Elevate Your Listener Experience with a Podcast Newsletter, with Kyle Adams
Digital marketing channels come and go, but there are two that have stood the test of time: email and podcasts. In fact, email has been around since the ‘70s, and podcasts have roots that date back to the ‘80s. Today, newsletters and podcasts go together like cheese and fine wine. In this article, you’ll learn how to elevate your listener experience with a podcast newsletter.
Recently on Podcasting in Professional Services, I interviewed Kyle Adams, Account Manager at ConvertKit, Owner of Kyle Adams Design, and a prolific creator. Kyle publishes a weekly newsletter called Creator Glue, the Dad Made podcast, and has experience hosting other business podcasts, like Invisible Design. Kyle helps some of the biggest creators on ConvertKit with email newsletter strategies and tactics to help them grow.
So how does Kyle’s perspective help podcasters in professional services? Well, podcast hosts are creators. Doesn’t matter the industry. And if your podcast doesn’t have an accompanying newsletter, you’re missing an opportunity to create a better experience for your audience. Listen to the full conversation as we explore the synergies between email newsletters and podcasts:
A Podcast Newsletter is a Product, Not a Channel
Traditionally, firm newsletters are monthly roundups of blog posts, webinar recordings, news about speaking engagements, and upcoming conferences or events. They’re sent out monthly or quarterly—both far too infrequent to stand out in the cluttered inboxes of today.
As we unpack this topic, let’s first look at the role of a newsletter within a professional services marketing strategy. In my experience, most firms visualize their marketing program as a funnel to capture market demand, illustrated below.
This approach works because sales cycles are typically long in professional services industries, especially architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). How long? In pipeline management terms, we’re talking months—even years—between opportunity created and closed dates.
In order to “nurture” leads, email has typically been a go-to channel for many professional services marketers. But there needs to be a reason for users to subscribe and surrender space in their inbox for you. I’ve seen many firms and associations address this by offering research or benchmark reports, in-depth guides, and webinars as “lead magnets” to capture email addresses.
The problem with this approach is that users give up their email in exchange for a singular piece of content. Not the emails that come afterwards. To fix this, position your newsletter as the product—the reason why users should subscribe.
“Last time we had Craft + Commerce, which is ConvertKit’s conference we have yearly, Jay [Clouse] and I were talking about things, and he just brought up the concept of a newsletter being a product,” said Kyle. “And I don't know why, but I've always thought of it as a marketing tool. But he turned that on his head and he's like, ‘well, it's actually a free product.’”
Add a Podcast Newsletter to Your Marketing Strategy
If your podcast is doing its job, it's providing value to listeners in some shape or form. While not mutually exclusive, here are some different ways a business podcast can add value to listeners:
Education — teaching your audience about a topic or how to do something
Entertainment — using humor, storytelling, or other means of holding the attention of your audience
Inspiration — instilling confidence in your audience by sharing new ideas and possibilities for their career
In another blog post, I wrote about 7 content marketing frameworks for lead generation. The “weekly newsletter” is among those frameworks (illustrated below). Using this framework, podcasters in professional services can apply a weekly newsletter to their show.
Promoting Your Podcast Newsletter
Positioning your podcast to be consumed as a newsletter is only the first step. Getting folks to subscribe can be challenging. In my experience, direct outreach and 1:1 conversations—whether that’s through email or direct messages on LinkedIn/X—is effective, but takes consistent effort over time. In my interview with Kyle, he offered some advice on how to promote a podcast newsletter.
“I would argue that the social aspect, like X or Twitter, getting on there and actually interacting with other people more than you even post content is more important because you're building those relationships,” said Kyle. “They'll subscribe to you, they'll eventually mention you. Word of mouth very much gets out there.”
Partnering with other players in the space—teaming partners, referral sources, SaaS platforms that serve your audience—are another great way to grow subscribers for your podcast newsletter.
“The other way I'm getting a lot of people on my newsletter is through ConvertKit,” said Kyle. “It has a creator network of other people who are making newsletters and they're recommending each other. Building partnerships that way has really helped me get more people on the list.”
Level Up Your Newsletter With Creator Glue:
Kyle runs a free, weekly newsletter called Creator Glue. In each edition, he shares everything he knows about building a top quality newsletter and giving subscribers the best experience possible.
“My past is in design and illustration,” said Kyle. “And I've just realized everything I've done in life revolves around giving a good experience. And I see that leads to good results, that leads to a quality audience.”
“And so that's a lot of the focus of my newsletter, is just like giving that good experience for not only the people reading your newsletter, but also, in some ways, giving yourself a good experience with creating that newsletter and building some systems and processes around it.”
Even if you don’t have a podcast, if your firm is investing in the personal brands of individual experts, consider subscribing to Kyle’s newsletter for inspiration on how to generate leads through personal expert newsletters.
Dad Made: Applying Business Podcasting Experience to a Personal Passion
By day I help professional services firms grow through podcast content, but at home I am a husband and father of three young children. In my opinion, I believe fathers in general should have more open conversations about parenting and strive to continuously learn and grow. Today, Millennial dads spend 3x more time with their kids than previous generations.
Kyle Adams is of a similar mindset. He and his longtime colleague and friend, Cory, launched the Dad Made podcast as a passion project to address the dearth of genuine conversations about contemporary fatherhood.
“We've been friends for, I think ten years now, almost,” said Kyle, referring to his relationship with friend Cory. “We've had two or three podcasts together. One of them was heavily business focused, more on the marketing sales perspective of things. We had another one that was focused on branding, and we had one that was focused on work from home type stuff. We talked and we just decided we're kind of at a point in life where from a podcast perspective, we want to have something that's a little more casual, a little more personal, a little bit more pulls us away from what we normally do in our daily work.”
“There's not a lot of dads talking about all these things that I was hearing from other people, even at work. I feel like sometimes people don't understand how it is at home. We just decided to try it out from there and talk through what it's like to be a dad and explore that and hopefully learn from each other through that and maybe hopefully eventually having some guests on as well and have them talk about their experiences.”
Need Help Turning Your Podcast Into a Newsletter?
Red Cedar Marketing isn’t just a podcast production company. We believe a podcast can fuel a digital marketing strategy for professional services firms. Adding a newsletter to your podcast helps deepen engagement, increase visibility, and generate new business opportunities. Check out our podcast marketing services, or simply reach out to start a conversation.
