607: Why You're Probably Wasting Money On Digital Marketing (And What Works Better At Getting Clients) with John Tyreman of Red Cedar Marketing: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

607: Why You're Probably Wasting Money On Digital Marketing (And What Works Better At Getting Clients) with John Tyreman of Red Cedar Marketing

Enoch Sears49min

Rion Willard

00:00

I gotta get to the meat of the content within the first two minutes. Hello and welcome to the Business of Architecture. I am your host, Ryan Willard, and today I have the absolute pleasure of speaking with John tiriman. John is the visionary behind red cedar marketing, and he specializes in empowering professional service providers to expand their enterprises through podcasts beyond his role as a Podcast Producer, John draws upon his expertise as a brand and strategist and digital marketer to enhance the promotional impact of his clients podcasts renowned for his hosting prowess, John has curated numerous shows, such as the visible expert digital marketing troupe, breaking biz dev and podcasting in professional services in this episode, as many of you know, I'm a big fan of podcasts, and we will be talking about the benefits of using a podcast for your business, how to set it up, the kind of equipment that you need, and where you can take it in. 2024 2025 we look at strategies for repurposing long form content, how to do it and where to distribute it, and we look at technology for making your content production streamlined and effective. Loads of gold in this interview, sit back, relax and enjoy. John tiriman, this episode is sponsored by Smart practice, business of architecture's flagship program to help you structure your firm for freedom, fulfillment and financial profit. If you want access for our free training on how to do this, please visit smartpractice method.com or if you want to speak directly to one of our advisors about how he might be able to help you. Please follow the link in the information we are looking for architect developer stories for the Business of Architecture podcast. So are you an architect developer with valuable insights to share? We're always on the lookout for passionate voices in the industry to join us on the Business of Architecture podcast. If you're ready to share your journey, lessons, strategies with our global audience. We'd love to hear from you. Reach out to us to explore being a guest on our show and help inspire other architect developers on their path. We'd be interested in hearing your story, whether you're at the very beginning of your development story, or whether you have $100 million portfolio of projects already in the bag, completed. We'd like to hear from you if you're working with the developers, or that you've developed a number of small houses, or you're working at a larger scale. It's time to announce this month's 200 300 400 club, if you missed our episode on the 200 club, listen to Bo Episode 485 to learn more about this new initiative for benchmarking small firm performance. So a big congratulations to Ramiro, Torres, Marina, Robina, Julia area, Philip Liang and Sean. Kiki Kelly, Morgan Yogesh, Mistry, Denise, Bucha and Yost bende, Judy and Larry April, Brad Smith, Brad Hubble, Peter Spruance Andrea Nemechek, Chris Driscoll, Lego mishlich And Ryan Smith, those are all our 200 club members. So well done, guys. Our 300 club members this month are Jorge catran and Renee Adams, Mark Elster, Chris Rawlings and Christopher Brandon, and our 400 club members are Kimberly dokes and Drew and Justin Tyndall. So congratulations, everybody. Keep up the good work. John, welcome to the Business of Architecture. How are you,

Speaker 1

03:36

Ryan? It it's been a few months, but it just feels like yesterday that we were just having a conversation. It

Rion Willard

03:41

does, it does, and I'm very excited to have you on the on the show. I was very much enjoyed being a guest on your show. Podcasting and professional services. Back in February, we recorded it, and then we actually published that episode on Business of Architecture not so long ago. And you are the CEO, the founder of red cedar marketing. You're a podcast host of both, as I said, podcasting and professional services and breaking biz dev. You're a fractional consultant. And you're really masterful, actually kind of helping businesses with their strategic marketing, being able to utilize things like a podcast, not only the kind of technical aspects of how to get it all set up, but as you were just saying to me a moment ago, actually being able to bring the strategy around, using a podcast for winning work and promoting your your business. So, and I know as well, you just mentioned that, you know, you've actually worked with a number of architects, you know, helping them do this sort of thing. So we'll kind of expand upon that a little bit in this, in this conversation, but perhaps we'll, we'll just start a little bit about you. Go. How did red Sears start?

Speaker 1

05:03

Well, Ryan, first of all, thank you for the kind words. I really appreciate that. But I spent 10 years working in an agency setting, helping professional services firms understand their buyers and win new business. I worked at a branding agency, and I worked with a lot of AEC firms, so a lot of architecture firms, a lot of design build firms, a lot of engineering firms, and I would be the one to review all of the interviews that we did with their clients, and aggregate all of their results and really kind of tease out, you know, what makes your firm different? Why do you win new business? And then those are kind of like the key ingredients that we would use to help shape rebrand, to help build marketing strategies. So I had a lot of experience working with a wide range of professional services firms, and then I led that research arm at that that agency where I, again, I studied what makes high growth professional services firms, you know, what makes them grow faster than firms that aren't growing so fast? And a lot of it had to do with an investment in not just digital marketing, but content creation, and creating content around your collective expertise as a firm and and so continuing my journey at that agency, I launched the podcast for the agency called the visible expert in 2019 with a colleague of mine, Kelly waffle, and so he and I interviewed what we call visible experts and documented their journey of how they kind of rose the ranks to where they were today. And that was that was a lot of fun. Kelly and I had a lot of fun. And then in 2020 early in 2020 I left that agency to go to another agency in or in DC, and this was a digital marketing agency, so they're focused on paid media and SEO and content creation. And so I launched the podcast and service of that agency. My role was a digital marketing director, and so we launched the podcast where I was interviewing a bunch of internal subject matter experts about technical things like SEO and PPC and things like that. And we found that, you know, that was a really great way to humanize the internal subject matter experts within the agency, and that was one of the cornerstones of our marketing strategy. And then in 22 I went out on my own as a fractional marketing director, and that was, that was really great, you know, I lucked into a few clients, but I my offering was a little too broad, and so I knew, based on my research at looking at, you know, the fastest growing professional services firms, what I needed to do was I needed to niche down in both my target audience and the services that I offered. So being a fractional marketing director, in my mind, was just a bit too broad. Yeah. And so in 23 about midway in 23 I narrowed my focus to experts and professional services firms, and then my offering was around podcast marketing services, kind of leaning into my experience in the industry, as well as my experience hosting a couple shows. And then I launched two shows in service of my one person business, red cedar marketing and podcasting and professional services being one, and breaking biz dev being the other. So that's how, you know, that's how red cedar came about. Amazing.

Rion Willard

08:47

So let's talk a little bit about professional service firms and podcasting. It's, obviously, I have a, as you know, a great love of podcasting, and I owe a lot to my current, you know, good fortune and enjoyment of my career, down to the wonderful world that podcasting has opened up and just the amazing ability that it allows you to expand in your network. And I think sometimes I certainly, and I mean Nick as well, we sometimes we can take for granted, actually, that what it took to get a podcast up and running. Because we often, I'll often encourage our own clients here at Business of Architecture, that architects, you know you should have a podcast. And actually having a podcast, it's a it's in theory, it's pretty easy to set it up, get a couple of mics, get a riverside subscription hit record, you know, upload it to Libsyn or podbean or whatever, and and you're away. However, the execution of it, I have, I have seen it become such an ordeal with people to actually. Put, put out a podcast. And again, you know, we hear things of and, I mean, I'll say this myself as well, that a kind of having a podcast is nowadays the sort of replacement of having a website, and it's something that you can maintain easily. You can produce content quicker for it. You don't have to worry about having photographs up, get yourself out there, get yourself talking. But for a lot of people, the whole idea of setting up a podcast, the nerves being able to communicate, the talking, the recording, taking yourself very seriously, this all becomes like this massive weight and stress, and then the technical side of it, which people can quickly become massively overwhelmed with that, it all starts putting these obstacles in the way. So, so how would you, first of all, why? Why should architects or any professional services firm be podcasting? And then two, how do we navigate successfully around these perceived obstacles? Yeah.

Speaker 1

11:01

So I think a great place to start is looking at how business is one today, right? And so if, if a podcast, if we believe that a podcast is great for marketing a professional services firm, let's take a look there first. So I believe you mentioned this on a very, very early episode of The Business of Architecture podcast. But the number one rule in architecture is to win the job, right and without the client, there is no architecture. And so business development is so important. And the the number one thing that I see out there in the marketplace, or the number one way that firms win new business is by responding to RFPs. That's typically, you know, how business development organizations are structured around RFP responses, and that can create, not the best environment, business development environment for your firm. And what I mean by that is, naturally a response to in our request for proposal is a competitive situation, right? And so you were competing against other firms, presumably, for the lowest cost bid, and the buyer is going to come around and say, Hey, nice proposal. Can you sharpen your pencil a little bit and shave 15% off? Well, that's not a really, you're not in a good negotiating position at that point. Yeah, right now, let's, let's flip that around a little bit, and let's say that you have positioned your firm as a specialist in one core area, right? And you have built a brand around being the go to firm for x, and buyers are coming to you, and they're, they're they're talking to you, and you are now in a position, a better negotiating position, because you have the ability to kind of enter into those conversations knowing that there isn't, there may or may not be A competitive situation, but you're in a better negotiating position. And so that's the power of creating your own business. And you know, referrals are great, but they're limited to your network, right? Digital lead generation, that's expensive as hell. And you know, you don't you get a kind of a low ROI out of that, a return on ad spend in person events. Sometimes they're mismanaged, right? You know, you know, you get out of in person events, what you put into it, the planning that goes into, you know, who's attending the event, and when you're going to meet up with them, and how you're going to follow up with individual people after those events. But with a podcast, you kind of get the best of all worlds, right? A podcast is a way for you to kind of accelerate your networking, or you can you're able to unlock conversations that you wouldn't normally be able to have chances are that your competitors don't have a podcast, right? And so therefore that experience would be different to, you know, your your prospective clients. They're going to remember, hey, yeah, I was on a podcast conversation with you, but they're not going to remember the sales meeting they had with, you know, the firm down the street. So that's kind of another, another reason why. But if we look at the marks of expertise, there's really like three core skills that experts in professional services have, speaking, writing and networking. And you know, if you don't like to write, that can be time consuming, right? But a podcast is a great way to just have a conversation and not have to worry about putting pen to paper. So those are just, I know I'm a couple all over the place a little bit, but those are a couple of reasons why a. Podcast might be a good fit for a professional services fan.

Rion Willard

15:04

Well, yeah. And I think the the if you've got people who can speak wells as well, this is the other aspect of it, right? And what were three things you said there, speaking, writing, and the other one, networking, networking and podcasting can really well, I mean, all three of them, like, if you're good at any one of them, you can use in a podcast, like, if you're good at writing. I know it sounds a bit counterintuitive, but if you're good at writing, it's only one step away from you actually having to read that, or have someone else who can speak well, read your writing, or turn it into some sort of animated podcast, and be able to communicate, and again, using a podcast for networking, and being able to go outside of your sphere of people that you typically know and a personal experience has just been amazing. It's just it opens doors you you as soon as you our podcast, you're now a media company. Yeah, and you can invite people in. You can invite prospective clients in. You can it's very natural to turn that conversation of like, certainly, if you're talking about business, start talking about problems or pains that the guests might be having, and then that can turn into a nice conversation about being able to help each other and kind of generate leads in that way, you know, and I think, for for an architect, person or an architectural firm, certainly, if you've got good speakers or people who are confident in being able to to chat, or at least people who can get over, you know, being on the being on the air or being recorded, it's a fantastic way of producing a lot of content. So, so what would you how do you help firms actually get up and running with the podcast? What would you say are the sorts of things they need to consider, how do they get over those hurdles we were discussing earlier? So

Speaker 1

17:04

I can help in a few different ways. We can, you know, I'm happy to do it with you. I'm happy to do it for you. I offer, also offer advisory services. So if you're doing it yourself, you know, I'm here to help answer any questions you have. So that's kind of how I work with clients. But in terms of what it takes to get a podcast launched, there's, there's obviously the first thing that a lot of people who are interested in podcasting, the first thing that they think of is, What mic do I need? What camera do I need, What software do I need? And yeah, that's all well and good, but that's not what's gonna make a successful podcast. A successful podcast is one that is sustainable, that has a cadence, that has a content that a content that is going to be published every week or two weeks or once a month, you you're able to sustain a cadence, and you're able to generate topics to talk about, whether that's a monolog episode, whether that's you and a co host talking about a specific topic, or whether that's you know, a new guest every week or every Episode. So there's a lot of work that goes into knowing how you're going to position the show and how that connects to your business. And that's kind of like, first and foremost is like, why are you doing a podcast in the first place? Are you doing it for lead generation? Are you doing it to build and strengthen your brand? Are you doing it for thought leadership? You know, those are three completely different goals, and therefore a podcast would look completely different based on any one of those goals. So understanding why you're doing a podcast in the first place, that's kind of like the critical piece, and then kind of getting into the How are you going to sustain a podcast? So what does your operations look like? What are the topics that you're going to talk about? Who are the guests that you're going to have on? Why are those the right guests to have on? So those are the kinds of questions that need to be answered. And then, of course, it's, you know, rolling up your sleeves and going out and in finding the guests and recording the conversations in terms of, you know, just starting out and breaking that coefficient of friction, I think it's something like 70% of all business podcasts are interview based. And so, like, let's just look at that for a second, because that's if someone's going to start a podcast that's kind of like the natural like foray into it is to start an interview show. So let's just focus on that for a second. I like to recommend to my clients that when you're thinking about guests to bring on, and you're just starting out, you group your potential. Guests into three groups, the first one being friendly contacts. And these are folks who are going to say, yes, like, you've got a podcast, sure. I'll jump on. I've got a good relationship with you. Let's record some content. It's fun. And record those first and then publish with those. The second group of guests. These are like rising stars, or like, industry like you see that they're like, on a growth trajectory, like you want to get them on the show now, because they're gonna have they're gonna blow up later on, and they're gonna be a household name later on, and so, but those folks may need the social proof to go and look at your show and understand, like, okay, is this a legit show? Is it, do they have episodes published? It brings a level of like, credibility to it. And then the third group, these are dream guests. These are, like, after you've been publishing for a while, after you've fine tuned your operations. These are the folks that you can reach out to and really swing for the fences. So those are

Rion Willard

20:59

that's great. That's really, really thoughtful. And I, again, I kind of looking at this, the friendly faces, the rising stars and the dream the dream guests. It's quite easy sometimes to try and go straight for the Dream guests, or even the rising stars, and kind of be put out because it's so difficult to actually get people booked in or or locked down, and that can be an immediate thing that stops the sustainability of the project, right, or completely, completely destroy the cadence so the friendly faces, the people that you know, that You've already got relationships with, who you know, how they speak, and that they're excited, absolutely, that's, that's a that's a love, that that's a really, really thoughtful way of actually structuring and getting the podcast up and running. Is if you, if you have to do just your immediate sphere of friends, and you can produce 10, 1010, 1010, episodes fantastic, because it means that it's now a kind of gateway to getting the rising stars and into the you know, once you've got 50 episodes, then you can start having those dream guests at to mark episode 50, or episode 100 or whatever it is. And on

Speaker 1

22:17

top of that, um, podcasting is, is a game of getting just a little bit better with every episode. And as a host, you know your first episode that you record is going to sound and feel a whole lot different than your 100th episode that you record. And so you're going to notice that. You're going to you're going to you get better with every rep that you take. And so if you start with those friendly contacts, you're in a relaxed environment, but you're also getting better at your craft, and you're sharpening your skills as a host, because there are certain soft skills that go into hosting a podcast, you know, like active listening and being able to kind of summarize key points back and Mirror and reflect and and know when to kind of shift gears and reign a guest in and get them back on track. So these are all things that you learn, and it's it's better to learn in a safer environment when you're talking to friendly contacts, so that you can sharpen your skills, so that you can really nail the interview when you talk to one of those industry stars or a dream guest,

Rion Willard

23:21

amazing. So talk. Let's talk about the other things that make up sustainability and cadence of a podcast. What can make a podcast non sustainable, and what can what sorts of things get in the way of establishing a strong cadence?

Speaker 1

23:37

Yeah, and this is a, this is something that I've run into in the past. And you know, you've got, you've got two resources that you can put into any kind of a marketing investment, that's time and money, right? And so those are the two things that you can put in. And a lot of podcasters, or a lot of companies that want to start a podcast at the beginning, they have a lot of time to invest right? You know, they're willing to learn how to do podcast editing because they don't have the budget to pay it. Pay a producer, and that's totally fine. But as over time, should the podcast be positioned correctly and should it have an impact on your business. Presumably, you won't have enough time to be able to dedicate to producing a podcast. And so then there's a shift that happens, and this is where a lot of sweet spots with the companies that I work with. They've been podcasting for a while. They've been doing it for a while themselves, but they need someone to help them take it to the next level. And and so that's, there's that's kind of one of the big stumbling blocks, because, you know, momentum is real when it comes to any form of digital marketing, whether that's posting on LinkedIn, whether that's publishing newsletters or publishing podcast content. Consistency is key, and hitting that consistency if you're if you're inundated with work, and you find yourself saying, oh, I need to throttle back on the podcast, and you shut it off for three months, it's going to be really hard to restart that and to reestablish the momentum that you had three months prior. So just understanding and looking ahead and being able to see okay, I may be coming up on kind of a fam or a feast season in my feast and famine cycle, what can I do to stay ahead of that? Can I talk to a producer to help me out? In a pinch? Do I need to change my operations and and double down on this investment so being able being proactive, and being able to see that ahead of time is one way to kind of avoid the the inconsistency challenge.

Rion Willard

25:52

I It's interesting as well the being consistent with the podcast. I mean, I often say, you know, Enoch and myself, one of the reasons why there's been any sort of success, success at all with the podcast has been largely part because we've just done like an episode every single week for the last 10 years. Yeah. And that kind of consistency has been, at times, very difficult to kind of to kind of maintain. And nowadays, with with with having people around, and office managers, and, you know, post production, it all becomes, it becomes easier and easier. But certainly there is that kind of, you know, that kind of escape velocity that you need to reach with it to get going. And that's why I really like the way that you've you've organized the guests, for example, friendly faces, rising stars and dream guests. And because we've seen, I think, you know, the one of the hardest type of podcasts to do is it's just you talking to cameras that monologs. I mean, that's that I find that very exhausting, and I have to sit down and write something out, and then, you know, then you're like, you're recording it, and it never quite comes off natural. And it's definitely like, that's a part of my craft that I'd want to kind of improve upon and get better but I wouldn't suggest people to start out like that, because that could be very and also just the volume of content that you'd need to be producing is enormous, whereas something conversational and doing it with a friend, easy, easy, if there's two partners of you in a business, just record the two partners interviewing each other or talking back and forth. Easy, you can start producing that, that content very, very, very, very swiftly.

Speaker 1

27:47

Now, chances are the conversations that you have with with that business partner are going to be insightful, and you're going to be talking about, hey, well, this is how I solve this challenge for this client. Oh, really, tell me more about that, because I had a similar challenge that I'm still trying to work through, you know, and, and, and those are the kinds of conversations that are so super valuable. And I think a lot of experts kind of devalue their own expertise, and they don't think that their insights are are truly valuable. Or people would tune in, but I think they would, and I think that the the direction that the industry is headed kind of proves that where, you know, content is more than just, you know, blog articles, especially now in the age of, you know, chat, GPT, right? Um, podcasting makes marketing a little bit more human too. And so it's not only you're not only sharing your insights, but you're showing that you're a person and that you are human, and I think that's really important today. Yeah.

Rion Willard

28:45

I always am amazed at the the ability of a podcast to kind of develop a relationship without you needing to be there. Yeah, and you find people who kind of connect with you and like they feel like they've got a connection with you because they've been listening to your your podcast, and it's quite it's quite a lovely thing. And that's the very kind of intimate part of the of the podcast, is that you're kind of speaking into people's ears about you actually having to be anywhere near them. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about what happens after you produce the podcast and well, or perhaps easy ways that you think of the production side of a podcast, and then we can look at the kind of repurposing elements of it, which I know you're very masterful with. So just, let's say you've you've recorded your podcast, editing becomes, let's you come in using something like Riverside these days, you can just hit, generate episode, and it takes out all of the gunk for you. Are there any sorts of advice that you give on that process now, from taking that kind of podcast and just getting it out there into the world?

Speaker 1

29:56

Well, I'll share a story of a hard lesson that I learned in. Um, it was early on in my podcasting career. It was on the visible expert podcast, and I was interviewing Joe Pulizzi, who is a like, the godfather of content marketing. And when I was interviewing Joe, I knew that he had, he was a big Browns fan, football fan, and so I was talking to him about the browns and everything, just kind of building rapport, because this is the first time I'd ever talked to Joe, and I wanted to be able to, kind of like make him feel comfortable talk about something, just to kind of like banter a little bit. And my mistake was including that small talk in the podcast, and we talked for like, three or four minutes about that, and what I should have done is I should have gone back and cut all that out. A listener actually reached out to me and said, Hey, John, love the podcast, but it took way too long to get to the content, and that always kind of sat with me. And ever since then, I made a point of, I gotta get to the meat of the content within the first two minutes, right? So you got 30 seconds for an intro, and you know, might take a minute or two to get to it, but if I can get to the meat of the content of that first two minutes, then I'm doing the listener a service. And if I don't do that, then chances are they'll bounce. They won't listen. If I got them to download the podcast, I want them to listen to it, right? So that was one of the big lessons that I learned about about post production and kind of take out that banter. And another part of it is, if you're editing your own voice, watch out, because you can pop in a trap. You laughing, because you know exactly what I mean.

Unknown Speaker

31:47

Yeah, that will, that will do your head in well,

Speaker 1

31:50

and then you get caught up in this, like, Okay, do. And then you want to edit out, like, everything, and you want to splice it so it sounds just right, and, and I've spent hours editing my own voice, and it's just it sucks. It's a time suck. It really is. And so part of that is like understanding in just like loving your own voice all of the flaws that come with it, and just embracing that and letting the conversation flow. Because if you use those text based editors and rely on that too much, your audio then becomes choppy, and it becomes, it kind of has a an effect that you don't really want. You don't, you know, listeners don't really like that. Having a more natural sounding conversation is sometimes more pleasurable.

Rion Willard

32:37

That's, that's a very nice point, you know, the kind of self reflection or the kind of self acceptance that you have to go through when you produce a lot of content, you gotta, you gotta get comfortable with your own voice and just accept it the way it is. And, you know, when I, when I first started podcasting, my partner, she's a, she's a trained actor. She went to Terada, and very good, you know, good speaker. She's now in film production, but when I first started podcasting, she would kind of point out to me various speech impediments that I didn't know that I had, and then I would listen to them on the recording, and once I'd heard them, I was like, Oh, my God, I have this, I have, like, a weird stutter there. Why is my voice so high? I thought my voice was much deeper than that. Why is my accent like that? Is that how I sound? And it's just this kind of process where you've just got to, you know, accept it and fuck it. Get out, get out there. And that's the that's the main, the main part of it with post production. What are your thoughts on? Just keeping it, keeping it simple. Because I know I see a lot of architects or people, they're going to post production, and they try and make it like some kind of Polish radio show with just loads of it. And it's like, okay, it's amazing. But you talk about that sustainability, I can't see how that's going to be sustainable.

Speaker 1

34:03

There's so many different things that you can do. I'm working with an architecture firm who I think is doing a really great thing with their podcast. So Mark Johnson from signal architecture, he has a podcast called signal radio, and he just launched it a few months ago, but I really love what he's doing. He's he's interviewing his clients in the space that they designed together. They're capturing the energy in the mood of the space around them, within the conversation. And so you could hear people walking in the background. There was one, there's a steam plant in Seattle that they one of his early episodes was recorded, and you can hear some of the sounds in the background, and you can hear the acoustics of the building and the space. And that was intentional, and that was part of why he wanted to do that, was to capture that as like a moment in time. Um, and I thought that was really powerful. And it was, it was a creative way to not only engage with his clients, but to kind of showcase the energy that comes out of the design work that they do. So it's not always just about the conversation. I think that's my point. Is there's there's no rules in podcasting. There's no one way to do it, and you the more creative you can get with it, the more you know it could have a really great impact on your marketing.

Rion Willard

35:37

Love it, so let's talk a little bit about repurposing of content like a podcast. And this is something that, again, we've dabbled with this at Business of Architecture. We've always found it very difficult just in terms of, like resources available to be able to do it and the recordings, or I've done bits of it at the moment, we've got, we have somebody who makes like a, like a, you know, small, short form content from there, and then it gets published. But what is, what is possible in terms of repurposing a podcast, and how does that build into a larger marketing strategy for a firm?

Speaker 1

36:23

Yeah, I like to say that a podcast is the most utilitarian kind of content, because you record one conversation, and yes, there's the audio version of that, but there's also, like you mentioned, the video version. There's long form video on YouTube, but then there's also, you can take the transcript and you can turn that into a newsletter, a blog post. You can turn that into text based posts. You could take a quote from your podcast and turn that into a social media tile, like a quote tile, a static image, so the the it's so utilitarian that first you really need to understand what what channels your buyers use to consume the information that for like, what channels they use to consume information about their professional development or their their business if they want to learn something more about their business, because we're talking about we're talking about professional services firms here. So LinkedIn is a great channel. YouTube is a fantastic channel. I think it's under utilized by a lot of businesses, and so just, we just focus on those two channels alone, on LinkedIn, one thing that, one tactic, I suppose, that I'm finding success with, is with breaking biz dev. We have a dedicated company page for the for the podcast, where we'll post, like two or three times a week, one of those vertical videos. And the reason that we post those vertical videos is because all the social platforms are kind of inching in that direction, where it's like Tiktok light, right? LinkedIn, it's like Instagram reels or Facebook reels. That's the direction on LinkedIn, specifically, where if you go to your on mobile. If you go to your home, like, your your home feed on LinkedIn, and you're scrolling through there's like, a Yeah, videos for you, and then you, like, click on it, and then you can swipe up for the next video. And the it's the videos that are optimized for mobile. So vertical orientation, nine by 16 aspect ratio, those are the videos that are going to be prioritized. So if you're publishing content constantly through a company page, it could be your personal page too. Those videos are likely to show up in those kinds of feeds. They're more likely to show up in those kinds of feeds. So that's, that's one of, like, the important parts about regularly publishing. We talked about the importance of consistency with publishing podcast content, but I think there's all it's also equally as important to be consistent with publishing those short clips.

Rion Willard

39:19

Yep, yep. Um. In terms of the mechanisms to produce that kind of smaller content, how, how do you do this? Because this is now when we get into a whole, a whole nother world of post production. And again, I know is, I know Riverside, and there's things like the script, which is amazing, which you can use to, kind of, you know, take a bit of long form content, but still it's, it's easy to get yourself lost into it. How, how would you suggest that, you know, what's a good strategy for, actually, kind of turning long form content into smaller pieces of. Content. And then, you know, how, how do you manage the how do you manage just distributing such a volume of stuff without it becoming overwhelming? Yeah, I'm talking here just a personal plea, sorry.

Speaker 1

40:14

Well, that last part is, there's the key. Because managing it is can be, gosh, it can be a bitch. So if you have descript, is a wonderful application, and if you're it's just so got it. I just love descript, and they're not, they're not paying me. They're not, they're not like a sponsor or anything. I just love that tool, and I'll share my workflow with you. So I record in Riverside. We're recording on Riverside right now. Riverside is great because it produces those high quality aligned videos. And so there's a separate like, for example, on this recording right now, there's going to be a separate track for me and a separate track for you. And what I do is I'll, I will take both of those tracks out of Riverside, and I will upload those into descript, and then I'm able to have two video feeds on the screen, and I will produce, like the full the like the feature length episode, right? And so that's, you know, half an hour, or 45 minutes, or whatever it is, and that's in that kind of widescreen orientation. And then what I'll do is, I'll actually just copy that and copy that file, and then orient it vertically in the whole episode, vertically right? And then in descript, it makes it easy, where you can just highlight a section and pull that out as as a clip, and then I'll batch that together. So, you know, I'll go through and pull out five, six, sometimes upwards of 10, clips per episode for breaking biz dev and and then I'll, go and I'll kind of batch like tasks. I'll write the copy for all of the posts and then go in and schedule those out for, you know, two weeks so that I can have coverage until the next episode drops, and so that that's really the flow that I'm using with that show in particular. And I've used that same process with other shows that I manage with some success. And you know, it helps keep, you know, the time input down, and it helps kind of produce a lot more content just from one input.

Rion Willard

42:33

So, why? Why? Why use descript over say something like the in house editing tools that you get in platform like Riverside, because in Riverside, obviously you can just hit a button and it can generate those AI clips for you. Why is what's? What's the advantage of using descript?

Speaker 1

42:52

The advantage with descript is gives, it gives you a little bit more flexibility in terms of the customization of the video itself. Riverside is great if you want to be scrappy and you want to pull stuff out quickly, if you want to rely on the AI. What I've found is that the AI doesn't necessarily always pull the best clips, yeah, and so if you are a professional services firm, chances are that there are going to be parts of the conversation that you record that you're really gonna want as part of a clip, and you're gonna want to be a little bit more picky about what you choose to pull out and feature. And there might be some like industry lingo, or, you know, there might be, like, a mention of a specific person that you want to call out, so that you'll have the ability to tag them in the post when you post. So that's kind of where, where I believe that human, human intervention is is key in in understanding kind of the context of the conversation, and what is relevant to pull out. You can do that in Riverside. You can do that in descript. It doesn't matter the platform. But I just want to make a point of, you know, that human level of, kind of pulling out the specific clips,

Rion Willard

44:16

and in terms of distributing then, like, kind of just, you're talking there about batching. Ex, we have activities like batch writing, copywriting, yeah, how do you, you know, do you use something like Hootsuite, where you're just uploading loads of content to that and then scheduling it to be to be released? Or do you do it manually? Or do you do a mix? Or do you have some like an office manager who's doing it for you? How do you manage that, that task of distribution, which get, which can I, you know, I've often found it, it's pretty tedious after a while. It's not something that you want to be doing too much of

Speaker 1

44:51

No, because you can definitely go across I do in it for sure. Yeah, no, I've, gosh, I. Use so many different schedule like social scheduling tools, hoots, Hootsuite, HubSpot schedule, and, you know, they all do the same thing, and they're all kind of expensive now these days anyhow, wins another one, isn't it Sure? Yeah, there's, there's hundreds of them, yeah? But honestly, I found that just going in and scheduling natively, going to LinkedIn and use their net native scheduling tool. It's it's free. You can do it on a calendar. It's easy to manage, and it saves you 100 bucks a month because you don't have to spend, you know, $99 for the Hootsuite, you know, level that you would need to be able to schedule the posts that you need across all the different channels. And

Rion Willard

45:43

of course, you can do that in Instagram and all the all the social media platforms you can schedule your posts. The

Speaker 1

45:49

meta business suite makes it super easy. LinkedIn, native scheduling is pretty easy. YouTube is the easiest out of all of them to schedule those shorts. It's so, so easy, Yep, sorry, that's that. It's not earth shattering, but that's my answer.

Rion Willard

46:11

I love it. I love it. I think that's a pretty good place to conclude, actually. And yeah, I really appreciate your, your time and taking sharing your expertise here with kind of opening up what it takes to put together a podcast. And I think you're the message really, of, it's such a good it's such a good tool. And you know, you've got one level, which is the long form, the original content itself, and then this another level of of repurposing content to really become with relatively small resource, to become quite a media force. It's it's very impressive. So thank you very much, John, for your conversation today. I thoroughly enjoyed it,

Speaker 1

46:59

Ryan, it's an absolute pleasure to talk with you. I feel like we could just keep having a conversation about podcasting, and we could go and I know it's it's late where you are right now. So I really appreciate your time and appreciate you having me on

Enoch Sears

47:13

pleasure. Hey, Enoch Sears here, and I have a request, since you are a listener here of the Business of Architecture podcast, Ryan and I, we love putting this podcast together. We love sharing information as much as we can glean from all the other industries that we're a part of. To bring it back to empower you as an architect and a designer, one thing that helps us in our mission is the growth of this podcast simply because it helps other architects stand for more of their value. Spreads the business information that we're sharing to empower architects together, so architects, designers, engineers, can really step into their greatness, whatever that looks like for each individual. And so here my my simple ask is for you to join us and be part of our community by doing the following, heading over to iTunes and leaving a review of the podcast. And as an expression of our sincere thanks, we would like to give you a free CEU course that can get you one professional development unit. But more importantly, we'll give you a very solid and firm foundation on your journey to becoming a profitable and thriving architect. So here's the process for that. After you leave us review, send an email to support at Business of architecture.com let us know the username that you use to leave the review, and we will send you that free training. On the training, you'll discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wish they would have known 20 years ago.

Rion Willard

48:47

Hello, listeners. We hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience, we'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month. Interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support@businessofarchitecture.com the views expressed on this show by my guests do not represent those of the host and I make no representation. Promise, guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you be unstoppable. Do.

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