We explain how one 45-minute recording session can generate weeks of content across multiple channels, the importance of having a distribution strategy before you start, and how our most successful financial advisor clients use podcasting as a cornerstone of their marketing efforts.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss podcasting for RIAs.
Transcript:
Stephen Beach: Episode two of the Craft Impact Marketing Podcast. And like we mentioned in episode one, we are starting a podcast in 2025 as a marketing agency because we want to be on the cutting edge. Not sure if you guys have heard of podcasts yet. They are coming out soon, you know, to an app near you.
In all seriousness, though, we started a podcast not really to start a podcast that gets downloads, but as a means to content creation. For us, we look at it as a way that we can produce a lot of content in a very short amount of time. We've helped clients do this, we've seen clients who've already been doing this, and we've helped them amplify their results with the podcast. Yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit, Faustin, about what the best results we've seen from this are.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, nice. I would say the number one thing, the number one reason we decided to start a podcast is just putting some sort of system behind your content creation, right? When we have advisors come to us, most of them understand the power of content marketing. They understand they should be on video, they should be doing social posts, but they do it sort of ad hoc, right?
They do it when they have an idea and they could execute it for that day or that week. They do it on a monthly basis when they think they have some sort of blog post they'd like to write about. But they don't have the consistent system to develop and publish content on a regular basis, which is what is needed in 2025 to differentiate you as a firm from all the other firms, from all the other information that your prospects are getting bombarded with on a day-to-day basis.
Podcasts give you that ability, especially with the rise of AI a couple of years ago. If you create a system where you are consistently, let's say on a weekly basis, getting on a camera, recording in a particular tool, video and audio, you can then take that audio and video and repurpose it across multiple channels.
You can take the full video like what we're doing right now and publish it on YouTube. You can publish it across all the audio platforms using a tool like Libsyn. Then you can take the transcript from your full clip of the podcast, repurpose that as multiple blog posts that you can publish on your website. You can take shorter clips from the full video recording and publish those clips as smaller social clips that you can spread out and distribute across multiple weeks.
So now that 45-60 minute session that you have on your calendar for marketing, where you're gonna record a podcast, you can clip that up and get so much mileage out of it for the next few weeks. It just fits into the way advisors operate on a day-to-day basis as well.
Stephen Beach: To use a cheesy corporate meetings term, let me double-click on something that you just said. I'm gonna try to weave those in throughout this show, just so everybody knows. Let's double-click on the consistent system that you mentioned. I think that's really important - how we set that up.
In our experience, the ones that have stuck with this for months, years, have seen really great results. The ones that are kind of one and done or tried it a little bit, haven't seen anything in return and then stop. Those are the ones that just don't show any ROI from it.
I think it's really important to set up a couple things. One would be the goal or what are you trying to get out of the podcast. Just to give some ideas, it would be, you could just choose one of these four buckets: brand awareness, thought leadership, lead generation, or customer engagement.
For us personally, I think we've got a couple of mix and match there where we're not looking at this as a lead generation podcast. We're looking at it from brand awareness and thought leadership primarily. And then as a tertiary benefit, maybe some of our clients will see this or hear this or read this content that we're audibly speaking, that's gonna turn into written content, and it might spark ideas.
The second thing would be the channels - have a roundtable with your leadership team and really think about the channels that you want to redistribute this content to because half of it is recording the stuff and kind of figuring out the topic and then getting in and recording it. And honestly, the other half is distribution.
If not, it just kind of dies on the vine because you're not sure exactly how it's gonna be published.
Faustin Weber: Where so many of the podcasts go is they just die on the vine after like three or four episodes, right?
Stephen Beach: And trust me, I can empathize with this because this is what we've tried before. And it's like, oh my God, that was so good. And then you kind of get done with it and it's like, now what? Where's it gonna go and at what frequency and to whom?
I think it might be helpful just to talk through how we decided to come to this conclusion and how we decided even how we were gonna frame this recording, this podcast. What we wanted it to be is a way for us to differentiate ourselves for people who already understand the power of content marketing and are looking for an agency to sort of take them to the next level.
We envision this recording being published across the different audio platforms, but where we really feel like it gets a lot of leverage is embedding some of the clips to some of our blog articles that we have right now that we send advisors early on in the process.
We thought, okay, who's our audience? Let's research our audience and see kind of what they're thinking, what their main challenges are, and what they're actually asking Stephen. Let's frame the podcast around that goal.
Stephen Beach: Yeah, love it. I think also I mean, we're in like this clip economy on social media. LinkedIn has become almost a buttoned-up version of TikTok. You have 20 seconds to capture someone's attention.
Everyone says embrace video marketing. Video is so powerful for thought leadership, brand awareness, helping close prospects, but how do you do video? Do you need a fancy setup? Do you need to get a crew in there?
We're in this clip economy, so combining those two things - embracing video marketing and knowing that we're in this clip economy, especially on social - it's a good avenue to help you produce a lot of clips that are relevant to your audience and then distribute them.
One other thing too is even if you just look at your website and you figure out the top five pages as far as traffic, and you want to enhance the user experience on those pages and potentially the search engine ranking, a good way to kill two birds with one stone would be adding videos to your existing top five pages.
It does a couple things - you're adding to the content, going a little bit deeper on certain topics, and people get a sense for who you are as a person. A real personal connection that they can't get just via text. By the time you actually meet face to face or via Zoom, they feel like they already know you.
Do you wanna add anything else before we wrap up?
Faustin Weber: I would just like to say, you know, so people get excited about a podcast, right? And they may even know their target market. For you as an advisory firm, it may be corporate executives in their fifties or tech professionals who are just starting out in their thirties. It could be pre-retirees.
But then they think about a podcast, and they're like, okay, where do I even get started? What do I even talk about? We typically would recommend starting off your podcast schedule or topics in the same way you would start off all of your content - focus on the challenges that are specific to that niche target market.
Then build out specific content pillars. If you think about pre-retirees, everything around changing your investment strategy when you retire, or taxes in retirement, is probably a better example, and could be a content pillar. Then, breaking out that content pillar into all the specific challenges or questions they might be asking.
You could build your entire content calendar around all the different questions that are being asked across all these different topics for pre-retirees, and just focus on that topic specifically for 20-30 minutes, and you have an entire episode.
Stephen Beach: Love it. So, why podcasting in 2025? To us, it's less about the podcast. It's more about what the podcast enables us to produce and then how we use that in different channels and with our existing community.
Faustin Weber: Yeah. Love that. It's perfectly said.
Shameless plug for Craft on Tap
Leveraging podcasting as a content engine for your RIA does matter, but as discussed, you need a thoughtful plan for building a system and getting your content out there. This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical strategies for RIA growth, listen to the new Craft on Tap marketing podcast. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts. Ready to chat? Get in Touch
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