Podcast Guest Marketing & Optimization Explained

Adding Podcast Guest Marketing to Your Brand-Building Arsenal

What do you do to build your brand, attract new customers, and effectively tell your brand story to the world?

Do you leverage social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for organic and paid reach?

Have you created a presence on video sites like YouTube and TikTok?

Or maybe you produce blogs and share them throughout your community.

Perhaps you spend time in social media communities, striking up conversations and providing solutions to member’s problems.

How about email? Have you built a list of loyal advocates who you can communicate with whenever you desire?

Maybe Search Engine Optimization, or SEO if you’re into the whole brevity thing, is more your game…

Without question, all of the aforementioned initiatives serve a purpose and give you ample opportunities to connect with your audience. When discipline and proper strategy are executed, the results can be game-changing.

But today, let’s look at another initiative that can help you amplify your brand message, bring more awareness and visibility to your brand, expand your network, and position you as an authority in your niche.

In a BIG way.

It’s called Podcast Guest Marketing, or Podcast Guesting. This means you find podcasts that run parallel with your mission and message in your niche, get booked, and serve as a value-driven, thought-provoking guest on those podcasts. You establish yourself as a resource that not only helps boost the credibility of the content you’re part of, but gives you the perfect stage to tell your story and make a significant impact on anyone within earshot!

How Does Podcast Guest Marketing Work?

Being fully-prepared to dominate your interviews, provide value at every turn, and impact the audience to a point they feel so captivated by what you have to say, they follow the Call To Action you leave behind on the podcast is what it’s all about. This is called Podcast Guest Optimization.

When you do this correctly, everyone wins.

The hosts of the podcast win because you help create engaging content their audience will absorb in a positive way. This will help fuel audience growth as listeners recommend and share the content with others.
The audience wins because they just discovered you as a valuable, useful resource in an area they want to know more about.
You win because each guest appearance on shows relevant to your mission and message allows you to impact a new audience in a positive way, giving them numerous reasons to enter into your ecosystem (follow you on social media, join your email list, pick up a free giveaway that you’re offering, listen to your podcast, etc).

When you find podcasts that have audience members that match your targets and set up a series of appearances on those shows, this is known as a podcast guest marketing campaign, or guesting campaign.

When you go on these shows, your job is not to sell, but to provide value. When you sell, listeners will feel like they’ve downloaded an infomercial and, in most cases, be turned off and not listen from start to finish. When this happens, no one wins. Audience members may bail on the podcast altogether and, obviously, none of them will be coming to see what you’re up to anytime soon.

But when you build a solid guest marketing campaign and impact the audience, you put yourself in a position for many positive things to happen, including but not limited to:

Positioning yourself as an authority and thought leader in your space
Growing your know/like/trust factor
Amplifying your message to your target audience GLOBALLY
Increasing the size of your network
Connecting with like-minded people to discuss topics you’re passionate about
Welcoming new people into your ecosystem
Creating fresh opportunities for client/customer acquisition
Collaboratively create evergreen content that can serve your brand for years
Selling without actually selling
Generating backlinks to your website from the podcast’s site to boost SEO

What’s Important to Know?

Being a value-driven podcast guest is much more than just turning on a microphone and talking. There are strategies that will ensure your guest marketing campaigns are successful.

Like any initiative designed to grow your presence and amplify your message, podcast guest marketing must be executed with a plan of action and proper goals/expectations.

Before embarking on a podcast guest marketing campaign, know who you’re trying to reach and why. As I mentioned before, not speaking to audiences that are aligned with your mission will result in little to no ROI and a lot of wasted time.

One big point to remember: don’t get hung up on audience size. If a podcast boasts huge download numbers, that’s great…but it isn’t a silver bullet.

As Pat Flynn, host of The Smart Passive Income Podcast says, “there’s riches in the niches.” Smaller, more defined audiences comprised of targeted listeners will deliver far better results than enormous, more broad ones.

There are also some “ninja strategies” that will help your cause as well, such as establishing a Call To Action that’s easy to follow and ways to monetize your interview before it goes live.

Podcast guest marketing campaigns deliver best results when carried out with consistency. Doing one interview every few months will lead to a significantly longer timeframe to accomplish your goals. Try to get into a habit of doing an interview a week. Not only will this help you build a foundation for your guest marketing efforts, it will raise your comfort level on the microphone.

Once your comfort level rises, up the number of interviews you do.

Podcast Guest Marketing is a fun, innovative, and effective way to build your brand. Whether you want to establish your personal brand or bring more awareness to your company’s initiatives, doing so on podcasts can take your efforts to new heights. Millions of people and counting are listening to podcasts for information, education, and entertainment. And every time you tell your story on a podcast you love, you open up new opportunities for growth and success.