Leveling Up Your Podcast By Defining Your Ideal Listener | Jerry Dugan

In podcasting, understanding your audience deeply and personally can be a game-changer. In this episode, Jerry Dugan explains why you must create a listener persona (avatar) for your target audience. By defining your ideal listener, you will unleash accelerated show growth, success, and impact. Get ready to connect more authentically with your audience, make informed content decisions, and select guests who resonate seamlessly with your show's mission!

MORE ON THIS EPISODE: https://PodPros.com/252

Key Moments:

00:00:15 - Introduction, 
00:01:22 - What is an Avatar
00:05:41 - Importance of Having an Avatar
00:07:40 - How to Create an Avatar
00:10:41 - Refining Your Avatar

Timestamped Summary:

00:00:15 - Introduction
Jerry introduces the topic of defining your audience and the importance of creating an avatar for your podcast. He stresses the need to be specific and target a niche group of people to make the most impact.

00:01:22 - What is an Avatar
Jerry explains that an avatar is a manifestation of your ideal listener or customer in the form of a person or biography. He shares his own target audience of Christian men in their 30s and 40s who feel stuck in a rut and want to pursue their dreams without losing their faith, family, or health.

00:05:41 - Importance of Having an Avatar
Jerry outlines two main reasons for having an avatar. Firstly, it protects you from getting distracted by various marketing strategies and tools. Secondly, it helps you focus on the platforms and avenues that will truly make an impact on your target audience.

00:07:40 - How to Create an Avatar
Jerry advises starting with a high-level description of your target audience, such as their age, interests, and profession. Then, dive deeper into their demographics and psychographics, including their dreams, aspirations, barriers, and the help they are seeking. He encourages creating a detailed story for your avatar.

00:10:41 - Refining Your Avatar
Jerry emphasizes that your avatar can evolve and change as your show and audience grow. It's important to regularly reassess and refine your avatar to ensure you are effectively reaching and serving your target audience.

MORE ON THIS EPISODE: https://PodPros.com/252

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple. I'm your host, Alex Sanfilippo. For this episode's guide and resources, please visit podprosecom. And now let's get to the episode.

Speaker 2: 0:15

Hey, what's going on? Everybody, my name is Jerry and we're going to talk about how to make yellow chicken curry. Wait, hold on. Oh, my notes say podcasters. This group is podcasters, so podcast hosts. What we're really going to talk about is how defining your audience with great detail through something called an avatar will help you get the most out of the efforts you make and also make the most impact with your podcast. Because if you're able to define who you're trying to reach, you're going to be very specific. You're going to hit that niche. You're going to be talking to a niche type of group of people.

Speaker 2: 0:51

I'm a firm believer, as an Army veteran, that the person who tries to defend everywhere really defends nowhere, and the same goes for our marketing efforts with our podcast. The podcast that tries to be everything to everyone reaches nobody. So we're going to talk about what is an avatar, why do you need to have an avatar, how do you create an avatar, and then my own story of how an avatar has really impacted my show. So, first things first. What is an avatar? It's not the movie about aliens on a planet called Pandora, or Sam Worthington saves the day by repeating the dances with wolves theme. This, in fact, is something else. It comes from a Hindu word, and it's about how a spirit can be manifest into physical form, and so that is where the word avatar comes from. That's what we're going to be using. So how do we take your ideal listener and manifest that ideal listener in the form of a person or a biography? So that, in a nutshell, is what an avatar is.

Speaker 2: 1:53

Now, to give you an example, I'll share you my target audience and also my avatar. So my target audience is specifically Christian men who are married, they have children, they're in their thirties or forties the Christian men, that is and on a professional level, their careers or their businesses, have really checked all the boxes of what success should look like. However, these men, despite having everything look good on the outside, deep down feel stuck in a rut, and what they really want to do in their life is to have meaning, to have impact and purpose, without losing their faith, their family or their health. So they're looking for answers around. How do I do that? How do I pursue my dreams, achieve my dreams and have a family, have a strong faith, life and stay healthy? So that is my target audience.

Speaker 2: 2:43

What does my target audience look like as an avatar, though, and to help you understand that, I'll tell you about my friend, aj. So AJ is 36 years old and he's married to his college sweetheart. They have two kids. One is in elementary school, the other one is in middle school, and they both work. Both parents work. You know AJ specifically works in mid-level management, so he's a director and he leads a team. He has the office with the power desk and you know he's just, he's moving on up Career-wise. This guy is on track to become an executive in the next few years. He earns a six-figure income. He's got the two-story house, the two-car garage with the two cars in it, and one of those cars probably is a minivan. Now everything looks good. You know he's checked all the boxes. He's successful.

Speaker 2: 3:31

However, deep down inside, aj wanted to do something else with his life. He feels that his current job, although it pays well and it pays the bill it provides for his family it doesn't really serve a purpose for his life. He really spends most of the day just putting out fires for other people. There's nothing strategic about it. It just doesn't see himself doing much more than clocking in, clocking out and being a cog in the machine. His hour commute back and forth. It just sucks the life out of him because he's stuck in traffic, he's barely moving, so it's like, well, what do I do with my time? When he gets home after work he has no energy to do it on his wife and to engage with his kids. And what activities he does do with his family, he's just mentally, emotionally and just, albeit not present. He's checked out and it takes a toll on his family. You know his relationship with his wife is waning and splitting apart. His children think that they're not good enough kids, because dad doesn't wanna spend time with them and he's just, he's missing out all around. He doesn't get to have the impact he wants at church.

Speaker 2: 4:36

So AJ is looking for inspiration. He's looking for practical tips that he can apply, starting today to take one step to get out of his rut. And my show, hopefully, is the thing he listens to on the drive to work, where he can listen to stories of people who felt just the same way he did and how they got out of their ruts and how they applied a specific practical piece of advice that he could also take and use for himself. And so the end result, hopefully for AJ is that he does take a leap of faith and pursue his dream to do the thing he really wants to do, to have the impact he wants to have with his life and also have a loving relationship with his life partner and leave a lasting legacy, impact with his kids and his community. So that's my avatar. It's not really a guy named AJ, and now chances are you're a seasoned into podcaster and you already have an avatar that you already go after, or you're brand new and you have one. But if you don't, I invite you to create one and actually abide by it and pay attention to your avatar.

Speaker 2: 5:44

So how do you create an avatar? But before we get there, why? Why do you need an avatar? Two main reasons for me. The first thing is it protects me from shiny object syndrome, because when it comes to marketing my show, when it comes to upgrading the show and how to format the show, I get excited about podcasting and I wanna try all the things. Yeah, I wanna use the tools that will make things easier. I wanna use the tools that will create videos. I wanna be on all the social media platforms because they're just fun to learn. The reality is I've become kind of a jack of all trades and a master of none of them. And when I re-engaged with my avatar, it helped me really hone in on where is my target audience? And it turns out they're not on all the things, they're only on a few things very deeply. So that's the second reason why to have an avatar and follow your avatar is because you now start to focus on the areas and the platforms and the avenues that'll truly make an impact with the people you're trying to reach. So that's what an avatar is and why you should have one. So let's talk about how do you create an avatar.

Speaker 2: 6:55

Now you heard from me already. I gave you an idea in detail of who my target audience is. So that's the high level you need to start with. Who is your target audience? If you were to describe your ideal listener or your ideal customer or client in detail, what would that look like and be able to define that? You know, in my case it was Christian men in the 30s and 40s. They're married, they have children and professionally they have all the boxes checked for success. So maybe for you it's people who love to do quilting. You know I have a friend who has a quilting podcast and she specifically, is reaching out to people who quilt for a hobby or for their business, and that's pretty darn niche. That's a target audience. So that's the high level.

Speaker 2: 7:38

Now you want to get deeper. We want to manifest your target audience into the form of a person. So give the person a name. For me it's AJ stands for avatar Joe. You don't have to do the same thing, you don't have to have avatar, it doesn't have to be initials. You know some people call their avatar Steve. You know Johnny, ray. You know it doesn't matter, it just give the person a name. So that helps to begin the personification of your avatar.

Speaker 2: 8:05

Two main categories to look at demographics and a really cool word I wanted to use psychographics. So demographics are kind of the basic information about your avatar. Where does your person live? Does the person have a gender? Are they married? Do they have children? Are they in a polyamorous relationship? Whatever it is, what are the basic informational blocks for your avatar? You know, what kind of work do they do? What kind of income do they earn? And from there you can now start to you know, and what kind of music do they like? What kind of social media do they engage on? What kind of clothes do they wear? You can really get down to the details for your avatar. There's no limit to where you can take your avatar's story and, from what I understand, the more detailed you can get, the better.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Now the psychographics as you start pulling those demographics together, you start to write a little bit of a story of what's going on in the heart and mind of your avatar. So what motivates your avatar? What dreams and aspirations does your avatar have? And yet, at one point my avatar, aj, aspired to write a book and wanted to live as an author, publishing books, inspiring generations of men for years and decades to come. Now, that is the dream. The barriers could be things like you know, he couldn't give up the money needed to support the family, and so there's the fear of loss of financial support. There's the who am I to write a book? So imposter syndrome. So what barriers does your avatar experience? So those are part of the psychographics. What are their dreams and aspirations? What are the barriers they face? What is the help they are seeking that your show can provide? So once you start to piece all that together, you can tell the story of your avatar and just like you heard me tell you you could do the same thing, you know. So what is the story of your avatar? And don't just like spend five minutes whipping this together. I mean, if you need to take a day, take a day. If you need to take two days, do that. If you write a draft today and then next week say no, no, no, that's not the real story of my avatar, go ahead and rewrite it.

Speaker 2: 10:11

Are you allowed to change avatars as the show you produce goes on and thrives? Yes, you can. It doesn't have to be the same avatar for the life of your show. As you grow, as your audience grows, the shift for your avatar can also happen. It's important to actually, once you have your avatar, it is important to actually use and reference your avatar and treat every single episode and post that you make as if you're communicating to that avatar and it helps really reduce the nerves for you. You know you don't have that pressure of trying to impress everybody. You're just trying to get the attention of your avatar and helping that avatar make an improvement and transform their lives in some way.

Speaker 2: 10:53

So before I paid attention to my avatar for the first five years of the show, my co-host and I we just kind of interviewed folks who sound interesting to us. It's like oh hey, you just ran a marathon, join our show. Oh, you're a marathon runner. We're not marathon runners, but we'd love to have you on our show. Oh, you survived I don't know, the Holocaust. Please be on our show. If you had a powerful story of some kind, or just an interesting story or an interesting skill, we threw you on the show and we never really thought about is this really what AJ needed? So one of the things that we still have to this day or I still have that I look at to this day when I look at my top five episodes Now again, my show is about reaching Christian men in the thirties and forties who are looking to have the career or business they always dreamed of and not lose their family, their faith or their health.

Speaker 2: 11:41

My number two of my top five episodes is about how a woman entrepreneur entrepreneur can open a Mother's Day Out program. Has nothing to do with the target audience I'm reaching, but if you are out there and you want to start that show, just I guess I've got the data to prove. There is a demand out there and I get it like one email a month asking me, how does this lady open up a Mother's Day Out program? And I have no idea. So I just put them in touch with the guests I had on at that time. So we were making impact, but we weren't making impact with the people we really wanted to make and we weren't really having the growth we wanted to make. And you know, it's seven years later and I'm finally getting it honed in and understanding.

Speaker 2: 12:21

Where is it? My target audience goes for their social media cravings and engagement, and so, before we paid attention to our avatar, we were on Facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube and a little bit on Twitter, but it was very sporadic, we didn't really engage in conversation. As we really thought about it, as I really thought about my avatar, aj, I realized AJ is a professional. He's looking for improvement in his career. He's looking for life balance. Where do you find that? Well, it turns out LinkedIn. And so I shifted my focus on the LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 12:57

For me and my show, that's what made sense and ever since then, I've seen engagement shoot up. I've seen my email list grow slightly, but it is growing. I've seen listenership grow. I've seen even the newsletter on LinkedIn perform way better than my email list outside of LinkedIn Still important to have that outside. But the point I'm making is, after I started paying attention to my avatar, to AJ, the engagement went up, the numbers have been going up and this has all been in the last year. So, from a personal standpoint, it pays to pay attention to who your avatar is. So, with all that said, the better you can define who your target audience is and then manifest that target audience into a personification, a bio, a person, the more impact you're going to have with the efforts you make to promote your show and create your show and therefore, the more impact you're going to have in the world. And the reason why I share this with you is because life it's just too short to have your podcast live in a rut. Take care, guys.