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Zach Armstrong, founder at Rooster High Productions, guides you through harnessing the full power content marketing powered by podcasts, especially for professional service businesses. In each episode you'll learn another process, method, or best practice for using podcasts as a cornerstone of a content strategy that starts that relationship with your next client before you meet them.
Zach started in theater in 2003, audio in 2010, and marketing in 2015. As an editor, storyteller, small business owner, and marketing process guru, you'll find yourself entertained and informed when you subscribe to Rooster High Radio.
[00:00:00]
Welcome to Rooster High Radio. My name is Zach Armstrong. I'm the founder at Rooster High Productions, and this is my little business podcast where I talk about content marketing and how it can be powered by podcasts. I actually use this method of content marketing powered by podcasts with this podcast, I do video with the podcast. We release it as audio. Traditionally, we do audio first as many podcasts do, but with video. And then I turn the video into clips that go all out over social media. So, check me out on really any social media platform you can think of because my content from this stuff is going up.
And if you like what you see, hey, get in touch with me. Let's set it up for you.
So today what we're talking about is why I do this so you can get to know me a bit. I've been making a few episodes [00:01:00] of this podcast, so if you've been listening, you've been hearing my voice, hearing how I talk about things a bit.
Maybe you knew me from before the podcast through business or something else. And I'm gonna share a bit of my story as it relates to ending up in doing podcasts as content marketing so that you can get to know me better. Because really, at the end of the day, business is one aspect of human relationships.
And I want to tell you more about who I am as a person as it relates to my career and how I . Got to this particular offer with content and content marketing and podcasts, right? So that you can understand who I am, what I'm about, in case you wanna work with me or one of your friends does, right? Or you just enjoy hearing a fun podcast, hearing a fun podcast about content marketing.
'cause you are uh, that kind of, that kind of marketing nerd, which is great.
That's fantastic. So My background is in theater, in marketing, and in lots of nerdery, lots of nerdery, lots of being nerdy, and a lot of [00:02:00] these things converged. A lot of these things converged and I realized that I wanted to go work for myself. Use the confluence of these skills and experiences to serve people in the way I'm doing now, right?
I formed storytelling skills through all of these places, through theater, through marketing, through my nerdy pursuit, which I'll dive into in a minute. And I formed storytelling skills. I formed planning skills. I formed a batch of media skills as well, and where all the Venn diagrams crossed over was podcasts and marketing and telling people's stories.
And I wanted to figure out who stories needed to be told, who could hire me to tell their stories in a way that would connect people helpfully to. . Businesses, Andre, especially service professionals who are really gonna serve them in a fantastic way and stand out above the crowd on social media as they speak to their audience and say, Hey, here's who I am.
Here's how I'm different. Here's why you should pick me as [00:03:00] far as this professional service goes, whether you are a realtor, a coach, an accountant, any of these kinds of people, right? How you can get yourself out there by saturating social media with your podcasts content.
So this story of me starts in the theater. I was a young homeschool kid and one of the homeschool you know, camps where I would actually go do classes with other people involved theater. And I picked theater as an elective because I thought it would be easy to pretend to be somebody else. I was lazy and I thought, oh, this is, this is real easy to do. I can just pretend to be somebody else. Simple. And I caught the bug there. Now, so many of the stereotypes of theater kids are sometimes true, and I was a nerdy little homeschooler who just loved the socialization, and I loved the, the, the dynamic of pretending to be somebody else.
I love acting. I loved acting. I was in musicals all through middle school and high school. Musicals and straight plays or non-musical plays is the term. All through middle school, [00:04:00] high school and college and I loved it. I loved acting. I loved the community around play. I loved performing in front of an audience.
I loved the collaboration with all of the other people, all of the other actors on stage. It was a place where you learn how to be, you learn how to be a part of something. You learn that it doesn't just rely on you to get the good thing done.
Now I spent a long time in this world, in the theater world doing all sorts of plays, dabbling and directing here and there, just in the educational context. And eventually in college, I realized that the life of an actor was not one that I thought would sustain me emotionally or financially. And so I decided to move over to the administrative side of theater, helping run the theater so I could still be adjacent to the thing I loved.
I took some training in that area and, serendipitously, I just needed, I needed another practicum, so I grabbed really the only one open in the timeframe that worked for me, which was sound design. [00:05:00] And I started learning about sound design, about using sound editing programs, sound capturing right.
And I trained in that and did, did an entire practicum around Eugene Ianesco's Rhinoceros. It's a play, so if you haven't heard of it, it's a very, it's a fascinating one and important part of theater history. And I did the sound design for Eugeni and ESCO's Rhinoceros, which was a lot of fun and serendipitous since I'd be working with audio so much later in life.
I spent some time then after college working in the arts and then over to the agency world where I started to work on marketing. Specifically. I got in there because I was a theater kid being hired by a couple theater people and I already knew how to work in a team on production as we went out to shoots for shooting commercials for this marketing agency as we cast audio spots that we would place on Pandora, right?
If you remember Pandora, I think it's still around I, my production experience and teamwork experience and how to work in [00:06:00] a production setting how to figure out how to tell a story that's based on a goal, right? That was such a skill to hone across theater. And then my, my agency time where you take, you take storytelling and you apply it to your client and you say, okay, what is the real story here?
What story do I want to tell? What story are we going to tell involving our client? What, what is their story? What is our client's story that we're going to tell really? Well that may, they might not even be aware of that their story is so good 'cause they're in it. How are we gonna tell their fantastic story in a way that connects their potential customers and their customers to their businesses?
Goals, what are we going to tell their audience about their story? That then gets the audience in the right mindset to buy more, to tell their friends to come back, right? And we want to do this with businesses who are a great benefit to the community. You know, credit unions, bookshops, [00:07:00] that sort of thing.
We worked with a lot of people who are in it for more than just the dollar. And so it was really rewarding to tell these people's stories. And connect their audiences to them, to the business through their stories. Really, that is the best version of marketing, and that's a large reason of why I'm doing what I'm doing now, is because I want to keep telling stories.
I've done it for fun outside of business and I've done it so much inside of business. I worked in higher education as a marketer helping tell the story of the institution I was at many other smaller stories of the people who have come out of the institution. It was an alumni program and so we would often tell the stories of alumni or tell the stories of students who were at the school being helped by, you know, alumni efforts and so telling these stories that you know, have goals, right? Increase the people's affinity for this university, get people to give to these scholarships, to support these students and change lives, right? What are the real goals that your story is pointing at now? [00:08:00] Maybe your story is helping in a general sense, right?
Raising brand awareness that is a big part of the equation at a certain stage, at a certain scale for a business. And then what are the stories you're telling that have motivation toward a specific goal? And so this was the world I started to live in for a long time. And another part of the storytelling that I practiced was
Over in some very nerdy pursuits. The tabletop roleplaying world has blown up in the past about 10 years, and it was deeply nerdy and shunned a bit before that. But I have run games similar to Dungeons and Dragons. There's been a major movie that came out about Dungeons and Dragons.
There are essentially celebrity game masters who run who run these games like Matthew Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar. All of these people who run who run these kind of improv imagination games with their friends, then the way it works is you essentially have a referee who, who, who is guiding the whole game.
And then you have a number of players who play characters in whatever fictional setting you [00:09:00] are in. It's often totally made up, not connected to any normal ip. And they role play in improv as these characters. And you do this session by session, right? You sit down, you do it for . Two, maybe three hours.
Continue the story, improv the story as you go with the referee. Guiding things, giving prompts, seeing how the characters respond. I'll link a few explanatory things in the show notes if you're still totally confused. Really, the point is, is that I was engaged in this hobby and still am for a very long time.
And so I was storytelling with friends. It wasn't simply loosey goosey, you know, wave your hands in the air storytelling. I would have to sit down and work with real people with real schedules, right? Real people with real personalities, personality differences, table dynamics, and work to make a help work as the referee, the kind of person in charge of the whole session.
To help make this make this the best possible experience for everybody at the table. And it was so rewarding and it was so connected to the kind of stuff I [00:10:00] would do in marketing. I was really honing the craft of telling a story with people, involving other people in the story. What are the goals of the story?
What are the goals of the. Experience of everybody at the table and how do we get there? How do we craft the story? And adjusting for all the variables that are gonna have inputs into the story, right? All the things maybe we can't control or don't expect, and then how do we work with that as we go forward?
And I had, I had gotten into podcasts as well. Started some podcasts with my wife, started some podcasts about other nerdy card games I was playing. And after a point I started to say, Hey, I want to use podcasts to tell businesses stories because I want to find, you know, that the people who do have the marketing budget to pay me, that's an important part of it.
So who are the people with the marketing budget? To pay me and how can I tell their story in a way that really does serve them in a big way? Right? So looking at podcasts and the medium of podcasts and how many other things you can turn podcasts into and how convenient podcasts [00:11:00] are. Many people would rather talk into a microphone than write a blog post, right?
And I started to think about how can I turn podcasts into content marketing for businesses and have that be really effective. And after some research, some practice on my own stuff, I landed on turning podcasts into daily video content marketing like this. So it's been a lot of fun. I really love it.
And so far it's getting traction as I, you know, sign new clients as, as the people I am working with are really happy with it. And I, I am excited to, I'm excited to continue with it. And the way, the way the storytelling shows up is in one, how I help consult people talk about themselves on their podcasts, right?
We walk through setting up their topics, setting up how they plan an episode, and then also with how I, how I . Pick the clips and steward the entire process with an eye towards their business goals and towards their business story. So it's a lot of fun. I love [00:12:00] actually getting to be a storyteller in marketing, working directly with professional service people who really want to help out their community, right?
They want to. They're in it for more than just the dollar. They want to be a good impact on the community, on the industry that they're in, and really raise the bar at least, at the very least, by it being themselves, right? By being themselves. That's my business story. That's my business story about how I ended up here running Rooster High Productions and making podcasts and podcast content for businesses.
I love this medium. I'm in the news about the medium all the time. Not in the news as in featured in the news, but reading the news about the business all the time so that I know everything that's going on with the platforms, how the platforms interact with podcasts. What we need to look for, what are new things I can offer based on these innovations?
It's, it's an absolute wild west out there, and I'm loving every minute of it. So I've been Zach here at Rooster High Productions. If you have any questions about content marketing or things I could cover on the podcast, send them in to me [00:13:00] via email, Zach at Rooster High. Dot com. If you want to learn how to do this process for yourself, you can do so by checking out my content on social media, on any platform on on the podcast.
And if you want me to run it for you, that's fantastic. Where you can, we can set you up with a podcast, get your content saturating social media from here on forward. Just shoot me an email, zach@roosterhigh.com. Rooster high.com, of course, is also where you can find all the information about my offers, how to work with me.
How to get in touch. So check that out as well. Thank you so much. We're gonna see you again next Friday, and I can't wait. See you then.