Episode Transcript
Monica Pitts 0:00
So hello again. And welcome back to marketing with purpose. We are coming to you today with a guest. And we're going to interview him about podcasting because he's a podcasting expert. And I know that we've had a couple episodes on podcasting before, but they're just coming from me, me hanging out over here behind the microphone. I don't do it for other people. I just do it for myself. But Khalil Our guests today, with banali, he actually has a new business that helps people start up their podcasts and actually helps run them for them. So Khalil, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your company to kick us off.
Khalil 0:46
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Monica. It's a pleasure to be here. We had you on our podcast, the cashflow contractor just a couple of weeks ago, and it was actually a great episode. We've heard a lot of good feedback from it. So thanks for having me on. And thanks for being a part of our show. Yeah, demand cast, we're talking about podcasts. I've been a part of gosh, I think I've been on over 300 episodes of podcasts, variety of podcasts at this point. And I think it's one of the best mediums to be able to create content, I think. I mean, if you understand content and the value of it, that it lives on that it grows without you, then podcast really falls into that. In such an easy format. I think not many people are great writers. But most people can speak especially if you're a small business owner, maybe the president of an association, you are talking for a living most times you having to lead people go into conversations. And so rather than limit your audience to whoever's in front of you at a given time, what if you can open that audience up to whoever wants to listen, whatever they want to listen, that's kind of the idea of a podcast and so excited to talk more about that today.
Monica Pitts 1:55
I love that you say that podcasting goes on for a long time. Like we've been running our podcasts, and it's 2019. And last year, I just looked over the data and we have like a 27% growth, and listens and downloads. And I really, I went back to all those spikes because I'm a complete geek. And I was like what episodes did it and what was crazy is it wasn't just one episode, friends, it was like, This day, somehow, lots of people found us. And it was like one listen on like a good jillion episodes, right? So I always say it's more like a marathon, not a sprint. So tell people kind of like, when they're thinking about getting into podcasting, what does that look like for them? Is it going to be like cool, bang all kinds of attention? Or is it more of like a slower roll?
Khalil Benalioulhaj 2:46
Definitely slower roll. I think the most important thing to understand about a podcast is that you are not going to be the next Joe Rogan, you're not going to be the next favorite podcast that you listen to most small businesses, associations, anybody that's starting a podcast, unless you're doing it for entertainment, entertainment purposes, you're not going to go viral. And you shouldn't be trying to go viral, you should be looking at one target audience, who are you trying to speak to? And what's a valuable conversation that matters to them that we can have on our show? What's a question they have? What's a problem they have? What's an obstacle they're running up against? Let's talk about those things. Because that's a valuable conversation to our target audience. And in our target audience may be really small. And that's okay, maybe we only get 50 listens a month, that's fine if it's the right 50 people. So that's the first thing that you have to get your head out of thinking, Man, I want 10,000 downloads per episode. That's a very hard feat to get. And I'm not saying you can't get there, but you're not going to hit it day one, unless you're an entertainment based podcast, because that's what tends to go viral. The things that are entertaining, provocative, have huge guests that are really well known. That's what's going to get a huge show. So really, we're talking about conversations that matter for your target audience. So in order to get started, there's a lot of barriers that people think in their mind that really aren't. At the end of the day, I would focus on the quality of content above everything, more than the quality of the way your video looks may weigh more than the quality of your audio. Focus on the quality of your content. That's the most important thing. That's what keeps people listening. With your quality of video, audio, whatever you're doing, you know, it doesn't matter. You don't need to be in a wind tunnel recording audio. No one wants to listen to that. But you don't have to spend $500 on a microphone. You can very easily even record just with good quality headphones. You know, typically the best low cost microphone you can find is the one that's on the string of the headphones. You likely already have some of those laying around, and it'll suffice as long as it's not just rubbing up against your shirt right for your video. Most webcams are fine But you may upgrade your webcam a little bit to make sure you have a better quality. And if you want to go into high end production, then find someone who understands that. And don't do it yourself because you're going to end up spending more money on bad equipment purchases and having to find new equipment. And the time you waste doing that, than just finding the expert who knows how to do it. I personally I'm using a Shure I think it's seven, something like that. It was about 200 bucks. And I'm using an opal see one that was about 250 bucks. That's my audio and my webcam. I think I look good enough. Right. So those are, those are some easy purchases for you. I think it's m v seven is the name of it.
Monica Pitts 5:43
And the end right there. That's your microphone, right? Yes,
Khalil Benalioulhaj 5:47
correct. And Opal, see, one is my camera, you can go way higher, and then what I'm using, but those are just easy ones. And I've done over 300 episodes and had no quality issues. So also another misconception that people have is that you have to be in person. And right now Monique and I are not in the same place. We are miles and miles apart. And that's kind of the standard right now for a lot of podcasts, especially niche podcasts that are very industry specific. You're not inviting people to a studio to come to the show. A lot of times there's just more headache and that of coordinating location coordinating times, the editing and the really, it's the production process of gathering that you have to have way better equipment to be able to not pick up Monica in the same room as me whenever I'm speaking to my mic, and she's in her mic, but we're only five feet across from each other. There's just a lot more involved. But when you're remote, there's great tools. There's so many out there. popular ones, we use squad cast personally, but you also have Zen caster and Riverside, as well as a number of plugins that go directly into zoom that work fantastically. So it's not an issue, you can find a really good tool, probably even free, but as little as like $15 a month to be able to do that. So that's kind of the setup process. More so it's about just getting reps. And I'd say the more challenge is on that quality side of the content of feeling comfortable having these conversations on a recorded format. And it's not that hard. But you just need to get a couple of reps under your belt.
Monica Pitts 7:22
Yeah, definitely. Because everybody's gonna start where they are. And there's no, there's no shame in that there's no shame in you using your, you know, headphones, you're perfectly calm. I'm pulling a blank. Now, my little iPhone, headphones, I've had a number of guests that, like use that for their audio and they sound great. Even back in the day they had, like you just said they had them like plugged into their ears and they were plugged into the phone. And it was it was great. And so I don't think that you should let the technology stop you from starting your podcast it you start where you are, and people do not expect you to be producing a high end like today's show. That's not what they expect from you. And if they do, then, Oh, heavens, maybe you find out the wrong audience. So one thing you mentioned was problem solving. And you said, you know, can I solve a problem for my audience through my podcast. And I think that one problem that our listeners face, because we do have a lot of construction companies that are bigger, we have a lot of nonprofits as well, is just communicating with their constituents, not so much always an outward facing podcast, like something that you're trying to get more business with, or get more donations with, though some of our nonprofits are definitely trying to do that with their podcasts, but also just educating the people that you already know. Can you talk a little bit about how someone might use a podcast to solve the problem of like, maybe into and really communicating within their company to help improve culture or, you know, connecting with their donors regularly to make sure that they know what's going on? Or, you know, an association might be bringing things like legislation that's coming up this year to the forefront for their members to let them know that they're working. Can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely.
Khalil Benalioulhaj 9:14
So we've worked with several different types of companies that are running podcasts. And I'll go through a couple of examples. One of them is for a, it's the AEDPA. It's through the president of the AEDPA, which is the experiential design designers and producers Association, which is really for trade shows. Chris Griffin is the president of the AEDPA. And he has his own podcast and it's a great opportunity for him to not only promote his company through the podcast and what they do, but really to promote the edpa and show the value of it and so he regularly has members of the AEDPA on the podcast to not only talk about what they do, but to talk about the value of the AEDPA so becomes a really great marketing resource for their Um, for their association. The other thing is the legislative side, they've were huge trade show, you can imagine the tradeshow industry was really affected by COVID. And I mean, nobody was going to trade shows. And so it was huge for them to get some legislative action in place. So that they could get help with, you know, not laying off everybody and getting more financing to help through the the pandemic, around a number of other issues as well. But for, for the AEDPA, they, they covered a ton of the legislative topics on the podcast in detail with experts that were out there lobbying every single day on on in DC. And they were able to get all of the really important information about the legislative acts into an audio and video format that was much more digestible than reading, PDFs, and all sorts of information about the legislative actions. And then they were able to get them even into clips. So they're just talking, you know, there's probably 12 items they're talking about inside of it, well, maybe only one of those items mattered to the target audience. And so they were able to get a clip of each of the 12 items, so that if I'm wanting to learn more about it, I don't have to listen for an hour and a half, about the legislative action, I can just listen to the 10 minute clip of that one part that was really pertinent to me. And then that can be promoted out on social media or sent a newsletter, etc, etc. They're still running today, experienced builders is their podcast, and they're doing a great job. But that's one way they've used it on the legislative side. We also have someone that does a quarterly, they do more than they have several different types of episodes, but one type of their episode is a quarterly update. And it's really, you know, they have several subcontractors that are a part of their company more or less, they really their subcontractors only work for this company, because they have so much work for them. And so they've really got a lot of people that listen that are really just internal for the most part. And on their podcast, they do a quarterly update, where they talk about some of the biggest things they've accomplished in the last quarter. They even recognize some of their subcontractors or their employees in those podcasts. But then they also talk about where things are going, what's what's coming up in the next quarter, what they're looking forward to what they're watching out for challenges that they may face new processes that they have to implement. And they talk about those things as a way to lift up their industry and show Hey, we're we're being the example here. But also as a way to update all their subcontractors through a really easy medium, they don't have to call an all hands meeting every quarter, and hope that people show up. It's a recorded format that can be clipped out where there's very specific topics that are covered, and I can listen to five minutes and get the topic or I can listen to the whole thing. So those are a couple of different media ways of using the medium of podcast to get out to people that are more internal, either inside your association or inside your company.
Monica Pitts 12:50
I like the idea of using it almost like a newsletter, I think, no, no. Well, I'm an audio learner. So that's how I intake information. And it's funny because I have a nine year old who is the exact same way. And she never shuts up, like ever. And as she's doing even her math homework, she has to say every number out loud. And I'm like, Oh my gosh. She's like, Mom, the numbers don't even make sense until I say I'm out loud. And I'm like, Yeah, that's way to be audio, girlfriend way to be out of Yo, can you go in the other room for a second and be audio in there?
Khalil Benalioulhaj 13:29
Well, it's funny that you mentioned, it's kind of like a newsletter, I kind of want to back up and just talk about content. Because you know, maybe there's contractors out there that aren't doing content, we work with a lot of construction companies, and they are failing to do content oftentimes. But even associations and other small businesses may be struggling to get content out, meaning they're not really good at putting their newsletter out consistently. Or they don't even have a newsletter, they don't have any articles on their website. They're not really educating people through content. They're just doing it through one to one conversations, they have to schedule a meeting to get information across. And the challenge with content is that usually there's maybe like a president of an association, for example, who has really the knowledge to be able to educate people to update people with content, but they're limited. They're just one person, they can't write a newsletter and an article and go to the meeting and do all these things on top of their already busy schedule. What's great about having a video podcast is that you are basically multiplying yourself, if you can do a video podcast of yourself and then take that you don't have to take it let's say you're the president of association, you do the podcast. That's it, you spent an hour recording it step away. somebody on the team now can use the exact words the exact knowledge of that President to put the product podcasts out on YouTube and on Spotify and on Apple, but then make clear So now that we have, we have these five minute clips that can go out on our YouTube channel, as well as our Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram. And then also, they can take the transcript from that podcast, and somebody can then listen to it, and make it into a newsletter that's written format, they can make it into an article that goes on the website, they can make it into a ebook guide that we send to people as a PDF. That is kind of the standard for training people on how to think about this topic, right. And so just by doing that one hour podcast recording, not only do you have a podcast now, but you've now created a content strategy for your team for your company to be able to get content, all the different mediums on all the different channels for your target audience. And so that's one really big reason why I love it is because you can get the expert to multiply themselves really easily. You
Monica Pitts 15:51
can use it for training to internally, we actually just had a conversation the other day, we're trying to really nail down how we want to talk about the three different ways that we build websites, and Stacey talks about it every day, I talk about it less often. And I was like Stacy, I need to get better. Like we need to like go back to the like note cards are going to trade shows here in a couple of weeks, I need to get this down. So I'm good at talking about this. I'm not afraid to say I suck at something. And she was like, You know what, I'm just gonna record myself talking about it. And then we can listen to it. And we can digest it and make it into something that is, you know, easy for you to use. And to like, when we have ran like there's a local year and giving campaign called como Gibbs. And we, for the longest time, did all the training for the nonprofits to get them ready to go for their urine giving campaign like, here's all the stuff you need to get done here. Here's how you need to think about it. And we offered it both in video training and an audio training. And the audio training was just a podcast. It's literally just a podcast, it's uploaded it into our podcast hosting space, and you can just play every single episode. But then they had the opportunity to learn it. However, best fit their schedules, right i so I love that I love that they can the the president can multiply themselves it can power their content strategy, but also you can use it in other ways too, in your business to help it you know, solidify and come together. So that brings me to another thought though. All right, so you're like this President is just gonna sit down and do like this one hour podcast, you need sound like it's gonna be so fast. Sure. So what type of time investment are people looking at when they decide to add like, let's say one episode? What type of time investment are they looking at with that?
Khalil Benalioulhaj 17:51
Depends on what level you're at. If you've hired a service to kind of help you do the editing, do a lot of the post production, you can really limit it to, you know, per episode, anywhere from one to three hours depending on how much strategy you want to put into it. If there's a guest involved, how much you know how long the episode is, you can really get it down to one or three hours per episode of your actual required required time. If you're going to be doing all of the editing all the post production, it can take as much as 25 to 30 hours per episode, depending on what exactly you're doing. Are you mixing and mastering? Are you getting really high quality audio of four guests on one call with transitions between speakers, and then getting for each, you know, for an hour episode, then turning that into 10 different clips that are five minutes long, as well as you know, snippets that are for tick tock where you're getting maybe 20 of those where you're getting really good quotable moments. And then are you also gonna have advertising spots that are mixed inside of that video, where there's got to be even more thought put into the editing and the timing of the ads and all that stuff. So it just depends on how big you want to blow it up. But I've seen there's one person I've seen that does it in, he records, his episodes are 40 minutes, because he uses the 40 minute limit on Zoom for his recording, because he doesn't pay for zoom. And while you're on it, he does his ad reads his intro his outro. And he literally just takes no editing, grabs it publishes it. And so it's 40 minutes per episode for him, maybe maybe, maybe an hour 20 minutes to download it and publish it. But that's that's all he does. And he's got a successful show. He's he's got a software company that caters to construction companies and he does really well. So you can do it like that. But you just have to understand who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. That was his goal. That's what he does. I think more realistically though, if you are going to hire a podcast service company, one to three hours per episode.
Monica Pitts 19:56
Well then you this guy that you were just talking about who can yeah Do it on his own. It sounds like he might be a solo. Yes, human like he's not inviting guests on. When he has
Khalil Benalioulhaj 20:09
an admin. That's it. Sorry, he does have guests. Yeah, so he scheduled it. So there's, there's a little bit more if we're talking about the administrative side of the podcast, and scheduling and all that stuff. It's really what you make it. This guy's really good at sales. He's always networking. And so for him, he can just say, hey, we'd love to have you on my show. And maybe he sends out 20 of those a week. And maybe he gets three replies back. Yes, you know, but he's recording at least twice a week.
Monica Pitts 20:39
But the response rate for people being on your show is actually really high. Like for me, I feel like I don't have a lot of problems with, like having people turn me down to be on my show. Now, if I want to be on someone else's show, that takes a little bit more work. But yeah, tell me a few tips about guests. Because I think a lot of people have the intention of having guests on their podcast. And they, you know, yes, sir. Sometimes like, it's like having people over to your house. Sometimes they're amazing. And sometimes you they leave and there's half drink sodas all over the house. And you're like, How did this even happen? And where did the sodas even come from? You know?
Khalil Benalioulhaj 21:17
Yeah, you definitely, I always encourage people to start out with people that they love talking to, maybe it's a really good client, maybe it's someone internal on your team that's really great at you know, they're always giving presentations, or lunch and learns at different companies. Salespeople are great talkers, usually, and have those cues of like, I'm talking too much, or I'm not talking to enough from, I didn't really make a point there, right. So you want to make sure that you're your first few guests or someone you're comfortable with. I also don't recommend you going and finding your All Star guests that dream guests and having them be your first or second interview. Because it's challenging to interview someone without, you know, any, any practice. So unless you're really good at doing interviews that are recorded, get some some reps underneath your belt first. But for the most part, here's how I think about guests. It all starts with your audience. Make sure that you know your audience and think about who they want to be on. Think if it makes sense for them. And then what is the value that they're really going to bring? What are the things that they're going to talk about that are going to make my guests go? Ooh, that's interesting, right? With that being said, your audience typically likes to see, you know, one of three kinds of people, people that have been there, done that, so that are already in their shoes. So you know, let's say I am a small business owner that owns a framing company, maybe you bring on the largest framer in the southwest, who's grown to, you know, over 200 million in revenue or something like that. Wow, if I'm a framer, I want to hear this guy talk, right or girl talk. So Been there done that. The next one is really that expert advisor role. So maybe they haven't been there, done that. But they've, you know, let's say maybe they're, you're still that framer. And this is a subcontractor attorney who's worked with over 500 subcontractors on their contracts. And they're an end litigation. Man, I zero idea about legal. And I should probably know a little bit because I feel like I could get, you know, really hurt in the future. Because this, that's probably a good one, because it's specific to me, but it's also really good advisor. The last one is someone who hasn't been there yet. But as in is on the journey, that's really helpful, as well. So maybe you're an association and someone just became a member. You know, we did a podcast at at once for someone who had just become a part of a teacher's union in Massachusetts. And they the reason they joined was because they got into an issue at their local school. And it was with a parent, and it had a student, they were not in the wrong, but they didn't have any legal cover. And they decided to join the union. And the union ended up representing them in court. And so they basically told that story of man, I didn't know what I was doing. Now, I'm a member of this. And now I got access to the litigation. But I also had resources. And it actually helped me in my lesson planning as a teacher, and there were so many benefits they were seeing live. Maybe it's the construction company that's just getting started out. And they're basically getting a consult live on the podcast from an expert from your company. Right? Those are the those are the three types of episodes that do really well. There's other types of episodes you can do where maybe it's a customer testimonial, where you're talking about their their experience working with you. But those are some really good formats that can be helpful for your content strategy. I will say one thing that we haven't talked about is podcasts as a sales tool. A lot of contractors especially On the commercial side, it's very hard to build relationships with the key decision makers. And so maybe your podcast is about. You're a construction company, and you work with commercial GCS. And you're trying to get more opportunities to bid and you want to build relationships with GCS. Maybe your podcast is about General, General Contractors, and how they achieved success or something along those lines, go and target those general contractors ask them to be on your show. And let that be a way of opening up a door for you to now have a relationship with that GC. Right. So those are some some examples of episode types you can have and also how to use it as a sales tool.
Monica Pitts 25:42
I love it. I especially love the journey example. Because especially if, if your product or service is a personal transformation for people, a lot of the times people, they want to get all the way to the other side. But that feels like insurmountable. And so if you can show them people along the way along the steps and the phases of the journey, then you can build hope for them. And they end benchmarks that are realistic, and they can really see themselves in those people's shoes. So it's a pretty powerful thing. Because a lot of people are like, I want to start a business, I want to start a podcast, right? That's why they're listening today. Because they're thinking I might want to start a podcast, but they're talking to two people who've released you know, hundreds of episodes. So that's different than if you listened to our episodes, you know, episode number 20. Go back and listen to that one. Because, you know, everybody starts where they are. And
Khalil Benalioulhaj 26:37
yeah, so you're gonna get better over time. Okay, so
Monica Pitts 26:42
my last topic that I kind of wanted to cover today was ROI. Because I this is tricky, because it's not, it's not a sprint, right? You already said that. It's more like a marathon. It's like a slow roll. So I feel like some of the people that start their podcasts are gonna get, you know, hundreds of downloads and other people. Maybe the 20 is awesome, like, so tell us about how you can gauge your return on investment. And maybe even like, when it's okay to walk away, like what, you know, start with gauging. And then I'll ask you, when you walk away, how does that sound? Very go?
Khalil Benalioulhaj 27:24
Well, I think for the most part, like I said, you're not going to go viral with your niche, industry specific podcast, it's just it's most likely not going to happen. There's not a lot of those out there that are viral. You in terms of you know, gauging your success. It's not like Google ads, where you have a pay per click, and you know exactly how many impressions you're gonna get. And you can calculate that it's not to that level, you're going to be able to get some analytics in terms of listens, and maybe shares depending on which channel you're monitoring the analytics on, when they dropped out of the podcast, those kinds of things. But the real value isn't in how many listens, you get. I always tell people to measure their success in podcasting by how many times people bring it up to them. Right? You are the president of the association, how many members have said Oh, I love that episode with so and so. Right? You can see some of that on like social media, for example, you can see if people are commenting on it or sharing links to it or reposting that can kind of be a good gauge for you as well to show like, oh, people thought that this conversation mattered. And they're finding value in it. But if people are finding value in it, you're going to end up winning long term. Let me just give you an example. There's this, you know, if you if you're interested in gauging ROI of not just podcast, but even social media, you need to understand dark social, I believe Chris Walker is really the the guy that under came up with this idea of dark social, but the reality is that you go into your HubSpot CRM or your Salesforce CRM or whatever Account Based Marketing Software you might be using, and a majority of your leads or opportunities meetings booked whatever your metric is, are going to be coming from Google search or paid Google. And there's a reason for that. Because if you think about your buyers journey, how you buy products, how you, you know, try to look into software, how you try to look into podcasting service, whatever it is, maybe you saw an a post on Instagram, there's a little clip on there that you watched. And you said, Oh, that's really cool. And then two weeks later, you saw another one from the same person. Oh, wow, that's really cool. Maybe I should search that. And so then you go, and you open up Safari on your iPhone or Chrome on your Android, and then you search it. What was the name of that? Okay, let me let me search it. And then it gets attributed to Google. But the reality is that Google was not the original source of you finding that tool, service product, whatever it is, it's just that, you end up going to Google to make your decision based actions, I now want to check that out and actually buy it. So now I go and I search it. It's either again at Google or there is an ad for it. So you click on that. And now your CRM is at attributing that to Google reality as it's based upon that podcast that you did, or that social posts that you put out. So don't think that you're going to have really clear cut analytics, think about how many times people are mentioning it, what the engagements like in terms of comments, shares, likes. And then if you'll you'll have a just kind of a gut feeling, though, of like, oh, wow, someone brought up the podcast, again, someone brought up the podcast again. And then it's going to grow. The other thing I will say about the value of apart podcast is that it's not just about clicking Record, it's about clicking publish. And what I mean by that is, it's not, if you build it, they will come that Field of Dreams line. Like people think about that with content in general. And it's not about just building it, you have to go and promote it. And when I went for a podcast, it's not just enough to get it up on Apple podcasts and Spotify and YouTube. That's not enough. You have to go and promote it, go on social, share it, get it into your newsletter, maybe even run ads to it. But get it out in front of people first for them to find it. Make sure that they are very aware that you publish a podcast and it's not just that, oh, you put it inside of Apple podcasts, and it's there to live. You've got to go and promote it. That's how you're really gonna get ROI from it. And, yeah, that's how I would measure it. Yeah,
Monica Pitts 31:35
I bet. I like the example to that you do have to promote it. Because when I look at our own podcast analytics, I see that most of our listeners, like 90 something percent, listen on Chrome. And it's because the way they find out that we have an episode is that I email them. And then I take them to my website. I have links to the mult, like multiple networks that it's on, but they click on the link, they go to the website, and they just press play there. Right? So they're listening to it out on Chrome, not in like iTunes, which kind of sucks because like, Yeah, I'd like I'd like it to happen out there too. But, but I'll take what I can get. And I do like what you said too, about the feedback, because I definitely, that's one of the way I gauge if an episode was good or not, it's a really good episode, somebody is going to email me back about it. Absolutely. And it's like three people email me back that that's doing pretty darn good. It's like a really low energy, but it took time out of their day. And they did it. So
Khalil Benalioulhaj 32:38
yeah, don't go for viral, if you're having the right kinds of conversations, hearing from one or two people is more than enough. Right. And that's the other thing I was gonna say in terms of your analytics that you mentioned earlier is that you may, you know, see huge spikes, but it's not because of a certain episode, they're listening to 10 episodes, and that's going to happen. And the reality of of podcasts is you'll get people to binge just like you get onto Netflix, and you watch that show, and then you finish it in two days, they're gonna end up binging your content that matters to them. And the way that they're finding your podcast could be from a podcast search, but most likely, it's because you promoted it. And so I would venture to say that whenever you're looking at your analytics, and you're seeing a spike in your listens, don't actually look at what episode was there, go and look at your social calendar and your email newsletter and see which newsletter do we put out? Which social posts did we make? Because that's like the source of the spike in traffic.
Monica Pitts 33:29
That it's funny that you mentioned that because like, one of my email list subscribers just emailed me and was like, Oh, my gosh, I just listened to like, a whole bunch of your episodes, because I was cleaning my house for you know, like, deep cleaning. And I just wanted to like follow up with you and ask you about that work travel trip you guys did in Costa Rica, like, like, was it? Are you going to do it again, and I'm like, Thank you for emailing. That's awesome. I like it makes you feel good when people respond. So friends, if you are listening to something and you really like it, go ahead and email that creator because there's nothing that will make their day faster than getting feedback about something that they've made. Okay, so I did ask, I told you that I was going to ask you when to walk away? Because I think that's the tricky thing about any marketing venture is you start in on it, you have to do it for a while. It's not just going to you don't see immediate results. You got to do it for a little while. And you have to allow yourself to grow. You know, you're starting where you are. But then when does it make sense to say, maybe we don't do this anymore?
Khalil Benalioulhaj 34:36
Yeah. No, great question. I think for me personally, there's a variety of reasons you can have a necessary ending in life and in podcasts necessarily. Endings is a great book by Dr. Henry Cloud, highly recommended, especially if you're in business, because there's things that you have to say no to a lot of times we can feel like a quitter, and that's against our philosophy and it goes against our character but the reality is that there's Just seasons in life where we end things, just like we can't grow tomatoes and Alaska in December. That's a natural thing, right? You, you have natural times in your life when you're supposed to be in school. And when you're supposed to be executing, there's times when you're supposed to be, you know, really investing in your life and your personal side and times in your investing in your career. So what's the necessary ending for a podcast? I think the most natural necessary ending is when your target audience has either changed, or they're not finding value. That's the biggest one across the board. So man, we set out to start this podcast so that we could grow our target audience of association members. Well, are they actually finding value in it? Or Is anybody from that audience bringing it up to us? are, you know is that still our target audience have a you know, maybe we were focused on specific types of members. And now we're not really on that type of member. And we need to kind of shift directions. Okay, that's a necessary ending, or a pivot to the next part. Maybe the person that was really running the podcast for the most part, and not something that you can outsource, like the editing of the podcast, but like, literally the thought leader on the podcast is leaving, it might make sense to end that podcast, if you don't have somebody who can replace it. Right? I've had both of those situations happen. Actually, it's with the same exact podcast where their target audience changed. They were going after residential cabinet manufacturers, and their target audience changed to go to more direct to home buyer, or home or homeowner, right. And so they changed from cabinet shop to homeowner, the podcast didn't make sense anymore. They were talking about things that cabinet manufacturers cared about. And now they're trying to talk about things that homeowners care about. Just didn't make sense. So they ended, right. I've had it where the host, one of the hosts of the podcast was had now time to retire. Well, do we have someone who can fill their shoes? Not really, okay, let's just end the podcast. So those are the times that makes the most sense for me. If you're not hearing feedback from your target audience, and it's not supporting other content you're doing sometimes you may think, well, no one's listening to the podcast, but all of our blogs, all of our articles, all of our newsletters stem from the podcast, you should still be doing the podcast if people are engaging with those other medium formats, if they're not. Okay, we got to rethink our content strategy altogether. So I hope that's a good enough answer. But it's really revolves around your target audience. Are they finding value? Are they still your target audience? And is it actually working? That's that's an eyebrow out If those things aren't true.
Monica Pitts 37:43
I think that makes perfect sense. Because we started like, our podcast is just marketing with purpose. And then we segmented it into having two podcasts. We had construction marketing with purpose and nonprofit marketing with purpose. And for a while, we covered a whole bunch of really specific topics. And then we just ended up having our topics. They kept diverging, like it kept us overlapping. And I was just publishing the same stuff in each of the podcasts. And then I was like, why am I doing this? Like, this doesn't make sense. And so since everything just seemed like it was really overlapping, we just brought it back in and took out the words in front of the title of the podcast, marketing with purpose, and it and it turned out, okay, like, it wasn't a bad thing. People were fine with it. And the reason that it worked okay to serve both audiences out of the same podcast is because they share the same core values. And a lot of the times they share the same struggles. It's kind of like a win. Win. We've done like, really strong nonprofit initiatives. I've just emailed, I've struggled with it. I was like, Oh, I'm not going to email out my entire email list. That's silly. And then I was like, no, no, no construction companies have the same core values. A lot of them as a nonprofit. They're just running as a business, right. And so they're all about the customer about serving them about making sure that they take care of the families of the people that they employ and doing a great job. And, you know, producing incredible results for people. And nonprofits are doing the same thing. So I email out the list. And I got my construction companies emailing me back, and they were like, this is such an incredible initiative that you're doing right now. Thank you so much for sharing. I'm on the board. If this nonprofit, I want to send it over to the President and I was like, Yeah, okay. See. And so it kind of works in the way that they overlap like that. But I was really surprised at the feedback on it is pretty cool. Okay, so before we close. Now, I know that the tech thing is really challenging for people and you provide a tech solution for people in their podcast, but it's more than a tech solution. It's like a whole organization. solution you're like a, your your product is demand cast. But ultimately it feels to me like you're almost a department of their company that is helping them produce this podcast. Can you just really quickly tell us about it in case people were like, Yeah, this sounds great. And everything, Monica and glial but like a tech bad? No, no.
Khalil Benalioulhaj 40:27
No, I totally get it. So a lot of, you know, we wanted people to be able to have conversations that matter, right. And that there's, that takes a variety of shapes. But really, if you're going to have conversations that matter through a podcast, you got to make sure that you're set up properly, and then that you're organized, and you're able to promote. So that's really what we set out to accomplish. With demand cast, we work on one time at podcast episodes if you want, or we do you know, monthly recurring episodes that we work on, as well as fully managed podcasts. So I'm going to start with a fully managed podcast really quickly, we'll help you get everything set up so that you can run your own show. And then from there, we'll make it to where all you need to do is show up for a little bit of strategy and the actual recording. After that you review any of the work that we've done to make sure that it's up to par with what you want, we find a cadence pretty quickly to where you're comfortable with that. So that's kind of the fully managed side. And then from there, there's people that are really already running a show maybe like yourself, Monica, that really have all this in place, they've done the editing for a while or they've used another company, but they don't feel organized, they feel like they're just getting things last minute, they feel like they don't have the tools, they need to be able to promote their show really easily. That's where we come in and we help them they literally just upload a file for us. There's a little bit of setup at the beginning so that we know what your music is, what your thumbnail is, any graphics that you want. And then from there, we do all the editing, we do all the post production where we get that, you know, 60 minute episode into bite sized chunks that can then be promoted in a newsletter or on social media accounts. And we get it in a really clean delivery deck that's sent over as a PDF with every episode that goes live. So that all you have to do is look at the PDF, say I want to post that clip, click download and upload it to your social media. So that's really what we do at demand cast. We make it simple to have a podcast and yeah, we've been doing it for gosh, a year and a half now got several clients on board on both sides of it just the kind of one time they'll send us over whenever they have a really big guest. They send it over to us. So they have a really nice delivery deck when their guest, the episode goes live, they send it over to the guest, hey, Please promote the show. And it's really easy for that guest to promote it. And then we have some that we're doing the fully managed aspect where every week, we're doing a recording for that, for that show. So yeah, that's us.
Monica Pitts 42:52
The delivery deck part is really important, actually, from my podcast guests. The most compliments I get are that after the podcast goes lives, they they get an email, and it has a graphic and it's easy to share and links to social. And they're like it just made me it's so easy. And I'm like well, yeah, I set it up in the airtable statically sense because I kept forgetting to do it. Oh, yeah, it just you know, things get busy. Well, yeah. Well, if people have questions about your service or about, you know, podcasting in general, how do they get a hold of you?
Khalil Benalioulhaj 43:30
Absolutely. Demand cast.co is our website. And then also you can reach out to me through banali.com or my email Khalil kh a li l at Denali, bu N A li.com.
Monica Pitts 43:44
Thank you so much. Okay, and tell them one more time the name of your podcast. And if you guys really want to hang out with Khalil and I again, you can go over to his podcast and I'll tell you about websites. Yes,
Khalil Benalioulhaj 43:56
absolutely. Perfect surprise there. Right. Yeah. The cashflow contractor. I'm co host with Martin Holland. If you're a construction company, definitely give us a listen. We talk about all things in growing and building your construction empire. So it's a lot of fun. i We're almost up to episode 200 goes live next month. So yeah. Congratulations.
Monica Pitts 44:20
Well, thank you everybody, for hanging out with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, or if you learned a thing or two, then feel free to subscribe. Or also you can head over to May create.com. That's ma y e CR ea t.com and get the show notes. I'll have links to alleles contact information so that you can really easily reach out to him. And you can subscribe to our email newsletter where you can get an email about these episodes every single week because like Khalil said, it's not just about hitting record. It's about hitting publish and so So that's how we'll keep you informed so thank you so much and until next time everybody go forth and mark it with purpose
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
