How A Podcast Fits Into Your Outbound Marketing Strategy

TL;DR:

Molly Roland, Founder of Heartcast Media, gave me a complete mental rest when it comes to podcast networking. Most podcast gurus give the advice to focus on your audience - make sure you’re giving your audience the best experience possible. What Molly advised me to do was to actually focus more on the guest and how you could provide value to the guest than the audience.

As an example, let say you’re in the business of creating content for businesses.

An audience focused approach to this podcast would be to invite thought leaders on to discuss best practices on how to creat good content. You may even do this as a solo podcast where you talk through how to create content effectively, efficiently, and consistently.

This approach is akin to inbound marketing. You’re putting out content that your target audience would find value in and over time hopefully some of the people that listen to the podcast may end up becoming customers.

On the other hand, a guest focused approach for this same business would start by picking a niche they want to do business with - lets say its accountants for this one. You create content for accountants so they can get more leads.

In this situation, what you’d do is not create a podcast about content creation, but create a podcast about accounting where you could interview accountants that run their own practices. This gives you an opportunity to build rapport with them, and crucially, make them look good. Once you’ve recorded the podcast and you’ve made them look like the greatest accountant on the planet, you let them know what you do and ask them to share with their network.

This approach is akin to outbound marketing. You’re going out and finding one person at a time to pitch your offer to.

The inbound/audience focused approach already gets all the attention, so here’s a breakdown of how to do the outbound approach.

Before you can start using your podcast as a marketing tool for your business, you have to be clear about what your goals are. What are you trying to achieve?

If you’re reading this article, we’re going to assume your goal is to meet people that may end up doing business with you. What we’re not going to cover is how to get millions of downloads with your podcast. You don’t need a wildly successful podcast to get access to decisions makers that can do business with you.

Who to invite on the podcast?

You want to invite people onto your podcast that have a problem that you can solve. Let’s continue with the content creation for accountants example. You’re going to want to target accountants that have enough money to hire someone to do content creation for them. So ideally it would be owners of accounting firms that have at least a few employees. If they have a few employees, chances are they’re doing well enough to invest in more growth. Now this may not be the case with every firm you talk to, but the point is that you need to get specific with who you’re targeting so you don’t waste time and energy targeting people that will never do business with you anyway.

How to find these people?

There are tools available on the internet that can help make this process easy by scraping the internet for data and spitting out a list of emails. However, when you’re starting out you’ll want to start with your own network to get the ball rolling. Once you have have a couple interviews under the belt with accountants you can then use those as examples when pitching other guests to come on the show.

When you’re ready to start reaching out past your network, you can use business directories, LinkedIn, and good old fashioned google search to find accounting firms. Do a little research on the firm and the owner and send them a cold email or LinkedIn message pitching them the idea of coming on the show and sharing their insights.

How does that turn into business?

Come to the interview prepared, build rapport, and make a really good podcast. Cut the podcast up into shorter snippets to share on social media, turn it into a blog post, do everything you’d do if the guest was your actual client and this was a piece of content you were creating for their business. Make them look so good that they naturally want to share it with their friends and family.

Once you’ve done that, its time for the ask. As the saying goes, “close mouths don’t get fed.” You have to let the guest know what it is you do - what problem you can solve - so that they know who to refer you to. Don’t assume just because you did a podcast with them they’ll start asking if you can do this for a friend of theirs. That may happen, but don’t count on that happening to grow your business, make the ask.

Your ask may look something like this:

“I don’t know if you know this, but my company create content for accountants so they can get more leads.

Here are 3 case studies of our best work. [insert case studies link]

I’d be honored if you’d consider sharing this with your network, I’d be happy to pay you a referral fee for any business closed.

Thank you!”

Don’t be too pushy, just let them know what it is you do so that when an opportunity comes their way they think of you and send people your way.

Some of your guests may be doing multiple podcasts every week so sharing with their network may not result in as much, so you can’t leave it just up to them to share. Take the opportunity to add calls to action into the content you’re producing.

At the end of the podcast, add a line saying: “if you wish you could could create content that would bring you more leads, you’re in luck because that’s exactly what we do. Go to X website to get in touch.”

If you are positioning yourself correctly as an accounting podcast, other accountants will hear this and some people will reach out. Then its up to you to close those deals.