardeners how to discern between them. Lead listeners to a dedicated blog post about pruning secateurs and scissors. You might want to throw in a giveaway or promotion that listeners can enter when visiting your blog. By chance, you sell the same tools and offer readers of your blog posts a special discount. If they’ve listened to the podcast, read the blog and clicked through to the product, it makes sense to reward them with an extra giveaway or discount.
Databox published an insightful blog post about using show notes, SEO, and quotes from your podcast in your blogs and other topics that will help you set up the circular flow between your different marketing tools.
Another blog post by Wistia suggests that you host your podcast on your website to create owned subscribers. That might be an option if you don’t want to list on various podcast platforms. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
The crescendo of all your efforts is a dedicated audience that buys your products and stays loyal to your brand. Talking about buying. A no-nonsense payments provider like Truevo can help you convert all your efforts into sales. Drop us a mail, we can’t wait to bring home the bacon with you.
