How to Get Leads from Your Podcast Interviews

How should you prepare for a podcast interview?

Brigitte: You want to think first and foremost about who the audience is and what will give them a major aha moment. One of the key benefits of giving podcast interviews is how much you’re able to segment and speak to very specific audiences. You can adapt your messaging and storytelling for that specific audience. You can use the language, the case studies, the stories and experiences that will really resonate with them.

We have a client who is a therapist who helps other therapists transition out of private practice. Super niche. She has an amazing podcast called Rebel Therapist. We were able to book her on all of these podcasts that were specifically talking to therapists about their revenue models.

Start by validating their experiences and pain points using the language they’re already using. Then, give them one transformation during the interview.

To prepare, you want to look at show titles from the past few months. You want to peep the social media of the host. This should go without saying but you really need to listen to at least an episode of the podcast before you go on.

When you listen, consider:

• What kind of questions do they ask?

• What’s the tone?

• Is the host an interrupter?

• Are they gonna give you a ton of time to tell your stories?

• Will they answer follow up questions?

• Are there questions they ask every time?

Listen to the first 5 minutes and last 5 minutes of several episodes because those are the hardest part to get right. Know how you want to introduce yourself and know the answers to any questions they always ask. It shows you care about the audience and that you respect the host.

How do you make sure you speak to your audience?

Brigitte: There are some great techniques you can draw on from sales and marketing, like mirroring, which is when you pick up on the language your audience is using. When researching the host, look for any words they use to describe their audience. What identity language is the audience using?

My team works with a lot of different business owners but the language they use to describe themselves is different. It could be CEO versus small business owner versus freelancer versus solo entrepreneur versus founder. Knowing these words can attract or repel an audience. If you go on a podcast that is geared towards artists, for example, and you’re using the word founder instead of artists, makers, creatives, painters—however they identify—they’re going to think you don’t get them and it will turn them off.

Skim the blogs of the podcast hosts for language they’re using.

You also want to have two or three stories you can tell that will resonate with them. You can always adjust these based on the podcast topic or audience. We have an amazing client who is a book coach. She founded a book coaching company, and we were hired to help get leads for her new company. One of the things we had to work with her on is how to reframe her stories to be about her company’s expertise and not her own. She had moved out of coaching herself and wasn’t working day to day with authors. We encouraged her to start talking about her trainer’s experiences which were much more applicable to her target audience.

You want to consider what client stories or personal experiences you have that will be relatable to them. They can be yours. They can be others. When you can craft thoughtful connection points in terms of the language and the storytelling, you’ll speak to your audience and they’ll want to hear more from you.

If your goal is to get new leads, what should you make sure to cover in a podcast interview?

Brigitte: Storytelling is the most overlooked thing. A successful formula for any interview is to do the research ahead of time as we talked about, prepare one to two things that you want the audience to take away and share a couple stories that illuminate those takeaways. Get them to have an insight or a transformation where they say ‘I’ve never thought about this problem this way!’

Before you go on a show, know the aha moment you are going for. Put it on a post it on your monitor for during your interview. Jot down a couple stories that bring that insight to life. The storytelling is the difference between what gets somebody to say ‘aha!’ to actually taking an action. You have to create that emotional resonance with people in order for them to take that next step with you.

I run my company as a full-time digital nomad. I live in a trailer; I travel the United States with my husband. We have a team and we all work remotely. If I were to go on a podcast to teach people how to change their whole business over to this model, I might talk about some of the insights that I’ve had running a company this way. One thing that was really transformational for me was my shift from doing crisis PR with intense deadlines into this more intentional lifestyle where our work was created around our life. In my past career, at any moment, I could get a call like that would derail my entire day. That just doesn’t happen with Podcast Ally.

If I were trying to convince you to go for this lifestyle, I would tell you that story of transformation. In this story, you’d see how it was possible for yourself. In that possibility is a lead coming your way to learn more.

What kind of call to action do you recommend?

Brigitte: When you get to the end of that hour and the host asks, “How can people find you?” And you say, “Oh, well, you know, you can find me on Instagram or go to our website or subscribe to my podcast,” it doesn’t work.

Folks are usually listening to a podcast while they’re doing something else—driving, doing the dishes, taking a walk.

But if people make it to the end of that episode, they are 75 to 90% ready to buy. What you wanna do in that moment is tell them exactly how to buy.

Instead, you want to make a clear and direct sales pitch.

When people ask me at the end of a podcast interview, where can people find you? I say:

“If you have been listening to this interview and you’ve loved everything I’ve had to share about how we work with people, our approach and the results that we get, I’d love for you to come over to podcastally.com/apply and schedule a time to talk with me and see if we would be right for working with you.”

It works. It especially works well for people who work at a higher price point. You get total qualified leads who are ready to invest. Just this week, I had a consult booked from a four year old podcast interview because they came across the interview and they realized, yes, this is who I need.

List building and social media followers aren’t really appropriate for podcasts. You want to think about a podcast more as a sales conversation done a scale. You want to give them one place to go and you want to give them the option to buy immediately because a lot of them are ready. If you slow them down with something like ‘go to my social media’, you just put up a barrier in front of the sale. I always tell people, prioritize sales over leads with your podcast interviews.

“When you go into an interview, know what you want to get out of it. If you’re unprepared and unclear on your goals, it’s easy to get scattered during your interviews. ”

How do you track leads that came in from a podcast interview?

Brigitte: This is hard because a lot of people will hear the interview on a podcast player and they’ll type in a link instead of clicking on it. It shows up in your analytics as direct traffic. If this is important to you, one technique is to create a landing page and duplicate it with the URL slug as the name of the podcast. One of our clients, Christina Scalera, has an online shop with contract templates. She created a page that has every single one of her freebies to share on podcasts and she just duplicates and changes the URL for each one. We have another client who has a high converting lead magnet funnel. They give a unique link to that funnel for every podcast interview.

You can also use a coupon code which you’ll hear a lot in podcast ads. They’ll say, “We’ve created something special for listeners,” but really it’s the same thing everyone’s getting and they’re using it to track their channels. It feels exclusive though and people love that.

If you don’t want to manage all that, you can always use a “where did you find me” question on your booking forms. Podcast listeners tend to be very specific and they’ll share the exact name of the podcast.

Any last advice for podcast guests?

Brigitte: When you go into an interview, know what you want to get out of it. Do you want to network with the host? Are you trying to get more public speaking gigs? Choose your stories with this in mind. Create your call to action with this in mind.

If you’re unprepared and unclear on your goals, it’s easy to get scattered during your interviews. In marketing, we talk about how before somebody is going to buy from you, they need to know, like, and trust you. They’ve got to hear your name, hear your company, know what you’re doing. They need to like what you stand for. They need to see that you have the expertise. They need to see that you have a way of working that they’re going to enjoy.

A podcast interview, on average, is roughly an hour. So you’ve had an hour to get somebody to know, like and trust you. It’s like a referral, right? The host shows trust by having you on and they’re your audience to lose.