In this episode of "Sequence Over Strategy," Michelle Warner, a business designer and strategist, shares her decision-making process behind starting a podcast and why she doesn’t rely on it for awareness.
What job are you asking your marketing strategies to do for you? In this episode of "Sequence Over Strategy," Michelle Warner, a business designer and strategist, shares her decision-making process behind starting a podcast and why she doesn’t rely on it for awareness. Today’s question concerns transitioning from private to group coaching. Michelle highlights the importance of understanding the job you need your marketing strategies to do and how to align them with your business goals.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. For over 15 years now, and working with more than 1,000 clients, I've helped small businesses grow. And during all that time, I've noticed the same trend everywhere.
When business owners are confused, or they're not growing the way they want, they're actually all facing the same problem and trying to solve it in the same incorrect way, and they don't even realize what they're doing. So, what are they doing? They're throwing out a bunch of popular tactics at their problems.
Maybe they're posting on social media a ton trying to grow followers, or releasing new products, hiring a bunch of new team members. Maybe they're raising prices, or lowering prices, or researching how to price things correctly. Maybe they're launching a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a podcast that's also a YouTube channel. I literally had one client tell me that a former coach said if she didn't post 15 times a day to LinkedIn, she would never get any clients.
Now listen, none of these things are inherently bad or wrong, except maybe the 15 posts per day thing. But all of these things ignore one foundational problem. A problem that if we just stopped to solve it, would help us build in a stable, steady way without all the noise or waste or frustration that we come all too familiar with as entrepreneurs.
Think about it.
Imagine building efficiently with less drama and more confidence. But as entrepreneurs, we've set ourselves up to fail at that most basic goal, no matter how good it sounds. And that's because we spend so much time throwing so many things at the wall, just waiting for something to stick, that it's hard to know why something sticks when it does, which makes it hard to repeat the wins. It also makes it hard to understand any losses. So unfortunately, in all that chaos of the day-to-day, it's way too easy to get lost trying to do all of the things. And when you do that, you're never going to build something sustainable and growing. You're never going to build a sturdy business.
And look, I get it. It's very tempting to look for the trends, the popular tactics, or the perfect playbook that can make it feel like you're in control and you have an instant winner. It's also very easy to throw that spaghetti at the wall. We've all done it. We've all been there. But the real skill we need to master is different. The real skill we need to master is taking a breath before making the throw to make sure we're asking the right questions first. If we did that, we'd realize an important thing. We'd realize that it's more important to figure out the right order for our actions than it is to take any action at all.
Yes, you heard me right. Rather than throw that spaghetti at the wall, rather than just taking a bunch of action, or rather than looking for a perfectly polished playbook, what we need the most is to understand sequence over strategy. That's the idea that it's more important to do things in the correct order than to do things correctly. I'm going to say that again.
It's more important to do things in the correct order than it is to do things correctly.
The perfect strategy for your pricing won't matter if you don't sell something people want. The perfect strategy for this podcast doesn't matter if I hadn't proven my ideas elsewhere or built a small audience of passionate supporters already. What you do next is the most important decision you can make right now.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy, a show about small business entrepreneurship. My goal on this show is to help you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than someone else's theoretical strategy. And I'm going to do it all so you can build a sustainable business that serves you for all the things that matter the most, your time, your energy, and your profit.
As you know, every episode of Sequence Over Strategy is organized around a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business and a specific question that they send me to answer on this episode.
Today’s Listener Question
Today's question comes from Kinsey, who's a counselor and coach, and I am so excited to answer it because it allows me to do one of my favorite things. And that shares some behind the scenes decision-making from my own business and specifically why I started this podcast. So, we're going to roll back the curtains and get into my decision-making on why a podcast and why now. Here's Kinsey's specific question.
“Can you share more about why you chose to start a podcast and the markers you used to decide it was the right time and strategy for your business? I am shifting my work from a private therapy practice to a nonprofit that provides group coaching to clergy. It is a slow progression, but I already have a two-year contract to run two groups. I'm hoping to fill one that is not contracted, but is from other funding sources. Relationship marketing is working for me, but I also need to get the word out. I don't believe I have the capacity, brand recognition or following to do a podcast now, but I'm curious to hear about yours or clients of yours sequence and strategy around starting a podcast.”
Well, Kinsey, first of all, you get a gold star for using the phrase sequence and strategy in your question. Thank you so much. And like I said, I get so many questions about the behind the scenes of my business. And I'm really excited to share that with you because you know what? The decision for this podcast is probably different than what a lot of people think it was. And that's why you need to pay attention to this episode.
The Surprising Reason to Podcast
My answer as to why I launched this podcast and why I did it now, it's not going to be what you're expecting. And this happens to me often. As a business designer and strategist, I know, because you tell me, that a lot of people are looking at my own business model. and they want to hit copy and paste because they assume what they see on the surface. They assume that what I'm doing is, number one, perfectly designed, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't always follow my own rules, and also that they can take it at face value, that what they see is what they get, and there's not a different decision happening under the surface. And that's just not true. For example, if I have a podcast, people assume that I want it to be the most successful, viral, growing thing on the planet. And that is not at all true, which you will find out in this episode.
So, please stay tuned today because I'm going to take you behind the scenes of my decision making. And by doing so, hopefully convince you that all is not what it seems. And you should never assume you know what's happening in a business based on what you see on the surface and in public.
And Kinsey, I'm also going to have a few ideas for you and how I'd love to see you thinking through your own sequence over strategy choices. Because you nailed it, it's probably not the right time for you to do a podcast, so it doesn't matter that you don't have the resources. But I do want to leave you with some thoughts about what I think is the right time for you to be doing.
So, first things first. When you are thinking about why you're going to do something, if you're thinking about, oh, I see a lot of people doing podcasts, should I do that? The first thing I need you to think about, the first thing I need you to know is what job any marketing tool that you are thinking about implementing is going to do for you. This is always the first step in any sequence over strategy decision. You see, most people see and talk about what's popular now or what's working now, right? We hear about dancing on TikTok, that's always my favorite example to use, or posting on LinkedIn 50 times a week, or sending newsletters, even the monthly roundtables that I host, or let's face it, launching a podcast.
When you think of marketing and ramping it up, when you think of needing to meet more people, your brain naturally goes to strategies. It naturally goes to looking around and seeing what's on other people's papers, right? Kind of like in elementary school, you're taking a look. What's everyone else doing? I want you to resist that temptation and I want you to think sequence first.
Don't think about the strategies yet. Let's first walk through the sequence. And when we're talking about marketing, thinking sequence first means understanding the flow, the movement if you will, of what you're trying to create from the moment people meet you until the moment you ask them to buy something from you. And then and only then, when you're clear on the movement you're wanting to create, can you start choosing strategies to plug into the different phases of that movement? Then you want those strategies to actually create the movement that you have envisioned.
To do this, you need to know two things. Number one, you need to know what side of the marketing continuum you're going to be on. Are you going to be using relationship marketing? Are you going to be using traffic marketing? Or are you going to be using a combination thereof? And if you're not familiar with those terms, go check out episode one. I break it all down there.
And then the second thing you need to know is what that means for the job you want done in the three stages of marketing. So, let's back up real quick and talk about those three stages of marketing.
The Three Stages of Marketing
I think about marketing in these three stages. Number one, awareness. Number two, engagement. Number three, sales. And why I do that is because it helps me break down and create the flow that I want to see in my marketing. If I'm just talking about marketing and I just have to pick strategies for that, I don't actually know what job I'm asking anything to do.
Instead, when I break it into these three stages, awareness, engagement, sales, I can start to understand the jobs that I need done. Specifically, the awareness job is to make sure people know I exist. It's to make sure people are meeting me. And specifically, they're meeting me in the way that I want them to meet me and with the impact I want them to meet me.
Then engagement, it works to take those people I've now met during awareness and to help them build trust with me, to help them talk their challenges down to size, help them really identify what they need to do to fix the challenge that they have.
And then sales is obvious. That's when I need them to buy something. And you can imagine that different marketing strategies (the strategies we're talking about the social media, the newsletter, the podcast, the speaking, the whatever) they work better for different stages, or they can do different jobs in different stages. And they also work differently based on whether you're focusing on relationship or traffic marketing. And again, if you need a refresher on relationship or traffic marketing, go check out episode one. We break it all down there.
Before you ever get into choosing any kind of strategy to add to your efforts, you need to ask yourself, do I want to be relationship or traffic marketing? Or again, somewhere in the middle. And what am I doing right now to accomplish the three stages of marketing? How are people meeting me? Right? That's the awareness. How are people then engaging with me, getting to know me, understanding how to apply what I've taught them? That's engagement. How are they buying from me? That's sales.
If your answer is that every marketing strategy that you're doing is doing all three of those things, it's doing all three of those jobs at once, well, I would invite you to have a rethink because that tells me that you're not really thinking this through at the level we need you to think it through. And you've probably just thrown some popular strategies against a wall and you're hoping that they'll work. You've probably just seen what other people are doing and have assumed that that means marketing. Instead of sitting down and asking yourself, do I want to use relationship strategies? Do I want to use traffic strategies or a combo thereof? And then of those things, of those things that I've chosen to do, what jobs am I asking them to do? Am I asking them to do an awareness job, an engagement job, or a sales job?
And by the way, if I've just called you out, if you're one of these people who is kind of looking at your marketing just as one blob, that's okay. It's how 90% of business owners operate. But we want to do a better job. That's why we're here. We want to ask the right questions and do a better job so that your marketing does a better job for you, and you don't have to spend as much time and resources doing it because it will be more efficient if you ask yourself these questions first.
So, Kinsey, let's get everyone what they're always asking for and talk this through using my business as an example. And then at the end, we'll also look at some suggestions for your business.
So, if we start with my business and we all love a little behind the scenes, right? And again, I'm happy to give this to you because I have to tell you nothing frustrates me more than seeing people say, oh, I saw you do this. And so I started doing it too. And that's not because I mind that you're watching what I'm doing. That's cool. And it's very flattering. But I do worry that you're not understanding the whole picture of why I'm doing what I do. If we only borrow from what you see publicly, you may think you're doing what I'm doing when in fact you're doing the complete opposite. What works for me may not work for you because we're asking them to do different jobs.
That doesn't just go for my business, by the way. I'm not special. That goes for any business. So as your resident business strategist and designer, I implore you, please do not look at what you see on the surface of someone else's business and assume that you can copy and paste. Most people are making sequence decisions behind the scenes and inform the strategies. And if you don't know or understand those sequence decisions, then copying the strategies can send you down a very wrong path. Let's see how that can be done again using my business as an example and why specifically this podcast was released now.
My Business Sequence
So, what's the first thing that we need to know in the sequence? First thing we need to know is, am I relationship marketing, traffic marketing, or some combination? And in my case, it's some combination. I'm looking to do a bit of both. The marketing that I'm hitting sits right in the center of the continuum. I'm going to be borrowing a bit from each side and that's very normal.
The next thing to know, how do I break that down into the stages? Where am I focused on relationship strategies? And where am I doing more borrowing from the traffic side? And what the heck does that mean for this podcast?
Well, for awareness, I rely heavily on relationship marketing for my awareness strategies. I believe very deeply in that. So specifically, I am relying on something that I call borrowing audiences. And that means I'm asking myself, where are my audiences already gathered? And then I'm going there and I'm meeting them. Think guest teaching, speaking, going on other podcasts.
Here's where we may hit the first surprise or the first assumption that you may be making about why I'm doing this podcast. Because it is not primarily an awareness strategy for me. I'm going to say that again. This podcast is not an awareness strategy for me. And why am I making a big deal out of this? Because it might be counterintuitive to you.
Most people see podcasts and think big, popular, audience growth, viral. I want to meet people here. That's not at all what I see and it's not the job I'm asking this podcast to fill. I just told you I actually want to meet people under relationship marketing conditions, which means I want to meet them where they're already at. I do not want to assume that they are going to somehow stumble upon this podcast.
But I did have a job that wasn't getting done in the second stage of marketing, in engagement. So, my awareness marketing is working wonderfully, but I had a hole in my engagement strategies. And engagement is where you start to see me lean more into traffic strategies.
For a long time, I was only selling one-on-one work. And so, my engagement strategies were also heavily relationship strategies. My goal was to meet people in the same way that I've just described to you. I went and borrowed audiences and met people. But then for that second stage of marketing, my goal was to have follow-up conversations with those people. One-on-one conversations.
That's still true for my corporate and my one-on-one work. But then my audience began to expand. Word got out. And I started teaching a few boot camps each year. And the audience who buys boot camps, it's a little bigger than my one-on-one audience, and it's a little different. And it's a combination audience. It's really an audience that responds well to both relationship and traffic marketing. So I still want to meet them through relationship means. I want to build that initial relationship with them. But I don't have the time, and frankly, they don't necessarily want to spend that kind of time with me to talk to me one-on-one after that. That's a little too intense of a relationship for the type of people who would attend my boot camps.
A few years ago, I introduced a monthly roundtable to meet my engagement goals. And that's still going on once a month. I host a group Zoom where I answer questions and we gather as a community, and we talk about some of these different topics. It's a fantastic forum for me to build on relationships of people that I've met in some other way. You know, we come together, and we talk through things and we really are able to think through and go a little deeper and understand concepts that maybe I've shared during awareness.
But here's the problem with those roundtables. I don't keep an archive of them. I could, but for many reasons I don't, and I don't think it's a good idea to do so. Because I don't do that, there's no way for people to binge my content or to get information that they need right now. One month I might be talking about strategy, another month I'm talking about marketing, another month I'm talking about decision-making. Every month is different. And so, if you need to, you want to be refreshed on how I think about relationship or traffic marketing, There's not really a way to do that unless I happen to be hosting a roundtable that month that's focused on that.
As my audience has grown, I am constantly getting people asking for more resources, asking for places that they can binge and go deeper, asking for the back catalog of how I think about building a business. But it doesn't exist. I don't have a blog and I won't have a blog. I know that about myself. But I can podcast. And this idea of creating a reference library that people can go down the rabbit hole of any time they want or need to. Now that was really intriguing to me. That was a job I wanted and needed done on the traffic and engagement side of my marketing.
So, enter this podcast. It is intended to be a reference library for people who want to go deeper after meeting me elsewhere. Will some of those people share it with their friends? Of course, and I thank you so much to those of you who already have. So, will some people meet me here? Yes, I am sure they will. But my primary goal of this podcast is to deepen my relationship with the people I meet in other places so that I can run more boot camps each year.
Right now, I run two or three of those a year, but I have to tell you, I want more demand for them. They're absolute fire. They get people so many results and they are surprisingly my favorite thing to do. But right now, I don't have the marketing system in place to sustain more than two or three bootcamp rounds every year. This podcast is designed to change that. That is the job the podcast is doing for me. I want it to help more people engage with me over the course of the year so that we can do more boot camps and I can help more people.
In a very weird way, that means that I am doing more traffic marketing to make sure more people hear about relationship marketing, which may seem a little opposite, but that's exactly what's happening. So many people benefit from understanding how to relationship market. That I no longer want to feel like I'm gatekeeping that information and keeping it so close to me I want to reach more people that means leaning into more traffic marketing that means When I'm meeting people I'm looking for larger groups to meet, and that means an engagement, I want to give people more ways to engage with me more ways to go deeper than just relying on a monthly call that they have to show up to and that there's not really an archive of if they want to go refer to material afterwards. So again, that's why this podcast exists. It exists as an engagement opportunity.
Advice for Kinsey
So, Kinsey, now that you know why I chose to do the podcast, let's turn it back around to you and your business and look at your question again. You start by asking, “Can you share more about why you chose to start a podcast and the markers you used to decide it was the right time and strategy for you?” Well, I've just done that.
I hope what you've come away from that with is understanding that podcasts can do different jobs. And again, it's all in thinking through those initial questions of, are you relationship or traffic marketing or doing a combination thereof? And therefore, what does that mean for what you want to do in awareness, engagement, and sales? And where might there be a hole there that you want to fill with something like a podcast?
And then, Kinsey, you say, “I am shifting my work from a private therapy practice to a nonprofit that provides group coaching to clergy. It is a slow progression, but I already have a two-year contractor on two groups and I'm hoping to fill one that is not contracted but is from other funding sources.”
Okay, you've laid out right here the first step in your sequence decision. Because what do we need to know? I need to know what kind of marketing you're going to be doing, where you land on that relationship to traffic marketing continuum, before we can even think about strategies.
So, Kinsey, you say ‘other funding sources.’ I'm curious, what does that mean? If it means you are looking for other organizations to fully fund a cohort, well, that's going to mean you want to do relationship marketing, right? That's going to look very much like a B2B sale, and you're going to be wanting to build very specific relationships with organizations you've identified as being likely funders for a program. But if on the other hand, you want to sell this publicly, and you want to fill a cohort of individuals raising their hands individually and saying, yes, I would like to be a part of a group program, Then we're going to be looking at something different, something that's closer to the middle of the relationship traffic continuum, probably something that looks a lot like my boot camp strategy I just shared with you.
For awareness, you'll be looking for places where your likely customers are already hanging out, and you'll be asking yourself, how you can borrow that audience to go and speak to them, and then you continue. The relationship marketing is working for me, but I also need to get the word out. I don't believe I have the capacity, brand recognition, or following to do a podcast now. 100%, I agree with you there. But I'm curious to hear about your or your clients’ sequence and strategy around starting a podcast.
Okay, so getting the word out is the big statement in this portion of the question. We have to drill down more again to understand what this means, and it goes back to my original question. Who are you trying to get the word out to? When you say that relationship marketing is working, I'm guessing that means you've been able to build referral relationships with people you already have connections with, in order to land that funding for the first cohorts. And that's fantastic. That is definitely step one, is use the relationships that already exist in your life. But when you run out of those and find yourself where you are now, wanting to grow and not having an obvious path, you want to resist the temptation to deviate from what's been working for you.
Instead, you want to find a different, more expansive version of what's been working. And what do I mean by that? Well, first, as I've said, your instincts are correct. Launching your own podcast would be a big deviation. That would be a mistake right now, because let's think about what a podcast does in an awareness stage. Right? Because when we're talking about expanding, we are not talking about engagement right now, like I'm using the podcast. We are talking about meeting more people.
And if you are asking a podcast to do an awareness job, you are asking it to find people from your own platform. And that means you're counting on people stumbling on it or going viral or the algorithm showing it to people or in some way having a big sharing episode where people are able to come to you and find your podcast. And that's not a great strategy for you for a couple of reasons.
Number one, it's really difficult right now to get that kind of buzz unless you have some kind of big competitive advantage, like lots of friends in the right places, or you have buzz for some reason, or you're a famous celebrity. And by the way, that's why I'm so clear that my podcast is not intended to expand my audience. I'm going to do that job elsewhere. My podcast is intended to serve those people once they've met me. And those are very different things. So that's issue number one, right, is if you're looking at that podcast to expand your audience, you are hoping that kind of the traffic is going to find itself to you, and that's not an assumption you should make.
And then secondly, under either scenario you describe, you know, an organization funding you or finding individuals to fill a smaller cohort, you don't need a ton of leads, my friend. So, trying to find them via a podcast, via something that's correlated so heavily on the traffic side of the continuum, is actually a really difficult and inefficient way to do it. There are easier ways.
When I'm thinking about what I'd recommend for you, Kinsey, it's to find ways to meet either those leaders of the organizations you want to fund your cohorts, or to meet the people who would be buying, not through something as anonymous as a podcast, but instead thinking through how can you meet them in a more powerful, relationship-centered way. And look at what I'm doing already for my awareness strategies, and I would recommend the same ones to you.
Think about how you can build a network of people. Who do you know who can invite you to speak at a lunch and learn, a workshop of some kind, a conference if those exist? Inside of a community where your leads are already gathering, where can you go in and give a talk, give a workshop, do something that would add a ton of value to a community that is already gathered together? That's going to be the easiest way to expand your audience in the way you're describing you want it expanded. And what you're doing there is, again, you're just doubling down and expanding the strategy that you're already using. Instead of introducing some completely new strategy, you're saying, hey, relationship marketing is already working. And again, I'm operating under assumption that you're doing a lot of that one-on-one right now.
Instead of doing that one-on-one, instead of doing relationship marketing where you're meeting one person at a time, let's expand the definition of your relationship marketing and say, how can I go to a place where 10 people are gathered or 25 people are gathered and talk to them so that we go from a one-on-one relationship to a one-on-25 or one-on-10 and meet folks that way. Instead of going through the rigmarole of trying to create a podcast that inherently designed to be very much one-to-many, right? Don't jump all the way to that one-to-many. Think about, how can I go from one-to-one to one-to, you know, select few, if you will, getting in front of those right people that you're looking for? That's what I would wish for you. That's where you are in your sequence and what would be effective for you.
So, Kinsey, my friend, and everyone else listening, I've thrown a lot at you, so let's review and recap. When you want to expand your audience and you're tempted to add new marketing channels, first, please ask, who do you need to meet and in what quantities, right? And that's inherently asking, are you relationship or traffic marketing? How many people do you need to meet? If you don't need to meet that many people, then you're looking for, you know, one to several or one to a few opportunities as opposed to one to many opportunities.
Then you want to ask yourself, what are you doing right now for the awareness stage? What are you doing specifically to meet people? that doesn't involve relying on a platform or an algorithm that you can't and will never control. AKA, like, don't tell me you're hanging out on social media. You don't control those algorithms anymore, and there is so much noise that people are not going to find you there. Sure, sometimes a needle in a haystack, someone might find you, but on a consistent basis, that's just not going to happen. So instead, we want to ask, how can you go get in front of that audience?
Based on that number that you need and what you want to do for awareness, again, is that a relationship or a traffic strategy? Meaning, do you need a strategy that's going to get you in front of 10 people or 1,000 people? And most of the time, the answer is going to be 10 people. If you are a creative, if you're running an agency, if you're a service-based business, if you're a coach, most of the time, even if you're running a group program, you don't need a ton of leads. You don't need thousands of leads. You probably don't even need hundreds of leads. And so, your efforts, if they are going in the direction of a strategy that is built to reach the masses, your efforts are really going to go wasted. There's going to be a lot of inefficiency in them.
Instead, I want you to think about, how can I find a strategy that just meets the people that you want to meet? And then once you know all those answers, then you can start plugging in the strategy that's going to be the best fit for the job you need done. And again, I can tell you if the job you need done is to expand from one-on-one or just a few small programs a year to more consistent small programs, The answer is usually that you need to figure out where your people are already gathering, whether that be listeners to a podcast that is not your own that you can go be a guest on, whether that's going and attending events that they're already attending, whether that's gathering in support groups or masterminds where they've already gathered, wherever your people are gathering. Go there. Go make relationships with the people who own those places so you can build a collaboration to borrow that audience. And then, and only then, do you think about how to engage with them once you have met them.
Back to my business. I do not meet people through my podcast. Of course there will be exceptions, but generally it's not what I'm doing. I am meeting them through guest teaching, through speaking, through going on other podcasts. And unless you need thousands of leads a year, that is likely the best path for you as well. So then if you do launch a podcast, it's probably going to be doing a different job. It's not going to be doing an awareness job. Like me, maybe it's going to be doing that engagement job of building that back catalog, building that reference folder for folks. And that's okay. That's the beauty of it is understanding the job that you need done.
So, with that, thank you so much for hanging out today. And Kinsey, thank you so much for this question. Because again, I know that so many people are wanting these little behind the scenes moments and understanding how I make decisions for my business. I'm so glad you gave me an excuse to share that.
And if I've sparked your interest in relationship marketing, come to a bootcamp. I just told you that they're my favorite thing to teach and I'm hoping to expand the schedule of them and offer them much more often in the coming year. And you can jump on the wait list to do that over at www.themichellewarner.com. If you jump on that waitlist, I will always let you know when a new cohort is coming up and you will get a discount.
And in the meantime, I'm going to be back every other week with a new episode of Sequence Over Strategy. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And if you found this episode helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would leave a review. And finally, if you'd like me to answer your question on this podcast, head over to themichellewarner.com slash SOS for a sequence over strategy or, you know, emergency call and tell me what you're wrestling with. I would love to help you with it.
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