Are you building a business that is attracting clients, or are you still chasing clients? The stereotypical “chase business” is the stockbroker who calls you during dinner pitching a hot new stock. An attraction business is one that delivers such great value that people will stand in line during a rainstorm to work with you — think Apple.
The basis of an attraction business is having a truly authentic relationship with clients. It’s hard enough to build authentic relationships with past clients and your sphere of influence, but is it possible to build a relationship with your prospects before you ever work with them?
The answer is yes; but, before we go any further, I promise this is not another lame article about using Facebook.
I want to explain how to use podcasting to grow your network, build deeper relationships with your past clients and sphere and get access to whole new groups of people.
Having a podcast is a unique type of marketing. Unlike every other form of marketing, a podcast is permission-based. All marketing, whether it comes in the form of radio, television, mailers or phone calls, is interruption-based. Most forms of marketing are designed to collide with our daily lives, interrupt our routines and capture our attention.
A podcast is different. We raise our hands and voluntarily tune in and subscribe to the podcasts on our devices. We go out and deliberately seek out individuals to follow and find content to consume.
Podcasts become part of our daily lives — they get baked into our routines and habits. So the question is — if they are so powerful; why don’t you have one?
I started my podcast in 2013. Since then, I have amassed over 10 million downloads, and I have listeners in over 140 countries. I have launched two businesses directly from my podcast and have built fantastic relationships with people that I would have never otherwise crossed paths with.
No one will deny that we are in the early stages of a podcasting explosion. More than 300 million people are tuning into iTunes each month, and it’s growing by 500,000 new people every day.
The superpower of podcasts
Podcasts can perform so many functions:
- They can educate.
- They can entertain.
- They can inform.
- They can inspire.
- They can garner laughs.
- They can incite tears.
But there is one grand function podcasts perform that arch above all of these and more. And it is the single most important reason you should seriously consider starting a podcast.
Podcasts connect.
They connect content creators with content consumers, and they do it in a way that cannot be duplicated by any other content medium.
The reasons for this are simple.
First, podcasts have a voice. Not the “voice” of a blog post, like we often talk about. But a real, live, human voice, with subtleties of inflection, emotion and emphasis.
It’s this voice that breathes life into the content. It’s your voice that people will begin to resonate with. It is your voice that people will begin to associate with the words “real estate” and “expert.”
Second, podcasts go where you go, when you want to go there. You don’t have to plan your life around podcasts. You plan podcasts around your life. A podcast is portable and packable. You take them on trains, planes and even when you go to the gym.
A short while after I launched my podcast, I got an email from a listener who told me he bought a waterproof speaker so he could listen to my show in the shower.
Podcasts are convenient, which is why you invite them into places other content cannot go and why podcasts connect in ways that other content cannot.
That’s why podcasts are there while you brush your teeth, wash the dishes and mow the lawn. Because they work on your schedule.
Podcasting makes it possible
All of us who create content online sell something or offer a service.
And no matter what you sell — a product, a service, an experience, information, an idea, yourself, something else — you need your target audience to know you, like you and trust you before they’ll buy it.
Podcasting is the best way I have found to build the know, like and trust factors online across a broad audience.
What better way can you think of to get people whom you don’t know to know you, like you and trust you, than to get your voice into their heads during some of the most intimate moments of their days?
This is the unfair advantage of connection that podcasts possess.
And it’s why you should consider starting a podcast if you haven’t already: so that you can connect with your prospects on an entirely new and more intimate level.
Stop letting someone else speak directly into the ears of your audience. That voice should be yours.
Toby Salgado is the host and managing director of Super Agents Live (podcast) and Real Estate Radio Experts (radio agency). Follow him on Twitter.