My name is Ed Ryan. I am the editor of the podcast Business Journal and this is the PBJ Spotlight where we interview a podcast host, dig deep into their show and shine a light on how they become successful so we can help other podcasters become successful. If you'd like to be considered for the PBJ Spotlight, send your show link and a short description of your program to edryantheeditoratgmail.com. In this episode of the PBJ Spotlight, we interview the PR Maven, Nancy Marshall.
Nancy launched the PR Maven podcast in September of 2018 and as of February 2020, there are 75 episodes of the PR Maven podcast, which you can find at prmaven.com or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. During our interview, Nancy shares a lot of advice on how she's grown her show. That advice includes some of the publicity and promotion she's done for her show. For example, Nancy created an award for one of her guests and threw a party for her listeners on her one year anniversary.
Of course, during that party, Nancy hosted her show live from that event. Nancy also says it's important to listen to other podcasts, use media whenever possible, create press releases for your show, be consistent when you publish, get on other shows, create special Facebook groups and write monthly newsletters. Then she explains why she believes growing your show must include having face to face interaction with people. Here's our PBJ Spotlight interview with the PR Maven, Nancy Marshall.
Who is Nancy Marshall? Well, thank you for asking it. That's very flattering. Nancy Marshall is the PR Maven. I've trademarked myself as the PR Maven because I love public relations and I've been doing public relations for my entire career. I've had a successful PR agency called Marshall Communications since 1991 and I have a team of 10 people and we work with a lot of tourism and outdoor recreation clients as well as economic development and healthcare clients as well.
We are experts in helping grow brands by growing networks and the PR Maven podcast was our latest effort to help grow the PR Maven brand as well as the Marshall Communications brand. So Nancy Marshall is a visionary who can't shut her mind off because she's always thinking of what's the next thing, but that's what I like. Great. Tell us how podcasting entered your sphere there. What made you think that that was something you wanted to add to your marketing and how did you first get into it?
Well, I've been active in a national network of advertising and PR agencies for 20 years now. It's called Agency Management Institute and I attend a lot of their conferences all over the country. I attended a conference two years ago at Disney actually about content marketing and how content marketing was going to drastically change public relations and advertising. The whole concept was that you need to identify your targeted audience and then generate content that will engage them.
Much like Procter & Gamble did back in the 1950s and 1960s when they started soap operas, the whole idea of soap operas was to come up with stories that were engaging for the audience of housewives who would then buy the soap that was made by Procter & Gamble. That little nugget really stuck with me when I went to this conference two years ago and I'm like, oh yeah, I could do that. Marketing is all about sharing your story and other people's stories too.
I got the idea and then it took me a few months to get all my ducks in the line and I had to get help with some aspects of it. We've now done I think over 70 episodes of the PR Maven podcast and I'm just loving every single minute of it. Tell us how you got started. You picked a hosting company yourself, you got microphones. Take us through for people that are listening that are just launching. That entire process can be nerve wracking.
It can be nerve wracking and actually I sought out help because I wanted to focus on the content and on bringing my best self to the show as well as bringing great conversation. In some regards the technical aspect slowed me down but luckily I have a young man on my staff named Greg Glenn. Greg has a broadcasting background so basically we teamed up and I assigned to him the job of figuring out all of the technological aspects.
He purchased some equipment and we were actually recording in our office initially but I wasn't happy with the sound quality and I know that sound quality is very important. Actually I have a client who's a bank president when he heard I was launching a podcast and he said I just hope it's not going to be one of those amateur hour kind of podcasts with the terrible sound.
I knew that sound quality was really important so I actually sought out a place called the Portland Pod in Portland Maine where there is actually a professional recording studio and an audio engineer. I did a contract with them and I record now at the Portland Pod and the audio engineer Tanner Campbell he actually goes on the road with me when I speak at conferences so I've done some live presentations from the podium at conferences that I make into podcasts as well.
I actually was blessed because I was able to get some other people with expertise that went beyond my own. I feel like my own expertise is in carrying on a conversation and Greg's expertise within broadcasting and Tanner's within sound quality. We have a really great team and I actually have a couple of others on my team who are doing the social media aspect so I didn't try to do it all myself. Who do you use for a hosting company? We're using Libsyn.
Now you have the shows ready, you have them in the can, you recorded them, you have some great help. How do you get the word out? I already had quite a social media machine so to speak for my agency and actually for me personally I've been on Facebook for well over 10 years now. Very engaged on Facebook, engaged on Twitter, certainly on LinkedIn.
Actually I use LinkedIn a lot to promote the PR Maven podcast because it is a personal branding and business podcast and I use LinkedIn posts again both for my personal as well as my agency and a lot of hashtags and tagging people. One of my big keys to success I believe is trying to identify guests for my podcast who themselves have large social media followings and then I ask them to share with their audiences.
So my two biggest episodes for 2019 were actually with a guy named Lieutenant Tim Cotton who is a detective with the Bangor, Maine Police Department and he has a gigantic Facebook following. I think he has 300,000 loyal Facebook followers. He writes Facebook posts every single day about a day in the life of a police detective in Bangor, Maine, which is actually Stephen King's hometown.
So those two episodes of the PR Maven podcast with Lieutenant Tim Cotton were the biggest ever because of the power of his network and his social media sharing.
So it sounds like an important part of getting your word out about a podcast is to make sure that if you're on somebody's show that you figure out a way to share or if you have somebody on your show, you figure out a way to share because most of the time it's free and social media can spread like crazy and you just never know which episode is going to be the best one.
Well, no, you don't know which episode is going to be the best one but my experience has shown that tapping into guests who are themselves active on their own social channels is a key to success and you can actually see how engaged people are on their own social media before you invite them to be on your podcast. So I mean I heard Lieutenant Tim Cotton speak at a social media breakfast in Portland, Maine and then I checked him out and saw what a gigantic audience he had worldwide.
So that's when I asked him if he would be on my podcast and he was actually quite happy to be on the podcast and then we actually gave him an award called the Golden Microphone Award for him as the most popular guest in the first year of our podcast and then we had a party for the first anniversary of my podcast and I invited everyone in PR Maven Nation which is kind of the nation that I've created of raving fans around my own podcast and we had the party at a brewery.
I think there was probably about a hundred people there. We had free beer and food. Yeah and I did a live podcast in front of the audience with Lieutenant Tim Cotton. So how are your downloads and listens and the interaction that you have with your listeners? Talk about that. Well the downloads and listens have been gaining every episode.
We do an episode every week and actually we were just named as one of SpeedSpot's top 10 personal branding podcasts and the criteria that they used was consistency which we're very we make sure we put out a new episode every single week on every single Tuesday and actually that's it's a lot of work to generate a weekly podcast but I look at consistency as part of my own personal brand and the brand of my agency like we're dependable
and we do what we what we say we're going to do so part of that is publishing a new episode every week. And then SpeedSpot also looked at social media sharing which we do a lot of especially on Facebook, Twitter. We actually share on Pinterest as well and LinkedIn as I said. Audio quality was part of it and domain authority. So I find that you know just like any kind of marketing effort you know the shares and the listens increase on a weekly basis as the word gets out.
We also are doing Alexa flash briefings for every episode so I have a daily Alexa PR Maven marketing minute and for anybody who uses an Alexa device they can enable the skill and part of our process lately has been educating our listeners about how to do that exactly because even if you have an Alexa device you might not know that you can do these flash briefings and or listen to them. So that's been that's been an extra effort but I think it's paying off.
How difficult was it for you and how difficult is it for podcasters to create something like that? Well you know Ed it's just like everything else with this podcast. You know it's been a constant learning effort and it is not as easy as it was initially presented to me. You know when I think when I heard initially about creating a podcast at the conference I went to two years ago it was presented like oh yeah you could just record this on your phone and it's really easy and blah blah blah blah.
Well sorry that's not true. It's not as easy and it's actually pretty expensive. I think each episode you know when we figure in the value of our time and all of the subscriptions for Listen and other subscriptions we've needed it's probably about between $1,500 and $2,000 an episode to produce. So it's been an investment.
Wow. So what is your advice to other podcasters about how to get their show out and how to get you know work the show you know that you do have to put a lot of time in if you want to gain listeners and you can't give up after seven episodes. So what is your advice to those that are listening that are getting into podcasting or struggling through the first episodes or maybe they're on 10 and they're just hitting a wall?
Well I'm glad you asked and actually I'm glad you mentioned about not giving up. You can't give up. You need to just keep going forward and you need to keep learning from others in the business. You know I learned from others myself. It really helps to listen to other podcasts. I listen to Entrepreneurs on Fire which is by John Lee Dumas who is an idol of mine and I listen to well I have a big list of podcasts I listen to.
So to learn from others to constantly be upping your game but make sure to allocate the time and the money to do it right. Great and what other advice can you offer any podcaster out there about being successful and maybe even eventually making money at it? Well I think that you know I am the PR maven and publicity and promotion is really important. So to try to engage the media is has been a key to my success.
We've put out press releases consistently from day one to the media and we were able to generate news articles in publications like Maine Biz and the Portland Press Herald which are local papers and then what I'm doing now with your podcast for example so appearing on other people's podcasts. In the community of podcasters there's sort of this spirit of reciprocity where it's kind of like I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine.
So again asking other people to be on your podcast and then asking to be on theirs is really a good key to success I believe. I have a very busy mind I'm always thinking about oh how can I promote my podcast and also think about how can I help others too. I think that's the real spirit of it is to help others and then they'll want to help you.
You know the idea that you came up with for the party after the first year I think is brilliant because you're just creating another event you're creating another way to reach out to the people that listen to the show and it really it doesn't seem like it's a huge commitment in money especially if you're not renting out the place. So if you pick a special episode like episode 50 or episode 100 or one year anniversary it all kind of helps grow the show.
Yeah I mean I created a Facebook group called PR Maven Nation and I encourage people in every episode to join me on PR Maven Nation and so then that's where I put out the invitation I invited everybody in my Facebook group and we also have a monthly electronic newsletter so getting email addresses and sending something electronically each month but I believe firmly that in order to build your brand and your network you need to do it both electronically
or online and you need to have face-to-face interaction because I don't think you can really know somebody until you've actually been face-to-face with them. It's actually like chemicals that go back and forth between two humans when you're in the same space oxytocin and serotonin which are like what I call happiness chemicals.
So we at that party you know I was sitting there with Tim Cotton interviewing him and I had the audience in front of me and we had a lot of laughs and it really brought us all together and everybody who was in that space during that event they will remember it. Actually there I got some criticism from some of Tim Cotton's fans who weren't at the event like oh that sounded like you were like laughing a lot and being kind of silly.
Well it was a party we were having fun so I'm a big believer in celebrating so that was the big reason to look for an event for the first anniversary. So yeah it was after 52 episodes that we did that probably do it for the second anniversary as well. Why not so is your goal with the show mostly to have it as a marketing tool for the PR Maven brand or would you like to make money at it?
Well for one thing it's to promote Marshall Communications which is my PR agency which is the presenting sponsor. So one goal is to bring in clients and actually we have already brought clients in. We've actually created strategic plans for other companies.
There's a company called Memec which is an insurance company that hired us to create a strategic marketing strategy for their podcast and we created a podcast for them called the Safety Experts because they do insurance for businesses to try to prevent workman's comp cases and so we named their podcast and then we helped them with all of the details that they would need not only tech for the technical aspect but also for marketing and promoting their podcast.
So one goal is to get more clients like that that will hire us to create. We have something called the Marshall Plan which is our form of a strategic marketing communication strategy. Also yes I have been interested in raising my own profile. I've written books and I write for Forbes.com and I do speaking engagements as the PR maven so that was another goal.
And then you know what Ed the third one is to have fun because I've been in this a long time and I needed something new in my career that was different and I am just having a ball with it. So you know earlier on you mentioned the audio quality and it's so important to have a show that sounds good. When you do your interviews hardly anyone has a landline anymore. Are you using Zoom? Are you using something that we haven't heard of yet? I'm sorry? We're using Ringer. Okay using Ringer.
The quality of the shows sounds crystal clear so it's obvious that you're using some great stuff and have some great help there. I do a lot of my interviews in person with people inside this professional broadcast studio. I find that the audio quality is better and also the interaction is better. As I told you I like to be face to face with people because when you can look them in the eye and again laugh and smile and connect I think the audience can tell.
So I have found whenever possible I try to get people to come and do the interview in studio with me. For sure. So finally Nancy how can people get in touch with you, listen to the show, learn more about you and see you in person? Thank you. So prmaven.com slash podcast will bring you right to my podcast and you can listen to it there but it's also on iTunes and Spotify and all of the podcast players.
You could email me at nancy at prmaven.com and that's prmaven.com and I'm also very active on LinkedIn and I love connecting with people on LinkedIn. I post there all the time and yeah I don't have any national speaking engagements scheduled at the moment but that's my big push for 2020. So I'll be posting those speaking engagements on LinkedIn as I get them. Well Nancy thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate your time very much.
Thank you Ed I enjoyed it and I look forward to meeting you in person too.