Understanding What Your Customer Wants At Their Core With Tracy Hazzard From The REALLY Know Your Customer Podcast With Betsy Westhafer And Tony Bodoh
As the world becomes even more competitive, finding ways to connect with your customers has become a must. Otherwise, you might just find yourself getting drowned out by the rest of your competitors. As consumption continues to go up, one of the best ways you can get intimate with your audience is through podcasting. Sitting in the hot seat in front of Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh for the REALLY Know Your Customer Podcast, Tracy Hazzard shares her expert knowledge about what is happening in the world of podcasting, how businesses have transformed, and where it is going to go next. Her Podetize method and platform have been helping many podcasters achieve the results they want for their businesses. She tells us how she is taking understanding her customers at their core to a whole new level and building everything else to support them with a personal touch.
Listen to the podcast here
You’ve mentioned podcasting. Tell everybody what in the world is happening. It’s explosive. Bring us up to speed, first of all, on your career path on how you ended up podcasting, if you could walk us through that. Tell us what you’re doing now and talk about what’s happening in the world of podcasting.
As Tony mentioned, my roots are in the world of design. Originally, that’s where I came from. A few years ago, I realized that the design world and what we were doing in product design, which we’d been designing and developing 250 products in a decade. That’s how many we did for mass-market retail. It was a lot of products all at once. Things you buy at Costco, Walmart, Target, and things like that. We realized that the world was shifting so much there that the designers were unimportant, that people were straight shopping over in Asia and styling and not designing anymore.
We realized that our role in that had to shift. At the same time, 3D printing emerged and some other things were going desktop. We thought, “Let’s see if we can build ourselves some thought leadership around there and come out from behind being a ghost designer,” which is what we were. You’d never see our name on products. You’d see Martha Stewart’s name on the products instead of ours. We decided, “What’s the best way for us to come out in front and let people know who we are? Let them know the knowledge that we have so we can share it with everyone.” We can maybe push out and develop a new business model based on that.
That’s what we decided to do. We decided that it was going to be in 3D printing because it was a new area and it was exploding. It was a great way for us to talk about product design and something innovative and technical at the same time. That would be an exciting world for us as well. What we didn’t expect was that there would be no business for us. There would be no services. People didn’t want to buy the services. What they wanted to buy was the information. They wanted more and more of it.
Understanding Your Customer: Before the acceleration of the know and like, the only thing that matters is trust-building. The know and like is going to happen if people decide to give you a shot.
Fast forward about a year and we had 100,000 listeners on our podcasts called WTFFF?!, which is the geeky term for 3D printing: Fuse, Filament, Fabrication. We had people asking us for more things. “Do you have a book? Do you have courses? Do you have these things?” We’re like, “No, we’re designers. We could do a project for you.” We didn’t know what to do with that. We were shocked by it. We started to adapt and we started to develop instead of more of an info model where the podcast was the business.
More people came to us and said, “I have a podcast, and mine’s not doing as well as yours. What are you doing?” We had our first twelve clients shove their credit cards at us and said, “Take my business. Please take over and take care of my podcast. Whatever you’re doing is working. I want you to do the same thing for me.” That’s how we ended up in business a few years ago. It went from twelve to over 400 today. It went fast. You’re asking what happened in the world and in the world now, consumption is up. The business has to change for the entrepreneur, for the business builder, for the corporate.
When you can’t drive people into your store, when you can’t drive people because you met them at a networking event and you’re not driving clients that way, when you can’t do that in person, you have to find a way to be intimate with them. Podcasting is a great way to be intimate with your audience. That’s something that we hone in the strategy by which we help our clients launch their shows. We’re tapping into this very important, get to know someone strategy and it’s an accelerated know, like, and trust model. I gave a talk on that on how to build the trust factor. We built in all of these things into that process.
Tracy, when people have a podcast and they’re trying to engage with their customers or prospects, for the purposes of this question, when they’re engaging with their customers, how do you coach them when it comes to “You’re putting out a podcast? What does that mean for your customers?”
We always want to be listener focused. I was mentioning before the acceleration of the know, like, and trust. The only thing that matters is trust-building. The know, like is going to happen if they decide to give your show a shot. You’re in their ear. It’s an intimate process. They’re going to get to know and like you over time or they wouldn’t stay listening. They would have given up already. We want to work on that trust factor as our predominant strategy. I have three things that I like to build in that. The number one thing is care. I need to show whoever my audience is that I absolutely care about them, their wellbeing and their future and that that is honest, benevolent care in that process.
Not just anyone should start a podcast. You should start the right show for you because not doing that means your show will not grow. #ReallyKnowYourCustomers #BetsyWesthafer #TonyBodoh #podcastinterview Click To TweetI need to make sure that’s coming across to them. The advice I’m giving you isn’t so you’ll buy my stuff. That advice I’m giving you, I want you to succeed with because when you succeed, it will translate to you crediting me back in either you’ll send me someone or you will buy my stuff at that point. That’s the model we want. We want extreme care at the beginning for our audience. Sometimes our audience is our guest. Keep that in mind because we’re in this model of our connection and networking with guests is the end goal of our podcast. It’s not always the listenership.
I have clients who have barely a dozen listeners a show, and it is the connections and the meetings of the guests that drives more business for them. It is the care they show the guest on the show that matters. That care has to be placed right. You don’t want to offend listeners in the process when caring for your guests. We do want to try to do both at the same time. We move from the care side and now we need to show that credibility, that we are in capability. We want to do both things at the same time. Credibility and capability are the next two things. Credibility is simply if you want to do business with me, you need to know that I’m going to show up and I’m going to do what I say I’m going to do.
Understanding Your Customer: We’re coming out of a ‘me’ cycle, and we’re moving into a ‘we’ cycle.
By showing up week after week at exactly the same time, by giving and caring during that time and possibly by giving some access to me and other things that they can consume for free and other things like that out there whether it’s videos or downloads, other things that you have out there, you’re grouping those things to show great credibility. Now I’m starting to trust you even more. The third thing is most people go in and go, “You should trust me because I’m a bestselling author.” “You should trust me because I speak on stages next to Tony Robbins,” whatever that might be. That’s usually the process that we go and we go and write through our skills and capabilities.
If we do that, then the question is is that true or is that overstated? Is that fake on your resume? We are skeptical about that as a listener, as the receiver of that information. Instead, we want to take our skills and we demonstrate them throughout the process in a good way. You two here are demonstrating deep knowledge and how customer care happens because you both have tremendous experience. It’s coming across in the questions that you ask, in the wrap-up when you talk afterwards and the points that you pull out. That’s why people are listening to your show because they’ve discovered that you do know what you’re talking about. You’re not running a show to host a show for its keyword ranking or something like that. You’re not doing it from a technical you care and it matters. When we pull those things together, we accelerate that trust and that trust is the key to everything.
