Nora Sudduth | Hello Audio
Podcasting has become one of the most popular B2B marketing tactics for driving top of funnel awareness, but it hasn’t really gained traction for use at the middle and bottom of funnel (and beyond).
Hello Audio is trying to change that with private podcasts, and on this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Hello Audio co-founder Nora Sudduth explains what a private podcast is and how it can be used to drive greater content consumption, nurture leads, improve the customer experience, and boost internal communication.
Check out the full episode to hear about all of the ways you can use private podcasts to get better marketing results.
Resources from this episode:
Check out Hello Audio
Connect with Nora on LinkedIn
Follow Nora on Instagram
Nora and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Nora Sudduth, who is the co-founder of Hello Audio. Welcome to the podcast, Nora.
Nora (00:24):
Hi, thanks for having me. This is great to be here.
Kathleen (00:27):
Well, I, I love talking about podcasting and I love podcasting, obviously, because I've been doing this for a long time and it's, it's very interesting. We have had a number of guests in the past. Come on this show to talk about the topic of podcast, but we've never covered it from quite this angle before that we're gonna talk about today. So if you're listening and you're interested in the topic of podcasting, hang on, because this is gonna be a good one. Before we get into that, Nora, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what Hello Audio is.
Nora (01:05):
Absolutely. so my background is I came from corporate, so I'm one of those folks that retired from corporate took that traditional path to success climbed the corporate ladder until I realized that maybe it wasn't the right ladder. I should be climbing, you know, retired did this whole entrepreneurial thing initially started with the marketing agency, had a multiple six figure agency, right after I stopped corporate in less than six or seven months. Then I kind of took a different path and started helping other people build their businesses. I worked with Russell Brunson over at ClickFunnels, helped him build a couple of seven figure programs there. And then I've just kind of been consulting, really helping people surmize their intellectual property and being able to monetize it. And it wasn't until I met my current co-founders at Hello Audio, Lindsay and Derek Padilla, that we kind of took this different path as you know, Hello Audio is, is truly a, a to podcast hosting platform, but we really specialize in, in private podcasts.
Nora (02:05):
Yes, we host public podcasts as well, but that's not where the magic is. And so I'm excited to talk about private podcasts today, but how it came about was really about consumption. It was really built for ourselves and how we use it. You know, I'm a busy mom, I have two kids. I find it hard to consume all the content that I want to when it, you know, comes to professional development and the, all the courses we've I know it's not just me listening. I know there's lots of folks listening to this that has probably, you know, you invested a ton of money in courses or even coaching programs. You haven't listened to every call. You haven't listened every replay. And really we built it for that initial use case in mind. And then it kind of blossomed into to a lot of other ways that people can use private podcasts, but it was really just making it easier to consume the content that you want to consume. That's kind of how it all started.
Kathleen (02:55):
Okay. You dropped the term private podcasts a few times. Yes. And I would, if I was a betting woman, I would bet that there's a lot of people listening that do not know what you're talking about. <Laugh> so can you take a second and kind of define what you mean by a private podcast?
Nora (03:13):
Yes, absolutely. So most people you're, right. Most people are, are familiar with a public podcast. So like this amazing podcast that you're listening to now as a public podcast. Right. And what that means is that it's available for the general public. So anyone can find it and search it and, and subscribe to it. And we don't necessarily know which specific people are subscribed to this. But so I don't know your email address if you're listening right now. I don't know your specific email address, what a private podcast does is it's it allows you to control who gets access. So it's not out there for the general public to, to find or consume, which kind of allows you to be able to now turn your premium content things that you would gate or charge for it. And it, it feels in plays just like a normal podcast.
Nora (03:57):
It shows up in your favorite podcast as player of choice, just like next to this amazing podcast. You would've another square, if you will, right. That would have this premium content. And what that allows you to do is now reach your people where they're already at. They're already, you know, I, I, we saw a stat the other day where the number of hours that people are consuming podcasts rivals the number of hours that people are watching Netflix every single week. And so why, why are we not taking advantage of this channel of this medium private podcast now allow you to do that, but in a way that allows you to control who gets access for how long, and it allows you to do really cool things with the delivery of content. That's another big difference between private podcasts and public podcasts. It's all about how the content is delivered. So we can get into that here in a little bit, but you can do some really cool stuff that you can't do with conventional public podcasts.
Kathleen (04:52):
Yeah. So let's actually talk about that a little bit because you know, I think anybody out there who's, who's either podcasted or looked into podcasting or listened to podcasts kind of has a sense that the traditional podcast is, is hosted somewhere like this podcast that you're listening to right now is hosted on Libsyn and then it gets syndicated out to you know, Apple Podcasts and Spotify and Stitcher and SoundCloud and all the millions of places. I feel like these days that podcasts are kind of fed to you when they are public podcasts. And the idea there is that you are trying to meet the public listener kind of where they already are and it's about discoverability. So you wanna show up in the various podcast search engines and you want to make it easy for somebody to listen to your podcast in the platform that they're already accustomed to using. This is different. And so can you kind of break down how it's different and like, and let's talk about the, the deliverability, the deliverability of it.
Nora (05:55):
Yes, absolutely. So what I love, how it's, how it starts is the same, which means it just feels like a normal podcast, which is great. Like you can use the same podcast player. There's nothing to download, right? It's just kind of there. So the ease and convenience factor that podcasts already have is, is there with private podcasts, what's different is your ability to podcast anything. So if you think about a normal podcast show, so you interview amazing human beings, right? And, and you kind of have a show and it's more of a format that's recurring. Now being able to use private podcasts, you can podcast all sorts of content. You can podcast your course, if you're a, if you're a teacher or if you are a course creator, if you are a coach or a have a coaching program, you can now podcast, create a podcast with your coaching call replay and make it easier to consume that content.
Nora (06:43):
If you are a blogger, right? Why not make it easy for people to listen to your blogs? They may not have time to sit and read it, but you're creating amazing stuff. You can read or speak your blog post into a private podcast. Same thing with an email newsletter. All of a sudden, if you think about, you know, how many PDFs you downloaded from a lead magnet, you know, that maybe you didn't consume, you could turn that into a private podcast. Now we're kind of changing what it means to be a podcaster. You can have a private podcast without necessarily having a show. And when it comes to deliverability, private podcasts allow you ninja ways, I guess, is the best way to say it in terms of delivering the content. So in a conventional public podcast, when we release an episode, it goes to everyone at the same time, it's a, you know, we're pushing the content out and, and it's, whoever is subscribed to that podcast gets all the same content at the same time with a private podcast, you can still do that.
Nora (07:38):
You can still push the, you know, date driven feeds and, and kind of have it out. But now we're doing evergreen pushes, which means the date that people get an episode, even though we're all subscribed to the same feed can depend on when they initially subscribe to that podcast. So my day one would be different than someone else's day one, that's subscribed maybe a month later. And so we've got kind of the drip feature, if you will. And we now have the ability to personalize the feed with private podcasts. So based on a listener's actions or a listener behavior or listener tags. So if you were a, a buyer of a program, we would send you a specific episode. And if someone was a prospect and not yet a buyer, we could, could send them a different episode. So now we're able to customize that feed, which you can't do in a public podcast. So now with private, you're really talking about podcast, personalization, segmentation, and really kind of the world's first audio CRM.
Kathleen (08:35):
Okay. There's a lot here. I wanna ask you about yes. I wanna start with kind of the nitty gritty technical details, because you talked about being able to selectively release different things to different people at different times. And I wanna understand functionally how that works because I'm thinking of myself as a user, right? Like right now, if I wanna listen to a podcast, I go into my apple podcast app or my Spotify, and I have my list of podcasts. I, I subscribe to and I can, it's like Netflix, I can binge it at my own pace. Right? So you are talking about something that would be sent to me. <Affirmative> I'm not a subscriber per se, or maybe I would be, so how do I get the podcast?
Nora (09:21):
So this depends on how the person delivers it. So if you opted in for a lead magnet, you would get a link that said, here's your podcast. You'd say one, click subscribe. So you'd click on the link. You'd be able to choose your podcast player of choice and a list. So if you use podcast addict or apple podcast, you'd pick your, your player of choice and it would load automatically. So technically you are still a subscriber, but where it's different is that subscription link is now tied to your specific email address. So you have, even though we're all subscribed to maybe the same lead magnet feed, or if you bought, we all bought a course and we had a podcast version of that course, we're all subscribed to the course, but the feeds are very specific because they're specific to you and your email address, which is why we're now able to delineate which episodes get released at what time, based on your specific email.
Kathleen (10:13):
So I click the link, I click my podcast platform of choice. I might hit subscribe. Does it then show like if I hit apple podcast, is it gonna show up in my apple podcast app? So I don't have to go back to the link every time I wanna listen to it.
Nora (10:26):
That's right. It's right there. So you're only the only time you're ever clicking that link. It's only once. So it's, whenever you initially get access to that, you're sent your specific link. That's tied to your email address. That's generated just for you, your unique link. You click on that once. And the rest of the communication happens in the podcast app.
Kathleen (10:44):
Okay. Okay, great. And and so now we, we enter into the world of use cases and it sounds like there are a lot, cuz I heard you say courses, I heard you say audio blogs or books. I imagine you could also just have, like, I could take this show and if I decided it was popular enough that people would pay for it, I could say, Hey, you need to pay me a membership fee to listen. So there's lots of different ways to use it. And you also described, and I wanna get into that, but you also described, in some cases we're sending but a link and they get the whole thing, right. Here's your link and you get all of it. But then there's like a pacing, like your ability to more customize what somebody's getting. And, and the question I have around that, and I'm kind of skipping around here and so we can cover this in whatever order, but the question I have around that is like, how hard is that to administer? Well, it's one of these things. Like I put, when I put my head of marketing hat on, I'm like, okay, this reminds me of content personalization. Like, like there are a million ways to use it, but at some point like the effort you're putting in is not worth the juice you're getting out at the end. And so like how hard is this to administer this level of like, let's call it podcast personalization.
Nora (12:03):
Absolutely. So these are, oh, amazing questions. So one of the things that I'll, I'll take a step back because one of the things that we built this company on was ease of use. I have a, to technical background. One of my college degrees is in computer science. So I come from that tech background. I know, you know, living in this space and working and breathing in this space for so many years tech and, and having people buy technology or software, one of the biggest hurdles is how complicated is this gonna be? And how quickly can I start using it? And the was really important to the three of us to make sure that we built something that was super easy to use. So we have over 70% of our users that get their first feed up and launched in less than 24 hours, because it was just it's that important to us.
Nora (12:45):
So we wanted to make sure, even though we could do all these cool ninja things that it was really easy to use. So that's something that was, that was just the, that was a a non-negotiable I guess if, if you will, as we were building this now, when it comes to like the administration of a drip feed, so let's say this is really popular. And I'll kind of combine this with use cases with people who are running challenges, right. And there may be a five day challenge and it might be an evergreen challenge where you, you want people to opt in, they get this piece of content on day one, another piece of content on day two and so forth. And everybody's
Kathleen (13:21):
Day one is different is what you're saying.
Nora (13:22):
Everyone's day one is different. Yeah. Because someone might, and if it's a paid challenge, they pay on different days. If it's just a, a lead magnet, they opt in and give you their email address on different days. And this way you're able to keep it up year long. So it's kind of a set it in, forget it. And all you need to do is very it's in it's in the app. Day. One is when this episode gets released day two and all you're doing is setting it. So no matter how many people come in, you can have thousands of people come in throughout the year. And it's all just templated in terms of when people get that content release. So that kind of makes it easy. This also works. If you have like a 30 to a meditation product we have fitness coaches in our, our, in our, in our members area.
Nora (14:01):
So they have running programs, you know, think of all the things. If you're running coach, we have folks that work with horses and they, you know, they wanna be out there with the horse and, you know, so they don't wanna be watching a video as they're kind of looking and, and doing all the things, listening to the, to the, to the expert telling them what to do with the horses. We've a lot of those things, but now it's just set it once and forget it. The other part of how you can personalize this is with tags. So we are, we do have, so Hello Audio has a Zapier integration, which allows things to be automated. That's the big thing is we didn't wanna make this an administrative nightmare where you have to kind of constantly continue to do it or, or do anything manually. So if you have buyers come in, so let's say, you know, whether you're on Teachable, Thinkific, right? Whatever membership platform using to sell your product on, you can easily add them automatically to your audio feed. So you don't have to touch anything. You set up the automation once and whoever buys gets access to it. And depending on how you've set that, that feed set up, they're either gonna get access to everything. If that's how you set it up, or it's gonna be ripped out at a certain pace.
Kathleen (15:07):
Okay, great. So let's talk about some examples of how different people are using this. Cuz I do think this is a relatively new concept and it's, I, I just know for myself, it's easier to understand if I, if I like see it in action. So you, you dropped a few examples just now, but like, can we get into more specifics and, and I think it would be interested in, in understanding particular really for like B2B marketers. I think a lot of my listeners are B2B. You know, some of the different ways they could use it.
Nora (15:37):
Absolutely. so I want you to think about three different main categories or buckets of how to use private podcasts. The first is marketing. So you're doing your kind of podcasting content that you would normally use to prospect or your ideal customer. The second way is fulfillment or delivery. So after they've purchased and you're maybe delivering a course of program we have eCommerce folks that are actually using this. So, you know, kind of thinking more on the fulfillment side and then there's actually a third bucket, which is internal. So think about employee communications, like an internal podcast, employee training, employee onboarding, that kind of stuff. So more operational on kind of the, the backstage part of the business. Right? So if I look at some of our clients that are in the B2B space that are kind of using it in the marketing bucket, we'll start with that.
Nora (16:27):
A lot of times what we've seen over the last several months and even probably within the last year is people who are running webinars to attract their ideal audience, that the show up rate hasn't been great for live webinars. So we've had a lot of our clients either stop using live webinars and just move to an audio based launch, or they've started podcasting their webinar content or their video series, whatever launch content that they're using. They've created a podcast version of it that allows people to actually listen at, at, you know, at their convenience. Now you can do a popup podcast, which means you've created some immediate urgency, cuz it's gonna go away with private podcasts. You can do that. You can take them, they can be up and then you can set it to expire on a specific date. Again, you don't have to touch it. That's a date, set it and forget that. And that kind of creates a level of urgency of, oh, I better listen to this content before it goes away. Right?
Kathleen (17:20):
Yeah. Cause I think that's the problem with, with everything like webinars, you mentioned webinars, I sign up for tons of webinars just knowing I'm not gonna show up and I'm gonna get the recording and then I never listen to the recording.
Nora (17:31):
Even though we want to.
Kathleen (17:32):
It's ridiculous. And so it is interesting, the idea of being able to create that, that sense of urgency
Nora (17:38):
Yes. With popup podcasts. I think that's, that's has worked really well. And we've seen two X, three X, five X, 10 X conversions.
Kathleen (17:47):
What would be an example of why somebody like, can you share an example of how somebody's using that? Yeah.
Nora (17:54):
So we've had folks that have run live challenges and live webinars for years. And they've just kind of seen the, the, the kind of a decline in their conversion rate. And a lot of it was just because of the show up rate, right. Because we all know that they don't consume that launch content. They're probably not gonna by, because there's some education awareness and belief shifting that kind of happens in that marketing content. And so what we've seen is folks that we're not getting great conversions. So, you know, maybe less than 5% or less than 2% conversions on their live webinar, once they put it in a podcast version. Now all of a sudden they're seeing 10% conversions, we're double digit conversions because people are actually consuming the content. It's funny, it's it? And it sounds super basic. It's like making it easier for people to consume your genius, to consume your expertise, to consume your material or your content, making it easier, has a difference. And, and, and it has an absolute impact on your conversions.
Kathleen (18:47):
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So, so we talked about you talked about three buckets and you talked about prospecting. So can we break down some examples of how people are using this for prospecting?
Nora (18:59):
Yes.
Kathleen (19:01):
Or top of funnel marketing, I guess is a better way to put it.
Nora (19:03):
Yeah. Top of funnel marketing, we have folks doing. So we mentioned kind of speaking your blog posts or speak articles. If in we have a lot of folks that are just great writers, right? And a lot of times we love people love to read, but they don't always have time to sit and consume a 10 minute article or something. And even though it's amazing content, now we have folks that are just speaking their blogs, or we have copywriters who are amazing writers and they're using in their email newsletter, which is actually really good to, and people don't necessarily open all of their emails or their inbox gets clogged. So now they're using private podcasts as the new inbox and they're being able to reach them that way. So they're now being able to communicate top of funnel content there between webinars and launch material.
Nora (19:49):
We've also seen kind of uptick in lead magnets. So things like taking those PDFs that no one read and everyone downloaded, but they've just kind of sat in some graveyard of Dropbox folder somewhere and they're taking those and they're converting them into an audio form, which is relatively easy. Right. If you think about it, there's no video editing. All you have to do is have a mic and you're just kind of recording what a five or 10, 15 minute audio. And they're putting in, into these private podcasts. And now we've seen, so I had a gentleman who was using an ebook that was getting maybe 9% conversions, sometimes 20 on a really good day. And it was a good ebook. We turned it to audio when we were getting 80% conversions on the front end, just because audio has a higher perceived value. And if you think about it, if you think about whether you're gonna really, do you trust yourself to read that PDF that you're gonna download, or would you trust yourself to pop in a, a pair of earbuds, listen to something as you're going throughout your day? Right? Because audio does really unlock all of the other hours that we're consuming content, where we're not sitting here at the screen.
Kathleen (20:51):
And when you take something like an ebook and your experience and what you've seen is it like are, and you put, and you turn it into a private podcast. Is it really a matter of just reading your ebook or do you need to kind of change the, the wording and the delivery? I would, would imagine some eBooks have more visual components or might reference something visual, like, so I'm assuming you might need to kind of like edit it a little bit for audio
Nora (21:14):
Use. It depends some we've had no editing and it's just worked in terms of conversions, just because of the way that the ebook was formatted. It was more in kind of a spoken word or a flow there was to it. We've had some folks where keep in mind, you have show notes to use just like you do with the normal podcast. So you can actually put a link to your PDF. If there is a visual or graphics or something that you wanted to show, you can include a link to whatever those resources are in the show notes and allow people to use them as supplementary versus using audio as the supplementary content. Now you're allowing them to choose to consume the visuals when they have capacity or when they're able to sit and look at a visual. And it works really, really well.
Nora (22:00):
And it, you know, as far as editing goes we've had some folks kind of use it as an opportunity to re assess the content and have a, just a better conversation with their potential client. Yeah, I think that's, that's a big one too, is you're able to really kind of demonstrate your brand voice through an audio. And that doesn't always, I mean, some people are great writers, not everyone is really comfortable with writing, but you're able to just articulate and create such stronger connection. Audio is just more intimate when your voice is kind of in earbuds, in someone's mind, right. In their head, you're just able to convey. And, and I, I think you develop stronger connections when you use audio versus like a PDF, for example.
Kathleen (22:43):
Yeah. Now I wanna skip to the third example you gave, which was internal communications. Cause I think this is a really interesting one and, and this is something that I'm hearing marketers talk more about in, in, I would say like this, this year, it really became more of a topic than I've ever seen it before. And I, I think it's partly in reaction to the turnover within that marketing leadership role. Like there's all this data that the average CMO lasts like 18 months in a role or something it's very short the tenure of the marketing leader. And, and I've, you know, I think what, what we're seeing is people are realizing that they need to do a better job of focusing inward and, and educating the company on, you know, why they're approaching marketing the way they are, what they're doing, what the results are that they're getting, etcetera, to develop, you know, a coalition internally really like to develop a, a base of support and a sense of understanding and a shared language. So I think this is really interesting to me. And I'd love to hear a little bit more if you have any examples of how people are using this and, and kind of the results it's gotten.
Nora (23:56):
Absolutely. So you're spot on, I think there's between turnover and just being having more folks have shifted to a distributed work. So we're not in the office together. You know, most of the time, we're not necessarily having the opportunity to build our company culture. Like we used to you know, back in the day when everyone was kind of in the same office. And so audio does an amazing job of helping to create that communication in a way that isn't just another company wide email, that isn't just another companywide Zoom meeting, which no one wants to be on anyway. Right. Whether they're all multitasking. I know I'm guilty of multitasking during company wide Zoom meetings back when I was in corporate as well. But it now audio allows you to kind of consume that content on your own terms and really hear, hear the passion in some voice, here's the passion and, and why a leader, why something matters to a leader here, a story that you might not have otherwise been exposed to.
Nora (24:53):
Right. It's the other thing I've seen, so one of the examples that I'll bring up too, is being able to share your customer success stories via audio. This is huge to be able, if, if you think about most Oaks in a, in a company, they don't always have client facing roles, right? So in terms of, you know, what do I, what I do every day, does it really matter? Am I making a difference and to be able to use customer success, audio stories, and to be able to communicate to the entire company, what they are doing and the difference they are making in these customers' lives. Like that's, that's a huge to lift and it's a morale booster for a lot of employees. And to be, when do you ever get to hear that, you know, when you're behind the scenes or working on code or whatever, you know, your, your function might be, it's a great opportunity to be able to create that company culture, to be able to make sure everyone's on the same page that everyone understands the priorities without another all hands Zoom or phone call.
Kathleen (25:49):
So I'm gonna play devil's advocate here for a minute. Sure. In two different ways. The first is that I imagine there are people listening who are saying, okay, that's cool, but all of these things can also be done with private video. And there are, you know, plenty of platforms for hosting private video. So why would you do a private podcast as opposed to a private video?
Nora (26:11):
Yeah. And, and I'm not anti video. And I, and I love that you brought this up because that's important to state. I think that the, where audio has the advantage is the convenience factor. Because if you think about video and how we typically access, especially if we look at the con of the way podcasts specifically work, right? You can, you don't have to have your phone on a lot of times with video apps. If you're playing the video, you have to have it on. And the, the screen has to be on with podcasts. You can turn that phone off, take that phone in your pocket and, and continue to walk the dog or go for a dog or, you know, be on your commute or whatever that might be. So while video can be great and it, you know, video does convey a lot of expressions and body language.
Nora (26:55):
A lot of times you can get voice intonation and changes. So you get a lot of that emotional kind of feedback from voice as well without having to subject someone to watching more and be on, on more screen time. I think, as we've seen throughout the pandemic, I know I don't know about you, but I know for, for me, there was a time where, you know, Zoom fatigue was, was really real and everyone was talking about it. And even though I've used Zoom for years, it got to the point where it was just a lot of screen time. And, and I know I needed to break free from that screen, but I still wanted to consume information, right. The desire to be connected, the desire to communicate and understand what's happening, doesn't go away. So that's, that's the biggest difference is it just, it's the convenience factor.
Nora (27:39):
And what we're seeing is that even if you're a course creator and you've got amazing video, you know, we have Amy Porterfield is one of our users. And she has, she spent a lot of time and effort to create amazing videos for her students. And what we're seeing is that consumption for audio is just easier sometimes, you know, depending on their lives and where they're at, and if they're traveling and all of the factors that kind of go into it. So if we look at, at it from an internal standpoint, it's the same thing. You can spend the money and the investment to do videos, which typically it does cost a little bit more in terms of time and production. So we have to think about that. Audio tends to be cheaper and easier to produce, but it's also just a lot easier and simpler for, for folks to consume on the listener side as well.
Kathleen (28:22):
Yeah. And I was gonna actually add that that, well, two things, one you, which you touched on, which is that it is, in my opinion, it's way easier to talk into a microphone than it is to create a video. And a lot of people don't like being on video, but the other thing is there are use cases where video is impractical. For example, getting on an airplane you can listen to podcasts, asynchronously, you can download them and, and, and listen to them when you don't have wifi. But with most video platforms, you know, unless you're, unless you're downloading a movie to watch, like, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna watch video when you're in a position to stream. And that consumes a lot of bandwidth. It's, it's very hard to do on a flight. And if somebody's a business traveler, if you're targeting a B2B audience, it might not. You know, these are times when, when people have downtime standing in line at the dry cleaner, you know, like these are times when people have downtime, but it's not practical for them to watch a video. And they are major opportunity if you're able to make that downtime productive for them, at least that's how I feel agreed.
Nora (29:31):
Yeah. But I'm also, this is all about biased about audio <laugh>, but I think that bias is fair because it is about reach right. And expanding your reach. So as a business owner, as a marketer, a lot of your folks that are listening to this are, are what, what's our objective. We wanna reach as many of our ideal customers as we can. We want them to consume our content when we're able to reach them. Right. And we want them to take action and we wanna do a great job delivering what we, what we promised. Right. And so audio really does provide that elevated of success on, on both counts.
Kathleen (30:03):
Okay. Second devil's advocate thing. Yeah. Is that, you know, when we were talking about like internal audio, for example, I imagine there are people listening who are thinking, love that idea. I'm totally gonna do it, but why do I need a podcast platform for it? Like, why wouldn't I just slack out a link to an audio file that I recorded on my phone? You know, is there a reason I need to host this somewhere?
Nora (30:23):
Oh, that, yeah. And this goes back to convenience and ease. So we had you put MP3s, even if it's an audio file and you slack it somewhere who knows where that is, most people will lose it, podcasts. It all stays in one place. That's kind of the great part about being able to produce video content in a podcast, as you know exactly where it is. All of the episodes are in one place you can catch up and you can binge versus if I wanted to go catch the last three episodes of the all hands meeting, or I know that there's three messages waiting for me. I don't have to go chase them, which is not ineffective or in efficient use of employees time. Right. That way you're able to just kind of click open that podcast app, hit, play, throw on your headphones and go about your day.
Nora (31:06):
And that, to me, that's, that's everything. I mean, even we, we did this with course creators too. We, you know, cause that was the big thing is put your MP3s that, you know, make it accessible, use your transcripts, use all of the different learning modalities and those MP3s, like you download 'em on your phone. You have no idea. It, most people have no idea where they're at, right. And then trying to find them and, and click on them. It's just a very cumbersome experience. Whereas being able to create a private podcast creates such a seamless, easy user experience. And that's what we want our listeners to feel. We don't wanna create more work for them. We wanna make it as easy as possible for them to consume that content <affirmative>,
Kathleen (31:43):
As I'm listening to you talk, it also has occurred to me that there is a very interesting use case. If you're doing these internal podcasts and you are hosting them for then being able to incorporate them more easily into like new employee onboarding, where you could give, I, I'm just thinking about myself a as a marketing leader, if I hired somebody new to my marketing team, and I was doing weekly marketing updates, or even an educational series for the team on, on how we're doing marketing, I could just hand them a link and say, okay, go listen to the last, you know, 10 episodes of this. And it'll bring you up to speed on everything we're doing, which is
Nora (32:22):
Interesting. And employee onboarding. What I love about this. Remember, it's tied to that specific email address. So you, as the supervisor, you, as the leader, know when people are listening and when they're not right, you can specifically tell the insights and the statistics give you that insight based on the email address, which I love not trying to be big brother or big sister here, but that's just, it's nice to be able to know who's consuming what data and on the marketing side, that's obviously really important cuz you know who your hot prospects are, but when it comes to employee onboarding, think about before they get, they get access to slack before they're in your email systems, they can very quickly have a podcast from you that talks about your company that talks about it's, it's a personalized message from their supervisor, right? It's that experience.
Nora (33:04):
So we've had a couple of folks do this. I'm thinking of an agency specifically who did this, that has a, a decent, they onboard a decent amount of freelancers to be able to provide services to their clients. And they know like there's a lot of processes and here's how you get, and here's what we believe in. And here's, what's most important to our clients. And you know, here's kind of the rundown. Would you rather read that in an employee handbook? No, no. One's reading that in an employee handbook anymore, but if it's in a podcast where you're able to really kind of get to know your supervisor and get to know your teammates, that that's a, that's a much different onboarding expert for any employee. And I'd rather have an employee start on that foot than like here's a 50 page employee manual and sign it at the end and let me know when you're done. Yeah.
Kathleen (33:48):
Yeah. So let's talk about trackability because this is the problem with podcasts right now. And I've written articles on this in the past about just podcast metrics and how hard it is to know what's really even happening with your or own podcast because of the way there's a, there's a group called the interactive advertising bureau and they set the standards for how podcast performance is measured. And what most people don't understand is that when you listen to a podcast, it's downloading it in little bursts. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and, and so you're, they don't download an entire podcast and then listen into that. It's, it's part of what are called partial downloads. And so you can't actually like, know how many subscribers you have and you really can't know exactly how many people listened and how much of your podcast they listen to because because of this partial download thing, it it's, it's super complicated, but to dumb it down, you know, it's just, the big thing is there is a shocking lack of reliable data when it comes to podcast consumption.
Kathleen (34:49):
And so I'm interested in what you're telling me in that there is a unique link that goes to the person that you're sending the private podcast too. And you can track by the unique link. What I don't understand is <affirmative>, let's say you send me the link and you described this earlier and I click on it. And then I say, I wanna listen to this on apple podcast. And then it shows up in my apple podcasts. I understand that like with that link you'd know that I clicked it mm-hmm <affirmative> but then how do you then follow that all the way through to these are the specific ones that she listened to and here's how much of it she listened to. Like once I'm in apple podcasts, isn't it that same system of partial downloads and, and the big black box.
Nora (35:34):
Yeah. So to some extent, yes. So we are limited based on that technology and you're right. It's archaic and it's, it drives us crazy as well. We all hate it.
Kathleen (35:43):
Major opportunity for disruption here. <Laugh>
Nora (35:45):
Major opportunity. And, and to some extent, you know, because we don't force people, we don't have our own podcast player. We don't have a hello, Hello Audio player, because we wanted, this is one of the reasons we wanted to make it easy. So use whatever podcast player you love, right? Your podcast player of choice. So we are limited a little bit by each app that people use because podcast addict will do it then different than apple podcast than, you know, a lot of other apps just do it differently. However, one of the things we can do is because your RSS link is unique to you and your email address. We can see when those episodes were downloaded. Now, how good is that data depending on this black box and how apple does it, or things like that. It's, it's a little bit hard to say.
Nora (36:27):
And, and for some apps, you know, we can't get how long you listen to, or how much of the episode you listen to. Can you do other things like in the show notes, could you do link track in the show notes? Cuz there, there are things that we can kind of do that that'll help that a little bit and like the calls to action and things like that. But we do have a little bit more of an advantage than public podcast because that link is tied to your email address so that when you do click play on episode two, right, you're able, if you go into our, our systems and we're looking at sticks, we're now able to see that your email, you know, at gmail.com, whatever your specific email is, right. It'll, it'll actually show the blip on episode two. So we are tracking that.
Nora (37:09):
Now one of the things that we're doing next year is going through probably looking at getting the IAB certification and trying to look to see what we can do to make that data as good as possible. But I will say we're doing something on the backend, we're calling it, it's the super listener score. So we're able to kind of give your listener a score based on the velocity of their consumption. If they've activated, we can see if they clicked on the link to activate the feed. So they loaded it in their player. We can kind of see where they're clicking on certain episodes, so of what episodes they played. And now you're able to then take action based on that. So for per prospecting, who are my hot leads, right? The folks that are gonna have the higher super listener score are gonna be the ones that I wanna follow up with because they're consuming all of my stuff. Right. All of that kind of stuff. So by having the unique link tied to that specific email address, it does give us a massive advantage over where the typical industry data is. So now you're able to say, not just, I think I have five listeners or I think I have 50 listeners now I know exactly which email addresses are listening, which email addresses activated my feed, which allow me to take actions and follow up from there.
Kathleen (38:16):
Well, while it's not perfect, it's already like yours ahead of it. Everything else that's out there. Last question, and then I wanna shift over into kind of our, our wrap up. Does this, you you're, you mentioned creating an audio CRM and I can see how you're building up quite a, a repository of data on how people interact with audio content. Does it, does that in integrate with any other platforms that marketers are already used to using?
Nora (38:42):
Yes. So because we have a Zapier integration, we can pretty much integrate with anything Zapier can integrate with so we can trigger off payments. We can trigger off CRM updates, like we use active campaign for our CRM. So if we, someone an active campaign, we can trigger them to get an episode dropped to them or maybe an entire feed or something like that. So that's really great. We are also doing direct integrations. So one of the things we're working on now granted, Hello Audio does bulk upload. So if you upload it, a bunch of videos, we'll strip the audio for you automatically. So you don't even have to worry about that. No more shady sites to go to, to strip your audio. We'll do that for you. We make sure we have high quality audio. We've integrated with Dolby.io. So if your audio isn't the best and you wanna kind of remaster that audio, you can do that automatically.
Nora (39:30):
And we've also, we're also building direct integrations with Zoom and Google drive. So if you are, do doing a lot of calls and you just throw them in your Google drive folder, or if you're doing Zoom calls, you don't even have to worry about uploading them. When you log to the site, they're already there kind of waiting for you and you can choose what feed that they go. And so we're building all of those direct integrations. We have direct integrations with Thinkific and Descript. If you use, we love Descript for audio editing. They're one of our favorite tools. We find them really easy, so you can edit it right there in Descript and shove it into whatever feed you want to upload it right there. So we are building out a number of integrations, but the Zappier integration I think is by far the most popular, because that way it pretty much opens the internet right up to whatever that you wanna do in terms of both trigger and your follow up actions as well.
Kathleen (40:19):
Great. Well, I love this and, and, and what I will kind of sum up and say is that for several years now that starting back in 2017, when I was working at impact, and we were really trying to build a media brand, my team, we talked a lot about creating multimedia content and, and in our case, what we meant was in, in a perfect world, we wanted all of our content to be created in a way that somebody could choose to either read it, watch it, or listen to it. And that, that was like the holy grail, where you are ready to meet your, your audience exactly where they are and force them into the mode that, you know, in which you've created your content. And I feel like this really helps with that because yes, there, there are other platforms you can use to allow people to listen to content, but not all of them necessarily enable you to deliver your content in the same way.
Kathleen (41:15):
You know, if it's gated or if it's part of a nurturing sequence and needs to be timed, not all of them have, have enabled that in the past. So I'm really excited about this and I, I appreciate you sharing so much information about it and bearing with all of my questions. <Laugh> well, I love it. You were great. All right, now we're gonna shift over and because there are speaking of questions, there are two that I always ask all my guests, and I wanna hear what you have to say on these one is marketers talk a lot about how hard it is to keep up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing. So how do you personally keep yourself educated up to date on all the latest developments?
Nora (41:48):
I love it and it is hard. It is very difficult sometimes oddly enough, over were the, and I don't know if it's just the pandemic that made me shift a little bit, because I was, I was going to more events before every kind of everything shut down. I've been using Twitter a lot more, which is the I, and of all people. I would be the first one to say that I never thought I would be using Twitter to stay on top of trends. But it's in interesting to, to see people posting results of experiments that they're running. That's really what I gravitate to because at the end of the day, marketing trends are just experiments that worked, right? Yeah. There were experiments that didn't work. And so I tend to follow folks on Twitter and, and I'm following new folks every single day, which is kind of really cool, but it's, it's really just a, about staying on top of the experiments that people are running and what's working and what's not working or the insights that they're kind of garnering from the experiments that they're running, but of, of all the weird sources I've found some really great insights.
Nora (42:47):
Twitter is, is one of the ones within the last year.
Kathleen (42:50):
Yeah. I've, I really like Twitter a lot actually. And for me, that started happening when I ruthlessly curated, who I followed. Yes. Cause I used to follow a lot more people and I eliminated so many and now I feel like I can open my Twitter feed and it's all just super, super high quality stuff. Yeah. So that's my one piece of advice. If you're listening,
Nora (43:08):
I love it's and I will echo that because I'm still weeding some of the folks out of my, and it yeah. Makes a massive difference.
Kathleen (43:15):
Yeah. I love that. All right. Second question. The podcast is all about inbound marketing. Who do you think either a company or an individual is really setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer today?
Nora (43:28):
You know, I have always been impressed with HubSpot's inbound marketing. I, there are, I mean, an animal, a marketing machine when it comes to their top of funnel content and the, and just the value that they provide their, their folks, whether you use HubSpot as a tool or not. It's fascinating to watch what they're doing and the amount of just production alone. And I know that they have a lot more resources than some of us of, you know, in terms of our companies and our ability to produce is content. But I have always been impressed with their ability to just deliver top of the funnel value is a way to really get people in their inbound marketing strategy.
Kathleen (44:06):
Yeah. They are a good one. They get mentioned a lot. All right. Well, we're gonna wrap up and before we do, I just wanna make sure if if somebody wants to connect with you or learn more about Hello Audio, or has a question, what is the best way for them to do that?
Nora (44:20):
So to learn more about Hello Audio, and go to Hello Audio.fm, we have a seven day trial, no credit card required. So if you're taking all the barriers down, you can just check it out and, and see if it's something that is for you. If you wanna connect with me, you can find me on instagram at @norasudduth and at norasudduth.com.
Kathleen (44:37):
Great. All right, well that is it for this week. If you're listening and you like this episode, which I loved, I feel like I learned so much please head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a review cuz that's how we get found. And if you know somebody else who's doing really great marketing work, tweet me at my very odd Twitter handle, which is @workmommywork <laugh> and I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much for joining me, Nora. This was fantastic.
Nora (45:04):
Thanks for having me.
