Align Compliance with What Matters Most to the Business
Congratulations! Your latest podcast interview just dropped! Now all you have to do is sit back and get ready for all the…crickets? Yep.
Getting onto podcasts can be a terrific opportunity to grow your brand and generate new leads. But it can also result in zero visible benefit. Just like everything else you do for your brand, the “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” approach doesn’t work.
Podcast guesting can be a great ROI engine, but you have to be strategic about podcasting and put some wheels on that engine. And give it gas. (And a steering wheel, too, I suppose, so you don’t crash and burn.)
What I’m about to give you is the blueprint that Good Gnus uses with all of our clients, to give them the best business results from each of their guest podcasting appearances.
Know Your Goals
What are you doing podcasting for in the first place? If you don’t have clear and defined business outcomes for podcasting, then your ROI will be impossible to measure.
For example, I have a client who is laying the foundation for a spinoff business and wants to establish a brand reputation for himself now, before he launches the new venture. So he’s using podcasting to build a specific audience and create brand awareness within a particular niche.
Having a specific goal in mind will help him to easily justify the investment he’s making into podcast appearances — and if there are some adjustments to make along the way.
In contrast, I see smart business leaders all the time who commit to one marketing strategy or another without a clear connection to their long term business goals. They see an opportunity for a quick win — but they don’t consider the time, energy, resources, and money that gets pulled from other projects or campaigns.
Worse yet, I’ve seen business leaders make tactical business decisions for a quick win that actually compete with sales for their core business.
So if you commit to getting on podcasts for your business, make sure you know why you’re doing it and how you expect it to help reach your larger objectives.
Find the Right Podcasts
Maybe it should go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway. Find the right podcasts.
More isn’t necessarily better. If you’re getting booked on five podcasts a month, but they all have the wrong audience, you’re wasting time and money. You’d be better off getting booked on a single podcast with the right audience who needs and wants your services.
I’ve seen podcast booking companies that promise five, seven, even twelve podcast bookings per month. They’re contractually obligated to deliver, which means you may get booked on a bunch of lousy shows.
Also, define what the “right podcast” is so that you know it when you find it. Here’s a few criteria to include in that definition:
- Audience: Understand who your ideal audience is. Think about job titles, industries, professional topics of interest, and anything else you think is relevant. Find shows that reach the audience you need to get in front of.
- Activity: How often are episodes released, and when was the last one? Skip podcasts that are sporadic — they won’t be dependable.
- Guests: Do they welcome guests onto the podcast? If not, skip it.
- Region: If you only do business domestically, international shows that don’t reach your audience probably aren’t the right choice.
- Pay to play: Some podcasts will charge guests to appear on their show. This isn’t a best practice, so think twice about those shows. However, paid sponsorships are an option that you might consider.
This is just a starter list. You may have other criteria to consider, depending on your goals.
Lead with Value
Podcasting is different from other public speaking gigs. You aren’t there to win a sale or to generate leads.
Really.
A successful podcast entertains its audience before all else. Think about where and when people tune into podcasts:
- At the gym
- While walking the dog
- On a road trip
- Commuting to work
See the pattern? It’s during their personal time, when they could be doing something else. Podcast listeners may want to grow professionally or solve some work-related problem, but first and foremost they’re looking for something enjoyable and entertaining to listen to.
Jerry Seinfeld’s Guide to Marketing Mastery
Which means that podcast hosts are only interested in guests that their audiences will find interesting as well as informative.
Bottom line: no one wants a sales pitch, and no one wants to hear how great you or your company may be.
Your job as a podcast guest is to be interesting and informative. Share stories and solutions (not products). On a podcast, you want to be seen as a thought leader who is compelling to listen to, who has no sales agenda, and can help people to elevate their success.
That said, of course you do want to boost your brand and you do want to generate more leads. You just don’t want to do it during the podcast interview. So how do you do it? Good question!
Turn Listeners into Leads
Okay, now we’re getting to the good stuff. Here’s where you can start to gain ground in boosting your ROI on podcast appearances.
It’s the rare podcast guest that takes advantage of these best practices, because they take planning and preparation. But they also make you more valuable to your audience — which makes the podcast more valuable to you!
When you go the extra mile to plan ahead of time, you can turn podcast listeners into leads, and actually see the payoff of your podcast interviews. Follow this practice and you’ll see ROI from your podcast appearances.
Because people listen to podcasts while on the go, they aren’t taking notes. But hopefully they’re thinking, “Man, this is pure gold that I’m listening to!” They’re going to wish they had a handy cheat sheet to remind them of everything you’ve shared on the episode.
Now, they could bookmark the episode and come back to it later…or, you could give them those notes yourself.
Have a checklist or a cheat sheet, or some other handy tool that basically encapsulates your talking points from the podcast. Have it ready to go ahead of time, and ask the host to include a link to the landing page in the show notes.
As the interview is winding down, be sure to mention the tip sheet and the link you’re sharing with the host. Now you’ve given the audience a reason to go to your website, and you can collect their emails as they download your helpful resource!
Promote Like Crazy
It’s surprising how many podcast guests never promote their podcast appearances. Maybe they post something on LinkedIn when the episode goes live, but that’s it. So you get a spike in interest for a day or two, then nothing much else happens after that.
Your podcast episode is live forever. It’s evergreen content — always relevant. Why wouldn’t you keep promoting the show on a regular basis?
If you want to get to a destination, you have to keep your foot on the gas pedal — you can’t just hit the accelerator once and expect to coast the rest of the way there. The same is true for podcast ROI. If you want to see long term results from the time and effort you put into podcasting, it’ll require keeping your foot on the gas.
My recommendation: post an announcement when the podcast first goes live. Do it again a week later. Then promote the podcast episode every month or so going forward. As you do more podcasts and promote them, you can reduce the frequency of each one as it makes sense.
Now, you’re continually getting your podcast appearances in front of new audiences, and that link in the show notes is continually driving traffic to your site.
BONUS: hosts notice when you promote their shows. Because most guests don’t do much at all, you’ll stand out as a valuable guest who’s worth inviting back onto the show again.
Track Your Traffic
Google Analytics won’t tell you how many people are listening to your podcast shows, and it won’t give you great data about traffic to your site from podcasts. But there is a way to get some valuable data points that you can use to measure success.
When you give hosts the link to your website and to your tip sheet’s landing page, create a URL with a UTM code. This code should be unique for each podcast you appear on. Google Analytics will be able to read the UTM code and tell you which podcast each visitor came from.
While this technique won’t give you the total listening audience you’ve reached, it will tell you:
- How many visitors came from a podcast
- How many visitors landed on your download page
- Which podcasts generated the most traffic to your site
Now you’re able to get a sense of the actual business value you’re gaining from podcast appearances, and you can use this data to refine which podcasts you go on — and which topics resonate most with audiences.
Repurpose Your Podcast Content
Your podcast appearances contain valuable content for listening audiences — but so far it’s only valuable to those who discover your podcasts. Why not take that content and repurpose it for audiences that never listen to one of your interviews?
A single podcast episode could easily be repurposed in all kinds of ways, such as:
- A blog article
- An email newsletter
- An ebook (or at least a chapter in an ebook)
- A slide deck
- An image carousel for social media
- The script for a video
And so much more!
The more podcasts you do, the more repurposing options you have.
Now you’re setting your brand up for a snowball effect, creating more and more high-performing content over time. No more spikes in interest — instead, you’re continually generating more attention, traffic, and leads.
This is how you get the most ROI possible from getting on podcasts. It’s the same blueprint that we use for all of our guest podcasting clients.
Wouldn’t It Be Great if You Didn’t Have to Do All This Work?
Not gonna lie: it’s a lot of work to see this kind of success from guest podcasting. But it’s worth it. A single podcast listener is worth 100 engagements on social media. And most brands that do podcasting see lead generation as one of the benefits they reap.
The good news is that you don’t have to do all this work yourself. You can see great ROI from guest podcasting and offload the heavy lifting to a partner who’s been there and done that.
Good Gnus’ podcast services don’t just get you booked, they get you boosted. We’ll do all the work for you so all you have to do is show up to the podcast and be the amazing guest you are.
Get all the details — book a discovery call today!
