Find the Right Influencers for your Podcast and Get More Listeners in Less Time

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Hi there, this is Tom and Tracy on the feed you'd brand podcast. Today we're going to take a deep dive into finding the perfect podcast influencer.

Yeah, this has been a topic that's come up because I've been doing a lot of events and getting a lot of Q and A going after webinars and other things. And I think this is a really kind of important thing to understand what defines an influencer because there's different definitions of that and what really makes the perfect one for a podcast or a video cast. Right. What makes the perfect one for you to use when you're brand casting. And so I really kind of wanted to define that and it sorted also come to mind because we have our wonderful podcast, the Influencer Podcast, Right. Isn't that what it's called? The Influencer?

It's just called Influencers.

Influencers. John Levy, who is a fabulous behavioral scientist and his show is great. If you haven't heard of it before, you should definitely listen to it. And we're thinking about what defines an influencer. So I mean, inarguably you could say a celebrity is an influencer, right?

Sure.

Right.

I think anybody who's really very high profile in the media, whether that's old school media, print, tv, radio or social media, somebody has a lot of exposure and gets a lot of light shine on them, is probably an influencer.

And I'm going to argue that that's not the case. If you want to power your site, if you want to power your podcast, if you want to get more business, big difference. Getting an audience or getting clicks or likes is very different than getting engagement and business. And we want influencers that can lead us to more business. So I'm going to use an example from my Ink column. I guess it was earlier this year. I interviewed John Travolta.

You did? I think it was February.

Yep, February this year I interviewed John Travolta right before the Grammys at the city gala event and they asked me to interview him. His press people asked me to interview them because they wanted more bloggers. They wanted more people who wrote online columns to be interviewed because he had plenty of TV coverage. Right. Plenty of video coverage, but not as much Google power. So they wanted it. So I thought, okay, great, then I'll interview him. It'll actually serve my column well because they'll do a really good job of pushing it out and sending out that he was featured here, because that. And that will draw more audience into me. Won't that be great? That's actually not what happened at all. In fact, it's probably the worst circulated article that I've had in all year. So, in other words, their press team did no job pushing that out. His audience probably never saw it. His followership probably never saw it, based on the traffic that I can see that came from it. And so all that ended up happening for him was a really great backlink from income.

Yeah. Which actually is worth something, a backlink.

For me as well. But it didn't do anything in terms of delivering traffic. So sometimes even a celebrity delivers you no traffic. So what we want to do is we want influencers who are going to deliver you their audience. So they're going to be really great at pushing out your message. So they're going to be so excited about being on your show that they're going to tell everybody that they know. That's the number one criteria that I have. Number two criteria is make sure that they're going to put it into their website. Because if you don't have that true backlink going on, then it hasn't done you any value at all. And that's extremely powerful. So because that raises the overall Google value, which means Google sends you more traffic. So even if John Travolta didn't send me more traffic, Google should.

So that's really a trick, though, Tracy. A lot of times, I mean, just.

That's why we use Egobate.

That's why we use Egobate.

Yeah.

And we already did an episode on Egobate. And you want to try to make it easy to. For an influencer to provide you that backlink or to send people to you.

And more importantly, to provide it properly so it's hitting the right pages that are going to give you the most equity value in it. So those are the two things. Right. You want someone who's going to actually share it, so they're good at sharing. So that's one of the criteria that I have, is I always look through. And so if somebody says, I'd like to be a guest on your podcast, and most importantly, if a PR firm proposes somebody to me, I check them out. Because just because they hired a PR firm doesn't mean they're any better at this. I have seen PR firms who do a worse job of pushing out the messages. Their only goal is to get that ink masthead associated with their client, not do any jobs at promoting.

Yeah. So if they're really looking to get more out of you, more benefit from you in terms of if you have a logo that they're interested in or you have an association they're interested in.

Your show's of value. Right.

Your show's a value to them. You want to make sure that they're going to be of value to you.

Exactly.

And do they have a history of pushing out other things that other interviews that they've done on other people's shows, channels, blogs, whatever? Do they have a history of putting that out there? And that will give you a pretty good indication of if they're going to be beneficial to you.

Right. And so I have, over the years that I've been writing my column and that we've been doing the podcasts, I have seen that less than probably 10% of the PR firms, even independent PR agents who come and propose people to us, less than 10% of them do a good job at this. So I don't do repeats when I see that happen from them. So I will give them a try the first time around. And they say, hey, this is my expectation for how you're going to share it. And I push that out to them. But I find that when individuals contact me directly, they're much more grateful for the exposure and they do a much better job of sharing.

Yeah. I think PR firms in general are just trying to check boxes off on a list of things that they need to try to accomplish for their clients.

Right.

And follow up after the exposure has happened is one of the lowest things on their list. Because honestly, they're busy people. And I think there's just an inherent kind of laziness that happens. Oh, I got the pr. I don't need to do this detailed follow up.

Right. And so that's one of the things. So these areas like, so checking out to see how often they share things, how many times they repeat the shares. So sometimes I'll go through their entire feed, kind of pull through and see are they repeating it on a monthly basis? Are they resharing again? Because that's really important too. Are they pushing it out into all their social media channels? Are they doing more than that? Do they have a newsletter that they're pushing it out into as well? Like all of those things are things that I either check or ask questions about before I agree to. If somebody's come to us, it's very different when we seek guests out. We have a different criteria for who we seek out. But that's what happens when someone comes and asks us. So that's my definition of influencer, is they're very good at sharing out information and getting their audience to engage back. That engagement is also a measure as well. Are there people who they've shared it out to, are they commenting and then resharing? If they're just liking, that's not good enough.

So really it's what's the quality of their followers, of their audience?

Like, that's right.

Are they active and participating or are they just looky loose and they're. They're watching it? No. Yeah, I like it. But that doesn't mean they're taking any kind of action.

That's right. And actually, if you're checking through Facebook posts, here's a little pro tip. If somebody's hitting the heart button, the smiley face button, whatever that is, the crying button, it doesn't matter whatever, but anything but the thumbs up, like button. You get more value for that from Facebook.

Well, isn't it also true that there are certain automated things that can happen to like something, but if you're going to actually push the like button and hold it and then go over and choose one of the others, that is a real person who's doing that.

That's right. It's a sign of higher engagement. So when you have lots of those on a page as well, and so those actually get you more circulation on Facebook and all of those. So if they have engagement there, I kind of watch that as well. So it's not just comments, but if they have a lot of those hearts and other things going on, then that's worth considering as well.

Especially shares.

Especially shares.

Shares is even more valuable. Resharing, because now you're getting out to even a second or third level of people that you wouldn't otherwise touch.

Exactly. So those are always good signs of that. Obviously putting it into their website, making sure that they do update their press page on their website and those kinds of things on a frequent basis. So I go and check on how old that is and how they're doing that and when was the last time something, an article was updated there and when you check that. So that's the other area of it. And then from there really deciding whether an influencer is really a good match for your Podcast a good match to bring you more business is really understanding better their audience. And sometimes that takes time to read their site, to read who they are, what they're about. Is there a good match between your audience and their audience? Is there synergy there? Because it's great to have someone high profile. And wouldn't we all just love to have a celebrity on our show? But. But it's a temporary spike if that audience doesn't stick with you past it. And we want to make sure that we're really spending our time interviewing people of high value who are going to give back a lot to our audience and at the same time bring us people who could use us. Right. People who we can add value to.

Makes a lot of sense. So it really does take doing a little homework, doesn't it, Tracy?

Exactly. Finding the perfect podcast influencer requires research.

Now, there are a couple of different. I would guess I would call them agencies or companies that we know of that you can hire to find guests to book on your show. Now, you have more experience with them than I do, Tracy.

Yeah. So actually, we're going to have in a very. An upcoming episode in the month of October. We're going to have Jennifer Spencer. Come on. Energent Media is the name of her company, and she places guests on podcasts, so she'll help you research the right shows to be a guest on. Because a good tip as a podcast host is to share audiences with other podcasters. Right. Because a podcast listener is a podcast listener, and podcast listeners tend to listen to five or six shows. That's sort of like their average. And they'll drop some and they'll pick up a new one. And wouldn't it be great if they picked up yours, because they'd outgrown the last one and now they're ready for yours. So guesting on other podcasts, as long as you're not stealing their audience because they'll be hesitant to have you on as a guest, but as long as you're adding value to their audience, who there might be a subset of their audience who has an interest in your podcast, you're really sharing that.

Sure. And these agencies certainly can get you booked as a guest on other podcasts, but they'll also find guests to book on your podcast if you want to hire them to do that.

That's right. Yeah. It goes both ways, Go both directions.

But then do you know, do they do this level of research that we're talking about in terms of the shares or how active they're going to be how good a guest by our criteria, are they doing the same thing?

Most of them are. And I mean, we'll talk further depth about how Jennifer handles that. But Jennifer, Jennifer Spencer, really what I really like about her is that she's looking at it from a more adding value to your business bottom line. It's not just about press. And I think that's a really different viewpoint that you have to. If it doesn't serve you and doesn't serve them, whoever your guest might be, whoever the influencer might be, no one benefits in that process. And so that's not good for anyone. And so having that kind of collaboration influencer model is really important. And so I want to touch on one other thing, Tom, that I think happens too often is we forget to treat our partners, our joint ventures, our affiliates, whatever you want to call them, our subcontractors, like all of those kinds of people that you work with and do things for and it might be your network within your network. We forget to treat them with the respect of being influencers. And that is a mistake. So you want to make sure that you're going out there and pushing out and respecting the relationships. So in other words, if we aren't willing to step out there and say, hey, we're associated with so and so organization and we'd really like to have the CEO of that or the local chapter president come on the show, if you're not willing to do that and associate yourself with that organization, then it really is categorically unfair for you to be going and mining people from that organization. It needs to be a two way street. So we've recently done this, we sort of weeding out our network.

We are, we've been talking about that a lot.

Right. And for some people it's like an ROI thing. Like you look at them and say, how much money did I spend going to these kinds of conferences with these kinds of people? And was it worth the dollar value for us? And Tom, and I don't look at that because there's a lot of intangibles, a lot of people who know people, who know people that you meet or things that happen along the way. And we believe in that sort of intangible value.

Yeah, absolutely. Like you got a whole lot of business from someone that you met and you wouldn't have met them had you not gone to that conference. Now it was two or three steps removed from it and many months removed from it, but definitely you can trace it back to that. It would never have happened if you were not there. But in terms of direct results of business that came out of attending the conference itself, a lot of times there might be zero.

That's right. That's right. So we have an organization that we absolutely love. There's no direct correlation to our business on a daily basis, but it's coming up in LA digital footprint and we love the team that backs that up there. And they have 800 plus revenue generating websites that they run and we learn so much from them all the time and the team is just amazingly fantastic. But the reality is we've never once gotten a customer from attending the event and we probably never will. That doesn't bother me though, because I know that the relationship value is high.

The relationship value and really the, I mean, I wouldn't even say intangible. The tangible benefits we've gotten from being associated with that organization and all the people we've met, they've been very real and significant. It's definitely worth it. But it's indirect. It's not direct business we've gotten from them or from people we've met there.

Right. So what we've started to do though is to define at a different level after a certain time of being involved with an organization and they've gotten to know you and they're promoting you and they're telling everyone, oh, Tom and Tracy are the brand casting experts, things like that. When we really go back and we push to the organization and said, hey, you're going to start a podcast, let us help you do that. And then they either get too cheap and don't do it or don't call us at all and think that they can do it themselves from the courses that we taught for them. That's where we have a problem. Because now we don't have a respectful mutual relationship. We don't have a collaboration. And so if we're not willing to use our resources and use our affiliates, then we won't feature them. So we feature only people we're willing to use ourselves. And that's this new definition that we decided because we want it to be a collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship.

And so that's a good point. So it's, are your partners actually influencers themselves or are they helping to influence others about you and your business? That it becomes a real partner to me and is a very valuable, influential relationship you have to consider. I agree with you. We've seen a lot of people who think what we do is excellent. They refer other people to us. And there is a big difference between those that use us to produce their shows or those that don't.

That's right. And we're not being conceited about it. It's just as. Look, we want you to walk the walk, not just talk the talk and be a partner with us. And so that's our definition of an influencer. Someone who's going to do what they say they're going to do. Who influencing the same way we are. We want that to all have collaboration because that adds higher value to you, our audience. And that's our definition of influencers. So they might be influencing on a very micro level, like Jennifer Spencer. She's influencing on guest getting level. Right. Very small, very small, narrow area. But if I wasn't willing to use her or I haven't used her in the past, then what does that say about our relationship?

Yeah, No, I think it would be disingenuous, really.

That's right.

Reality is we recommend people that we use and we're going to let you know if they are people that we've used. And if we're just interviewing somebody we think is a great guest you'd want to hear about, but we haven't used them, we're going to let you know that as well.

That's right. So we look at that overall as the kind of litmus test. Right. And so thinking about these podcast influencers that you want to reach and all of that, I think that's where you start with. You start with your partners, you start with the people you've done business with before, and you start looking for them because there has to be be a very likely synergy between their audience and what they need next. And so we look at that as saying, okay, well, if they use this before. So for instance, in the private label podcast world, this is a really great way. So a couple of years ago, I was on maybe eight private label podcasts that kind of different.

Maybe over 10.

But no, no, I think eight of them were specifically related to Amazon sellers. Right. And so I went on about eight different podcasts with Amazon sellers that were focused on how to sell on Amazon or that kind of thing. Well, I came on and spoke on designing products. Right. Very different than the selling process and all that. So it was very complimentary and an easy association between their audience and what they were selling. And my audience that I was looking to find out information from and about and maybe get some exposure with, there was a really nice match and I was able to give a lot on the interview and never made a pitch at all. I Didn't ask for anything in the end, because that wasn't the purpose. It was more of a like, will this connection work and is it beneficial? It was a sort of a research project. At the end of the day, though, nine months later, I traced back $120,000 worth of business that came from people who heard me on those podcasts because it was such a perfect right fit between the audience that that host had garnered and the services that we provide were supplemental to that. So after that, we've gone a little bit deeper, and I did a webinar with one of the hosts, and now we're looking at an even deeper partnership with all of these hosts. And because we see that what happens is that we're just adding tremendous value. And why shouldn't the host receive some equity for that, for having garnered them in the first place?

Yeah, that's the point I really want to make sure is clear to the feed your brand audience here listening to this podcast is that as we've gone forward to build and grow those relationships more, we have created programs where, yes, we can benefit and get business from their audience, but the host is going to directly benefit monetarily from any business that comes from their audience as well. So it really is mutually beneficial.

Right. And so that's another model of influencers. So you can have those who are just looking to get more show credits, like more press on their press page. Right. But there's also those that are looking to have kickbacks, affiliations, percentage, shares, splits, whatever those are. Those are not selling out your audience if it's a right fit for your audience, because the audience can still skip you. They can still Google someone and look around you and go straight to their link if they want to. But if you've added value to them, your audience will instead go to the website, click the link knowing that you're getting money for that and knowing that it's supporting your podcast and supporting the value you added for them. They know. They know the difference. And so you don't have to hide that. You can be very clear about it. This is an affiliate link. Our show is receiving benefits and sponsorship from this link. If you click it, we'd like you to. We're not making you. They can skip it again. They can go straight to the website.

Yeah. But most often we find that listeners of a podcast who really like the podcast, they like the host or hosts, they like the content that's being brought to them, the things that they're learning and being edutained in general, they're going to be more likely to actually accept and partake of some of those things that are offered to them because they want to support the show. And maybe that isn't directly. They're not paying for the show to listen to it on a regular basis, but maybe they're giving a little business to someone who is either sponsoring the show or is offering something over the show. They're more inclined to do that.

Right. And you don't have to offer big things. I mean, you could just make links, like book links. Your guest is an author. You can make an affiliate book link with Amazon. It helps the author sell more books on Amazon. They're always eager to do that. And it doesn't take anything away from a cut from that author because Amazon pays you the 4%. So audiences know that they're smart, they're savvy, they're digital marketers, a lot of them themselves. They understand that and they're willing to give you credit if you've served them. So thinking about that influencer as a bigger thing for everyone, to create more business together, collaborate to create more business together. That's our definition of the right kind of influencer, but again, targeted specifically with the right audience match and fit. So the audience really benefits from the value from what they listen to and what they hear from that guest. And the audience can benefit if they use their services as well. So then you benefit back in terms of monetary or business transactions that go on there. So we want it to go both ways.

So I like that. So we really talked about a couple different levels of influencers on the show, right? Some is just, hey, are you getting the right guest who is an influencer outside of what you. You're doing and outside of, just within their own world, are they an influencer? And then different levels all the way, getting up to partners that you might work with who are influencing their audience on your behalf, and you're influencing your audience on their behalf. It becomes this mutual sustainable effort, right?

And then there's one more level you can do. We don't recommend you do it like every week or something like that, but it's good every now and then, maybe once a month to throw in a client influencer or a user influencer, someone who's used your services, someone who's used your program, someone who works through that. Because what happens is a lot of times we're sitting up here going, yeah, we do this and you can do this too. And it sounds great, but we are maybe a year ahead of where you're going to ever be. But what about if you hear from someone who's a couple months ahead of where you are? It helps you visualize as the listener that, wow, I could really get there. And I do not recommend you make it all testimonial. I think that's terrible. I think that's not a good use of it. But when someone can say, I envision myself in that person's position and I can really see how I could be helped from your services or from listening to this podcast again and again and again now, I've really come a long way. That's the best way to use clients, I think, in that process, or associates.

In that process, which is a different kind of a relationship and partnership of sorts. Right. You're helping maybe get some exposure for your clients client and they're actually giving you a little bit of a testimonial or you're showing your audience really the value that they've received.

We see this a lot with like high level, especially entrepreneurial thought leaders because they all associate with like high level thought leaders. But you get into that world and I talk myself out. They're like, why aren't people coming back and buying my courses? I have very reasonably priced courses. Well, they're talking themselves out of it because they think that's really unattainable. This is just inspiration and not something that is doable today. And so that's really where we get into the situation in which we want to make sure that you're giving them something where they can visualize themselves in that place. Not someone who's so far light years ahead of where they are right now and today. That's when it can be really useful to use someone like that.

That's a good point, Tracy. Well, I hope you've really enjoyed this conversation about how to find the perfect podcast influencers and really what different types of influencers you might be looking for or considering as you go through your journey in this new media.

That's right. And as always, you can find all the information on brandcastingyou.com or feedyourbrand.co in the app and you can also find us on social media. Edyourbrand.

Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back next week with another great episode. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed.

You'd brand.

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