Making Podcasting Impactful – A slight rebrand announcement

Every year at the end of the year, I take some time to reflect on the business with my team and plot a course for the coming year. We go through a planning process I’ve been using for ages called True North. It inspired in a large part by Hoshin, which is a Japanese manufacturing and planning process. The thing I love the most about this process is that it forces us to think not just about “Now” but where we’ll be in 30 years: to our “True North.”

In seeking out that True North, our mission has been to make podcasting easy for businesses and creators for the past several years… and I’ll be honest, something has felt off about that. In the moment, it felt like the best answer I could offer up, but it didn’t sit right with me. There had to be something better. So, I took some time to reflect and see what I could figure out.

This past year we were working very hard to grow the business through outbound cold email marketing & sales. Throughout this process, I got the opportunity to sell HumblePod’s services a lot. We had a great partner for outbound leads, and they brought us a lot of opportunities, which turned into a lot of conversations. That said, converting these leads into sales was a challenge. I’m used to this in sales, so it was no surprise that cold email leads were not the easiest to convert! However, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was saying something wrong.

By the end of the year, we had about the same revenue as the previous year with more effort than the previous year. It felt frustrating and tiresome.

So I took some time to hit the books, and I picked up my copy of Founding Sales by Peter Kazanjy. The chapter I was on was about nailing HumblePod’s Narrative – something I was fairly certain I had right… but clearly hadn’t explored as in-depth as I needed to. Ultimately, through this chapter and some furious scribbling of notes, I realized we were missing a very obvious narrative in our business.

HumblePod doesn’t just make podcasting easy. We make it impactful for businesses.

If we just stick with saying, “We make podcasting easy,” all I’m saying is that you shouldn’t have to worry about producing your podcast. We’ll take that heavy burden off your shoulders. The challenge we face is that most people don’t see podcasting as difficult until they’ve tried to put one out for themselves… and once they’ve gotten to that point, we’re now competing against an existing producer or an internal (”free”) resource that helps them with their show. If I’m being brutally honest, this is a weak pitch… and the conversions this past year proved that.

With well over twenty years in podcasting, marketing, and business expertise, I know that a podcast is worth more than just the number of downloads you get for each episode. In fact, if you’re relying on downloads to find your worth in podcasting, you’re thinking about it the wrong way. Your podcast should be providing value to your target audience, opening up doors for your business to grow, and helping you establish credibility in your field. In short, your podcast should be impactful, and, if I’m being honest, that’s what we do best at HumblePod. 

We never start a new client off by asking solely how many downloads per episode they want to get. We start by asking what will make the podcast successful for their business, and then we help them gear their show towards achieving that end. We want their show to be as impactful for them and their audience as possible. That’s what we’re good at, we’ve been doing it since the beginning, and I’m now, finally, finding the right words to put to it.

We never start a new client off by asking solely how many downloads per episode they want to get. We start by asking what will make the podcast successful for their business, and then we help them gear their show towards achieving that end.

Being impactful also means that we do more than just creating podcasts. We create supporting content that helps extend the reach of the show. We can help our clients develop targeted marketing strategies, manage their show’s advertising, run livestreams, record on-location content, assist with studio design and construction, and even create parody music videos. All of this is stuff that we have done in the past or are currently doing for our clients, and we don’t talk about it enough. Does it make your podcast easier to manage? Sure. But what we’re really doing is helping your podcast be more impactful for you and your business.

Over the next year, you’re going to see HumblePod continue to diversify its offerings as we start to offer more consulting-focused services and additional media solutions. Our mission to create high-fidelity, impactful content so that our customers shine even brighter and achieve their business goals has not changed. We’re now more focused than ever on helping your podcast be as impactful as possible for your business.

Want to learn more about how we can help?