Inbound Success Podcast

Nov 13, 2017

This week, I'm taking another deep dive into podcasting - this time with Andrew Dymski of DoInbound and GuavaBox.

Andrew is also a co-host of The Agency Journey podcast, a fantastic resource aimed at helping agency owners build and grow their agencies. He and his co-host Gray MacKenzie have been podcasting for some time now and have published over 120 episodes, with lots of lessons to share from that experience.

Listen to the episode here, or read the transcript (below), to learn how Andrew and Gray created and grew their podcast and the impact it has had on their businesses.

Transcript

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, my guest is Andrew Dymski, co-founder of both DoInbound and GuavaBox.

Here’s what Andrew and I discussed on this week’s show:

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and this week I am excited to have as my guest Andrew Dymski. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew Dymski (Guest): Thank you so much for having me here. I'm excited.

Kathleen: Yeah, my pleasure. I would love it if you could tell our guests a little bit about yourself, who are you, what do you do, where did you come from? All that good stuff.

Andrew: Awesome. Well, my name is Andrew Dymski. I'm a co-founder of DoInbound, which his a process and project management platform for marketing agencies. I'm also a co-founder of GuavaBox, which is an inbound marketing agency, and kind of through the DoInbound experience, my business partner Gray and I launched our podcast, which is the Inbound Agency Journey, which we just rebranded to The Agency Journey. So, on those, we just talk about how to grow an agency, talk to different owners, kind of pick their brains on what they did to scale their businesses. So that's a little brief overview of who I am and how I got here, and you know what we're up to right now.

Kathleen: Great, and I've actually been listening to your podcast for a long time, which was one of the reasons why I was excited to have you on. How long have you been doing that podcast, and how many episodes have you produced?

Andrew: Yeah, we are over two years now, and we're 125 episodes in right now.

Kathleen: Wow, that's pretty neat.

Andrew: Yeah, so we're really cranking there. It's been awesome. We're kind of a mix of interviews with agency owners, interviews with consultants on there. And then also just kind of Gray and I coming in and sharing like, you know, where's DoInbound at, what challenges are we facing right now, and how are we approaching these challenges. So, it's kind of a mix of content on there, but it's been a really fun journey, something that we didn't really expect when we launched it that it would get these kind of legs, but we're really grateful that it did, and it's been a fun kind of journey through the community, so to speak.

Kathleen: That's great. So, the podcast is actually what we're going to be talking about. Maybe you could rewind a little bit, and tell us a little bit more about why you started it in the first place, what were your goals for the podcast, how did you get the idea?

Andrew: Yeah. So, back in the day, DoInbound was really young at this point, and we were trying to continue to get traction. We did not have an audience really established - I think there was like 100 people on our mailing list, which was really just from emailing our friends who are agency owners, and some people at HubSpot sending it to other people. So, we really wanted to figure out how do we launch DoInbound and get that name and brand built, but at the same time, how do we give back to this community? And it just kind of hit us like a lightening bolt, like, let's just talk to the people who've already built successful businesses. You know, we're a company that's going after a narrow niche of people, and by doing that, you can create some really niche content, which is awesome.

I think if you're trying to relate to a broad swath of people, it's really hard to create content that resonates with everybody. But the more narrow your focus, the more your content can resonate with people. And so that really positioned us first, because we did a podcast that spoke to a specific niche of people, but at the same time, we spoke to leaders in that niche. And so that allowed us to build off of their networks, because that is just the way podcasts work. If you invite a guest on, they share their story, and you ask them to share the podcast once it comes out. You know, eight times out of 10, nine times out 10, they're going to do that. And so, that's what helped us get up and get out early on in the process. The guests begin to build the network for you, and that helps you get traction early on.

And then from there, it just kind of snowballs once you've got a lot of episodes out there, and you're putting shout outs out, like you're just building more and more content on your website, and you're in iTunes and showing up there. And consistency's a good part of that game. But picking a niche, and then talking to thought leaders in that niche is really, really important, because you can kind of piggyback on their audience when you're just getting started.

Kathleen: Great. So, when you first started the podcast, you knew you wanted to focus on agencies and, I mean, really the name of the podcast says it all. Or, the old name was the Inbound Agency Journey, so it was about building an inbound agency, now you're shifting for the agency journey. How did you decide on the interview format?

Andrew: That's a great question. It's kind of morphed over time, how we handle the formatting of everything. What we wanted from the beginning was the feeling that there was, you know, you and I are having a conversation, and the listener is kind of the fly on the wall. Not like super strict in terms of format, not super tight in terms of time, but just like, we'll go where the conversation takes us. And that format has worked out really well, because you never really know going onto an interview what you're going to dig into. You know, something we tried to do, like topic-driven seasons, and kind of give guests a feeder topic before they came on. That was challenging because that might not fit with that specific guest.

So we've played around with a lot of different formats. We like to get some of the background story from our guests, just to figure out who are you or how did you get to where you are today in case the person has never heard of them, which is, for us, most of the time. Like, most guests aren't, like, Jay Baer or Gary V. or anyone like that. So they're-

Kathleen: It would be a very short run for your podcast if those were the only people that you had on.

Andrew: It wouldn't last very long.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Andrew: But we have those kind of get-to-know-you things, and then we dive right into the agency's story. What are some successes that you guys have had? What are some failures you've learned from? We like to get this informatoin so we can kind of tackle things from both sides. I like to talk about their work flow, their processes, what are tools that they use to drive their success? And then, just a lot of follow up questions, kind of chasing the rabbit down the hole and seeing where does this take us. And people have been really open and really honest, which his great 'cause you can tell instantly on the podcast if someone's trying to put smoke and mirrors up and they're just not being real with you. But we've been blessed in that a lot of our guests have been really open to share about what's actually happened, and being able to share like the frustrations along the journey too.

So when it comes to formatting, I'd just say, put a rough roadmap in place and give them milestones you're going to try to hit through the conversation, but take it as a conversation would go and not a super strict "question one, question two, question three, get off" kind of style.

Kathleen: Now you mentioned something really interesting earlier that I want to pick up on. You mentioned the word "season."

Andrew: Yeah.

Kathleen: And you do your podcasts in seasons.

Andrew: Yep.

Kathleen: Which not all podcasts do, so can you talk a little bit more about that and why you chose that kind of structure?

Andrew: Yeah. Most of it is for our own internal planning purposes, so we like to put 12 episodes in a season, and we like to book a season at a time. So, from our process side of things, we like to batch our interviews in, you know, one to two weeks spans if we can. Sometimes, it's just schedules don't work out that way, and you've got to kind of drip it out across the season. But going into a season, we like to know, you know, what are 15 to 20 guests we'd like to target here, so we can book 12 in this time span. And that's really helped us hone our process down, because we're planning out who's recording it, who's doing the show art, who's writing the recap notes, and all that kind of stuff. So we're not planning super far in the future where all those tasks might change, or we might add new team members or something like that.

We like to plan far enough ahead where we feel like we have a runway, but not so far ahead where, you know, we can't react if something new comes up, and we want to highlight or we're seeing trends...stuff like that. So, it really helps us internally.

Kathleen: That's really smart. I also, obviously, have an interview style. One of the challenges is that scheduling interviews isn't always entirely within your own control, because you've got to work around a guest's availability, and it can be easy to put yourself in a situation where you're stuck and you don't have something for the next week, and so having that backlog is fantastic.

 The other thing that I've noticed that you do is you and Gray alternate hosting.

Andrew: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Kathleen: Why's that?

Andrew: Each of us have different personalities, so we're going to ask different types of questions, and I love it because Gray goes down one path, and I would probably go down another path. So, you get kind of two different perspectives on there. That might annoy some people, I don't know. No one's ever sent over a negative comment like that, but you also get to know both of us too, which is really cool. And that's the cool thing about podcasting - whenever you meet someone at a conference or something like that, they come up to you as if they already know you, and they do know you because they've heard your voice so often. But maybe you've never had the chance to actually speak with them. That's a fun way to start a relationship, because they just feel comfortable with who you are. The main thing was to get to know both of us, and to just understand that we ask questions in different ways.

And back to the format question, we used to do a recap at the end of each episode, where if Gray did the interview, I would go and listen to it, and then we would do a recap, you know, "Andrew, what did you think about this interview? Well, how did it go down?" We stopped doing that and just focused straight on the interview, but that was kind of an early formatting thing that kind of helped us do that, and we just kind of kept with the alternating interviews since then.

Kathleen: I got it, and I imagine that also lightens the load for each of you individually.

Andrew: It does, yeah. It's not exactly a 50-50 split. I need to go back and see who did what, but just the way the scheduling come through, sometimes there's a season where I've got more of a load, and sometimes Gray's got more of a load, so it all kind of comes down to how the calendars play out.

Kathleen: Interesting. Well, you went into the podcast wanting to target a niche audience of agency owners, and you got the agency management platform. Tell me a little bit about your goals. Did you have specific KPIs that you were tracking when you started the podcast?

Andrew: Not when we started. Our whole idea was, let's throw this thing out there really quick, and it was a short turnaround too. I think from the idea of Agency Journey to the first episode being live, it was like two or three weeks. And that's kind of just who we are here, like, when we get an idea we like to go out there and test it, validate it, and if it works, we'll pour into it. If it doesn't work, we'll back off of it. That's true across DoInbound, like the product itself. That's true around all of our marketing, so I would really encourage you to do that idea, the test to see how it does, 'cause you're not going to know until you throw it out there.

One challenge that we're going through right now is trying to figure out ... We're having conversations with people who have listened to the podcast for a year, and then will come to us and say, "I didn't know you guys did software." It's like, at the end of the day, we need to sell stuff though.

Kathleen: Right, there's that balance that you need to strike between not pushing the product too much, but also not entirely obscuring that there is a product.

Andrew: Exactly, so we're trying to find that balance right now, just 'cause you don't want to pollute the channel and be like one massive commercial for DoInbound. But at the same time, I want people to know who we are and the solution we offer, because I think it can really help, you know, lighten people's loads. So yeah, we're trying to figure out now, do we continue to educate the listener without obstructing their experience, get some more leads out of the podcasts, but maintain kind of that same feel and vibe that it has right now? So that's the challenge.

Kathleen: Can you tell us a little bit about how, from a very functional standpoint, how do you do this podcast? Like, what equipment do you use? And what platforms or software are you using for it?

Andrew: Yeah, so we do all our interviews on Skype. It's all audio based, so I'll usually start the Skype call with the video on and chat with the person, just get to know them a little bit. But then record it with the video off. We've just found that if we can record a better audio quality consistently doing that. 

Kathleen: Do you have software that you use to do the call recording, because Skype doesn't have that built in?

Andrew: We use Ecamm Call Recorder. It's fantastic. You can record both video and audio on it. We'll call up the guest, I'll do a little chit chat, just like prepping them. Sometimes I'll have a pre-call where we'll just like kind of go over what we're going to go over in the podcast. Most of the time, it's handled all over email where I'll send them a rough outline, "Here's what I want to hit on." They'll send over any questions. We'll hop on, we'll do the interview. We're usually 20 to 35 minutes in our interview length.

Once that's done, I hit "end" on the recording, say thank you to them, and we've got a Dropbox folder system in place, where I've got a templated folder for what an episode is. So I'll just clone that, put the guests name and the episode number, so like "125-guest's name," and that has like four sub-folders in it. The first one is the interview, and we're getting crazy into the processes here-

Kathleen: No, this is great, this is exactly what I want to hear.

Andrew: That's how we roll. So the first folder in there is just "interview." And so into that folder, I put the call recorded file, which Ecamm spits that out as an MLV file, but then they've got a tool that allows you to splice that out and split the tracks. So, I can have one recording with your audio on it, one recording with my audio on it, and I'll save that as a WAV file, and put that in there as well. And so, I'll do that, Gray will do that when we conduct the interview.

And Tristan, he handles marketing on our team, when he goes to actually format everything, he'll open up Audition inside the Adobe suite, and he'll put the intro at the beginning, and he'll put "side one," "side two," of the interview on different tracks, and kind of adjust the levels. Sometimes one mic is hotter than another, so you'll pull one down, push one up, kind of get them to where they're on the same level, and then put in our outro MP3. Save that Audition file, render that out as a finalized MP3, 'cause you can optimize it for size and stuff, and that goes into another folder inside of Dropbox.

And then we have a show art folder where we've got a show graphic that we do for every episode, which is just headshot with their name and their company name. So, we've got those PSD files in there. So all the individual show assets are all saved in Dropbox there, and then we host everything through Podbean. And the reason we chose Podbean is because you can have multiple channels, so we have multiple podcasts over here. We've got Agency Journey, the Inbound Sales Journey which goes through how to sell services, and Agency Toolbox is another one where we do some video podcasts, kind of breaking down different tools you can use to run your agency. So Podbean gives us the opportunity to have those multiple channels all in one spot. So then we just upload the show there, and it is one RSS feed that then feeds to iTunes, it feeds into all the other podcast places where you get your shows.

Kathleen: Great, I love that level of detail. You know, it's funny hearing you talk about that, because when I first started podcasting, I mean I knew nothing. I was like, "I'm just going to talk into a microphone," and people are going to listen. And I had a podcast before this one, which is kind of where I cut my teeth, and at that point I had somebody else doing the editing of the audio for me, and now I do it myself.

And thank goodness I had somebody really experienced in this teach me how to do it, and I never fully appreciated how important it is to adjust the gain, which is what you're talking about. Where if you have two people on different microphones, or you have an intro and an outro, and then you have sandwiched in the middle a podcast, the volume level, literally, of the audio on all those different tracks can vary. People have probably experience it if you've listened to enough podcasts, I know I have, where you're listening to the intro, and it's really faint, and so you turn your, you know, your car radio volume way up, and then the actual podcast starts, and it's so loud. Oh my God!

Andrew: Yeah, it's just yelling at you right there.

Kathleen: And that's because people don't do that, like those little details. They're not adjusting the gain on the different tracks, and so it's all over the place and it's ... It makes for a poor listener experience.

Andrew: It definitely does.

Kathleen: So that's great, those are those little lessons you learn the further you get into it. But it's a balancing act, because I think that things like that can make it intimidating for somebody who's considering starting a podcast. I'd just love to get your take on, if you were starting over today, and you knew nothing, you know, would you do it the same way?

Andrew: I think I would. I don't know. We went through Podcaster's Paradise, which is John Lee Dumas's course. That kind of helped me cut my teeth to learn all the basics of what I need to do and everything. Watched a ton of YouTube videos, 'cause there's so many different ways you can record everything and do everything. So, I definitely sunk a lot of learning time into it up front to know how to handle the process, and then we've been able to outsource it from there. So, that's one thing - establish a repeatable process. Don't just do it yourself. Each phase of the process, record how you do it. Once you hone a system down, and maybe you take a couple episodes to figure that out, or like you did, you can work with someone, have them start up a process in training you, and then you've got something that's repeatable now.

But either way, I would focus on documenting out exactly what you do, so you know what levels are you shooting for in each episode. That's not just what I think or Tristan says, what, you know, I know that we're going through certain audio levels, and we're going through certain lengths, so just think about your process. Break it down into different tasks, and have a checklist for each of those tasks so that you know that you're getting out consistent results at the end of the day. And then, it's whether you're doing it, or you hire someone, or you outsource it to someone else in your team - at the end of the day, you're all following the same process, and that's what's really important.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's great advice. You started the podcast, you had your format kind of nailed down. It sounds like you guys knew what you were doing from a technical standpoint and a production standpoint. How did you decide on how you were going to promote the podcast and also, talk a little bit about what format your show notes take, because that's an area where I see incredible variations.

Andrew: Yeah. So, I'll tackle promotion side first. We've got our list, so what we'll do once a show comes out is write a recap post about it, and then that gets linked up in our weekly email that goes out to our database, just telling people, "Hey, here's who we have on the podcast this week. Here are other pieces of content that we created." And so that's just kind of a general update that goes out there. And then we schedule social updates across our Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. We haven't done a ton of promoted posts or boosted posts on it yet. That's something that we might do at some point, but just putting it out on those channels has been really helpful.

We started uploading it to YouTube as well. We've got a background graphic, we'll put that show graphic on it, and then upload that as a movie to YouTube. So if anyone wants to subscribe to that channel, they'll get notified whenever a new podcast comes out, because some people like to listen to their podcasts on YouTube. So that's something that we added probably six or seven months ago, started uploading all of our episodes there as well, just to kind of tap into another channel with the same content. And that's what is really nice about a podcast is you can create one core piece of content. It itself is an audio file that can be published on several different channels with SoundCloud, with iTunes, all the different places people can get podcasts.

But then you go to the show notes. I think that we've done every form of show notes possible, from like crazy long-form show notes of like over 1000 words per interview to bare bones, bullet pointed posts to somewhere in between. It's like, here's some bullet points of what we talked about, here's some reflection on what we thought about the show. And that's kind of where we are now is to provide a little bit of context to what was talked about, a little bit of opinion in there as well, and then kind of a bullet point of any resources that were shared, things like that.

Kathleen: Now how did you settle on that format? Because obviously there's this balance, and I know this from firsthand experience, between the amount of time you put in and, you know, wanting to get some SEO value, but also wanting to deliver value to the person who might want to look at the words.

Andrew: Yeah.

Kathleen: So, which one of those factors were the ones that really weighed in on your decision about the format for the show notes?

Andrew: We started long form first, and that was helpful because it gave us kind of a good baseline of posts to go back and look at the traffic. And say like, "Was this worth the two hours it took to write this recap?" And what we came to is no. Like, once we put out a few short form show notes, we could kind of see what was the engagement on those different posts versus the long form posts. We'll do organic traffic over time, and we did not see a significant difference between the long form and the short form. And at the end of the day, it wasn't a great performance either way, but it just wasn't worth the time for us to put kind of the work on those bigger posts.

What we did do is we went and looked back and said, okay, what are our top performing show notes? And those top 10 blog posts, we put together content upgrades for each of those, so they were ... One of them was like, "How to sell an inbound game plan," that's one of the Inbound Sales Journey podcasts. We put together a little content upgrade, a little PDF that people can come in and download from there. And so by just looking at the top performing posts, we were able to optimize those a little bit for lead conversion, and I've seen some really good results from that. And that's something that since those posts are out there, they were already performing well organically. You kind of continue to see that lead flow coming in from each of those posts.

But my advice would be try them out, and you know, give each option enough time so you've got a good collection of posts, you know like eight to 12 posts at least. Before you make your decision, just figure out what's working well, so that you can get the most results for the least amount of output, because we're always trying to optimize that. How can we spend less time on something and get just as many results as if we spent twice that much time on it?

Kathleen: Right. Going back to promotion, you used all the different social media channels. You've now added YouTube, which is really interesting. Which channels are you finding you're getting the most traction from?

Andrew: That's a good question. YouTube, we don't get that much traction on it right now. We do some basic optimization on there, but there's no real oomph behind it. We do get a good amount of traffic coming from Twitter, just from randomly scheduling posts on there really. There's no complex strategy behind it. It's kind of just spreading it out across our channels. We don't post every episode on Facebook. And we've played with a lot of different attention grabbers on Facebook. Like, sometimes for a little season, I did little one-minute intros to episodes, in which we just recorded a video of, "Hey, here's what we talked about in this episode. Here's what you'll learn. Here's the link to go check it out." And that worked pretty well.

Kathleen: Like a teaser.

Andrew: Yeah, like a little teaser trailer. And you'll see Tim Ferriss does that on his podcasts. He doesn't do a video, but they'll like splice out 30 seconds of the show and have that on Facebook, and it's teaser that points to a blog post.

Kathleen: Interesting.

Andrew: And that's something you can boost a little bit as well. So we're experimenting-

Kathleen: Did you see any results with that?

Andrew: Yeah, we did see a little uptick in it. It was a big time output just from my studio setup. I need to get something setup every time I do it. I don't have like an established place I can just go, or I don't, you know, I don't just turn on the webcam. I need to do a better job than that. It's just like, "Here it is!"

Kathleen: Hey guys!

Andrew: Good, check it out!

Kathleen: Exactly.

Andrew: But in that sense, it was a good bit of an output, but there's ways I could streamline that and just haven't gotten around to leveraging that channel for promotion as well as it could be. I do see a lot of promise there. If you have a Facebook audience already in place, check that out, or if you targeted a niche again, you could boost posts to some audiences there are very narrowed down. That's fantastic as well. 

Kathleen: You mentioned Twitter, which is interesting, because Twitter is so controversial. People either seem to love it or hate it. I'm curious ... I've had somebody else tell me that they had good traction with their podcast on Twitter. I'm wondering, you said you just schedule it out on your networks. Two questions in response to that. One is, do you have specific social profiles just for the podcasts or are these, you know, company social profiles on which you're promoting the podcasts? And the second question is, are you using hashtags at all? 

Andrew: Yes, we do have an Agency Journey handle, which is just for the podcast. It's got a decent following on there, and we put a lot of time into that, building that following early on in the podcast, and it's just been kind of ... We haven't done as much focused effort behind building that up since then. We also share it through DoInbound's social accounts and then our whole team, our individual accounts as well. So we kind of divide and conquer it up that way. We do mix some hashtags in there. We don't do a good job of picking a hashtag, trying it out for a couple weeks, and seeing, okay, what traffic do we get from this? And then just narrowing down what are our best options there.

But again, with a niche, we know what hashtags to go after for agencies. There's a defined collection of conversations happening out there based in the niche that you pick. So the more niche you are, the better off you can be picking those types of hashtags. So we do mix hashtags in there as well, and it's just been kind of "spray and pray" in terms of scheduling everything out, and stuff like that.

Kathleen: I did an interesting interview with George B. Thomas of the Sales Lion, who has a podcast as well. And one of the little tips that he shared, which I loved, was periodically he'll put hashtags in the title of the show notes. So that when people share the article, the hashtag is already in the title. So he can control what hashtag is really being put out there, and he's got a lot of good traction from that. 

Andrew: That's a great idea.

Kathleen: Now going back to the topic of metrics. So when you first started, you didn't have a define set of KPIs or metrics or whatever you're going to call them that you're tracking. Today, are you tracking anything specifically and can you share with us any results?

Andrew: Yeah, so we're looking at downloads overall. That's one thing that we have been paying attention to, and so we're about to crest 100,000 downloads in the podcast, which isn't a crazy number for podcasts out there. But if you're talking to an audience that's 5-10,000 people, that's a pretty good number. I'm proud of that overall download number, so what I look at is how is that total download number growing exponentially? Like, how is it month-over-month continuing to expand, because we're having more and more content that goes out there, so that's one thing that we look at.

We look at overall website traffic, and then what percentage of that traffic each week was contributed by the different podcasts. So, that's one thing that's on our scorecard for each week. And then for our funnel what we worry about is what percentage of that becomes a lead, whether it's one of those upgrades or if it's an ebook that's on the bottom of one of the show notes, and then what percentage of that signs up for an automated demo or books an in-person demo. So those are the statistics that we're looking at on our scorecard each week, and so we're always tweaking a lot of the funnel emails right now.

I should know off the top of my head what our average conversion rate is on the podcast, but I'm not sure about that right now. We're tweaking what our welcome sequence looks like for people, what's that main call to action that we're greeting people with right away? Historically, it's been to content. The past three months, it's been to straight "book a demo with us," or switching that now to, "Hey, come check out an automated demo where you can watch it at anytime, and if you have questions, you can book time with us." So we're playing with those different things, kind of depending on where the traffic comes from, but that's one metric that we're looking at.

Another tactic that we're trying right now is putting together a top 10 episode guide, and we're using lead digits from lead pages to deliver that, so we're only like two episodes into that promo right now maybe. I don't even know if they're going out live yet, but that's another thing that we're trying to do to drive traffic from listenership to get them into our contact database to get to know them better there, and kind of make that connection of, "Oh, DoInbound also sells software." We say, "Hey, if you're new here, or if you just want to figure out what are the top most downloaded episodes, come check out-"

Kathleen: Sort of a greatest hits.

Andrew: Exactly, yeah, 'cause it is overwhelming. If you just stumble on a podcast for the first time, you're like, "Wow, I love this stuff, but like, how do I like sort this in terms of like biggest impact?" So we just thought, okay, we know what the most downloaded episodes are, no one else does, but we can put that list together, put it together as a content offer, and then anyone who wants to check that out can shortcut the learning curve can go and check that out there. 

Kathleen: I love that idea.

Andrew: Yep. I'll let you know how it goes, but I think it will be helpful if we'd just taken the show notes for those 10 episodes plus the audio files and compiled it into one big PDF, and then people can come and consume it however they would like to there.

Kathleen: Nice. Now, lead gen, you mentioned you're tracking how many leads you get from the podcast. Do you see any difference in the quality of leads that come in through the podcast versus the quality of leads that come in through other channels?

Andrew: No, not really, because the podcast is the point of spear when it comes to our inbound strategy. We don't blog regularly other than the podcast. That's our consistent piece of content that comes out each week. We do some guest posting that will bring leads in, but most of our leads come through the podcast. Most of the people that we've talked to recently have been like, "Oh, I have been listening to you for a while. I didn't know you did software." And they download something. They learn about that. So, we haven't seen like a big lead quality issue. It's actually really good quality from the podcast.

Kathleen: That was going to be my next question.

Andrew: So again, I think if you speak to people that's a good channel for you. We do have a content offer that we put up where we share all of our podcasts processes. So if anyone here is listening, and you want to check that out, you can just Google "DoInbound podcast templates."

Kathleen: Or you can send me the link, and I will put it in the show notes as well. (click here to view the templates)

Andrew: That's another thing we can do, so. I'll do that, I'll send that over to you, but that's a very high converting offer, but it's not a good fit offer for us.

Kathleen: Right, you're getting a bunch of podcasters.

Andrew: Yeah, so. It's done well on Inbound.org, so I'm happy about that. We just have to put together a funnel around the podcast to actually do something with those leads, but those aren't good fits. But it is about process too, so...

Kathleen: So lessons learned, somebody's out there, and they either have a podcast or they're thinking of starting one. From your experience, what are some of the things that you either would say, "Hey, don't do this, this was not worth the time." Or, "You should definitely do this because it will save you time or get you ahead."

Andrew: I would definitely do an interview-based podcast, especially if you don't have an audience, or if you're not already like a high-profile thought leader. Just because it's easier 'cause you can build on those networks, right? It's that exponential growth, 'cause I mean when this goes out, I'm going to share it for sure. Like, I'm going to share it with our community.

Kathleen: Thank you.

Andrew: So, there's that, and that can help you just hit the ground running a lot faster. There's the association as well that you get as a host with the caliber of guests that you bring on. Like, I'm a co-founder of GuavaBox, not a massive agency. I think we've learned a lot, we do good work, but there's definitely bigger agencies out there that do a better job of things. But I've been able to speak at Inbound the last two years because of the podcast, because of the platform that we've built where we've invited people on. We've brought knowledge together and curated it in that way. And if you can step into a niche and be that curator, that really helps your positioning in that niche. It helps you get stronger, too. Every single week, I'm talking to the best and brightest out there.

So, that's great for us just to continue to get to know the industry that we're talking to and the people that we want to serve. But at the same time, it can help you out. It can help you with co-marketing, it can help you with positioning, like a lot of other things. So, I would start with the niche. I'd talk to the people who are winning in that niche already, and then I wouldn't, you know, play around not doing it. It doesn't need to be perfect. Put something together, go out there, make it happen. And you know, there's enough tutorials on YouTube where you can do that for pretty much free, and the ... As things go, it'll hone in and get tighter, 'cause you learn lessons as you go, you know. You don't need to be scared of the microphone. You will get better over time and be more comfortable over time. I guarantee that, but if you never try, you'll never know.

Kathleen: Yeah, done is better than perfect.

Andrew: Amen.

Kathleen: I have had a similar experience in the sense that I love doing the podcast, because I get to talk to all these different people, and I learned so many really interesting tips on just how to do marketing better.

Andrew: Yeah.

Kathleen: And hearing how other people are doing it, and so even if nobody ever listens, I do this podcast because I feel like it's making me a better marketer. Hopefully it's making some other people better marketers too, but you know, if nothing else, I have learned a lot.

Andrew: I feel the exact same way. It's quite awesome.

Kathleen: That's great. Well, two questions we always ask our guests at the end of the podcast, and I'm going to ask you. One is, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well - company or individual - so that if somebody out there wanted to see an example of, you know, someone who's crushing it, who should they look towards?

Andrew: Is it okay if I say IMPACT?

Kathleen: Don't say that. I mean, I love it! So funny, people say that, and I'm always like, "Don't say us," because I want to find some new examples. I'm flattered, but I'd love to hear, you know, who out there, besides IMPACT.

Andrew: No, no. I'm a follower of podcasting, obviously, so I think people who are doing really well in the podcasting space are Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins. Those are obviously international brands, big business brands there, but what those guys do well, and Gary V. also, they're creating content all the time. And they're not afraid to put stuff out there, and not everything that they put out is like NBA-level information. It's every day stuff, but you could follow their journey as they're going through whatever it is they're doing. So that is one piece that I take away. I try to think, "How can we do a better job of that?" It's like not just teaching all the time, but how do I make someone feel like they're part of our journey?

Kathleen: Yeah.

Andrew: And so, that's something that you know Josh and the guys at the Baremetrics do a really good job of that as well, if you're into the SaaS space. Josh Bickford there, they do a really good job of telling that company's story through their blog, so I really like that. So just kind of breathing authenticity into your marketing is something that I see. I look for people that are doing that well, and I see that in you guys too, so I can't help it. I said it. Sorry!

Kathleen: Well, that's good advice. I think you're certainly not the first guest that has mentioned the word authenticity, and it does bear repeating. It's something that we forget really easily.

Andrew: Definitely, yeah.

Kathleen: Which is back to "done is better than perfect." Sometimes it is good to leave the little mistakes in the podcast... the dog barking in the background, which happens to me more often than not. Yeah, it is about being authentic. Where do you go to get cutting edge thinking about marketing, stay current? You know, I do feel like, especially being in the HubSpot world, there's great information out there. HubSpot gives us a lot of good information, but it's a little bit of an echo chamber.

Andrew: Definitely.

Kathleen: I always like to hear where people get inspired.

Andrew: Yeah. I've been geeking out on Facebook groups recently. There's a lot of really good communities out there. There's a good digital agency owner community that Jason Swenk put together that shares a lot of great questions and great insights, just from different agency owners that are growing out there. I'm in a ClickFunnels' group. I'm not a ClickFunnels customer. I follow Russell Brunson. He's kind of a polarizing personality, for sure, but I get kind of that authenticity again as well, sharing his journey in the different stages over there. But I like following that community just because there's a lot of give and take from people, and a lot of asking questions and sharing good resources there, and people putting together some really long form, user-generated content in there.

So my channel has been Facebook lately, but not just the news feed. I try to find the different groups that conversation is happening in. That helps kind of curate content as well, so that I can see, you know, what are some good suggested pieces of content that other people are finding interesting or what questions are people asking? So when it comes to podcasting or blogging, something like that, a Facebook group is a great place to mine for questions that your audience is asking. I'm not a marketer so I'm always trying to learn, but also trying to figure out, "How can I take something from this and apply it to what we're doing and step up our game in that way?" So, that's the channel I've bene using lately is Facebook groups and kind of the improvements they've been doing there lately.

Kathleen: That's great, yeah. There's a couple of new ones in there that I haven't heard. I'll have to check out ClickFunnel and Baremetrics as well. So that's for sharing that.

Andrew: Oh yeah, it's my pleasure.

Kathleen: Well, it's been great having you on and if anybody has questions or wants to followup with you, what's the best way for somebody to get in touch with you?

Andrew: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. I am @AndrewJDymski, D-Y-M-S-K-I. You can also email me, andrew@doinbound.com. Happy to chat, answer any questions, share any podcasting tips, anything I can do to help out there.

Kathleen: Yeah, and if you're an agency owner, I would say you have to listen to the Agency Journey podcast. It's fantastic. There's tons of episodes. Now we know there are 250 plus, and if you're not an agency owner, but you're just interested in kind of getting a good sense of what a really good interview-style podcast is like, also listen, because it is a good example. So, thanks for being on this week, and hopefully we'll get to have you come back, and you can share with us some of the other experiments that you're doing to further optimize the podcast, to know what the results of the rebranding are, and how some of those teasers are working out on Facebook.

Andrew: Yeah, would love to come back, share with you guys all the results there, what those numbers look like. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. It's been great.

Kathleen: Yeah, thanks, Andrew, and for everyone else, thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please do leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, makes a big difference, especially for new podcasts like this one. And if you know anybody who is crushing it with their inbound marketing, shoot me a note. I'd love to interview them for the podcast. Thanks for joining me.