How to Leverage Customer Data to Make Your Podcast More Valuable

It’s the age where every other business has a podcast. Chances are most of your competition either:

1. is thinking about launching a show

In this article

1. How to Find What’s Important for Your Customers
2. How to Turn Customer Data into Added Value for Your Podcast
3. How to Develop a New Podcast Concept Starting with Customer Data
4. The Difference between Listeners & Fans or Why Customer Data Is Valuable
5. Your Customers Are Your Fans—Use Them!

2. already has a relatively good-to-awesome show

How do you stand up in this ever-demanding world of savvy podcast marketers? Here’s a tip for you: use data from your customers to fashion your podcast into something they’ll like. Most likely, other people who have the same issues – i.e. potential customers – will find that information valuable and unique.

Today I will talk about leveraging customer data to turn your podcast strategy woes into marketing strides.

How to Find What’s Important for Your Customers

Creating valuable content for your customers, no matter whether they’re existing or potential customers, should be the main driver for the media marketing efforts of any business. Yet to do that effectively, the first item on the to-do list should be finding out what’s important for those customers.

There are several simple ways to attempt that:

• Customer surveys are a powerful tool to gather relevant data. Placed correctly, they will even help reduce churn by convincing customers that you’re listening to their needs.
• Questions during onboarding calls. This is a basic-yet-efficient method, asking your new customers something similar to “what made you decide to do business with us?” It also helps you know exactly what’s most important for this account.
• Customer reviews. You’d be surprised by the differences between what a customer says in a survey and what that same customer will write in a review. Everyone adjusts their messages based on who will be seeing that message. While customers might be more honest during one-on-one calls and customer surveys, they tend to be less forgiving in online reviews. However, those reviews might reveal hidden truths about what’s important to your customers.

Beyond these clear-cut methods of gathering customer feedback, there’s a less intrusive and more practical way to understand your customers: creating a customer success team and using a customer success tool.

While this mainly applies to SaaS businesses, the methodology behind such an approach is universal. Having a 360 view of how your clients use your product can not only provide the information you need to make your podcast unique, it can go hand in hand with surveys, reviews, and other customer touch-points to reveal things you had never even considered. Plus: you get to keep an eye on customer health scores.

How to Turn Customer Data into Added Value for Your Podcast

Now, regardless of which method you use, you will learn things that you can turn into added value for your business’ podcast. Below are some possible scenarios.

Your customers may:

1. Value a specific feature of your product. Make this into one of the first episodes in your podcast series. Center the discussion around that feature or what that feature represents. Think: why do they value that feature? What’s the added benefit?
2. Dislike something about your product. Address this directly. The first step would be assuring the customers privately that you’re taking their concerns seriously. But further than that you can try to resolve the issue and document the process, then turn the results into a story for your podcast. Nothing tells customers you care more than detailing exactly what you did for them.
3. Use your product in unexpected ways. Not everyone will use your product exactly like you envisioned when you first created it. The key here is to embrace every unique scenario, because there may be others who’d benefit from the same use case. Write a podcast concept script and describe it!
4. Say they value something, but they mean something else. In this case, you simply have to center podcast episodes on explaining concepts that your customers might not be that familiar with. You can use the interview podcast format to keep it engaging and bring in subject matter experts that can explain it and have an audience as well.
5. Frequently complain about your competition. An ideal scenario for any business, the best way to respond to this is by creating a podcast episode centered on the value proposition of your business—what you’re bringing to the table as opposed to your competitors and how you’re fixing the issues your customers had with previously used products.

How to Develop a New Podcast Concept Starting with Customer Data

Coming up with a new and fresh take on business podcasts is difficult. However, the most radical way to approach this is by actually putting your customer’s issues first.

Think about all the different learnings and scenarios you discovered. Can any of them be turned into more than one episode?

If the answer is yes, the next step is to develop a podcast concept:

• What will the podcast series be about?
• Will you require guests?
• How many episodes can you realistically put out based on this concept?
• What will be the focus of each episode?
• How long will each episode be?
• Can you split each episode into relevant segments? If so, what are they?

Once all these points are settled, the only thing left is to give your podcast show a name & record it.

The Difference between Listeners & Fans or Why Customer Data Is Valuable

Business podcasts are almost everywhere these days—many companies have them, but a frequent trap that I see is business podcast producers trying to compare their show to a consumer-oriented one. Or even with the most successful podcasts in the world.

That’s a mistake because it’s not what’s important for a business. You are not trying to obtain millions of listeners, you’re aiming for hundreds, maybe thousands of ultra-engaged fans. Fans that can ultimately become brand advocates and bring in new customers.

By leveraging the power of customer data, businesses can attract new customers easily since they would be speaking directly to the pain points they have. So before you settle on what you want your podcast to be about, ask yourself:

• What value am I bringing to my customers?
• How will I measure the performance and success of my podcast?
• Who are the customers I am speaking to? What is my audience?
• How do I make my audience come back for each new episode?

A good example of turning user data into a success strategy to generate loyal fans is Nathan Latka’s podcast:

“Nathan took things one step further in the early days: he kept things as cheap as possible. This meant that regardless of whether he actually generated listeners, he would be able to persevere long enough to build the audience over the long term and collect invaluable data.”

Tom Hunt, 11 Steps To 12 Million Downloads: The Nathan Latka Podcast

Your Customers Are Your Fans—Use Them!

Today, we have demonstrated that using customer data for a business podcast is essential to make it useful and successful for you and your fans.

However, what we said is only an intro. There are many other methods to gather customer data and make it useful for your audience and clients. I am interested and would love to hear any ideas you have here.