The Power of the Podcast
The speaker in this week’s podcast is Rachel Atkins, an award-winning reputation and privacy lawyer and partner with Schillings. She was nominated by Spear’s as the best reputation and privacy lawyer in 2023 and the Citywealth 2023 Top 100 international private client litigation lawyers.
Awards are important. They are a form of social proofing. If you want the best reputation and privacy lawyer to work for you in a crisis, choosing one with an award is a third-party endorsement. Spear’s and Citywealth are independent of Rachel and Schillings. They have researched and decided that Rachel Atkins was the best.
She has also got some well-satisfied customer quotes: ‘She is highly experienced, very intelligent and gets to the point very quickly’, ' She is a ninja litigator that can see around corners, and ‘She is fantastic at her job, and nothing fazes her’.
These quotes are another form of social proofing - or third-party endorsement. If you are undecided about who to appoint to represent you in a reputation crisis, a satisfied customer endorsement is highly persuasive in winning the business.
The third area of social proofing in speaking at events. The events organisers also research what their audience want to learn about and invite speakers who are experts and well known in their field. This is another highly persuasive form of social proofing.
Award winners, speakers and professionals with well-satisfied customer quotes are a firm’s brand ambassadors - and their accolades must be applauded. Of course, they must be included on the firm’s website and in their brochures, the award winners LinkedIn page must be up to date and include all forms of social proofing, but how do you get beyond this?
In my CPCP (Complete Private Client Practitioner) program I dive into the psychology behind winning business. We all have an innate fear of the influence of strangers, we don’t want to listen to anyone pushing product - it makes us feel very uncomfortable.
However, there are four principle ways to sidestep this fear and engage your audience. Our podcast series ticks all four boxes. This is why it has attracted such a large audience. The first 40 episodes were downloaded just 80,000 times and it was ranked in the top 160 investment podcasts in the country. In the last thirty days our podcasts have been downloaded 7.21k times, with 3,000 subscribers and an open rate of 33.49%.
But the success of this series is not because it is a podcast. It is because the podcast is promoted by an independent third party which interviews only award-winning professionals. This taps into the power of authority but also the power of aggregation.
A newsletter promoted by a single organisation is likely to be opened 2-3% whereas if produced by an independent third party, it sores to 30+%.
Podcasts produced by independent third parties have soared in popularity in recent years. They were originally called audio blogs and date back to the 1980’s. In 2003 people could download audio blogs to their iPod, and journalist Ben Hammersley coined the term ‘podcasting’. In 2005 Apple officially added podcast to its iTunes Music Library.
In my CPCP program I explain why and how to use these tools to maximum effect. Since then, 700,000 podcasts have been created with over 30 million episodes of content. Roughly one-third of these episodes have been made since June 2018.
The podcast format is trendy. A recent study showed that 49% of podcasting is listened to at home while doing other tasks, 22% listen while driving, 11% at work and 8% while exercising.
Podcasts allow the listener to dive into topics while doing other things, so time does not have to be set aside to read or watch a video.
If you have won an award and would like to be included in our popular How to Keep Your Money series please get in touch at caroline@carolines.club or if you would like to find out more about our CPCP program please visit our CPCP members page on Carolines.Club website.