In this episode, Sean Boyce, the Founder of Podcast Chef, shares his experience and strategies for marketing businesses with nuanced offerings. He emphasizes the importance of catering to the audience’s level of understanding and discusses the balance between attracting new clients and catering to those with strong buying intent. He emphasizes the importance of finding your value proposition, gaining social proof, and getting customer feedback. They also discuss the power of podcasting and leveraging various channels to attract customers.
Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services.
To solve this, Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time.
Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market:
- Nuanced businesses can be harder to market due to their complexity and lack of familiarity.
- Starting with a more specific and opinionated approach can help potential customers understand the value of the offering.
- Understanding the audience’s level of knowledge and adapting the messaging accordingly is crucial in successful marketing.
- Experimentation and trial and error are key to finding the right marketing approach for complex businesses.
- Build confidence by recognizing your past successes and identifying the problems you can solve for others.
- Determine your value proposition and gather social proof, case studies, and demonstrations to support it.
- Use multiple channels, with podcasting as a cornerstone, to grow your brand and attract your target audience.
Resources:
Connect with Sean Boyce:
Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:
Quotables:
- 07:41 – “Yes, so I’m a data-driven person, engineer at heart, you know, tech geek what, however you want to describe it. So I love the T&E approach, as I often abbreviate it. The trial and error where I may have something I want to do, like let’s say I wanna work with Fortune 500 companies as a B two B SaaS consultant. Great, can I come right out of the gate and do that? Maybe, maybe not, right? So I need to figure out a way to systematically get to those folks first and foremost to start having conversations with them to see whether or not there’s a need, if they have a problem that I could solve, if they have a problem that I can solve, do they believe that I’m someone that can solve it, right?”
- 09:12 – “I think there’s a lot of content out there that could be misleading in terms of like, you need to come up with all of the details now. And then you, you know, you do that in as just checking a box and then once you’ve checked that box, then you just sell, sell, sell. And just like everything goes super well, it’s not really the case. I think there’s a lot more of the like putting the plane together in the air while you’re flying it, that anybody who’s involved in business will tell you is a core component of the process. So getting comfortable with that, getting comfortable in those uncomfortable scenarios, is really an important piece of it.”
- 06:58 – “Because there’s a certain amount and there’s, there’s always going to be, particularly in the marketing space, there’s a certain amount of grow your own clients. You have to help them along the way through that sales journey. But I think on the other side of it too is the moment you have somebody with a strong buying intent, you now have a different problem, right? You have to be able to speak to that exact buying intent.”
- 15:28 – “The ability to then leverage the content you already have or the stuff you’re creating to then I guess collect field data as well as to what’s performing well, so you can understand what messages appealing to your audience. And, and I think in the beginning when you first start out, like your only real litmus test if you’re doing it for the first time is you look at your bank account or whatever, and you go, yeah, I didn’t get any checks this week. And that’s a real problem because it’s exactly looking at you’re, you’re looking at too much of the process. It sounds like the very first decision you made was actually not to be focused on that outcome, but instead focus on am I having good conversations first and then from those good conversations, am I able to turn any of them into a single piece of business? And then can I repeat that over and over again?”
- 11:04 – Brian: “What, what were your first handles, and what are the ones you’re using now?”
Sean: “Great question. So I think a lot of people struggle with as it’s often referred to as this imposter syndrome and especially when you’re starting out and even more so if you’re innovating, like when I was starting as a product consultant, I couldn’t find a lot of content out there about other people doing something similar. But what gave me the confidence in that was that I knew that I had done this successfully before and I had seen people with the kind of problems that I could help them solve. So that gave me a level of confidence to give it a shot, right? Because a bunch of people told me not to do it. Like a bunch of people are like, I don’t even know what that is. I never heard of that. Good luck selling that.”