Talking Shizzle

Building Consistency: The Key to Podcast Longevity

• Taylor Shanklin

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About the Guest(s):

Julia Campbell: Julia Campbell is a renowned expert in nonprofit digital marketing. With a background in magazine journalism from Boston University, Julia has carved a niche in helping nonprofits navigate the digital landscape. She is the author of two books, a sought-after speaker, and a podcaster. Julia’s passion for storytelling, coupled with her extensive experience in the nonprofit sector, has made her a trusted voice in digital marketing strategies for social good.

Episode Summary:

In this enlightening episode of Talking Shizzle, host Taylor Wilson talks with Julia Campbell, an expert in nonprofit digital marketing, on the empowering benefits of podcasting for brands and entrepreneurs. This shizzle is hot and we are returning with a new season, and starting it with Julia, who shares her journey, tips, and secrets on leveraging podcasts to build community, enhance brand visibility, and foster professional networks.

Julia elaborates on her startup story, from her journalism roots to becoming a leading voice in nonprofit marketing. She provides practical insights on managing podcasts amidst a busy schedule, the critical role of consistency, and the importance of high-quality, personal content in an increasingly AI-dominated content space. Julia’s expertise in acquiring sponsorships and her advice on engaging meaningfully with them shed light on maximizing ROI from podcasting in terms of networking, visibility, and business growth.

Key Takeaways:

  • Consistency and Authenticity: Julia emphasizes the importance of showing up consistently with authentic content to build credibility and trust over time.
  • Networking Tool: Podcasts are excellent tools for networking, providing a platform to connect with industry leaders and interesting personalities while adding value to your audience.
  • Structured Approach: Adopting a structured approach to podcasting, such as batching episodes and utilizing scheduling tools like Calendly, can help in managing production efficiently.
  • Sponsorship Strategy: Julia shares insights on acquiring and maintaining sponsorships, highlighting the importance of delivering value and maintaining communication.
  • Personal Connection: Utilizing podcasts to build a personal connection with your audience can significantly enhance trust and engagement, offering a unique value that AI-generated content cannot replicate.

Resources:

Transcript

0:00:02 Taylor Shanklin: Hey, hey, all you lovely people out there, you’ve got a lot going on in your day with big dreams and big goals for your world. Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from leading entrepreneurs, change makers, coaches, and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Shanklin, CEO and founder of Creative Shizzle, and I am stoked to bring you a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle today.

0:00:32 Taylor Shanklin: This show is all about helping you think differently so that you can grow. Talking Shizzle is brought to you by our team at Creative Shizzle, where we help businesses, entrepreneurs, and social good innovators make amazing marketing chisel happen. Check us out on the web@creativeshizzle.com. now let’s talk some shizzle.

0:01:01 Taylor Shanklin: All right, what’s up, everyone? We are back with a brand new season of Talking Shizzle. It’s been a little bit of time since we’ve gotten on the podcast and behind the mic, and I’m super pumped to have Julia Campbell, a really good friend here today, to talk about using podcasts to grow community and build your brand and have interesting conversations. How are you?

0:01:26 Julia Campbell: I am doing fantastic, and I’m so excited to be on your podcast as you’re kicking it back off again.

0:01:32 Taylor Shanklin: I know it’s exciting. I got kind of tired.

0:01:35 Julia Campbell: I don’t know.

0:01:35 Taylor Shanklin: I think it’ll get a little bit burnt out of talking for a bit, and I needed to pause. You’ve probably felt that as a podcast host, I was. I was hosting podcasts for many years in a row and just kind of was like, I need a break. And now I feel refreshed, ready to come back and do it again. Okay, so, Julia, you know, it’s funny. I was thinking about this. I think we’ve been working together on your podcast for almost three years.

0:02:02 Julia Campbell: I think it’s been three years this August. I can’t believe that. I know I need to probably do some kind of celebration around it, but that’s crazy.

0:02:14 Taylor Shanklin: So tell us a little bit about why you decided to do a podcast in the first place.

0:02:19 Julia Campbell: I love speaking, and I love writing. I love creating content and talking to nonprofits. I love networking, and my background is in journalism. So I studied magazine journalism at BU, and I thought I was always going to be traveling the world and be either a print journalist or, like, a tv journalist. Like, the morning show was my favorite show. I just love Murphy Brown. All of those. I love the idea of storytelling and talking to interesting people about interesting things.

0:02:50 Julia Campbell: So for me, when I started the podcast, it really was a form of content creation, like giving something for free, putting something out there to nonprofits that really struggle and need help. And it was a lot about marketing and sort of building up my visibility and sort of getting my voice out there. And now it’s a little bit more about networking and meeting interesting people and people that I would want to meet that I wouldn’t really have a good excuse to just sort of email them. But I could say, oh, I read your LinkedIn post. I read your Forbes article.

0:03:23 Julia Campbell: I read your Harvard business review article. I think you’d be a fantastic guest on my podcast. And then since I have been doing it for a while, I do have some credibility and some receipts around downloads and listenership and things like that. So now, for me, it’s a great way to sort of also stay abreast of what’s going on in the industry, but connect with people that I probably wouldn’t have just randomly kind of reached out to and said, like, hey, can we have a 15 minutes coffee?

0:03:52 Julia Campbell: So for me, it’s really been great in building my professional network as well.

0:03:57 Taylor Shanklin: Do you find very many people ask you, well, what’s your audience size or anything like that before they agree to come on your show?

0:04:05 Julia Campbell: No, I literally never had anyone ask that. I think the reason is I usually am introduced to them by someone else or have met them personally, maybe at a conference, or I do a lot of research. So I wanted to have Jenny Blake, who’s one of my favorite authors, she wrote free time. She has a podcast called Free Time. She actually wrote the book pivot. And I was, I’m still obsessed with her. The biggest fan girl of Jenny Blake.

0:04:36 Julia Campbell: So I wrote her this really thoughtful email, and I said, look, I’ve read all of your books. I listened to your podcast. I really think that these three themes would resonate really well with my audience. They’re nonprofit marketers and fundraisers. And she immediately said yes. And then once I had her, then I reached out, I could say, oh, I reached out to another author I love, Tamsen Webster. Oh, I’ve had Jenny Blake on my podcast.

0:05:00 Julia Campbell: Would you come on? And then once I had both of them, I reached out to another author I love. So it’s kind of snowballing, but I think doing your research, I get so many pitches for people to be on my podcast that clearly have never listened to my podcast and don’t understand what it’s about and don’t understand the audience. And if it’s something like that, I usually don’t respond. But oftentimes I find that people are just not doing their research. They’re sending out blanket pitches, they’re sending out blanket statements.

0:05:31 Julia Campbell: And I find that when you’re interacting with someone and you’re asking them for their time, you know, take some time to do some research. So whether it’s me approaching a guest or whether it’s a potential guest approaching me, it is always sort of very personal, and I really do my due diligence.

0:05:48 Taylor Shanklin: I cannot back that up enough. And I agree. We haven’t even been podcasting for a while myself. I still have a lot of random people email me about or LinkedIn me about being on a podcast that I haven’t even touched in three years. I’m like, I’m not even doing that show anymore, you know, and then it’s just off base. So, yeah, I agree. I think definitely, I love your point about, like, using it as a networking tool.

0:06:15 Taylor Shanklin: I totally, 100% think that it’s a really good tool to be able to give some, I don’t know, give something back to someone when you’re reaching out to them instead of just asking for the 15 minutes coffee break.

0:06:28 Julia Campbell: Right. There’s people that I’ve wanted to meet professionally, and I have met them through the podcast. And then I do feel like I could reach out and say, oh, I saw you spoke at this conference. Would you be willing to introduce me to the organizers? Or, oh, I saw that you self published a book like Mika Whitlock I just had on the podcast. I’ve been talking to him about self publishing, and to me, it’s a great doorway. It’s almost like an entryway into building a relationship that’s even stronger with people because I don’t feel very comfortable just sort of jumping off and saying, oh, I saw you did this, or I saw, you know, you’re connected with this person.

0:07:07 Julia Campbell: Can you connect me? It’s more, what can I do for you? And then earning that right to sort of ask them for a favor.

0:07:14 Taylor Shanklin: Okay, so you’ve been podcasting almost three years. You run a business. You’re on the road a lot. How do you get it done? You know, as we’re talking to other busy entrepreneurs or people maybe, who are thinking about a podcast, or maybe even people who do a podcast and don’t feel like they’re managing it very well, like, what are some things that you figured out to keep a regular show going while not feeling burnt out about it?

0:07:40 Julia Campbell: I have a very regular structure for how I do my podcast now. So I use calendly to schedule, and I only podcast. I only record, I believe, the middle two weeks of the month, usually Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday only between like 10:00 a.m. and 03:00 p.m. so I first of all, very much set the parameters of when I’m in a podcast, I like to batch. I don’t like to be like a podcast recording here, a podcast recording there.

0:08:10 Julia Campbell: I like to batch my episodes, and I like to know that I have a podcast day and just know, like, I’m focused on that. And the other thing I do is I have the podcast prep form that I took from somebody else that, you know what I mean? Like, it’s all, I’m happy to send anyone my podcast prep form, but I took it from someone else whose podcast I had been on and then adapted it. And for me, that really helps the guest understand the questions, the headshot, the bio. You know, there’s sort of a checklist you have to go through, so making sure that, you know, sort of all the I’s are dotted and the t’s are checked.

0:08:46 Julia Campbell: But Taylor, working with your company, that has just been so amazing because I know once it’s recorded in Riverside, I really don’t have to touch it again. Like, your team takes it, you do all the things. It’s sort of like if you plan well ahead of time, then it becomes a well oiled machine over time. And I feel like having done it now, I really. It’s so hard to believe it’s been, it’s been three years, but knowing that every Wednesday a podcast is going to go out, like, no matter what, and trying to really do the episodes when I have some high energy and when I’m like, it’s not a busy time period for me, but my advice to podcasters would be it really is about consistency and it’s about what you’re comfortable with doing.

0:09:35 Julia Campbell: But I think batching a pod, like, if you have four podcast episodes that you can do in one day or two days, and then, you know, a whole month is ready to go and ready to be edited and ready to be sent out in the world, it’s just kind of such a weight off your shoulders. I also have sponsors and that management, the sponsors are lovely, but that management takes a lot because there’s the recording of the pre roll, keeping them updated, the final report, making sure that I’m promoting them throughout the month. So that’s probably the most amount of work with the guests.

0:10:09 Julia Campbell: They’re usually just very well prepared, they know what they want to talk about. I send them some questions ahead of time, and then as long as their sound is good, we’re kind of off to the races.

0:10:22 Taylor Shanklin: Okay, so how did you start getting sponsorships? Cause I don’t think you started your show with sponsorships. And that’s common.

0:10:29 Julia Campbell: It’s only been the last year, maybe.

0:10:33 Taylor Shanklin: Yeah. And you always have a sponsor. Now, speaking of someone who sees the back end of the show.

0:10:39 Julia Campbell: Right, exactly. Because I always have a pre roll, and then usually I do an episode with the sponsor, or what I want to start doing now is like a LinkedIn live with a sponsor, and then turn that into sort of a bonus podcast episode, which is a value add for them. So I started my podcast after I’d really already built an audience. You know, I had my blog for years. I’d been speaking. I had two books.

0:11:06 Julia Campbell: I had, you know, my online courses, and I’d been doing free webinars forever for all sorts of software companies. I really wasn’t starting from scratch, so I can’t speak to getting sponsorships starting from scratch because they do want to know that you have an audience. I find that my sponsors are not as concerned with download numbers as they are with my reach in terms of, like, my email list, my social media, and just having them be able to promote whatever it is they want. Like, certainly we measure, you know, oh, are they getting the, for instance, if they’re promoting a report, are they getting certain amount of clicks and downloads on the report? Or if we’re promoting a webinar together, you know, what’s the registration and what’s the turnout?

0:11:54 Julia Campbell: But I think build it. Just, you have to really establish that you have something to add to the conversation, and then the sponsors are going to sort of get something out of it and keeping in touch with them. I think what happens is we reach out to sponsors, they give us a check, and then they never hear from us again. I try to stay in touch with them, and then I ask them about next year. What are your plans? Do you have your marketing budget for next year? What are you thinking?

0:12:24 Julia Campbell: What else can I do for you? How else can I add a to this? But I hesitated for so long, and then I just, then someone asked me, I think it was one of the companies came out and just asked if they could sponsor. And I completely made it up out of nowhere on my first podcast sponsorship pitch deck. I’m also happy to send to anybody that wants it and completely made it up and they accepted it. And I thought, okay, here we go. And then once I had that sponsor, then I felt like I go to other sponsors, but just starting small for me, it’s not going to be something that’s going to pay my mortgage, but it’s going to pay for podcast production and it’s going to pay a little extra as well. So for me, it’s definitely worth keeping it up.

0:13:11 Julia Campbell: But yeah, we’ll see how it goes. Some podcasts, I know do a year, some podcasts do six months, I do monthly, but sometimes this will buy multiple months.

0:13:20 Taylor Shanklin: I think it’s cool that you change it up every month. I mean, also it gives your audience something like a different jingle to hear. They’re not always hearing the same, you know, sponsor role. You know, as someone who listens to podcasts, sometimes when I hear the same like commercial over and over again on the podcast that I like, it gets a little. Yeah, yeah. Like you just kind of tune it out and, you know, so I actually think it’s cool and a good idea that you do yours monthly.

0:13:45 Taylor Shanklin: Do you prepare or give your sponsors like a monthly report out on downloads or reach or anything like that? So is that something that’s part of your communication to help them kind of continue to see the value?

0:13:59 Julia Campbell: Yes. So I give them usually the first week into the next month. So if it’s a Mae sponsor, the end of the first week of June, you would get a list of all the episodes, who were the guests download number as of June, whatever it was. Because the thing is, the downloads are always going to increase. I need to actually probably get better about following up six months later and sending them a download number because, you know, for me, it’s increasing over time. People find it, they listen to one and then they’re like, listening to another one.

0:14:32 Julia Campbell: And then I share with them the email marketing that I did, the social media marketing, the reach, and I look to them to tell me, you know, if they feel like they accomplished what they wanted to accomplish. Like, I can’t tell on my end how many downloads or how many website hits they got, but if they want to share that, I add that into the report so they kind of have it all together. And then next steps for working together, you know, I always give my current sponsors the sort of first right of refusal for the next year.

0:15:04 Julia Campbell: My only issue now, and, you know this, Taylor, is all the software companies I work with are like merging and buying each other out. And like, everything’s changing so quickly that it’s very hard to keep up with in this industry. But I think it’ll. I think it’ll be fine.

0:15:21 Taylor Shanklin: My next question for you is, you seen value in, you know, opening up new connections and kind of building new community and partnerships. You’ve seen value and podcasting in the getting a sponsor to kind of be involved with you on an ongoing basis, even help cover the production costs. What are some of the other key areas you feel like in your business that you, even if anecdotal, you feel like this podcast has helped move the needle for your business in some way?

0:15:51 Julia Campbell: Well, I know that people are listening because I talk to them at conferences or they’ll email me. I wish more people would. I would love to hear from them. But I have definitely received a, you know, client inquiries, and I know a few people that signed up for my most recent course had heard me from a podcast. I’ve definitely made more connections on LinkedIn, which is where I do a lot of my marketing and even selling.

0:16:17 Julia Campbell: And it’s built my email list, which is a huge marketing asset for me. So I can actually trace two clients that I have worked with that said they found me from my podcast, but also just that credibility piece. I know we were talking about Seth Godin, how Seth Godin was on my podcast, which was mind blowing and amazing, and I still can’t even believe that that happened, to be honest. But that was because his team at Goodbin, so he’s running a new nonprofit auction company.

0:16:50 Julia Campbell: They reached out to me on LinkedIn, and they said, oh, we’ve been seeing. You’ve been posting. We heard your podcast with the Microsoft philanthropies person. We would like to be on your podcast. And I said, oh, that’s great. You know, not thinking ever that Seth would be. And then they came back and said, you know, Seth took a look at your stuff and listened to a few episodes. He really wants to be the guest. And just to have that credibility, that sort of confidence was, I mean, really incredible. I mean, that was the highlight, obviously, of this year for me.

0:17:21 Julia Campbell: And he was so gracious and so kind and just so wonderful to work with. But having that level of visibility, like, it’s really, you can’t pay for it. It’s really hard to. It’s hard to pay for that kind of professional credibility.

0:17:36 Taylor Shanklin: Well, you get it because you’ve been showing up for years, doing it consistently, and, like, giving your audience good content, valuable, authentic content. And so I think the space that a lot of times we sit in as a content creator or business owner is one where, you know, there’s always this kind of like, what’s the, what’s the value I can bring to my ends? But then what’s the ROI on, like, spending all my time on this content.

0:18:06 Taylor Shanklin: And I think you are such a good case study or example. I don’t want to for you as a case study, but such a good example of, like, it worked well.

0:18:18 Julia Campbell: It’s all about showing up consistently. That is something that when I first started my business, I listened to. It was probably Amy Porterfield or maybe Marie Forleo. And I was listening to, like, online marketers because I thought that was a business I really wanted to have. And I’m still trying to grow that piece of my business. But the takeaway was constantly, constantly, show up, just show up, show up, show up. Give away everything for free.

0:18:47 Julia Campbell: And then your one on one consulting, your in depth courses. That’s what you charge for your speaking engagements eventually. I spoke for free for years. You know, my gosh, I spoke at chambers of commerce and Kiwanis and junior league and anybody that would, anyone and everybody that would have me. And then I blogged for ten years weekly because it was something I just thought, okay, I’ve got to do this.

0:19:11 Julia Campbell: It’s the only way that I can establish credibility and build trust and affinity with an audience that’s really hard to break into. And what I think is people jump around like, they’re like, oh, I’m going to blog for a year, or I’m going to podcast for a year, and then I’m going to do webinars for a year. But I would recommend always, like, picking something and being consistent. So my blog now, I really don’t write it every week. I mean, there’s no way I could do this in the podcast.

0:19:41 Julia Campbell: But my podcast is my content that I can repurpose and actually put on the blog and show up. It’s sort of how I’m showing up. And I talked actually to Seth about this. Cause he stopped his podcast and he said, you know what? I did it for two years. I really loved it. He said, but now I’m just finding another way to show up. I’m just doing things in a different way. But he said, I wouldn’t have done it for six months.

0:20:06 Julia Campbell: I really wanted to do it for a long period of time to see the results because, oh, my gosh, like anything else, it’s like pushing a boulder up a hill sometimes. Like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

0:20:17 Taylor Shanklin: What I remember sometimes, like earlier on in my career, before I’d gone out on my own and was trying to, as you know, a leader of marketing teams say, this is why I think we should do podcasting, or this is why I think we should spend our time on LinkedIn content. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where are the leads? You know, like, I think a lot of people are so caught up on, like, marketing and sales attribution that they’re often missing the bigger picture of show up and, like, do good things for people, share free content. I’m with you on that. Make things free.

0:20:55 Taylor Shanklin: And, like, people who really want to buy from you will come to you, as opposed to you chasing people who maybe don’t care about buying anything at all at the moment.

0:21:07 Julia Campbell: Absolutely. And the thing with podcasting, actually, Jenny Blake told me this, and it made so much sense, is it’s your voice in someone’s ear. You can’t buy that kind of trust. And if someone doesn’t like me, that’s fine. They know they don’t like me. I mean, that’s cool. If they listen to my podcast, they’re like, oh, man, I hate her voice. Totally fine. Then we probably wouldn’t be great working together.

0:21:29 Julia Campbell: But if someone says, oh, I’ve heard of Julia, I want to kind of check her out. I want to see what she’s all about. And then they get a good feeling from me. It’s such a personal medium. It’s so much more personal than writing a blog. And this is why I really want to try to do more video, because that’s even the next level. Personal from audio. But audio is sort of my comfort zone right now. But it is that you, like, think of the podcast that you listen to or news or the radio or WBUR, whatever it is that those voices are so familiar. Like, if you heard them in the grocery store, you would know, and you just really have a feeling that you get when you hear them.

0:22:09 Julia Campbell: So that’s what I’m trying. That’s what I’m really trying to do with my show, by the way.

0:22:13 Taylor Shanklin: I want to, first off, just say I actually think, as I was going back down memory lane and trying to think about how long we’ve been doing it, I actually think you maybe were my first client.

0:22:24 Julia Campbell: Amazing. And I hope I brought a lot of people to you.

0:22:27 Taylor Shanklin: Okay, so give me one last kind of final thing that you feel like you want to tell this audience right now, either about podcasting or maybe something exciting that you’re working on, a project that you want to shout out about.

0:22:40 Julia Campbell: Oh, I don’t know about a project. What I want to tell this audience is that I just read a statistic this morning that said 90% of the content online next year will be generated by AI, and that really horrified me. I don’t have any issues with generative AI. I think they’re fantastic tools. But the only way that we’re going to stand out and cut through the clutter is by being unique and by having our own voice and by doing things that the AI can’t do.

0:23:13 Julia Campbell: And I think podcasting, sure, maybe you could have an AI podcast. I’m sure that can happen. But having your unique stamp on things and having your unique voice come through and not being afraid of doing something a little bit different, I think that would probably be my best piece of marketing advice for businesses, for nonprofits, for brands, for anybody.

0:23:36 Taylor Shanklin: Well, hey, thanks so much for being on talking Chisel today. It was awesome having you. Thanks for joining us, everyone. I hope this was helpful. It’s good to be back behind the mic and we’ll see you next time.

0:23:51 Taylor Shanklin: Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening chisel our guests bring to us with every episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast player so that you don’t miss a beat of the talking Chisel podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review.

0:24:19 Taylor Shanklin: We’d love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the good, juicy business growth chisel that you would like to hear about. Get in touch with us and follow along@creativeshizzle.com or email us at podcast@creativeshizzle.com until next time, keep making your shizzle happen.