Indepth with Peter Murphy Lewis: Podcasting, Marketing and Building Credibility | Peter Murphy Lewis

Peter Murphy Lewis Full Episode

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Sadaf Beynon: Welcome to PodJunction Podcast, a show for podcasters who want to use their podcast to grow their business. I'm your host, Sadaf Beynon, and today I'm joined by Peter Murphy, a successful marketing consultant and seasoned podcaster who not only runs a successful podcast, but also integrates it seamlessly with other media like TV shows and LinkedIn.

Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Sadaf, I'm excited to chat with you about podcasts.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, right back at you. Thank you so much. So Peter, let's start from the top. What inspired you to start your podcast and how does it align with the goals of your business?

Peter Murphy Lewis: The story's fun, uh, cause it takes me back to a challenging job that I took upon myself, um, in the middle of COVID in an industry that I was unfamiliar with, which was [00:01:00] healthcare more specifically, long term care for people aren't familiar with long term care, I'm talking about nursing homes, and it happened.

Uh, during COVID, so I couldn't go in and talk to, you know, my customer, to my clients, to my prospects. So the reason that I started a podcast is because I was in a very, um, high learning curve, new industry, and there was no way for me to go in and learn from, My Prospects, and the best way for me to do it was to interview CEOs who are experts in their field.

Uh, podcasts made them look good and they would share information for me. So I use the podcast for the first three months to spin me up and know what I was talking about. Now, obviously I approached it very humbly saying, I don't really know anything, but they taught me in three months.

Sadaf Beynon: That's incredible.

Yeah,

Peter Murphy Lewis: it, it, it was, it was [00:02:00] nerve wracking at the beginning because I thought As a podcast host, you had to be the expert in the room. Now I actually think you shouldn't be the expert in the room. I think the best podcast is a podcast host who does the least amount of speaking and does a better job of listening.

Um, but I didn't know that at the time and that was kind of really what I think made it unique is because leaders were better speakers than I was and they were teaching me and then their social. Proof and their trust passed off to me. Um, and I got spun up.

Sadaf Beynon: That's, that's a really good point because you're right.

Um, we, we, we seem to think that we need to be the experts, but actually letting the expert do the talking is so much better for the podcast and also for your own learning, isn't it?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah. I mean, I, I think that had I not done the podcast, I would have been nervous to [00:03:00] use the jargon. I would have been afraid to go to conventions.

I definitely would have never done public speaking in the industry. But after I spent, you know, hundreds of hours on the podcast. Interviews, I then felt comfortable going to conventions, I could hold a conversation over lunch, I could, uh, I became a keynote speaker in the area that a year beforehand I didn't feel comfortable doing a podcast in.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, that makes so much sense. So, you've mentioned conventions. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, so, in the United States, specifically in the B2B, um, even more so in the healthcare, traditional industries still depend upon in person events, conventions, congresses, whatever you want to call them, summits, and that is Very, very strong in the long-term care space.

So soon as Covid started [00:04:00] to allow us to open, um, up to conventions, uh, it was time for me to hit the road. And I think that there were kind of two things that that happened because of the podcast. One is. I made a pitch, I made an aggressive kind of media booklet, PDF, around my background as a TV host, my background as an entrepreneur, my background as a CNA, a certified nurse's assistant, and then being a podcaster in the industry.

That, uh, pitched that out and said, Hey, I want to go to your convention and I want to interview your board members, your keynote speakers, uh, your best members, your, you know, your stakeholders, your cheerleaders. And the very first convention I pitched it to, they accepted it. They're like, this is great. We have this guy who knows how to communicate.

And he's going to show up and he's going to do live interviews, some on stage, some in the lobby, [00:05:00] some in the boardroom. And he's going to repurpose these across all of these channels, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook. And he's going to give us, give the content to us where he makes us look great. Because Sadaf, one of the things that's great about conventions is a lot of in person conversations Make for unique relationships, but a lot of times you go back to your office and that material that you learn from the convention isn't necessarily evergreen.

It doesn't ever get into action because it happened while you were relaxed. Well, the podcast people sharing these tips with me and it becomes evergreen because we turn it into a PDF. We turn it into a webinar, it stays on the podcast format, we'll write up an SOP, and then we'll give it back to these leaders and they can share it with each other.

That was the first thing. The second thing that I think that it, um, I didn't expect, which was me going to conventions then turned into me getting invited as a keynote speaker. So I did, you know, more than, uh, 20 talks at these conventions over, over two, two years. [00:06:00]

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Wow. So that's another thing is with podcasting is that.

The networking side of things just really blows up. You're really able to get into places that you wouldn't normally have been able to.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, we, I think there was probably, if I were to give away the recipe for success that works for us, and we're now doing this same process with a couple other clients is go for people who are not influencers in the digital space yet.

So they're not, they, they, they haven't necessarily been on a podcast, but They probably haven't been on TV, but they're stakeholders in their community or in their association. So for me in the healthcare space, those are board members. Board members are often leaders of their community, of their state, regional, maybe even national level, [00:07:00] you know, they might be 50 or 60 before the digital world.

So they're influential. Offline, but don't have the place online yet. And making those people look like heroes on your podcast space, um, is beneficial to them and beneficial to you because that person will then open the door up for you. You just have to, when you turn off the recording, you just say, who are three other people in your space that you think that I should interview and make me Highlight their work and now they're gonna open the door to someone even higher.

And eventually you're gonna start to share Audi share, um, audiences. The two other people that I think, um, I focus on is the event planners at the conventions. So they're often people doing the legwork. So if you focus on the executive director, you focus on the CEO, you focus on the president, well, you're competing against five other people in the state who are trying to get their attention.

But if you speak to the event planner, who's the person who puts together the podcast, Invites, puts together [00:08:00] the sponsorships, puts together who are the keynote speakers. This 28 year old who got out of college four years ago, um, is the person who's doing all the work and can open the doors for you and is not nearly as busy as, or for people's attention as CEO.

And then, so once you do those two things, eventually you're going to get a really big name. In my case, it was the CEO of the largest healthcare association in the United States, the president, and also, um, And then the second largest association, we also got her as a president. Once we got those two people, we, you know, we started to get well known authors.

We started to get huge influencers on YouTube and those three kind of elements just spiraled as a domino effect in terms of brand awareness for what we were doing.

Sadaf Beynon: That's really cool. So it's the three of them are working in tandem. So Peter, you've integrated your podcast with television and social media platforms.

What inspired this multi platform approach? And how has it benefited your business?

Peter Murphy Lewis: The [00:09:00] inspiration came from the challenge, uh, that I previously, um, mentioned, and I'll go a little bit more into depth of that challenge, which is the private equity. So we took the private equity company that hired me and the previous CEO to turn around a troubled Company with a lot of churn. Um, we had to rebrand it quickly.

We had to do it during, during covid, and then we had to, you know, build up the pipeline, build up the brand for when it would, when we would exit this asset. And the challenge with that was, is we didn't have a lot of. So, we didn't have a lot of seasoned marketers who specifically came from that field. So we had to growth hack, we had to fail quickly, but we had to make sure that any failures that we did didn't affect our brand.

So we could fail at tactics, we could fail at strategies, we couldn't [00:10:00] fail at anything related to our reputation. In order to growth hack it, I knew that I couldn't have a podcast that only 20 people would listen to, or only 200 people would listen to. Um, and I couldn't have a YouTube channel that I would only have, you know, 15 subscribers.

So everything that we did on the podcast, we had to think about how we could repurpose it across different channels. And I think the, the four ish ways that we did that was, Newsletter. Mm-Hmm. Backlink Strategy, YouTube, and then LinkedIn, and I think LinkedIn's probably the most important. Then I'll just briefly mention SEO, because I don't think that most podcasters are thinking about it, but LinkedIn was important for us because our prospects were on LinkedIn.

It's important for us because LinkedIn. [00:11:00] Was easy for us to find everybody else's second connections. So to set off what that means, um, for, for us is with LinkedIn, if you were a client of ours, uh, for the last two or three years, more than likely, um, your connections would be potential great prospects for us.

So could have you on the podcast. Then I could. Scrape all of your second connections, become, um, not necessarily friends because I mean, friends on let's not friends on LinkedIn, but come connections with all of them. And then when I start to push out your content, they're going to recognize who you are and they're going to trust me and my reputation.

As long as my conversation with you is authentic, it doesn't come off as salesy. And the other thing that is helpful on LinkedIn, and I find that a lot of podcasters don't take advantage of this. With LinkedIn, you need to apply for the creator status. And creator status allows for you to [00:12:00] do, to create newsletters.

It allows for you to do live streams. And once you start doing that, you can take advantage of the LinkedIn algorithm, which is soon as you become a connection with someone, your content, your RSS feed is going to be pushed to that new connection. So whatever you're pushed out yesterday, when you and I become a connection today, you're going to see whatever I pushed out.

That's the first thing of the algorithm. The second thing of the algorithm is. If I am doing live streams like our podcast right now, if we were pushing this out in real time to LinkedIn, it's going to send a notification to all of my connections that Peter is going live right now. And what's good about that is people, the email saturated post COVID area, there's emails have been saturated with people spamming and cold emailing and too many newsletters and so forth.

So. We need to get outside of email, and I think that that's what LinkedIn allows [00:13:00] us to do. From an SEO point of view, and I'll make this as quick as possible, is for every single guest that we have on our podcast that has a ranked domain of something higher than 50, we finish the podcast, and then I say, hey, would you like for me to write up a great blog for your website that you're PR person will have complete editorial permissions to make adjustments for, for you to post on your website.

And then of course the guest says, yes, right. They already trust me. They know that I'm communicate. They've seen my website. They know it's professional. Why write it up? They just send it to the PR person, the PR person publishes it, and now we get a backlink, a do follow backlink that's going to improve the rank on our website as well.

Sadaf Beynon: Wow, that is so interesting. Can I ask you a bit more about the creator status? How, do you have to, um, have a company profile for that or page for that? How does that work?

Peter Murphy Lewis: You know, I, I haven't done it in quite a while, but I did give some advice to someone yesterday on it. So I'll tell you what it was when I applied, um, [00:14:00] three ish years ago.

Um, I knew two people who had applied as a creator status, and both of them got rejected. So I did a little bit of research on it, and then I realized that LinkedIn wants you to be creating, uh, native videos and content on their profile, on their platform, not sharing YouTube links, not sharing Twitter links, not sharing your blog links.

So I just downloaded clips of my podcast video. Edit them and then uploaded them to LinkedIn. I made newsletters. Um, I, I made posts on LinkedIn that weren't links to another platform. And then I applied for creator status and I got accepted. Now, uh, as I mentioned, I had two people who were. Bigger Creators Than I, and they both got rejected, but I think that they were probably just repurposing content from other profiles.

So the person I gave advice to yesterday, as I said, over the next seven days, upload three clips directly to [00:15:00] LinkedIn, share those. Um, do two or three different posts and then comment on a couple of the people's newsletters. And then I think that they'll get approved. And I think that's pretty much a slam dunk.

But the good thing about the creative status is then it allows you to create newsletter and it allows you to suggest people to subscribe to your newsletter. It allows you to, um, uh, tag people in your newsletter. And then obviously the algorithm, as I mentioned, once you go live with something, it pushes it out to your entire audience.

Sadaf Beynon: Oh, that's cool. Um, just going back to what you were saying about repurposing content you were saying, um, newsletter, backlinks. Um, YouTube and LinkedIn, but about YouTube, do you put out the whole recording on YouTube? Is that how you do it? Or do you, um, slice it and dice it into smaller segments?

Peter Murphy Lewis: We were doing our content at the beginning off of Zoom, and then we were doing a lot of post production editing.

Uh, as we got further along, we did everything on [00:16:00] StreamYard.

https: www. youtube. com Uh, I would just hit go live and it would send that recording directly to LinkedIn and YouTube as if or were live. And because I had done a little bit of, I'd done a little bit of the legwork while I was doing the interview. Mm-Hmm. , um, it was professional enough that it was ready to go straight, so I'd put up the entire.

Uh, episode. And then from there, what we do is we, we do clips into reels, right? But that's something we worry about afterwards. We try to pay attention to what got the most views and so forth.

Sadaf Beynon: So while we're on this topic, um, how do you do the whole production side of things? So once you're done on StreamYard, you have a team that picks that up, or are you involved in that yourself?

How does that, what does that look like for you?

Peter Murphy Lewis: So we, we help with. Uh, as consultants for a couple of different clients [00:17:00] who are either using podcasts as guests, using podcasts as hosts. Or a new, um, avenue that we're going down right now is like a podcast takeover. So to, to answer your question, it depends on how important podcasts are for them.

Whether it's a brand awareness play, if it is a, Middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, you know, uh, more of a sales approach to determine how much word we are using our team for one client in the investment space, we spend a lot of time on it. So we do pitching. Right now we are, because there's a number of us on the team who are actual content creators, we're going to do podcast takeovers, which means that I would come to you Sadaf and say, Hey, you're amazing at your podcast.

Your audience is big. My audience is going to like you as well. Can I come on your podcast and interview you because you normally don't get to talk about yourself. [00:18:00] You're usually interviewing others. Um, and then I'll talk about you. People are excited to hear about your personal story because they've already fallen in love with your voice, your face.

The way that you ask questions, but they don't know that much about you. So that's an opportunity for us to share audiences. And we spend a lot more time on, on that one. Now for the, on the production side, on the, on the team side, I would say we spend more time on the LinkedIn distribution and tagging than we do on anything related to audio or video or video editing.

Sadaf Beynon: Okay. Back to LinkedIn, you brought that up. You were saying about, um, new prospects that you, you, you connect with via your, um, connections, right? Their, their, their connections are then your prospects. So, um, you strategically share content soon after connecting with new prospects. [00:19:00] Can you share how you decide which content to share and like timing in order to get the engagement you want?

How do you do, how do you go about that?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah. So it's a good question. The way that we normally do it is we cut up our clips, um, for our clients and we put it on some type of tool that tracks opens and views throughs. So like for, for one client we use vidyard and we, um, We upload those videos to Vidyard, inside of Vidyard we make like sub chapters, those sub chapters then we send out to our database or our client's database and we can tell which of the clips that people in the email click on.

So we'll, we'll send out an email saying, Hey, here's an interview we did with Peter Murphy Lewis about how to crowthack a podcast. And then in the email, it'll say. See about how he used it to become a keynote speaker at a convention. See about how, uh, he used it to, [00:20:00] uh, scrape second connections and then push out that information.

See about how he growth hacked the LinkedIn algorithm. We'll send that out to a database of 150, 000 people. We'll wait seven days. We'll see which is the clip that the clip that got the highest view through. So something over 90 percent and which one got the highest amount of clicks. We'll take that.

That's the one that we'll concentrate to push out to other platforms. So we use our database first. And then from that database and from what we get from that email, we'll also push that out to ads. We'll take those clips that did the best with our organic audience who already knows us. And we'll push those out to ads.

Sadaf Beynon: Right, okay, so it's finding, um, it's finding those clips, that content that you're putting out in different formats, and seeing which one gets the best engagement.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, and if, if you, if, if If we worked with a client that doesn't have a large database yet, and so we have, we have a client right now in the painting space, and we have a client in the zoo [00:21:00] space, and we have a client in the bank space, right, if, depending on how big their, their database is, or how comfortable they feel testing these, if they don't feel comfortable or their database is small, we just test it on ads.

So we'll, you know, we'll throw a hundred dollars at, um, five different clips and within four days we'll know by a click through rate and we'll just put the rest of the budget on the, the clip that's doing the best.

Sadaf Beynon: Right. Okay. So, um, about that, so you've, like you mentioned before that, um, you know, you're, you've introduced part podcasting into a less digital industry such as healthcare.

So what strategies do you use then to make your podcast accessible? To these audiences

Peter Murphy Lewis: that that's a good question and that took me a while to figure out I think that there's a couple different ways that we have had success there the the first one is The [00:22:00] the first one is the first one is you can see my son behind me the the the first one is taking A landing page that has a keyword in it that our cold prospects or our cold email and recipients will immediately identify with so that they'll want to click on it.

So let's go back to healthcare. So let's say you set up that you're in the state of Michigan. And I'm going to send you a cold email. The likelihood of you opening and clicking on something is slim to none if I can't put into the URL something that makes you feel like, Oh, this is interesting, the person knows who I am.

In my case, what I did was I created a landing page for every convention in the state of Michigan. And then I would send in that email to you. It would say, so, [00:23:00] um, the company I worked for was Experience Care. So I would put experience. care forward slash 2024, um, Michigan Healthcare Association. And I would send that to you.

And you're going to click on it because one, you know it's this year, two, it's a convention that you go to, three, it's the state that you live in. You go to that and then right on the landing page I say, we're coming to visit you and we want to interview you. Immediately they know podcast, they trust it, podcast already as a genre.

Make sense to people, they might not know how to use it yet, but I put a very fast autoplay link in there from YouTube that they'll know right away, Oh, this person has spoken to people I know, spoken to people I trust, spoken to people I admire. And then immediately in the landing page, we say what else I do.

So I'm coming as a keynote speaker or we do this software or this is the solution. So they trust us because they see us. They don't have to go click and subscribe to something on Spotify that [00:24:00] they don't know. Right. Especially in that industry. Um, and then, and then they, they, um, we'll see what else we offer as a solution.

So it connects our, our company brand, what we sell as a solution to their pain point with the podcast. The second thing that we did would, we would take my most successful. Webinars, or not webinars, we did most of my successful public speaking events. So I taught people how to use LinkedIn at, in healthcare.

And I taught people how to use the book, Five Languages of Love to motivate their employees and find staffing. And I also taught people how to use LinkedIn to find, uh, entry level, I'm a certified nurses aides from community colleges. And what we would do is we would take the best keynote speaking, uh, programs that I did, and then we would convert those into shorter versions of 15 or 20 minutes on LinkedIn.

So I would make two to three events every single month. On [00:25:00] LinkedIn and bring that over and then in that LinkedIn, we would be like, Hey, you're only seeing a 20 minute version of all the things that we teach throughout the year. Wait till you listen to this podcast that has, you know, thousands and thousands of people listen to it.

It's your peers and they're teaching you how they've solved their problems. So instead of this guy, Peter, that you've never heard of. That doesn't know much about your industry. Why don't you go listen to the hundreds of peers that you already know who explain how they've solved problems. So, because I was trying to break into an industry where nobody listened to a podcast, nobody, right?

Like the average, the average thought leader, the average customer in my industry was 50 years old. They, they, they were, if they were using Spotify, it was because they were listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, right? They didn't know how to subscribe to a podcast yet.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah. Right. So. If, for example, someone wanted to break into, um, the real estate industry, I can't think of a better example, [00:26:00] but would, like, would the same strategy that you've been using, would that apply?

How would you approach that?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, the real estate industry is a lot harder because I feel that it's saturated, um, and Um, compared to older industries. So I believe in, I believe that podcasts are still growing to grow. And I would double down, I would triple down into anything that's an older industry. Um, and they're, they're, they're just, they're just going to blow up, right?

I'm like, I'm betting big on podcasts becoming more than just background noise in older industries. Now in real estate, so I haven't thought in my mind, but now that you asked me, this is off the cuff. I think from the real estate podcast that I've listened to, because I had a real estate um, client for a while, I think real estate people talk about themselves too much.

So they use it as an excuse. This is a sales funnel that [00:27:00] is so obvious and they don't, the majority of the guests that I've listened to, or the majority of posts I've spoken to do one man or one woman shows where they talk about trends or talk about themselves. I think that if you approached it a lot more humbly and did a lot more listening like you are right now, uh, you would be more successful.

And then I would go down, I would probably do the exact same play that I shared with you beforehand, which is go after the, You Conventions and go after an older generation of people who aren't in the digital space. So I'd go after board members from the most important real estate associations who might not be at that all over the internet, but those people are going to open the doors to you to, you know, the, the stakeholders, the movers and shakers in, in their industry.

That would be my first play.

Sadaf Beynon: So what other older industries are there that you, that you think are untapped?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Uh, anything that is mostly brick and mortar and You know, still has customer service depended [00:28:00] upon people. So, uh, banks, in my opinion, are still behind the times when it comes to digital marketing.

Um, I would say even like, uh, car, car, car, lots of car industry. Um, I would say definitely anything in the healthcare space, social work, um, airlines. Mm-Hmm. . Um, if you were selling to an airline, right, and you're or to someone in the manufacture business and you have to travel all around the country, you could, you know, 10 x your reach by.

You could still go visit people in, you know, in Kansas and Oklahoma and Detroit and Florida and so forth, but you could reach 'em a lot faster with evergreen material if you're able to penetrate their ears by getting them to trust you by inter interviewing their peers.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Um. Yeah, those, those, those are the ones that come to mind.

I mean, anything that's in, uh, natural resources, right? Like, so, [00:29:00] oil, gas, commodities. I would say, so, I, I always, I always say, if you're in a boring industry, like, if you, if you're, if you're at a bar, um, at the airport, and people ask you what you do, and your job is so boring, and so complex, that. You make up something just to move on to the next conversation.

Sadaf Beynon: Yeah, yeah.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Your industry is ripe for podcasts. If your job is so boring, I feel like you're probably 20 years behind in digital media. And that is ripe for podcasting because people still care about conversation in those worlds. It's not just about clicks.

Sadaf Beynon: I like that. I like that. Thanks for sharing that, Peter.

So, um, I guess my next question is what kind of metrics do you look at? to, um, to see the, the growth of, of your podcast. In terms, not just in terms of audience, but actually the bottom line.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, I, I get that question a [00:30:00] lot from. People who are thinking about doing their podcast, or when I have, um, ref referrals, reach out to me and you know, they say, Hey, I'm thinking about doing a podcast.

I heard about you. What should I do? I'm worried about, you know, throwing a hundred thousand dollars at a podcast this year, not seeing any return on the investment. I tend to see podcasts as kind of three main metrics that I'm looking at. Probably the first most important is pipeline. Right? Like Chris Walker, who's, who's a big marketer in our space and a big proponent of podcasts is make sure that your lead magnet form or your contact form in your side of your HubSpot on your website does not make people answer a pre, a template Rather, let them ask how they first heard about you.

And then when you talk to them, when [00:31:00] your SDR talks to them or your discovery call, say, what is it that made you finally reach out to us? Like what, what is the last impression that made them? And I think that if you run a successful podcast for six months, maybe nine months, and by successful, I mean, you do it every single week.

You follow the steps that you guys teach on this podcast. You follow some of the ideas that I shared here for growth hacking across other channels, you should start to see people trickle into your pipeline who say that I've either first heard about you on a podcast or I booked a call because I heard you on the podcast.

So either it's bringing people in or it's bringing people to a call. Um, and then the second metric that I think that you could pay attention to after about. 12 months of running a podcast is your sales cycle should be shorter. So what I did with, with a preview with a client was I would take clips of their podcast [00:32:00] interviews mm-Hmm, , and push it out to everyone who hit the pipeline.

So, as soon as you move from an MQL to an SQL and then you now have, you're in the pipeline for a 25, 000 deal or a 250, 000 deal, I'm going to re market case studies to you and podcast interviews to you until you close. And that should shorten the sales cycle. So, instead of my average sales cycle being two months for an enterprise SaaS.

Uh, product, uh, I want, I want to get down to six weeks to four weeks and I am certain a podcast can do that. I saw it, I did it. So those two things are the two metrics that, that we do with our podcasts and with our third and our clients. And lastly, and this isn't near, this isn't quite as quantitative as you were asking.

Uh, but I think that you should be able to see some type of, some type of conclusive metrics around brand awareness. So, you should either see your YouTube channel grow in subscribers when you're [00:33:00] pushing out as a LinkedIn newsletter. LinkedIn will give you the metrics of who are the people who are reading your newsletter.

It'll tell you what their job role is. So, in my newsletter, I look for about 15 percent of the people who should be reading my newsletters are CEOs. So, those are decision makers. Another 15 30 percent should be C suite executives. So just underneath that CEO and that's good metrics. Those are good metrics for me.

And then you can see every single person who subscribes, right? So I launched a LinkedIn newsletter, uh, a month ago that is repurposing our podcast content and our blog content. And we hit. You know, 1, 200 LinkedIn subscribers within one month, and the majority of those are CEOs and C suites, so that might not show up into the previous metrics I mentioned, which is pipeline or even sales cycle for quite some time, but there are enough [00:34:00] indications that's headed in the right direction, like if a client comes to you and says, Hey, I, uh, brand awareness, that's, you know, That's too vague for me.

Well, I mean, then, like, when you go to a convention and you speak to 15 people at the happy hour, don't count that as good marketing either then, okay? Because you know what it is, right? It's not in your pipeline, but you just met 15 people who recognize who you are, and you know what their pain point are, and you know what they think about, and you know what the next convention they're going to.

Sadaf Beynon: That's such a great point. How often do you send um, newsletters out? Is that a monthly thing or a weekly? We're

Peter Murphy Lewis: doing it, uh, we have two, we, the client I'm working with right now is in the investment space and we are on two sides of the marketplace. So we need portfolio managers and we need investors and we're in the private equity space.

And so we run two newsletters. Twice per month to two per month for investors, where we are showing them [00:35:00] the digital assets that we are acquiring and investing in and why we are buying them at lower multiples and how we can make them efficient and have a positive outcome, um, on when we exit. And then on the other side of the marketplace, it's operators.

Which are portfolio managers. Those are people who are going to manage our assets when we acquire them. And we're doing a newsletter around events and conventions that they should be going to and we are doing that twice a month. Both of those, both of those newsletters started a month ago and both of those hit more than a thousand subscribers in the first month.

Sadaf Beynon: Oh wow. So do you have any stories, any success stories of your own where you're, when you're um, Your sales cycle is a lot shorter and you've had someone walk through the door and want to sign up.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, it was, uh, with the private equity company where we did the turnaround project, um, in the healthcare space.

We, we saw our, our leads, [00:36:00] um, You know, 5X after a year of running the podcast, we saw our sales cycle move from four months down to three months down to two months. Uh, we had warm leads coming in saying, Hey, you know, I met Peter at a convention. I heard your podcast. I heard Peter interview X, Y, and Z person.

Um, and then we also used. The podcast with people in our pipeline. So if you were in our pipeline and you're actually a good guest, we're not going to use it to close a deal, but you're actually, you're, you're going to help us. And if we show you how great your work, our work is, you know, the more likely you're going to trust us.

And so we, we shorted our sales cycle and grew our pipeline. To give you, to give you a, a hard, a hard metric. We grew from, we rebranded within three months of me starting as the CMO, uh, at that healthcare job. And within a year and a half, we went from zero website visitors [00:37:00] to 25,000 website visitors. Uh, because of our SEO work, because of our brand work, and because of our podcast.

So you can imagine what 25, 000 people on your website look like in your pipeline after, after some hard work.

Sadaf Beynon: That's incredible and very aspirational as well. Thank you for sharing that.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah.

Sadaf Beynon: Um, what are some of the challenges you've faced in your podcasting journey and more so like in, you know, in current times?

Are there challenges that you're, you're facing and how are you dealing with them?

Peter Murphy Lewis: I, so I'll give you some funny stories, um, from the, from the beginning, the, the challenges from the beginning, if you're doing your podcast the first time is you feel really clumsy and clunky for two or three months. Uh, you feel imposter syndrome, you over structure interviews, you prepare way too much, you organize questions into a format that are the way that you think, but not the way that you talk.

[00:38:00] Um, and I did all of those things. I did all of those. I, I, I did a perfect 10 dismount on all of those mistakes. Uh, today I don't do any of those. I, when I do podcasts, I prefer, prepare minimally for that. So, for example, for this podcast as a guest with you, uh, I listened to, uh, a podcast with you and Matt.

Uh, and I'm like, oh, the, you know, these, these people are lighthearted. These, they're, they're fun. They're funny. You can make mistakes. I don't need to worry about that. Anything. All I need to do is make sure I de uh, deliver value and based on who I can know you're delivering your podcast to, I, I'm like, oh, I feel comfortable talking about this, which is an old industry and how to growth hack with LinkedIn.

Um, other challenges I would say is getting your first big guest is, is hard. Um, but I feel like I shared kind of my recipe to success for that, which is going to people who are not already famous online, but they're great offline. Uh, and then going after [00:39:00] not the top, not the top of the food chain, go after the event coordinator, right?

Go after, instead of going after the CEO, go after the CMO to be on the podcast. Um, and then just get, get one or two good names and those people will open up the door to the others. That was, that was a challenge for me as well. Uh, I I'll show another challenge, which is people who overthink post production.

Sadaf Beynon: Okay.

Peter Murphy Lewis: Decent quality microphone with an authentic interviewer who cares about his or her guests. is a lot more important than cutting out my uhs and ums, my mistakes, my awkward silences. You know, I can tell from the way that you interview, you care about my answers, you care about the questions. If you did no post production on this, I don't think it would affect your reach whatsoever because you're a good, you're a good host.

Sadaf Beynon: Thank you. No, but I, I see your [00:40:00] point about the, the heavy production. Yeah, I, I understand where you're coming from because the, the content is so much more important. And actually I was laughing when you were saying about your first challenge of like the first few that you do, you over prepare and all that.

That's exactly where I'm at right now, so I get it. Is there anything else, Peter, that comes to mind?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, I think I would wrap it up for somebody, for somebody who, for somebody who's thinking about starting a podcast or they've started, but they need, they feel like it's a waste of time or they're not doing a good job.

I think, I think that you need to imagine that you're, That your morning coffee, like imagine you're sitting down, which is what most of us do in the morning. We have our coffee, we have our breakfast. We usually listen to a podcast, right? Mm-Hmm. or some type of YouTube channel. That [00:41:00] content in our ears is so perfectly tailored that it's made, um, for us to think about, to start a conversation.

That content that is in my ears in the morning, or that content that's in your ears in the morning could be. Design, Developed, Created, Curated by you. All you have to do is make sure that it's valuable. In my opinion, since I'm usually not the expert in anything that I speak about, right, I'm a marketer who translates complex ideas into simple concepts.

I'm not an expert, I'm just a customer. Translator is making the guest deliver valuable information. So if you're stuck, if you're about to start, don't worry, you don't have to be the smart person in the room. If you're stuck and you start because you can't think of if this is going to have a good return on investment, trust me, if you deliver the value, having someone Put their headphones in their ears while they're having coffee and breakfast in the morning and hear your [00:42:00] advice as the vehicle to the value that they are consuming each day.

It's, it's, it's immeasurable on how valuable this can be. Just, just do it. And if you don't have the budget, just start doing it on YouTube and LinkedIn for free. And then follow some of the ideas that you'll hear on this podcast. Wait till you see the pipeline have a difference and then turn it to professional service.

Sadaf Beynon: Oh, thank you. That's. That's great advice. One of the things I like to ask my guests, Peter, is, um, and you might have already touched on some of this, but I'm still going to get you to do this. So in 60 seconds or less, can you tell us why you think podcasting is a great marketing tool to grow one's business?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah. Uh, I'm going to bet big on podcasts becoming. More than what blogs were in the 2000s, they're going to be front and center. They're going to be intimately woven into our daily routines, just like I shared with your coffee, your [00:43:00] donut, your cereal, um, podcasts, podcasts are here to stay.

Sadaf Beynon: I like that. I really liked that.

So Peter's been incredibly insightful learning about your journey and your strategies, Um, I feel like you've, you've given us so much value here today. Thank you.

Peter Murphy Lewis: My pleasure. Thank you.

Sadaf Beynon: Where can our listeners find your podcast and follow your upcoming projects?

Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, so I've got a lot of pod uh, projects going on.

I just filmed a documentary. I'm currently traveling across the United States filming a my fourth TV se, um, season and podcasts, um, developing several different podcasts in a YouTube channel. The easiest way to find what I'm doing is LinkedIn. It's, uh, I'm the only Peter Murphy Lewis. On LinkedIn that you will find, uh, my pictures are funny.

My banners are funny. And that's where I share all of my content.

Sadaf Beynon: We'll add that information to the show notes and to our [00:44:00] listeners. Thank you for tuning into Podjunction podcast. I hope today's episode inspires you to think creatively about how you can leverage podcasting for your own business growth.

Be sure to check out Peter's podcast and the links will be on, on the show notes. If you found this episode helpful, we'd love for you to leave a review or share it with someone who could also benefit. I'm Sadaf Beynon. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of Podjunction, where business meets podcasting. If you've enjoyed the insights from this episode and want to grab the show links, head over to podjunction. com. And while you're there, we'd love for you to sign up to the newsletter too. Whether you listen while on the go or in a quiet moment, thank you for letting us be a part of your day.

Remember, every episode is a chance to gain insights and to transform your podcasting journey. So keep tuning in, keep learning, and until next time, happy [00:45:00] podcasting.