One of the biggest goals (but often one of the largest challenges) of any company is getting in front of the right demographic. Podcasts are a powerful tool that can help your brand tell its story to a specific audience. And as they’ve become bigger and bigger stages for brands to tell their stories, we have, through trial and error, been busy putting together best practices to help our clients take advantage of podcasts to advance their brands.
As a full-service marketing agency, we’re always looking for ways to leverage tools like this to help our clients (or ourselves!) FIND and WIN new customers. Below are some of the strategies we’ve found to be helpful in successfully landing and sharing podcasts.
Create a Branded Podcast Bio to Use for Pitching
This is something that’s unique to podcast pitching because unlike pitching a story or an announcement, pitching a podcast is much more about the interviewee. We’ve found that, oftentimes, hosts are more interested in the person they’re interviewing than in the most recent announcement the interviewee’s company is touting.
Pitch an Array of Topics
When pitching yourself or a client for an interview, we’ve found that rather than pitching a press release-style announcement, it’s very helpful to pitch an array of 5-7 topics that your interviewee is comfortable speaking on. This ultimately makes it harder for the host to say “no” to the interview, because if they do, they would be saying no to multiple topics rather than just one. If you pitch your podcasts strategically, you should be able to get at least one of your topics to stick.
Prep, Prep, Prep
If you’re like most people, stepping behind a mic can be a daunting task, even if you’re not in front of a room full of people. And in many ways, the virtual nature of many post-COVID-19 workplaces has made podcast interviews even more challenging. Without being able to “read the room” the way you can when physically sitting across the table from an interviewer, it can be difficult to interact the same way when interviews are conducted over the phone or on a video call. This makes preparation even more important. Before your interview, ask the host what questions they plan on asking, or even suggest your own! Then plan to do a walkthrough of your interview with a trusted colleague prior to getting in front of a hot mic. This will help give you the confidence needed to navigate your interview.
Share the Podcast
Sharing your podcast interviews after they drop creates a win-win situation. Podcasts already have a niche audience, which is one of their strengths, but when you share it with your own network it reinforces that even more; not to mention the visibility it brings you. Remember that podcasts are looking to grow their audiences as well, so sharing your episode not only helps spread your message, but it also helps share your interviewer’s platform as well.
If you want to take this one a step further, you can extend the life of your podcasts by transcribing them and posting the transcription to your website along with the link to the audio. A transcribed interview will not only double as great web content for your company, but it will also help prospective customers find you via keyword searches of the content in your interview.
Because of the depth they allow for, podcast interviews can be a treasure trove of content. Once your company or client has a few under their belt, use them to gather information for future media opportunities as well as fodder for social media and web content. If you’re featured on a podcast, link to it on your company’s website! This cross-pollination will help bring your company more publicity and will boost SEO for your website.
We believe in the power of podcasts so much, that we recently decided to start practicing what we preach, and our CEO Matt Certo launched his own podcast: Brand Narrative. Brand Narrative dives into topics from all over the marketing and branding landscape, and features our clients, F&W employees, and more.