Reach 1000s Of Ideal Customers By Being A Guest On Podcasts – with Mark Colgan

Speaker

Mark Colgan is a graduate from Nottingham Trent University with 10 years of experience in Marketing. Mark is the CEO and founder of “Speak on Podcasts”, the world’s leading booking agency for B2B and tech brands. Speak on Podcasts increases brand awareness and demand by having B2B leadership speak on relevant podcasts as guests. Mark previously worked as an Outbound Prospecting & Cold Email Coach, and a Sales Consultant at Yellow O. Mark Colgan is a tool for Startups, B2B Saas, and B2B tech companies!

Quotes

“Speaking on relevant podcasts is the most time and cost effective method of reaching thousands of your ideal customers cheaper and faster compared to other traditional methods of driving awareness and driving demand, such as paid ads, SEO, or even launching a branded podcast.” 

Key Points

• Podcasts are a good tool to create top of funnel content and build brand awareness.  
• Mark provides podcasting strategies based on the size of your total addressable market.  
• How to find relevant podcasts to speak on.

Transcript

Hi there and welcome to ChatFunnel’s Demand Gen Summit. I’m Mark Colgan and I’m going to be talking today about “How to Reach Thousands of Ideal Customers by Being a Guest on Podcasts.” As budgets are cut, marketers need more cost effective ways to reach new audiences at scale. During the session, you’ll learn why leading B2B brands like Gong, Hopping, and Pedal are using and leveraging industry relevant podcast to drive top of the funnel awareness,

Build strategic partnerships, and feel that content marketing strategy. We’re going to look to get through in today’s session, so I’m going to keep the intro brief. My name is Mark Colgan. I’m the CEO and co-founder of a podcast booking agency “Speak on Podcast.” In the last two and a half years, we’ve booked over 2100 podcast interviews for over 100 different brands across various different industries, all helping them increase that brand awareness and drive demand.

So why podcasting, and why is it important now? Well, as we all know, the buyer’s journey has changed. It’s no longer a linear journey like it once used to be or what we believed it to be. Also, we know that the majority of decision makers are actively searching for solutions to the problems that they have before they speak to a salesperson, or even engage with any marketing collateral.

So this is how buyers buy. These stats from a couple of years ago. And I can imagine that journey is even more challenging now. Then when we look at demand generation and the 3% rule, the 3% rule is the fact that only 3% of prospects are actively buying at any one time. So that means that 3% are ready to purchase.

Seven are open to buying but not looking. The remaining 90% of your total addressable market are not in the market at the moment. So how do you make sure that your brand stays top of mind when that does change for them? When their priorities shift and they need to look for solutions to the challenges that they’re facing. So this is a image here about the old way, a new way.

As I mentioned before, demand, that’s top 3%. You can use demand capture to capture those people who already are looking for that solution. However, when you’re looking at creating demand, you’ve got 7% seeking change and 30% are seeking solutions. How are you ensuring that your brand is mentioned in conversations when those come up? Now, this is where we start to talk about dark social, dark funnel, or the dark iceberg. This one is from Declan Mulkeen here. But as you can see that there are certain things that your CRM will show you from an attribution point of view. And there are a number of dark touchpoints such as WhatsApp messages, social media, third party review sites that perhaps you’re not paying for podcast interviews, YouTube channels, YouTube videos. This is exactly where your prospects are going to seek solutions for the challenges that they face.

They’re asking their peers and colleagues and communities what they would recommend and what they would advise. And on the right hand side of this screen here, you can see is people asking in Slack communities for their recommendations on a tool to do X or tool to do why. And you can see that with the amount of comments and engagement, this is where people are going to get those answers and they’re getting those answers from people who are either past users or aware of the brand. And they’re very usually they’re very unbiased responses. Here we have another example from Refind Lots of creating demand through dark social, not in market. You can see that social media, podcasting, community, word of mouth and other built. It builds up that funnel. And then when it comes to capturing demand with the intent channels your attribution stuff, I will just be saying organic search social or other of course, people already know about your brand because they’ve been searching online, they’ve been looking at review sites, they’ve been listening to podcasts, even asking their peers they put in your brand name, then visit your website.

And that’s why it shows up as organic or direct. But, budgets are being cut. B2B brands need to be more cost effective. We need to find ways to be more efficient to reach our audiences at scale and also create content for those audiences. And this is where podcasting comes in. There are three main strategies when it comes to podcasting for B2B brands. That is, you can advertise on podcast, you can guest on podcast, and you can host your own podcast. Maybe it’s a combination of the two. On the page here, I’ve got a small matrix that you could use. If you have a large TAM, total addressable market, and a high ACB, then you likely want to start by guesting, then hosting, then advertising.

If you have a small total addressable market and a high average contract value, then perhaps hosting your own show is probably the best place to start. Then guessing, then advertising. Of course, you can always come back to the video, pause the video and look at these slides. So the three strategies that we’ve got here when it comes to podcasting is host your own, advertise on others, or speak on others. But in the rest of the session, we’re going to be talking about the third option, which is speaking on other people’s podcasts. Speaking on relevant podcasts is the most time and cost effective method of reaching thousands of your ideal customers cheaper and faster compared to other traditional methods of driving awareness and driving demand, such as paid ads, SEO, or even launching a branded podcast. And it’s a new opportunity. Most B2B brands still don’t do it, so there’s that first mover advantage. What we recommend that you do is have a look at a database called ListenNotes.com. Search your name or your status or your brand name or your SEOs. They’ve been there. And also look at your competitors. You want to see whether your competitors are speaking on podcasts already or not.

If your competitors are speaking on podcasts and you’re not doing that just yet, you need to go and speak on podcasts because this is where your audience and your ideal customers are going to learn about the brand and also the solution to the challenges that they face. If your if your competitors aren’t speaking, of course, just yet, you have the first mover advantage.

So go and find these podcasts that are well-known to your audience in your industry and reach out to them so you can speak on those. I will very briefly go through how you could go reach out to podcast hosts yourself and of course will be a resource at the end which you can also access. So just quick benefits of speaking on podcasts.

You get to leverage somebody else’s audience, which is a warm, loyal audience, and they’re there to learn that actively tuning in. It’s a very high value touchpoints, pretty intimate. You’re in the ears of your ideal customers. It’s a seller’s ready audience. Most people listen to podcasts because they’re looking to solve a problem or a challenge that they’re facing at the moment.

It’s great for SEO from a backlinks point of view, especially when it comes from some high quality domains. It helps you build real credibility. You’re not just going on your own website saying that you’re great. You’re talking about – the you’re telling stories to your ideal customer and you’re being interviewed by a host. The host is then validating the credibility of you as a business or you as a speaker.

You can also develop great relationship with the host. Host can turn into customers. They can turn into a joint venture, joint venture opportunities such as partnerships and also leading into being involved and invited into their private communities, as well as then being asked to speak at conferences and also webinars as well. And also, you need to remember that people buy from people that they know, like and trust, and many companies make the mistake of positioning themselves as the hero.

But what we really need to do as marketers is to position ourselves as the guide and our customers are the hero, and we’re the ones that can help them on the hero’s journey. One of the other benefits of speaking on podcasts and interviewing is the content repurposing. From one podcast interview – a 30 minute interview. You get about 3 to 4000 words unedited.

From this you can create over 60 different content assets, which you can then distribute across your various owned channels. And of course you can recycle this content in the future as well. So the question really is, can you afford not to? Here is three companies who are investing in podcasts? Not all of the mentions that they have on the website listeners will be them either paid or and media.

That might be other guests talking about that about that particular brand. But as you can see, there’s hundreds of results for Hopin, SalesLoft, and Gong.io. So are you being part of that conversation? So a couple of examples of campaigns that we work with, Paddle. Andrew DAVIES, the CMO, wanted to reach the B2B SAS audience or product led growth executives.

So we placed them on several podcasts. There were more than these examples here, but you can see that these are extremely relevant podcasts, and that’s the key when it comes to speaking on podcast – relevancy above everything. It’s not necessarily about the total addressable market or the audience size of the podcast itself. It’s about that relevancy. You need the CMO going.

Wanted to speak to Mid-Market enterprise sales leaders. So we reached out to sales specific podcasts. You’ll see there’s no Joe Rogan. There’s no Tim Ferriss here. That’s not what we’re looking for. We’re not looking for broad, famous shows. We really want to find those highly relevant podcasts that have the highest percentage of that ideal audience listening to. Another example here for us over, he sells e-commerce marketers and e-commerce founders.

So we reached out to e-commerce specific podcasts where we knew from looking at the job site, also looking at the interview titles, the description of the podcast, the previous guests, topics that his ideal audience were listening to. Right? That’s the theory out the way I’m going to dive into showing you how you can do this yourself. So to begin with, when you’re looking at speaking on podcasts goals and audience is where you need to, where you need to stop.

When it comes to your goal audience, you’ve got to remember that speaking on podcasts is a brand awareness play. You want to hear the ideas become known, liked, and trusted. It’s an evergreen strategy for you. It’s a goldmine for content, and it’s long term. It has a long term and compounding impact. You want to also think about your audience as your primary audiences and your secondary audience – and what we like to say to our customers is imagine that they’ve paid to speak at a conference and they’ve got a stage.

Who do they want to be sitting in front of them on that stage? What does that ideal audience look like? The first screenshot up here is an example of an inbound request that I had six months after the interview went live that just goes to show the Evergreen potential of speaking on podcasts. Then most importantly, the topics. What are you going to talk about?You’ve got three main areas that you can think about. You’ve got your area of expertise and what are you known for? What is obvious to you, but often amazing to others. Then you have your common questions. What questions do you find yourself answering all the time? What do you think brands or your what do you think that your industry could be doing better?

And finally, common questions and controversial opinions. So what questions do you get all the time, and what observations do you have in your market? These are just three suggested places to start. A lot of times we work with customers. They’re not too sure if they have anything of value to share. We go through a formula of these questions and in the end we bring it.

We come up with some content. So here’s research. When you’re thinking about “how do you find your ideal customers and the ideal audience”, the podcast that they listen to is a magic formula for finding those podcasts. We like to think about the audience plus the topics times competitors and influencers in the market. I’m sure that there in the market that you serve, there are non competing influencers or businesses that also share the same audience that you do.

Just simply go and have a look to see which podcasts they’ve spoken on recently as well. This combination will help you find your ideal customer’s ideal podcast. So when it comes to research, you obviously want to find a podcast that accept guests, so they interview people and it’s an active show. Unfortunately, there’s millions of shows that only release three or four episodes and then were never continued. But first of all, look for your competitors and influences. Which podcasts have they been on? Is that podcast still active? Is that podcast relevant to you? Then there’s podcast databases, listennotes.com is great. You can use keywords to search for particular search terms. You can even just search Google for the best podcast for marketers or the best CFO podcasts, for example, and also ask your customers and ask your team, find out which podcast they listen to, and if they’re relevant and contain your right audience.

That’s what you want to really focus on. A question that we get asked quite a lot at work is “Does size matter?” And when it comes to speaking on a podcast, really it doesn’t. Relevancy trumps size all the time, just like you wouldn’t set up an Instagram campaign and build – make – it – spend time building out an Instagram profile.

If your customers just want on Instagram, you want to make sure that you are focusing on the relevant audience that are listening to podcasts. And really, when it comes to evaluating relevancy and size, we actually look at several different data points. Again, in the interest of time, you can take a screenshot of this slide here, but there are a number of things that you could look at and it’s really a combination of these factors.

It’s not like it’s like measuring return on that spend or website conversion rates or email click through rates. It’s a very different channel podcast investing as a strategy. It requires a different approach. And please don’t just look at one data point and write off the podcast. Certain things can be bought like reviews, ratings, and even views on YouTube as well.

So make sure that you’re looking at a combination of these factors to determine whether it’s the right show for you and remember relevancy above all else. We now are moving on to the outreach and follow up stage. Remember, with outreach. Popular podcasts receive hundreds of pitches every month. You need to stand out. What you obviously need to do is find their email address and social media channels.

Listen to an episode to really understand if you’re the right fit. And what you want to do is connect the dots between the value that you can share with your topics and experience to what that audience can learn, and make it easy for them to say yes. You can see here is an example of a draft that we’ve put together.

We use a very similar draft to this. This is being edited so that you could literally take this template and use it yourself. And here’s an example of that email that you can send yourself. You can see that we’ve got a personalized intro to show that you’ve done your research. We’re bridging to a topic that you can talk about on the show and mentioned the benefits.

You have a simple call to action. You just looking for that reply and we’ve added a piece here to demonstrate additional benefits or personalization. This isn’t a must have, it’s a nice to have – never force this additional personalization. But if you can, it’s great to use. So as with all outbound emails, the objective is to start a conversation.

However, it’s not just the initial pitch – you need to follow up. Only around 30% of hosts will reply to that initial email. They’re busy people, and we book most of our interviews thanks to several follow up emails that we create. So we share other podcast interviews that our customers have spoken so the host can hear and see what they look like, especially if they record by video.

We sometimes go deeper onto on a specific topic that would resonate with our audience. We share social media posts from our customers with good engagement and say that we can also share the episode when it goes live. We write, we can write, a review on iTunes. Sometimes we record a video. In other cases, we’ve actually recorded a rap video engaging with the host on LinkedIn as well.

I don’t have time to take the word of, but it was necessary from the stage, which is all about attribution ROI. I have run through this. This is a process that we have built over the last two and a half years and like I said, I have booked over 2000 podcast interviews. There is a lot more to this than I can share in 20 minutes.

But when it comes to attribution and ROI, here’s a quote from Chris Walker. So “common sense would tell you that marketing attribution software can’t measure word of mouth, community referrals, show, social media engagement, podcast listens and more. Yet these are the things driving the most impact in modern marketing.” And as we saw in the Slack screenshots, which is just one channel in the dark social, that’s where prospects are having conversation.

The question to ask yourself is where else are they spending their time online? Is it listening to podcasts? And that’s really where you should be thinking about the attribution. You’re not going to be able to attribute everything that you do as a marketer, and podcasts is no different than that. Here’s a table about the ROI of speaking on podcasts.

There’s short term that’s long term. We have had customers that have closed deals after that first interview went live. A lot of customers take advantage of the relationship that they build with the podcast host who are pretty influential people in their industry. One customer in particular generated a 70 K deal by white labeling their platform from the podcast host.

Another customer closed that largest deal in terms of MRR from the podcast host before the interview even went live. As I mentioned before, there’s a ton of content that you can distribute, that you can repurpose and distribute and the high quality backlinks prospects are typically more educated and informed when they book calls with your sales team. Oftentimes if you have a if you are asking people what they heard about you, they will mention the fact that they heard you on a podcast.

It can shorten your sales cycle. This is obviously over a longer period of time. The podcast that you speak on compounded over time, and that evergreen content that works for you without you having to put any additional effort in there as well. And most importantly, the prospects know your story and feel connected to you as a brand so quickly on attributing podcasts, you won’t be able to track everything 100%, but that’s something I think as a marketer in 2022, moving into 2023, we’re becoming to be more aware and comfortable with as well.

From a qualitative point of view, you can perform a win loss analysis on closed one deals. You can ask, “How did you hear about us?” on forms. We’ve made that a mandatory form field on our website and also in conversations. If you’re using cool recordings of a like Gong, you’ll be able to surface those insights as well. If you want to simply think about a more attributable way of speaking podcasts, you can direct people to a landing page so it could be yourdomain.com/landingpage.

And that’s the same page that you share at every podcast interview. If you were a little bit more advanced or had the resources, if you wanted to, you could create multiple landing pages for multiple podcast interviews that you do so at the call to action that you share, you would, at the end of the podcast interview, you would then share the fact that you could go find out more about “Speak About US” at speakonpodcasts.com/chatfunnels, as an example.

And also if you’ve got a B2C, or there’s more B2C elements, or you’re offering a discount code, you can use specific codes for specific podcast interviews. But the aim, but the at the same time budgets are getting cut, marketers have to be more resourceful. Speaking on podcasts allows you to reach an incredibly loyal audience who are interested in learning more about the challenges and how to overcome those.

You can create content, you can repurpose, distribute it and recycle it. It can fill up your content marketing calendar for years. It’s a multiple. By speaking on several podcast at a time, you have multiple, authentic and human touch points with your target audiences at scale, which no other channel allows you to do so far. That’s it for me.

This has been a very quick one and one about podcast casting and how to reach thousands of your ideal customers by being a guest on other people’s podcast. If you have any questions or you’re not sure if you can afford to not speak on podcasts, please do feel free to book a call with the team. We walk through the strategy and also determine whether it is the right fit.You perhaps speak to them. Podcast isn’t the right fit for you right now and hosting your own show might be. We can point it in the right direction, no matter what direction that may be.

Thank you so much for your time and speak to you soon. Take care.