Originally posted on LinkedIn. Edited and updated here.
What do podcasting and marketing have in common?
A lot more than you may think. Both involve:
- Collaboration: People are important! Whether you’re working with other podcasters, interviewees, marketers, product managers, or sales people, you should agree on goals and roles and learn to work well together.
- Communication: You can’t collaborate without effective communication. You also must be able to communicate to your listeners (for podcasting) and your customers (for product marketing).
- Adaptability: Things change on a daily basis. It could involve new tools, new structures, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, you’ve got to adjust and move forward.
- Strategy: How will you reach your goals? As a podcaster maybe you want to be a thought leader. As a product marketer your focus is to launch and market your product. Either way you need to define your positioning and messaging.
- Analysis: You need to know what’s working and then figure out where to improve. For podcasting that could mean iterating on your show format and changing things up to better resonate with your listeners. For product marketing that could mean looking at your product’s usage metrics and developing onboarding sequences.
- Creativity: You should stay open minded and be able to solve all sorts of problems (technical, logistical, etc.). As a bonus remember that as a podcaster and a product marketer, you are also a storyteller. So tell your stories, creatively.
- Empathy: When it comes down to it, you are building relationships with people. These could be with fellow dinosaur enthusiasts, if say, you had a dinosaur podcast 😉; your co-workers you interact with every day to build a product with an impact; or your customers whose lives you are trying to better with your work—to name a few.
These things apply to product marketers, as I mentioned in my LinkedIn post, as well as book marketers. As an author, you’ll likely need to collaborate and communicate with designers and other people to get the word out about your book, and share your book covers.
The landscape is constantly changing, so you need to adapt. One great example of this is the group of children’s authors who connected with their community via the game Animal Crossing.
When it comes to strategy, content marketing can be key to finding new readers.
You can analyze data to be a more productive writer, by tracking your time.
Being open and creative in how you tell your stories can come in all sorts of forms, like the video game AI Dungeon that has served more than 18.5 million customized text-based adventures to more than one million monthly active users. From Publisher’s Weekly:
“People should absolutely be taking advantage of this technology—especially hobbyist and amateur writers,” said Emily Bellavia, who wrote a fantasy adventure novel using the AI Dungeon interface. “I used to love writing as a kid, but I never properly reconnected with the childlike wonder I had while creating stories. This allows you to flex that creative muscle without needing to devote an excessive amount of time to it.”
And last, empathy applies to everything. As an author you are building relationships with your readers and community!
