SRQ speaks with the Grow The Dream Show team

Posted by Jacob Ogles on Sunday Jun 7, 2015 11:40 pm

Entrepreneurs love talking with colleagues about the nature of running a business, so why not record and broadcast those chats? That’s what the team behind the Grow The Dream podcast—Grow The Dream founder David Johnson, consultant Josh Muccio and The Thomson Group founder Rod Thomson—decided to do, and now the podcast has been ranked by Hubspot as the No. 2 “Podcast You Should Be Listening To.” SRQ got the Dream team to talk some more.

Why did a podcast seem like a good way to speak about growing businesses? How did you make sure that the podcast would have a listenership? 

Muccio: We know that business owners are extremely busy, and may not have the time to research marketing trends and how to apply it in their business. So we decided that podcasting was the right medium for helping out business owners to think more strategic with their marketing efforts. Listeners can passively listen while driving, working out, cooking dinner, or even while at work. So it's a great vehicle for self improvement. Podcasting is great for listeners, but an extremely challenging medium for creators. So guaranteeing listenership is difficult. We ultimately believe that by providing great content and bringing on top-notch guests, we’ll be able to grow our listener base over time. Though, being featured on the HubSpot blog certainly helped accelerate things.

Johnson: Podcasting is undergoing a bit of a renaissance lately. Nearly all of us carry smartphones everywhere we go that have always-on internet connections. Netflix and DVRs are so much a part of our everyday lives that we’re completely comfortable with the idea of “on-demand” media and have, in fact, come to expect it. At the same time, mobile apps for discovering and listening to podcasts have improved dramatically, and the number of listeners is exploding right now. Consequently, as a content distribution channel, podcasting is very appealing. All three of us understand the value and importance of content marketing. We all advise our business clients about it and, to one extent or another, provide content marketing services to them to help them grow their businesses. Since business owners tend to be very busy people who wear a lot of hats, we felt like a podcast designed specifically with them in mind would be an ideal way to deliver value. The content can be consumed while they’re driving, working out, and in some cases even while they work. The perceived value is very high — especially if the podcast has good quality audio and is reasonably entertaining while also informing. In our own business, my team and I have, for many years, written blog content for business owners and their teams. We’re always looking for ways to deliver more value, and since I have a background in radio and in audio production, a podcast has been on the drawing board for a long time, What I needed was the right combination of co-hosts to add other perspectives, expertise, and the “on-air” interaction that can make a topic really come to life.

Thomson: Our entire economy is going through a huge change, shifting to an on-demand economy characterized by the Uberization of services. In that vein, podcasts are a perfect fit. Frankly, I’ve been surprised that they are not just enduring — being a somewhat ‘older’ technology — but that they are actually exploding in popularity. It makes sense. People are coming to expect to get more and more on demand, at their own timing and pace. And podcasts are a perfect vehicle for that. Topically, there are a lot of small businesses that just don’t have the revenues to have a marketing team or even a dedicated marketing person. It is either the owner or someone else who is wearing many hats, and marketing is one of them. The Grow The Dream Show podcast (growthedream.com/show) can really speak to them, as well as marketers and business people in general.

What sort of preparation goes into an episode of Grow The Dream for each installment? 

Muccio: Not as much as we would like. But ultimately it ends up being 8-plus hours per episode if you combine all of our efforts.

Johnson: Each of us lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps digital marketing every single day. We each specialize in unique areas, of course, and to varying degrees we work on offline marketing for our clients as well. So at the end of the day, we prepare for the Grow The Dream Show in our day-to-day work. Questions we get asked by clients, struggles and challenges we have to overcome, and campaigns we roll out that succeed or fail all inform the discussions that we have each week. On the occasions that we have a guest, we certainly read up. As an example, we recently had Jay Baer on the show, who is at the top of the content marketing business right now. I read his New York Times bestseller, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype, in advance of the interview to be better prepared. But all three of us had been reading his blog and had listened to some of his podcast episodes beforehand, so we were comfortable enough to just dive in and start asking questions. When it’s just the three of us, we will often have a dialogue via Slack, which is a communications tool we all use in our businesses. Early on in the process, we set up a Slack “team” for the show, and we use it to compile notes, send each other articles and links, and so on. Then before we record, we’ll have a brief dialogue — usually over the first round of the (coffee) Brew of the Day.

Thomson: We live the topics we discuss on a daily basis. So in that sense, we don’t often need to do a lot of prep when we tackle a specific marketing/messaging/communication issues. When we have guests, however, which we are planning to do much more of, we then try to be well-versed. Great guests, with large social identification, can help grow the podcast organically, so we really want to make sure it is a great show and they will want to promote it through their own channels.

I know many podcasts end up with one guy doing much of the tech heavy-lifting. Is that the case with this podcast? What are the tech challenges the show has to deal with?

Muccio: Tech is probably the hardest part of launching a podcast, but luckily we’ve got The David Johnson [@TheDavidJohnson on Twitter] taking the lead on the tech side of things. Publishing the episodes has a minor learning curve and a lot of busywork, but the real challenge is the audio editing. You’ve got to have a decent mic setup, the right recording gear and then ultimately the post-recording work is the most challenging part of creating a high quality show.

Johnson: Because of my background in radio, I tend to handle the audio production bits. Also, I’ve produced two other podcasts in the past and have also advised a handful of clients and helped them get started with podcasting. So, I’ve learned my way around the tech side of it from those experiences. That said, Josh (@JoshMuccio on Twitter) has also been producing another podcast and is launching a third. He’s also got no shortage of tech experience given that the first business he built and sold was so successful because he knew how to generate traffic via Google search. So when we got started with the Grow The Dream Show, we had a conversation to just agree on the tech details that needed to be decided. Ultimately, we have a pretty decent division of labor. Rod (@Rod_Thomson on Twitter) also has extensive experience with talk radio — both as a guest and as a co-host. Add that to his many years of experience in print media and as an author of a couple of books, and he’s by far the best at keeping the discussion on track and helping extract value for our listeners out of the conversations we have, especially when we have guests. From a tech standpoint, podcasting really isn’t all that complicated. We use WordPress to publish the episodes to the web, and beneath that are a layer of tools that include high-availability, high-bandwidth hosting of media files (we use Amazon S3 for this), stats trackers to report on the number of downloads, and then a combination of 3rd-party tools and some custom coding to deal with the RSS feed itself (which can sometimes be problematic for podcasters). I guess it could sound complicated, but we deal with this stuff everyday, so for us it wasn’t hard to get it up and going.

Thomson: Not surprisingly, I’m the least techie. I simply learn what I need to know throughout my business. David does the heavy lifting with the podcast, drawing on plenty of experience in the field, and Josh is quite technologically capable in his own right.

Do you work to make the topic of each episode timeless? 

Muccio: We try to include principles of marketing in every episode. But we do spend some time chatting about the latest tools & other current news that affects business owners looking to grow! So it’s a mixture of both in each episode.

Johnson: When we first got started, we made a very intentional strategic decision to avoid spending large amounts of time dealing with overly “current” topics that would have a limited shelf life. This is actually really challenging because Google changes their algorithm — in fact we did a show devoted to the “mobile-friendly” change back in April — and Facebook is constantly rearranging the furniture, so to speak, where businesses are concerned. These are just a couple of examples, but things are constantly changing in the world of digital marketing. At the end of the day, we have to address some of the time-sensitive areas that our listeners face as business owners trying to be effective. But even when we talk about something that we know will change, we always try to tackle it from a strategic perspective that will continue to deliver value over time. This is one of the reasons why I really like this team — each of us may take a slightly (or widely) different approach in a given situation, but we all ultimately see eye-to-eye when it comes to the strategic and philosophical reasons why we make the decisions that we make in our work. This hopefully allows us to be more relevant to our audience and deliver unique value as a team that we could not do individually.

Thomson: Evergreen content is the best for most podcasts because of varying listening habits. Many podcast listeners, including myself, tend to binge listen to different shows, either new ones that are discovered or ones that we just have not got to for awhile. In monitoring our podcast downloads, we can see that listeners do just that, as the download count on early episodes continues to climb. Therefore, it is important for us to be as timeless as possible — although that can be a challenge when talking about specific tech issues.

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Tags:   David Johnson  featured  Grow The Dream Show  Hubspot  Josh Muccio  podcast  Rod Thomson

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