Episode 211: 3 Ways to Optimize Your Accounting Firms Podcast

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Show Notes:

Sprout Social, State of Social Media

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Timestamps 

0:00 - Intro

0:08 - SEO Introduction

1:40 - 2023 State of Social Media

9:25 - Our Story

10:55 - First Way to Optimize, SEO Intro

14:55 - Second Way, Add Timestamps

16:45 - Third Way, Add Transcripts

Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the MediaBooks Podcast.

In this podcast episode, I'm going to be talking about three ways you can optimize your own podcast.

Now even if you don't have a podcast, this is a great episode.

You can kind of get a little bit of an idea of what you could be potentially getting yourself into if you are considering a podcast.

But with this new format that we're doing with our own podcast, I thought I would share some of the changes that I've made to optimize our podcasts, talk about how these are so easy to implement, and some of the tools I'm using.

But first, let's go over the 2023 State of Social Media Report from Sprout Social.

2023 State of Social Media Report from Sprout Social:

So Sprout Social is essentially a marketing scheduling app, but they have a ton of robust features and they're pretty popular in the social media management space.

And part of their marketing strategy is to put out these reports.

Occasionally, they'll put out these reports, just like this one that I'm referring to, the state of social media, to help social media managers understand the current state of marketing.

We can provide better services, have a better understanding of, you know, what is going on at your firm, What are people focusing on with their business?

It helps us kind of understand just our jobs better and how they're changing.

I read through the 2023 report and there's a few stats that I think are pretty interesting and are going to help you understand your own marketing strategy better, understand how marketing and specifically social media should play into your accounting firm strategy.

Also just very encouraging.

So this first stat, 53% of social media accounts have 10 plus people managing their social media.

Now, this report is pulling this data from social media managers and marketing teams trying to understand what is going on there.

Most of the people that answered the questions to the survey have accounts with 100 to 500,000 followers, subscribers.

So if we consider kind of where this information is being pulled, the fact that they have 10 plus people managing a single social media account to the size for this magnitude should kind of give us a moment of realization.

So many times when we're on social media and we see all these accounts, they're doing these amazing things.

They have these incredible graphics and these reels and it's super high quality.

And we're thinking, man, if I could just spend more time focusing on reels or focusing on my audience or they have all these comments, they have all these subscribers, how are they getting people to share and follow and like and do all these things?

Really consider how many people are probably managing their social media accounts.

10 plus people.

That means they probably have someone doing the graphics.

They have someone focusing on reels.

They have someone putting together a marketing strategy.

They have someone diving into their brand and diving into who their audience is.

They have people responding to comments.

They have people doing engagement.

There are so many parts and pieces and ways to optimize your social media account.

It can easily take 10 plus people to fully optimize an account.

So if you are struggling with comparison, if you are engaging with accounts and thinking, oh, why doesn't my account look like, you know, all these other big brands or I wish I could do what these people do, don't beat yourself up.

It is likely taking the time of 10 plus people of a full time job to put these full accounts together.

It is a lot of work.

And I think if you kind of grew up with social media like I did, if you're a millennial, you probably see social media as like a hobby or it's something that especially kind of older generations maybe look at social media as, oh, it's just, you know, the sort of dumb thing that, you know, young people do or they're dancing on TikTok.

It is not like that anymore.

And so if you know, full time jobs, full marketing teams are needing to fully invest into social

media.

And this is a serious thing.

People are starting to realize that now.

We can still get in that mindset of, oh, my gosh, I'm I'm not doing enough or I feel like I'm so silly that I can't achieve these, you know, big numbers.

It is taking full on teams to produce this kind of content.

Another really interesting point that the report brought up is that one of the top priorities of businesses in twenty twenty three is to build their brand and their loyalty.

And I felt like I had a good example recently of how this is true.

We recently had a social media client who already had an established website ask us to move them from WordPress to Squarespace so that we could begin managing it and so that they could also use their website more easily.

This is one of the big selling points of Squarespace, we believe, is that if you are on WordPress, it can be very difficult to update things, use it if you want to just change some wording, but you don't know exactly how to use the theme, the pages, maybe use a different plug-in.

It could be really complicated, really quick.

And we don't see that with Squarespace.

My client agreed.

We moved them over to Squarespace.

And so, you know, there's that whole piece.

But really what this means is that we have done a good enough job with our client that they trust us and they want to expand services.

That's loyalty.

And so maybe you've heard the stat before that it's easier to grow with the current

clients, that you have to upsell them, then it is to get new clients.

This is a great example of that.

Focusing on your brand, focusing on client loyalty.

If you have clients that you do one-time tax returns with, how can you really focus on doing a good enough job with them so that they maybe become a monthly client?

And even if that's not bookkeeping, maybe it's tax planning.

It's also important to note here that this relationship, migrating this client from just social media management services to web design services, did not happen overnight.

Rarely people see a single social media post or email campaign and just one and it convinces them to buy.

This client we were working with for 11 months and it took 11 months of building that relationship for them to be like, yes, I need to move over.

I mean that it took 11 months of convincing or they weren't sure at first, but it just took them some time to get to know us and really kind of understand what we were saying.

That's normal.

It takes people time.

So if you are trying to figure out a social media post that immediately converts or an email campaign that immediately converts, realize this stuff takes time.

You want to build a relationship.

You want to build up to that loyalty.

And so kind of understand that you're just, you're planting seeds.

We're not looking for immediate results, which I think is sometimes the impression that we get with great marketing is that you're going to have all these immediately, you know, stellar results and this one social media post is the thing that really, you know, turned you into a millionaire or went viral.

It doesn't really work like that.

Another quote that I want to bring up from this 2023 report from Sprout Social is about one in four business leaders consider it very easy to demonstrate the impact of social media data and insights on their company's bottom line.

Now every year, if you've stuck with us for a while, you know that we kind of follow this trend of like every year, the start of the new year, January, December two, we'll talk about the importance of tracking your marketing steps.

And this is why you are constantly telling your clients it's important to follow your numbers, to understand your financials, to stay up to date with your bookkeeping.

If you are doing that with your finances and that's the message you're putting out, but you're not doing that with your marketing, there's a little bit of a disconnect with there.

If your business is struggling, going back to your marketing stats and understanding how they relate to your finances can be essential in digging yourself out of a hole, out of a slow season, not understanding why your consultations slow down.

Your marketing stats should be just as important as tracking your financial stats.

They are both working with your business.

They can both help you understand why you're getting further or closer to your goals.

I think this point really kind of drives it home there.

Our Story

So for the last year, I have been publishing podcast episodes, five to 10 minutes, Monday to Friday.

It was a lot, but we actually did like almost 300 episodes or no, not almost 300.

I think almost 200 episodes.

And I recently changed our podcast scheduling to 20-ish minutes once a week.

Now I do a podcast episode a while back talking about why this changed, but one of those reasons for the switch is that really it took too long to do five podcast episodes each week and optimize it in the way that I wanted to.

We produce podcasts as part of our service offerings and I wanted to play around more with what really you can do with publishing a podcast episode.

I wanted to play around more with different strategies and having guests and doing all these different things.

And it really, I didn't have that opportunity too much with our current layout.

So by reducing the number of podcast episodes we publish, I am able to optimize our podcast content by making a few small changes that are not super technical, really don't take much time and we can implement these changes for accounting from podcasts we also produce.

So in this podcast episode, I want to talk about a few of those changes that I have done with this podcast and then also talk about how you can easily do it for your podcast episode too, or I'm sorry, for your podcast content too.

So here are three ways.

First Way to Optimize, SEO Intro

The first way is to add some SEO to your first 30 seconds of your podcast.

Now what does that mean?

Have you ever listened to a podcast where maybe they give you a little bit of like a clip in the first, you know, before they play the intro.

There is a reason for that.

There is a reason that they're giving you a little taste of the podcast episode and it isn't necessarily to just, you know, be fun.

It actually plays into your, into your SEO.

If you know anything about SEO blog content, you'll also know that it's important to use certain keywords at the beginning, middle and end of the content to signal to Google that you are talking about a specific subject.

For example, let's say you own a bookkeeping firm and you write a blog post about the importance of bookkeeping.

If you only use the word bookkeeping once in that entire article, Google's going to kind of be like, okay, are you really talking about bookkeeping if the word specifically bookkeeping only comes up once in that blog article?

I don't know.

I don't know.

There's going to be some questions raised.

Maybe you are, but if you write a blog article where you use the word bookkeeping frequently in the beginning, middle and end of your content, then Google is going to trust that you are actually talking about that specific subject and you are staying on topic throughout the entire blog article.

It is the same thing with podcasting.

If you are talking about a certain subject, like I'm talking about accounting firms, I'm talking about marketing on this podcast.

If I use keywords like accounting firm and marketing or social media or podcasting, if I use those keywords in the first 30 seconds of a podcast episode, I am signaling to SEO that I am staying on subject.

This is what I'm talking about.

I talk about it frequently at the beginning, middle and end of a podcast.

With your podcast episode, what you want to do is mention your specific keywords, whatever they are, about your subject, about your audience, about your business within the first 30 seconds of a clip.

Now, I realize this can be a little bit difficult if you're thinking, okay, I'm supposed to use, I'm supposed to talk about my accounting firm, I'm supposed to talk about a subject, I'm supposed to talk about this and that all in the first 30 seconds.

You don't have to necessarily nail every single keyword, but you want to have a few in your first 30 seconds.

If you go to the beginning of this podcast episode and you listen to the first 30 second intro, you're going to notice that I use the word optimize, podcast and accounting firm.

How do I do that?

Those are going to be the keywords for this podcast episode, but how I do it is I have basically an outline for each podcast episode.

I'll write the points that I want to talk through, I'll talk about the different links and things like that, and it gives me a flow so that I make sure I stay on topic and I'm not rambling.

What I'll do is I will work in one to two sentences that have the specific keywords I want to use, like podcast and accounting firm.

I highlight it in my outline and then I make sure I write it out word by word, the little one to two sentences.

It's typically the only thing I write out word by word when I'm recording a podcast, but I will highlight it and then so I make sure I read that sentence completely.

And then when I go back to editing, I will cut out that specific piece and put it in the beginning of the podcast.

Usually it's pretty easy for me to find just kind of understanding where it is in my outline versus the flow of the audio.

And generally this gives me time to think ahead of how to incorporate those specific words and sum up the podcast in that first 30 seconds.

So I included the appropriate words, I summed up the podcast, I'm able to easily find it, edit and clip it to the beginning of the podcast episode.

So it's a really kind of easy way to optimize and get those first, that SEO in your first 30 seconds.

Second Way, Add Timestamps

The second way that I have been optimizing our podcast is adding timestamps to my show notes, especially for YouTube episodes, which we publish everything to YouTube, but this is especially important if you publish your podcast episodes to YouTube.

Timestamps can be a short and quick way for listeners to skip ahead to subjects that they really want to hear about or to go back to pieces that they want to re-listen to.

Maybe they're listening in the car, you said something really interesting, they want to go back to that specific subject when they have time to sit down.

So you can do this by adding the timestamps to your show notes.

This will show up wherever you publish your podcasts, like Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, but you also want to do this if you're publishing your content to YouTube to the description.

All you need to do is do like, or I'm sorry, type in zero point or what is it?

Not semicolon.

What's those two dots called?

Like when you're having a time, zero dot dot zero zero dash intro, and then write in your subsequent timestamps, so 1.5.

You know, I talk about, I have an intro or I talk about bookkeeping, etc.

Whatever the subjects are.

And then all you have to do is put that in the description of your YouTube video and YouTube will automatically add those timestamps to the audio bar.

And you can move the scrubber along and see the difference, see at the different points when you talk about those different subjects, it's automatically added.

And so you can actually go to our YouTube for media books.

There's links below or links in our show notes where you can see a good example of this.

So it's a great way to kind of give people an overview of your podcasts and listen to specific points that they want to listen to.

Super easy to add.

Third Way, Add Transcripts

Also the third point to optimize your podcast content is by adding transcript content.

This also helps with your SEO.

Now there are a ton of places online where you can upload your podcast audio and it will quickly generate a transcript of your content.

Why should you do this?

Some people simply prefer to read or scan content as opposed to listen.

Let's say there's a subject you're really, that they're really interested in learning about but they don't have time or whatever to listen to a full podcast, they can read the transcript.

This will also help with your website's SEO.

By just adding more content to your website, adding more content that has those specific keywords like we talked about at the beginning of this episode, things like podcasts, accounting firms, using those words, it's going to show up in the transcript.

Again, just reinforcing your SEO that you're trying to do and then also give more people options to view your content so they're more likely to view it to use it to find it helpful.

Now how I do this is I actually use a website called rss.com.

If you know what an RSS is or if you've published a podcast, you know RSS is the feed that goes out to publish podcast episodes.

So it's simple simple to remember.

RSS.com.

It's free to use.

They do have pricing plans but really it's kind of dependent on how your podcast is set up.

So free to use and all you have to do is upload, create an account, upload your audio and then it'll quickly generate the transcripts.

I add the transcript text to the episode blog post.

This may look a little different depending on what podcast publishing app you're using but if you're using Squarespace, all you have to do is add it as a text block to the same post you're publishing your podcast audio to and then I have a really great page with my podcast where people can listen or they can kind of read through and get the same gist so that I don't have to like listen to the full podcast and like type it out by hand.

*Links included in the show notes may be affiliate links and subject to compensation by MediaBooks