The concept of influencer marketing is anything but novel. However, a multi-channel approach has opened the door for combining new outlets, thus allowing influencers to keep delivering augmented authenticity and increasing the ever-growing relevance of the concept. In fact, it has become the buzzword on every savvy marketer’s lips, and brands are harnessing different channels to make the most out of their advertising budgets. One influencer channel that has exploded in popularity in the UK these last few years and managed to keep influencer marketing further relevant is precisely podcast advertising. So, today we figured we’d share a few tips on how to use your podcast as an influencer marketing machine.
How to Use Your Podcast as an Influencer Marketing Machine
Do you wish to share your message, inspire others, and promote your brand? Then, fellow advertisers, brands, and influencers, podcasts are the place to be. If used effectively, podcasts can help you boost traffic generation, establish trust, and increase brand authority. They can also help you build organic, genuine, and strong relationships with big names in your industry, as well as engage listeners almost anywhere and anytime – whether they’re behind the wheel, at the gym, working out, or at home, doing their laundry.
They’re convenient, yes, but they’re also extremely effective in capturing the audience’s attention because of the highly personal experience and the immersive storytelling they provide.
Finally, genuine personality, knowledge, and expertise are something one cannot fake. It always shines through, regardless of the type of content you create.
Ready to latch onto the podcast wave? Let us then see how you can use your podcast to drive your influencer marketing strategy.
Bring On Awesome Guests
The best podcast episodes will always make their listeners eager to engage, debate, and invite other people to listen. And, hands down, the best way to achieve this is to find and bring on some insanely great guests. Luckily, once you have an idea of what you’d like to discuss with each guest, targeting the leading names in your space and getting the interview is relatively easy.
How so?
For starters, being asked to be a podcast guest is flattering. Second, it takes a minimal time commitment while offering a valuable and long-lasting content piece. Finally, podcasting is a fun and rapidly-growing medium. So, as your podcast grows, even star names in the industry would be reluctant to decline the invitation to have a chat with you.
You can reach them in many ways, from using social networks to joining forums to tracking other podcasts within your niche.
Make sure your podcast offers value
As a podcaster, you must ditch the self-promotion mindset to offer value to your guests. The rewards will come naturally.
It should be a symbiotic relationship. Both you and your guests can gain value: you are reaching their audience, and they are reaching yours. Otherwise, it will become hard to book high-quality guests. So, whether they wish to promote their new book or just get the message of their brand out there, besides exposure, you should try to provide them with a little something extra.
This can be anything from a highly-edited, quality podcast episode to a short blog post to publish on their own website to social media content to share. Take short blog posts, for example. If your guest published this piece on their high-profile website, your podcast gets a link back and thus more traffic.
Hang out where your audience hangs out
It’s not uncommon for enterprises to make the mistake of focusing their podcasts on what they really want their audiences to know. Of course, getting your message across is essential for the business. However, being too selfish in promoting your podcasts often results in podcasts that talk at their listeners instead of to them. Don’t make this mistake – it is the people on the other side of the mic that matter the most. So, set some time aside to explore what they want to know and learn and what guests they want to see.
Track your podcast’s performance
To start using your podcast as influencer marketing, you must focus on boosting your traffic and visibility. By measuring the success of the podcast, creators can better understand and appeal to their audience and learn how to engage listeners. They can also identify how much influence it has and find out how to set it up for long-term success.
Although a bit tricky medium to quantify, you shouldn’t give up on metrics altogether. To determine whether or not your podcast strategy is working, take a look at things such as:
# The number of listeners and downloads per episode,
# The number of sponsors,
# Prices companies pay for advertisement space,
# Audience and critic reviews, etc.
Also, track your website and social media traffic to see if increasing social media following affected your podcast visibility and traffic. If it is, keep up the good work. If not, continue to work on increasing your numbers. The important thing is that you’re tracking it to see what works and what doesn’t.
Focus on the influencers in the industry
The problem is that the analytics solutions available for podcast creators these days are seriously lacking in detail. With no UTM codes for audio, you have no precise way of knowing whether the audience you’re reaching is the right one or not. You have the number of downloads per episode. However, there’s no information about who those listeners are and whether they stayed for the whole episode or watched one minute of it.
The good news is that you can focus on your influencer marketing. By refocusing your energy on influencers in your industry, you’ll see a noticeable boost in your audience numbers after each episode. That’s because each influencer you bring on will share their personal episode with their followers. Some of them will become new listeners of your podcast. They’ll start following your fresh content and going back and discovering your old.
Once you see the numbers piling up, your show will start to grow. This, in turn, makes it easier to attract more and more top influencers as your guests. Hit that point, and you’re on the right track.
Wrapping it up
Hopefully, you now have a general idea of how to use your podcast as an influencer marketing machine. The podcast market has seen a noticeable boom these last few years, and with interesting new podcasts being launched every day, starting will be challenging. But if you have the time and determination, this medium is the best way to reach top influencers, grow your audience, and boost your company profile. So, are you up for the challenge?
