In this special Q&A episode, Jeremiah is joined by Lemonpie CEO and Founder, Erik Jacobson, and our Head of Talent Relations, Josh Crist, to talk about what it takes to run a podcast PR tour.

This is a must-listen if you’re considering a tour for your brand but aren’t sure where to start. Erik and Josh walk you through the ins and outs of identifying shows to pitch, strategies for landing interviews, the value of podcast guesting, and how to measure the success of it all.

Names: Erik Jacobson and Josh Crist

What they do: Erik is the CEO and founder of Lemonpie and Josh is the Head of Talent Relations at Lemonpie

Connect with them: Erik’s LinkedIn | Erik’s Twitter | Josh’s LinkedIn

Podcast tours, like book tours, are a way for you to build awareness for your brand and for you (or your employees) as a thought leader in your industry. It’s the proactive strategy of finding podcasts that your ideal customers or ideal team members listen to and getting interviewed on as many of them as possible over a short period of time.

The more your name appears across podcasts in your industry, the more dominant the perception of you and your brand becomes. You don’t have to be a market leader to reap the benefits of a podcast tour. Instead, your goal should be to give the best, most transparent interview those shows have ever had in order to build trust with the audience and be seen as an expert in your space.

Rather than micro analyzing the number of leads you get from one specific interview, you should take a more holistic approach. Look at the aggregation of leads coming from all the interviews on your tour. It’s about setting the sail in the right direction versus narrowing your focus on each individual opportunity.

Many guests miss the chance to repurpose content from their interviews to share across their own organic channels. Rather than waiting for the host/show to send you assets, you can actually record videos of yourself for every single interview you give or even write blog posts out of the topics you cover. This will give you the ability to distribute your own repurposed content even if the host/show doesn’t provide you with marketing content to work with.

What are you asking of this channel in relation to the goal you hope it achieves? If you’re looking for podcast PR tours to drive leads in the first 30 days, there’s likely a mismatch between what this channel can do for you and what your goals are. Measuring podcast tour results is not the same as measuring paid acquisition channels. You need to be willing to stick with it long enough to see the outsized returns it can drive, even with the limitations of podcast tour analytics.

If you believe that people want to buy from people, then this is the right strategy for you. You need to go into this channel with the philosophical mindset that brand building comes from raising the profiles of the executives on your team.

This isn’t something you see results from within the first 3 months of your tour. Yes, you will see and be able to generate activity, but there’s oftentimes a lag from when the podcaster agrees to interview you to when the episode goes live. So you need to go into the first 3 months knowing it’s a ramp-up period where you build up a snowball effect with compounding results in months 6 through 12+.

A podcast interview isn’t a 30-minute pitch or webinar of your product. Instead, it’s a time for you to share the expertise you’ve learned from being in the same position the listeners are in. What sort of experience do you bring to the table that only you could have from having lived the same experiences of the listeners you’re speaking to?

When deciding which shows to pitch and guest on, it’s important to look at the size and impact as two separate factors. Shows with hundreds of downloads versus millions of downloads both have their place and can be valuable. But in the end, what matters is the impact this show has and what the audience fit is relative to your brand. We use the Lemonpie Score to figure out which shows to pitch for our clients.

When pitching to be a guest on a show, it’s important to lead with empathy and show up with value whenever you’re engaging with a host. Rather than assuming you have something they want, take the time to learn, engage, and build them up and their show in some way. Get to know the podcaster, what they care about, what kind of guests they like to spend time with, what community engagement they like to drive, etc. and figure out how you can help them succeed in those areas.

Whenever you pitch a guest to a podcaster, think about the timing, fit, and approach. Timing means they must be in need of and open to guests. Fit means you’re bringing value to their listeners that’s relevant to the show. And when you’re approaching them, you need to meet them where they are and not assume the host wants to engage with you on your terms.

Personalizing your pitch emails seems obvious but it’s a point most people miss. Take the time to actually listen to the podcast, comb through their social media, find out what the host really cares about or what excites them so you can reference those conversations in your email. Also, you can add a “5-Minute Favor” where you do something to be kind, helpful, or deliver value to them that shows up within the first 5 minutes of your engagement with them. This could be a thoughtful and personalized review of their show, it could be buying their book and leaving them a review, it could be tagging them on social and promoting their show.

The research and prep that happens before your interview isn’t something to skip over. This can be as simple as listening to previous episodes, researching the host on social media to understand what matters to them, reading any articles they’ve written or been featured in, or watching videos they’ve produced. A lot of the work you do to prep your pitch can then be used to build a relationship with the host so you can give the best interview that show’s ever had.

One of the main reasons you go on a podcast tour is to build trust with the people you want to know you and your brand. Trust is more easily created when you show vulnerability to the audience. This means you open up about your failures and how you learned from them, or you are willing to give away information for free that is deemed to be extremely valuable.

“Head-nod moments” refers to moments in your interview where you’re giving away so much value and information that the listener has to pause the episode, open their Notes app, and write down what you’re saying. You can spark these moments by sharing your methodology, framework, resources you use, or how to get from point A to point B.

This means you have a blank field on your website asking people how they heard about you, or you ask your sales team to add that question to their follow-up strategy. By letting people explain to you, in their own words, how they found you, you’ll be able to better track which leads are coming to you from a podcast.