Tom Schwab began his professional life as a U.S. Navy officer running a nuclear power plant on an aircraft carrier. As his family grew, he decided to separate from the Navy and went into industry. He later started his own business selling alternatives to crutches, and along the way, cultivated his skills in marketing.
Tom is now an inbound marketing specialist. He has been a speaker at HubSpot’s Inbound conference. He equates inbound marketing with permission-based marketing and outbound marketing with interruption-based marketing. He works with clients one-on-one to help them formulate their overall inbound marketing strategy and to get them to go beyond buying their traffic and start earning it. He found that the best content for conversion is podcast interviews. The investment is minimal in terms of time, but the ability to talk directly to customers is amazing. Tom teaches and coaches his client’s to grow their businesses using podcast interviews to reach a specific target audience.
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Key Segments

[00:10] Ultimately, people want to buy. They want to solve their own problem. If you help to frame that and to show them that you might be a good solution, you have a much better chance of getting a great customer, an advocate, and the lifetime value of the customer, than somebody doing a one-and-done because somebody clicked a couple of ad words.
[02:50] What is inbound marketing? It’s about trying to help people buy. It’s about helping them find answers to their questions. You can either earn attention by being helpful or buy attention.
[03:40] Nobody really wants your product or service. They want relief from a problem they have. Those who help them solve their problem are the ones who build the brands. It has never been easier than today to make a transaction online, but it has never been harder to build a business and differentiate it. Talk to their pain.
[04:25] How do you get your message out there? Blogs are pretty much saturated. They’re not working as well as they did five years ago, but podcasts are up-and-coming. You can talk directly to your ideal customer by being on a podcast they already listen to. Blogs convert at 1 to 2 percent, but we found that podcast interviews convert at about 25 times that.
[05:15] It’s not just about getting on podcasts or just getting known. There’s a strategy. We have a six step process to take people from listeners to visitors and from visitors to leads. [Listen to this section for the detailed steps.] This strategy doesn’t cost anything except time, and it’s repeatable. Sometimes you can even control when it goes out. For over a year, we did it with 12 clients one-on-one using over 500 different interviews to test the system then we started it as a course, a minimally viable product. We got feedback, improved it, added resources to it, and now it’s a fully launched course.
[10:15] Our company is called Inbound for eCommerce. Engineering dictated how I see the world. A lot of marketers think of the world as marketing; I think of it as an engineering problem to be solved. Today, data is telling you what people loathe and love. If a customer keeps telling you that they have a problem and need a solution, that’s the next product you should build. Build a minimally viable product, put it out there, and ask them open-ended questions like: “What questions do you still have?” or “What resources do you still need?” Keep answering the questions and making the product better.
[11:50] The course for being a podcast guest is one portion of our business. I also work with clients one-on-one to help them do their overall inbound marketing. We work with eCommerce companies to get them beyond buying their traffic and starting to earn it. But one of the things we stumbled on is that the best content we could find is podcast interviews. The investment is minimal in terms of time, but the ability to talk