How To Get Listeners To Actually Do What You Ask

We break down how to make a call-to-action that listeners actually complete without turning your podcast into a list of chores. 

In this episode, we cover:
• defining a podcast call to action and why it matters across platforms
• avoiding stacked asks by choosing one priority
• planning CTAs during the outline so they feel intentional
• preventing listener selective hearing by varying the wording and prompt
• using the Benjamin Franklin effect to ask for help in a compelling way
• following the why, what, where formula for clearer direction
• testing CTA placement with listener retention and drop-off data
• simplifying everything by sending listeners to one website landing page

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Transcript

Video Podcasting And Apple HLS

Jordan 0:00

So, Kevin, should uh we record video today?

Kevin 0:02

What?

Jordan 0:03

Aren't we video podcasters now? Is that what's going on?

Kevin 0:06

Uh I think I know what you're talking about. Okay. But it could it could be two things.

Jordan 0:10

I was listening to Pod news Weekly Review. Okay. And Sam Sethi, they were talking about Apple's HLS video integration, and like Apple announced like a whole new round of podcast hosts that are supporting HLS video. And Sam said Spotify's not on there, megaphone's not on there, but is Buzzsprout on there? And James said that Buzzsprout confirmed to Pod News that they will be supporting HLS video, which uh is good news.

Kevin 0:39

That's the quote.

Jordan 0:40

That's the quote. What is this about?

Kevin 0:41

Yes, we have communicated that to Pod News, and I think that's all I have to say about that right now.

Jordan 0:47

Oh, so coy.

Kevin 0:49

I said there's there's there's two reasons you could have asked that. One, we're we have uh Adobe Podcast today, which we're recording in, which I'm excited to give a try. They just added video recording, and so we are recording audio and video. But I don't intend to publish this video. I don't. I don't intend for you to. You're the one who does all the work after we record. Sorry. I should be sorry about that. But yeah, Apple has met with a whole bunch of other podcast hosting companies after their initial announcement, Buzzsprout being one of them. And we do intend to move forward with HLS support.

Jordan 1:22

Wow.

Kevin 1:22

I don't know exactly when that's gonna happen, but yeah, we're working on it. And it doesn't change our opinion. Like for anybody listening to the show and wondering, like, does that mean Buzzsprout's gonna be a video like first podcast hosting company? Of course not. No. We love audio podcasts, but there are a lot of people interested in video podcasting, and Buzzsprout is going to always be a home for anybody who wants to create a podcast. And so as the world is changing more and more, and more people are interested in doing video versions of their show, we want to make sure we have tools to provide uh to support them along the journey. But at least for the foreseeable future, Buzzcast is staying audio only, and I'm excited about that because I don't love video.

unknown 2:00

Yeah.

Kevin 2:01

So more information to come probably in the coming weeks. We'll um maybe do a full longer episode as uh the tools get built and things start rolling out. There are a couple, I know we have to stay on topic today because it's a quick cast, so we don't have a lot of time. But I would encourage anybody who you know uses the Buzzsprout app. There's a couple of really cool, fun features that rolled out in the last week. I think we're gonna talk about them in length next week, but they have to do with fan mail. So go poke around fan mail and see if you can find anything new and fun in there. And our transcript editing. We've got some new ways to edit your chapters right in your tr in your transcript.

Jordan 2:35

Yeah.

Kevin 2:35

That's not what this episode is about, but sneak preview for anybody listening. Go check out the transcript editing and fan mail.

unknown 2:42

Here we go.

Making a Good Call-To-Action

Jordan 2:48

Welcome back to Buzzcast, the podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. So today we're gonna talk about how making a call to action can work for your podcast, you know, like where do you place it, how to word it, and tracking is successful, things like that. If you don't know what I'm talking about, a call to action can be, you know, asking them to follow the show or leave a review or join your email newsletter list or visit website, share the episode, download something where we kind of run into problems, is where they will ask for several things to happen.

Kevin 3:23

Right. So the the call to action thing being like the most common use of this is like and subscribe and turn on the bell for notifications and all this. And this it's kind of like what like 90% of YouTube videos end with, right?

Jordan 3:35

Yes.

Kevin 3:36

In the podcasting world and the audio space, I think we don't hear that necessarily as much because podcasts, like audio first podcasts anyway, are sort of platform agnostic. Like they could be listening anywhere.

Jordan 3:47

Yeah.

Kevin 3:47

And so who knows what type of options you have depending on where you're listening.

Jordan 3:51

Yeah. And that's something definitely to keep in mind. But yeah, like you were saying, you know, like, subscribe, hit the bell, things like that. Like, so that's what we always hear is there's this sort of like train of asks for people to do. And I hear this all the time. I usually even hear it, like we sometimes do it in Buzzsproute podcasts. And it makes me cringe a little bit because like I know you're not supposed to, but it's easy to fall into. And so you'll ask people to like follow it, you know, join our Facebook group, make sure that you text the fan mail link and the show notes and support us because we've got this monthly subscription. And really, like the one main thing, like if you're to take one thing away from this episode here, I really think that it is the simplest thing to remember for a call to action is to have one ask. So just choose in the episode what the most important thing is that you want your listeners to do, whether that's to engage with the show or tell somebody about it, or go join your Facebook group or your Reddit community, things like that. And make sure that you just ask for that one thing. And I also feel like a call to action shouldn't feel like a commercial break. This is something that I hear a lot where there's almost like this disconnect from the content to the call to action.

Kevin 5:09

Yeah, it's just tacked on.

Jordan 5:10

It feels less intentional, right?

Kevin 5:12

A good call to action requires a forethought and planning. Like while you're doing episode planning, while you're creating your outline, while you're thinking about the guest that's gonna be on, there should be a part of that process where you're coming up with what is the one thing that I want to ask people who are listening to do, like to reciprocate some sort of value. Like I'm delivering this content for them. I'm gonna have an opportunity then for them to be able to get back to the show in some way. What do I want that to be? Sometimes things like creating a PDF or uh, you know, a template for something or whatever, like those are probably special opportunities that come along once in a while. I don't know that you want to take on creating some sort of you know freebie to go along with every single episode that you have, but once in a while, those are nice. But what about all the episodes in between? Where, you know, every tenth episode I might actually create a piece of material that, hey, if you go sign up for my email list, I'm gonna send you this, how to do this, X, Y, and Z, Soup to Nuts, PDF that you can have for free just for signing up for my email list. So that's your main call to action. But what about all the episodes in between? Because we're not gonna do that every time, right? And so whether you plan something big or you plan something small, like we should always have a call to action. There's always an opportunity for listeners to reciprocate some value exchange when they're listening to your podcast. And so the simple ones are the ones that get defaulted to all the time, and then they just kind of become add-ons. They become tacked on, they become not special anymore, which is the like and subscribe or leave a comment or drop us some fan mail or something like that. And then once in a while when you're planning, you have these special ones.

Jordan 6:41

I like that, Kevin. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when you have something like sitting on a side table in your house so long that you start developing like a blindness to it. Yeah. Like you stop recognizing the item. And so when you treat your call to action like the chotchkis that you have around the house, that you start like just not even noticing, they just kind of like fade into whatever the landscape is of your house. Like that can happen too with call to actions where you're just saying the same thing over and over, and like your listeners develop a deafness to it. Like it just falls upon deaf ears.

Kevin 7:16

Deafness is a better word. I was thinking like ear blindness in my head, I said ear blindness.

Jordan 7:20

Ear blindness.

Kevin 7:21

And I'm like, there's a word for that. It's not ear blindness, it's deafness.

Jordan 7:25

Yeah, your listeners get ear blindness. I love it. Yeah. And so it's definitely more impactful when you do work it in in a creative way that like feels logical, like it feels like the natural next step for your listeners. So, like instead of saying, like, oh, before you go, be sure to sign up for a newsletter or thanks for joining us. Like, don't forget to leave a review and donate to a support page. And it just feels disconnected. There's not much thought given into it. But if you try working your call to actions into your episodes, I actually think a really good example of this is our call to action for listeners to send in responses to fan mail. Yes, we ask for it every single episode. But what happens is we say, all right, so like let's plan out our next episode. What's the topic we're gonna cover? And then we decide on a topic and then we say, Oh yeah, and like listeners can send in this information and this information. They can send in their quotes and whatever data that they have by tapping the text the show link.

Kevin 8:24

So there's there's a reason to pay attention because it's different every time. It's the same call to action, but the action itself, like the prompt, is different.

Jordan 8:31

Yeah, exactly. If you give it like a little bit of forethought and if you put in a little bit of planning, it definitely makes it a lot easier to tie the ask to the value and get listeners to buy in. When I was researching this, I heard of a new psychology effect that I had never heard of before. Have you heard about this, the Benjamin Franklin effect?

Kevin 8:52

Uh no, I didn't know that he had an effect.

Jordan 8:54

Yeah, he has an effect, like Nelson Mandela.

Kevin 8:56

Okay.

Jordan 8:57

What the Benjamin Franklin effect is, is he wrote in his autobiography that basically he realized when you get someone to do you a favor, there's like this psychological thing that happens where they think, oh, I did a favor for you, so I must like you. And uh it actually like raises your value in their eyes when you convince somebody to do you a favor. Isn't that interesting? Okay, yeah. Yeah. So like when people do a favor for you, they feel more connected to you. And so this is why asking people to help you is so effective. This is why it like gets them to want to help you more in the future too.

Kevin 9:34

If they do it, I imagine. If you ask someone to do you a favor and they say no, I could probably go the opposite direction.

Jordan 9:40

Yeah, exactly. They they actually have to complete the action, but they're more likely to do the action if they feel like they're doing you a favor. So instead of saying, like, leave us a review, you can say, you know, if you enjoy this podcast, leaving a quick review really helps us to keep growing. Or I would love if you could help my podcast by taking a minute to leave a review. It just feels more compelling. They feel more like drawn to completing that task for you because you're asking for help. There's like a vulnerability to it. And yeah, there's a psychological effect for that called the Benjamin Franklin effect.

Kevin 10:14

Yeah, and letting them know that it's not just a throwaway. Oftentimes we hear, and this is a bit of a throwaway example, like leave us a review. You do hear that stuff so often that it doesn't feel worth doing, as opposed to leading with the benefit of saying it actually does help. Like I know you hear this all the time, but for me, it's motivating for me to go in there and read reviews of how people are finding this content and enjoying it and how it's helping their lives or whatever, like whatever it's doing for you, like why do you want people to do that? Explaining why you want them to do it, just not asking them to do it blindly.

Jordan 10:49

Yeah.

Kevin 10:50

Like all the time, like if you're thinking about the Benjamin Franklin effect and the idea that you want to convince someone to do something for you, the the most convincing way is to let them know how beneficial it is. I don't know. I was gonna give a weird analogy without just like my kids saying, Hey, can you grab me a drink? And I'm like, No, you can grab yourself a drink. Like you're at, but if they say, you know, dad, I just got home from a long run, it's been a long day of school, I just plopped on the couch and I'm really thirsty. But you might and I'm I'm like, yeah, I can empathize with that. I can understand how it's beneficial for me to do it versus you doing something for yourself. I'll be happy to do it for you. It's just more convincing.

Jordan 11:21

Exactly. And that's really the formula of a good call to action is why should I care? What should I do? And where do I do this? And so giving the benefit, the action, and the destination of your call to action, it's it's going to work a lot better in your favor. So, some examples of this is if you want the full list of tools we mentioned, check the links in the show notes. So, this is saying, you know, like, why should you care? You're gonna want this full list. It's the tools that we mentioned, everything. Um, if this episode helped you, leaving a quick review on your podcast really helps us out. And follow the show so you don't miss next week's episode on podcast intros. You're giving more information, you're giving more context to the listeners that this is why they should care. What do you exactly want them to do and how?

Kevin 12:07

Right. And I think putting this stuff in your outline, taking the time when you're doing your outline to come up with unique ways of saying this stuff prevents you from falling into the trap of always saying the same thing. And if you say the same thing every time, it's only going to resonate with a few people before they become earblind to hearing that same thing over and over again. So even though you might be saying the same call to action for weeks on end, saying it unique way each time will resonate with different people and it will make sure that people don't just get comfortable hearing that, oh, here's the part of the show where they ask to do that. I'm skipping all that.

Jordan 12:39

Yeah. Well, and putting it in like unique places in your episode too, like planning out different ways is it's kind of like um duck hunt, where like the if the ducks like all came out at the same time every single game, it wouldn't be as exciting. But because it's like varied, you feel more like it's a little bit more of a game.

Kevin 12:59

Where the duck's coming. Right.

Jordan 13:00

Yeah, you never know where it's coming. So you want to kind of like blindside your listeners a little bit too with those call to actions, working them in creatively, and then also like changing up where in the episode you put them. So, I mean, there's different places that you could put a call to action. You can obviously, if you just want to like have it at the very forefront of the episode, it's nice because people are guaranteed to hear it. You know, they they're more likely to hear a call to action at the very beginning of the episode before they dip out. Like if you look at like listener retention data, no matter what, you've got a dip after the beginning of the episode. But the problem with putting a call to action at the very beginning is that the listeners haven't received like value yet. And so if you're telling them like, hey, if you get value from this episode, be sure to leave a review or share it with somebody. If you say that at the very beginning of the episode, they're probably gonna forget that you asked them to do that by the end of the episode, right?

Kevin 13:53

Yep.

Jordan 13:54

If you put a call to action in the middle of the episode, that's usually the best because the listener is engaged, like they've warmed up to you, they're really into the content. The only issue with it is that they might be busy like doing dishes or cleaning their house or driving. And so they can't like do the action right away, but they're more likely to do it in the middle of the episode. That's why mid-roll ads cost so much more than pre-roll or post-roll ads, because they're effective. Yep. But I think that it really is the best place. And then at the end of the episode, usually people dip out. So it's kind of a waste of space to be putting your call to action at the very end of the episode after you've wrapped up. So, you know, you tell your guests like, hey, thanks for coming. And then after that, people are like exiting and they're already going on to their next episode, right? Yeah.

Kevin 14:43

Is there anything wrong with doing multiple of these, like putting it in the beginning and putting it in the middle?

Jordan 14:48

I really do believe that it's good to just ask your listeners to do like one clear thing, but I think it's actually okay if you break it up a little bit.

Kevin 14:57

I was just thinking through your example, like if you want to encourage people to follow the show. So, like, let's just say that you are podcasting and your your download numbers, your statistics, and buzz sprout are kind of all over the place. So some episodes you're doing 50 downloads, some episodes you're doing 10, and you're trying to kind of figure out why. And it seems like you need to increase the number of followers. Okay. So you decide I've looked at my data. This is gonna be my call to action for a while. I want to increase my follower account. So I'm gonna ask people to follow. So maybe you want to do that up front in the beginning of the episode, and you say, hey, listen, there's a lot of work that goes in this episode. I hope that you find it valuable. One thing that would be really helpful for me to be able to reach as many people as possible is if you follow the show, because that means next time I drop an episode that you're gonna get a notification, it's gonna show up in your podcast player. So click that follow link now. If you're not yet convinced that I'm gonna deliver the value and it's worth your follow, stick around and I'm gonna prove how valuable this episode is. Now let's dig in. And we jump into the episode and we do some content, and then you come in in the middle and you say, hopefully you're convinced that it's worth a follow. Um, I told you I'd come back and remind you to do that. And then maybe at the end of the episode and you say, if you still weren't convinced halfway through, here's the last reminder. Follows really helped me grow the show and allow me to keep producing this content that I hope you find valuable. Or something like that. Like it could be a fun way to remind people multiple times to your episode. It's still that one call to action, but you're hitting multiple times to remind them of. And again, remember that people listen to audio podcasts, sometimes they break them up. That's very common for someone to you know listen to the first half of an episode on the drive to work and the second half of the episode on the drive home.

Jordan 16:20

Oh, yeah.

Kevin 16:20

And so it might feel to you when you're putting an episode together, like, gosh, I just said this 10 minutes ago. But oftentimes a lot of your listeners, it could be hours in between them hearing the first one and the second one.

Jordan 16:30

Or days. There's some podcasts I listen to that are like three hours long.

Kevin 16:34

Right.

Jordan 16:34

And sometimes they take me like three days to listen. I'm not gonna remember the call to action at the beginning of the episode that I listened to like on Tuesday, you know. Um, I also think that experimenting with your call to action placement, like seeing if you ask people that have been listening for a while to leave a review on your podcast at the beginning of the episode and seeing if anyone like leaves a review. And if they don't, maybe play with working it into the middle and say, like, hey, no one's left a review this podcast, but I know there's like, you know, 20 people coming back every single time I drop an episode. Like it would help me out so much and see if they do it or put it at the end of the episode, see if they do it. Like you can experiment with things. It's okay to experiment with your podcast, especially with a call to action. And one of the ways that you can figure out the best placement for your call to action is to use retention data. So, this is what you find on uh Spotify, YouTube, or Apple. And it's sometimes called like episode consumption, listener consumption, retention, episode retention, whatever. From that data, you can see like where your listeners drop off, how many people are making it halfway through the episode, how many people are reaching the end. So if you have like 60% or more people reaching the very end of your episode, yeah, that's actually prime real estate for a call to action at the end of the episode, maybe to remind them to do the thing that you asked them at the beginning of the episode, finding out if certain segments consistently lose people. So we talked about like if you have a call to action in the same place every single episode, listeners are going to possibly get ear blindness to that, not care. And they're just gonna like hit skip. I've talked about this with my podcast where I had an ad read at the exact same place, like 40 seconds into my episode, every single episode. And there's this little like, it's like someone took like a shovel and just scooped out my listener retention. Yeah. And there's just like this like divot every single episode. And so it's really important to look at that and figure out like, hey, do I need to switch things up and kind of like, you know, blindside people, take them by surprise with my call to action? Right. And see if I can get more uh engagement from that. And we actually got a fan mail message from uh Eric from Twilo Zone Media when we asked in our call to action for how you do your call to actions. And Eric had a really good point. You know, we've we've talked a lot in this episode about maybe just trying to ask people for like one thing. But the problem is, it's like a lot of podcasters need people to find them on social media and like sign up for their newsletter and complete their listener survey and, you know, follow on the thing and subscribe to their subscriptions. So you want all this stuff to happen. And Eric found a really good way to make one call to action work for everything.

Kevin 19:21

Okay.

Jordan 19:21

He said just send them to your website every single time. Send them to your website, ask them to leave a review, go to the website, ask for them to subscribe to your podcast, go to the website. And so no matter what, he's getting them to that landing page where all these links live that people can, you know, like buy merch, go to the social media, all this different stuff. Right. And I think that's such a good tip.

Kevin 19:43

Yeah, I do like it. And I wonder if he sells it differently every each time. Like if he says, Hey, do you want a t-shirt? Do you want a hat? Something you can do find that on my website, and that's the call to action for that episode. And the next one is, hey, do you know that we have a uh weekly newsletter that we send out every week? You can find that on my website. So it you're sending them to the same place every time. So that becomes easy, but you're trying different benefit statements to figure out what draws the most people there.

Jordan 20:08

Yeah. Definitely try this out, see if it works. A call to action works best when it's just one clear ask and connected to the value of the episode. It's phrased very specifically, tell them exactly what you need, and make sure that it's placed where listeners are still paying attention. So for our next episode, we are going to be talking about where listeners actually find podcasts. So again, if you are a podcast listener, which hopefully you are if you're a podcaster, hopefully you're supporting other podcasts. Make sure that you tap the Texas Show link in the show notes to let us know where you found your most recent podcast binge. Like, where are you finding podcasts? And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.