How To Get Featured As A Guest On Podcasts To Build Your Brand

There are a lot of different marketing channels and strategies you can employ to build your brand, but a lot of them can take time to get off the ground. Building your own audience takes time as well. So, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way that you could leverage someone else’s audience to promote your brand?

What other strategy sounds better than being interviewed by podcasters with a wide audience already interested in your niche?

Getting featured as a guest on different podcasts helps you build fruitful partnerships with relevant influencers in your niche. And once you improve your network, your brand will gain more credibility and popularity.

So let’s see how you can build an efficient and successful strategy that will put you in contact with the right people for your business!

A Tested 6-Step Process for Finding Good Podcasts

Our process is going to involve:

• Finding relevant podcasts to your business
• Finding the right contact people and their emails
• Making a compelling pitch

First, you need to see what relevant podcasts are in your niche. After that, we’ll see how to find the right email addresses and contact these people. Next, we’ll craft some personalized pitches and follow-up emails for them.

If this doesn’t sound too complicated, it’s because… well, it isn’t.

Hence, it’s important to take it step by step and see exactly how you should plan this whole strategy.

Identify The Topics You Want To Discuss

I don’t mean just during the podcast interview, but for the entire process:

• What topics make your business shine among others?
• What is your personal area of expertise?
• What unique experiences or knowledge do you have that might be interesting to people?
• What would you want to talk about in your pitch?
• What would you like the new audience to know you for?
• What topics do you find comfortable to speak about during an interview?

Make a detailed list of everything you’d like to discuss at any given point of your outreach. Based on this, it will be easier for you to find the types of podcasts you want to be featured in and narrow the choices down.

A thing that’s worth putting on your list and that will give you a clear advantage over your competitors is the experience you have in the podcasters’ niche. The richer, the better. Things like strong credentials, experience with other businesses, how you managed to overcome your difficulties – the audience is interested in hearing everything that makes you stand out.

In my case, I used to run an agency and do digital marketing, so naturally, I focused my research on podcasts specialized in agencies and digital marketing. I have a lot I can talk about, the niche is relevant for podcasters, and their audience is interested in hearing my ideas. It’s a win-win-win situation.

Once you’ve figured out the podcasts that are suitable for your business, you need to come up with a list of topics you’re comfortable with.

However, one thing should be clear – at this stage of your research, focus on the ‘what’ element. More exactly – what should I talk about?

Once you’ve found your ‘what’, it’s time to move to the next stage and see who are the podcast hosts that are relevant to your niche.

Find Podcasts Connected To Your Niche

There are two ways of doing this: either hire a virtual assistant to help you or, since it’s a pretty straightforward process, do it yourself.

If you don’t know where to start, remember there are tons of resources and tools for finding podcasts:

• Spotify podcasts
• Apple podcasts
• Listennotes
• Podsearch
• Postaga

Write down every podcast that seems relevant to your brand. After that, carefully pick the podcast hosts that are easy to find. Although some podcasts might be relevant to your business, they aren’t that easy to get in contact with. Why?

Some of them might:

• Be too big so the chances to get a favorable response are too low
• Be inactive
• Have an audience too small for your goals

This being said, pick only the options that are best for you at the moment.

Contact The Right People For Each Podcast

Once a podcast gets your attention, it’s time to do some research and see who the people behind it are.

LinkedIn is great for this. If you can’t find the hosts or the producers of certain podcasts, look up those podcasts on LinkedIn.

After finding what you need, note these people down so you can contact them.

Finding The Right Email Addresses

The next step after finding your target contacts is to find their emails.

And like any other thing that sounds easy, there’s a catch. Finding the correct email can be a daunting task. Not every email address is correct, and sometimes you might end up with an outdated one.

Anyway, there are some specialized tools that can help:

• Hunter.io
• Voilanorbert
• Snov.io

On the other hand, some tools have a little bit of everything – they help you research and find emails. Postaga is a good example.

Crafting A Unique And Captivating Email Pitch

Welcome to the how part of your podcast outreach emails!

At this point, you need to remember two things:

• One – People pitch podcasters all the time.
• Two – The first thing podcasters will notice about you is your pitch.

And this is why your pitch has to be perfect.

Even if you think you’ve found the perfect formula, you must personalize your email accordingly every time you send it to someone.

Do you find lots of useful templates on the Internet but they all look the same?
Crafting that attention-grabbing email takes a little too long?

Hey, I’ve dealt with the same problems as you!

To help you out, I’ve decided to show you my go-to pitch that got me featured on lots of podcasts.

Hey [insert person’s name],

Your podcast was recommended to me so I have a few episodes of [podcast name] queued up – I’m excited!

Are you open to a guest slot / interview on your podcast in the next month or so?

If so, I’d love to come on and do an episode. I have a few ideas for topics relevant to your audience, including:

• [insert bulleted list of 3-5 specific episode topic ideas]

Here’s a real quick overview of why I would be a great fit for your audience / podcast…

• [insert short bulleted list of 3-5 lines on why I have experience on this topic]
• I have an audience of X thousand subscribers who I’d be happy to share the episode with

Let me know what you think.

Happy to answer any questions you may have and look forward to meeting you!

Here to help,
Andy

Why does this pitch work?

Firstly, it shows I know their podcast and this makes me stand out from the dozens of pitches they get every day (in particular if they are a bigger podcast). I’m not just a stranger that wants something from them, but an active follower of their podcast.

Similarly, my ideas for episodes are tailored to their audience. They don’t have to worry that their public won’t like it or if they won’t get enough views, because it’s exactly what people are interested in.

Moreover, my experience is relevant to their audience. Anyone that struggles with the same problems can find something that will help them. Likewise, anyone that’s keen on learning about this topic will like to hear what I have to say.

Plus, having me featured as a guest won’t benefit just me. I’m offering to share the episode with my audience, thus showing them that I want to help them widen their audience.

But things don’t stop there! There’s more to this than just sending a personalized and interesting pitch.

Remember when we said that a podcaster gets dozens of pitches every day?

That’s why you need to have follow-up emails. For various reasons, not everyone will respond to your email right from the start. Therefore, it’s important to prepare some follow-up emails too.

But when is the best time to send these follow-up emails?

In my experience, I recommend 2 follow-up emails sent 1 week after each other.

This way, the distance between your emails is balanced – not too quick for you to seem spammy, but not too distant for them to forget what this is about.

Anyway, don’t forget to put the same effort into your follow-up email that you do in your pitch. Follow-ups are important because, with every new email that you send, the chances for you to get a response will get higher.

And Finally… Sending The Emails

So let’s recap what we know so far:

• you know what you want to talk about
• you found the podcasts relevant to your business
• you researched who you should send your pitch
• you wrote the email

What’s next?

Pressing that SEND button!

But, instead of doing that 50x times over and over again, you can use either a CRM or a tool that integrates with your regular email.

Best, an even more efficient way to do this is to use an email outreach tool. You’ll have everything you need on one platform, and you can manage all email outreach campaigns the way you want.

Here are some popular suggestions:

• YAMM for Gmail
• Mail merge for Outlook
• Other separate tools like Postaga

Conclusion

Follow these 6 simple steps and you’ll get one step closer to your goal. Sometimes, getting featured on a podcast takes longer than expected, but this doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

If you focus on your strengths and offering value, everything should go as planned. Crafting a personalized email pitch is easier once you target and answer all the important questions – what, who, how, when, why.

A new audience is ready to hear about your brand!