Who Is Your Health and Wellness Podcast For? If You’re Not Sure, Your Ideal Clients Definitely Aren’t!

A few years back, I started working with a business consultant to help our company grow and get more clients, and I told him we’d been running some ads, but they weren’t really doing a whole lot. So his first couple of questions to me were, who are you running the ads for, and who is your ideal client? I basically said, I don’t know anyone with a podcast.

You know, I haven’t thought about it and in my head I was thinking, who cares about that? Just help me run some ads or fix our website, or whatever we gotta do. Let’s just get this going. But I quickly learned how wrong that mindset was because as he explained to me, in order to reach and resonate with people who would be your ideal client, you’ve gotta know who they are.

You’ve gotta know a lot about them, actually. But that all starts with knowing who they are. If you could describe your perfect client in detail, who is this person? And if you don’t know that well, you’ve got a lot of problems. And today we’re gonna talk about this in the context of your podcast audience and your ideal business client.

Because if you get this wrong or you don’t know who it is, you’re not gonna be able to successfully generate leads and revenue for your health and wellness business through podcasting. This is an absolute must. Okay. I’m your host, Joel Oliver, and this is Profits through Podcasting. So I came across a health and wellness podcast recently, which had been around for a while.

They were publishing episodes consistently, but they didn’t seem to have much of a following, and I don’t know for sure ’cause they cannot access their stats. But a couple of things I noticed that were a little odd was on Apple Podcasts. They had no reviews, which is very strange for a podcast with this many episodes and having been active for this length of time.

Also on Instagram, they had very few followers as well. Okay. So odd to say the least. And as I was trying to dig into this problem and see what could be the reasoning here that they don’t seem to have more of an audience. I noticed an issue with the podcast content, and that was the, it’s not clear who the podcast was for in a very problematic way because some of the podcast episodes were geared towards.

Industry people, people in the healthcare space talking about industry things. And then other episodes were geared towards patients like giving health advice and information on procedures. So basically in the same podcast, we are talking to doctors, one episode and patients in other episodes, which begs the question, who exactly is this for?

Who would subscribe to this? Really not clear who this podcast is for, and that can absolutely cause your listener numbers to suffer. We have to know who our ideal listener and client is, and then filter our marketing, our messaging, our content through a lens of their perspective, deliver exactly what is most interesting and valuable.

To them, your ideal client. I had this conversation recently with one of our clients as well, who started a podcast with no real goal At that point, they just wanted to get it going and learn the ropes, and eventually perhaps build out an online business or, grow some authority, that sort of thing.

So they didn’t have a full strategy when they started, but it came to a point where they had got through the first year and now it was time to talk about strategy. So we discussed this as well and looked at their content and started to think about how we could really hone in on a certain audience and who that audience should be.

Very important consideration.

So to continue on with the example I was talking about earlier, this podcaster didn’t have any reviews on Apple. Very low Instagram followers, low Instagram engagement, which just got me wondering what’s going on here. And of course the podcast was very unclear who it was for a mix of content. And then I noticed on Instagram the same thing.

There were posts for let’s call it consumers or patients, and then also industry on the same Instagram page. It just didn’t make any sense the reels that they were posting. Also, there were no hooks at the beginning to get people hooked and watch and interested and engaged in what the post was about.

A hook is so crucial these days and just outta context, these clips really didn’t give much insight. On their own. The whole thing didn’t come across as polished. I noticed the reels were cutting off in the middle of sentences. That’s just how they ended not appearing professional at all. Okay, so my judgment overall is just the content was not that good. It’s not at the level it should be in the health and wellness space like this person was a doctor and then they’re posting reels. I don’t know if they’re made from AI or what’s going on, but they just cut off in the middle of a sentence.

Not good. Okay? We’ve gotta do better than that. If you want to be a trusted authority. In the health and wellness space, whatever your particular niche is, you can actually do damage to your reputation and your image if you’re putting out content like that.

So not good at all. And then we have this issue of the content not being clear who it’s for. So we really need to be aware this. And now with all that said, what is the lesson here and how do we do it properly? Okay. ’cause know how not to do it. I’ve given you that example.

So the lesson to summarize is that everything you do, the podcast, the Instagram content, your newsletters, LinkedIn posts, everything you put out needs to be useful and valuable to your ideal clients. And as I said in the beginning, if you’re not sure who that is, you’ve gotta figure it out.

It’s the only way that we can begin to understand these people. Feel free to get in touch if you want to about that more. I’m not gonna get too far into it here, but you can’t create content for your ideal client if you don’t know who they are. And when you do know that you can make the content specifically for them because you understand their struggles and their goals.

They will see your content and hear you speak and immediately know this is the person who can help me. This is the person that’s gonna help me solve my problems. This is the person I want to do business with, right? There’s not gonna be any confusion. They will want to follow, they will be engaged. And of course our hope is that at some point they’ll become a paying customer for your business.

And one of the. Things that I did wrong upfront. As I mentioned, when my consultant told me about all this, I was kind of dismissive, is I just thought this whole thing was very surface level. Who is your ideal client? Well, it’s a person with a podcast, but no it, this goes very deep. You can start by looking at all of your existing clients or some past clients and see who out of these were the best, what were the reasons?

Go talk to them. Learn about their goals, what motivates them? What are their desires, what are their struggles? And when you understand those things and you can use that same language, then we can really start crafting our message and our content for those people. It’s not a guessing game. This is not stuff that you should be just making up in your head and you don’t need to. You can actually go and talk to these people and figure it out and know exactly how to talk to them, listen to the language that they use.

You can do some research as well, but once you understand this, you can craft all of your content towards those people and get rid of any content that’s not for those people. Okay. So, however that looks for your specific situation, don’t just have guests on because they accept your invite. Make sure that the guests you’re having on are going to be providing value to your specific audience.

Make sure the subjects you pick are gonna be valuable to your audience. Otherwise, don’t put it out okay? But you absolutely need to be clear on this stuff, otherwise. You’re just not gonna go anywhere. You might be podcasting for a while and just realize like, I’m not getting that much traction. I’m doing everything that I think is correct.

I’m promoting it, but it’s just not really happening. Well, if you find that you’re not speaking to anyone specifically, they’re gonna see that as well. And you’re gonna have a whole bunch of people who come across the podcast and just end up thinking, it’s not for me. The problem is when everyone thinks that it’s not for them, then no one thinks it’s for them, right?

So we want to really get specific on who these people are and let them know through our content and our messaging, and you’ll start to see the results.