“How to Become the Center of Influence Through Smart Podcasting” with Jen Spencer of the SmartBug on Tap Podcast
As part of my series of interviews about “How to Become the Center of Influence Through Podcasting”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jen Spencer, VP of Sales & Marketing, SmartBug Media™. Jen Spencer is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for SmartBug Media™, a globally recognized Intelligent Inbound™ marketing agency of experts in digital strategy, design, PR, and marketing automation. Jen is also the host of SmartBug on Tap, a weekly podcast delivering tactical advice on-demand generation and digital strategy. Over her career, Jen has built several demand generation and sales enablement programs from the ground up and has experience working within tech startups, publicly traded companies, mid-market organizations, and the not-for-profit space.
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Can you tell us the “backstory” about why or how you got started as a podcaster?
This is going way back, but I started my career as a high school teacher (English and theatre), and you understand very quickly that the 30-plus students in your classroom all learn through a variety of mediums. As my career transitioned into marketing, this aspect of human learning remained true. If I were to only ever produce written content or visual content, I’d be excluding an audience that prefers to consume information via audio. This knowledge, paired with a limitless supply of creativity and the ease of podcast production due to technology today, sparked my desire to create a podcast. What advanced it, though, was the 2–3 hours per day I spent sitting in traffic with others’ podcasts keeping me company, teaching me, and making me laugh.
The inspiration for SmartBug on Tap came from a conversation I had with a former colleague. He was asking for marketing advice on a project and in a few minutes I was able to share some insights that helped him. He said, “You know, I wish I could just listen to you share tips like this on demand.” Ta-da! A podcast was born.
Can you share a story about the most interesting thing that has happened to you since you started podcasting?
My current podcast is SmartBug on Tap, but it’s not my first. When I headed up sales and marketing at Allbound, I launched The Allbound Podcast. Unlike SmartBug on Tap, which is a micro-episode solo podcast, The Allbound Podcast was interview-style but still educational in nature. One day, someone in my network whom I had met at a conference a year or two prior reached out to let me know that he had been including one of my podcast episodes in his “recommended content” for the CEOs he was consulting. If that wasn’t flattering enough, he also shared that the information had been so valuable to him and his clients that he wanted me to teach a workshop about a related topic. I had no idea the work I was doing was making such a difference in others’ business lives.
Can you share a story about the biggest or funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The biggest mistake I made when starting my podcast was not front-loading enough content before the initial launch. I recorded three episodes up front and thought that was plenty. It gave me three weeks to build out more episodes, and that seemed like plenty of time. I didn’t anticipate catching a cold, losing my voice, and then being in a position where I was forced to produce a show quickly or run the risk of skipping a week. Today, if I don’t have four or five episodes ready to go, I get a little panicky.
How long have you been podcasting and how many shows have you aired?
I launched the first episode of SmartBug on Tap in early February of 2018 and we air one show per week — we are on Episode 26 as of September 10, 2019.
What are the main takeaways or lessons you want your listeners to walk away with?
We’re constantly bombarded with information, which is why I produce micro-episodes for SmartBug on Tap. My goal is for the listener to walk away with one thing he or she can start doing immediately. For example, to date, the most downloaded episode is “4 Tips to Mastering SEO Basics.” Is someone going to become an SEO expert after listening to this episode? No. But will someone learn how to do one thing a bit better than they could before they listened? I certainly hope so.
Check out the full interview in Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Jen Spencer!
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Podcaster Influencer, Jen Spencer of the SmartBug on Top Podcast shares the best ways to:
1) Book Great Guests. If you want to book great guests, you need to create great content. This means you should be writing, sharing, and socializing regularly. Consider your circle of influence and if you surround yourselves with exceptional people. If you build trust and authority among your network, you’ll be more likely to hear “yes” when you send an invitation — and you might even start fielding inbound requests!
2) Increase Listeners. There are two important factors involved in increasing listeners (besides creating great content, which are table stakes). The first is to actively promote your episodes. Consider all of the channels and tools you have at your disposal and share your work. The second is to analyze data and be honest about what content is performing well and what isn’t. Then use this data to inform future episodes.
3) Produce in a Professional Way. It couldn’t be easier to produce a professional-sounding podcast with limited resources. You don’t need a fancy setup, but you do need a decent microphone. I use a USB microphone and record my podcasts via GarageBand. I eliminate noise and distractions and edit out long pauses or vocal interruptions that keep the episode from sounding fluid and conversational.
4) Encourage Engagement. To encourage engagement with my podcast, I ask listeners at the end of every episode what challenge they are experiencing that I can tackle on an upcoming episode. You can also ask this question when you share your episode on social media.
5) Monetize Your Show. I’ve seen and heard other podcast hosts build up enough of an audience base to be able to sell advertising spots on their shows. Whether it’s in the introduction to the episode or a mid-episode spot, it’s possible to drive revenue from your content. This, however, is not my goal with my podcast. My monetization goal is a much longer play — to build brand authority for myself and for SmartBug so that if and when a listener is in need of marketing or sales enablement support, they come directly to me because of the trust I’ve built with them.
What makes your podcast binge-listenable? What do you think makes your podcast unique from the others in your category? What do you think is special about you as a host, your guests, or the content itself?
Check out the full interview in Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Jen Spencer!
