Being a Guest on a Podcast: 7 Ways to Promote Your Interview

Being a guest on a podcast is an excellent opportunity to place your brand in front of new audiences. It builds your network and allows you to lend a voice to your thought leadership and expertise. It can even serve as a way to build an audience for your own podcast.

A bigger benefit, though, is that being a guest on a podcast is usually a free marketing activity. It requires time, effort, preparation, and promotion, but the actual booking of the spot is usually one that requires no out-of-pocket expenditure.  But the surprising thing is, many people fail to get the benefit of being a guest because they don't promote that specific episode to their own audiences. 

As a podcast host myself, I’m constantly baffled at how little promotion the guests on my show do of their own appearances. While I understand the battle it takes to reject the idea of being “arrogant” or “self-promotional," if positioned correctly the guest podcast interview is less about YOU and YOUR COMPANY and more about the content you have to share! This is an excellent example from one of our favorite podcasts called "Build a Better Agency" with Drew McClellan - this episode is packed with knowledge bombs!

Being a guest on a podcast, regardless of the size of the podcast or the audience, is about sharing information that would be valuable, that enables the listener to take action or think differently as a result of your information.

When you connect emotionally with the podcast listener, you then have permission to say who you are and what makes you special. And that’s a green light to invite them to connect with you.

So, assuming your interview is sharing content that has value, let’s talk about the ways you can get more mileage out of your podcast interview!

7 Best Ways to Promote Your Podcast Interview (as a Guest)

When you've had the opportunity to be a guest on a podcast, the process doesn't just end when the recording stops. The next step is figuring out how to promote your podcast appearance to ensure it reaches the widest audience possible. So where do you promote your podcast? What's the best way to promote it?

1. Promote your podcast on social media

This one should come as a no-brainer, but it takes some strategic planning and execution.

If the podcast host does not share graphics with you that you can easily share on social media, ask first. They may be willing to create some for you (if they don’t have them already) so that the branding of the show carries through your posts.

If not, you can have a designer put custom graphics together to post on social media. Keep in mind that the title of the show is one thing you could post, but you can also pull out quotes from your interview or even behind the scenes photos to make it more interesting.

If you want something simple, consider creating quote images. For these, take some memorable or insightful moments from the interview and turn them into visually appealing images.

Make sure to tag the podcast and/or organization when you post to social media as well.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to schedule out at least 5-7 social media posts about the interview (double that for Twitter/"X" as the half life of a tweet is super short!). If you’re posting on Instagram or Twitter, use relevant hashtags for the content as well as the podcast medium.

In your posts, use different teasers and images, and spread the promotion out over a few weeks as to not overwhelm your audience with the same message.

2. Send a specific email campaign to your email list

The interview should find its way to your email list – whether it’s a feature in your newsletter, or a specific email campaign inviting people to check out the content.  

You can choose whether you want to link to the episode on iTunes or the landing page on the hosts' website, or your website (if you happened to embed the podcast player on your own site).

3. Add to your email signature

You know that little area at the bottom of each email you send from your personal or work email account? That’s one of the most underutilized pieces of marketing real estate! 

Check out this example from Evolving SEO, as originally posted on the Moz blog:

We send hundreds of email messages each and every day. Whether replying to a customer or sending a sales sequence, update your signature with a call to action to listen to the podcast episode.

4. Create soundbites from the show content

If the host provides you with the mp3 file, you can use it to create your own audiograms – which are basically “audio thumbnails” that work in social media and on websites.

Audiograms have emerged as a powerful tool for podcast promotion. Usually 15 to 60 seconds long, they offer an engaging way to tease out specific segments of the interview, grabbing attention and capturing interest.

Rather than merely posting a link to the interview, audiograms present a more dynamic and captivating method to draw listeners in. One of the advantages here is that you can extract multiple audiograms from a single interview. This allows you to showcase particularly eloquent segments or emphasize parts that would be especially beneficial for the audience to hear.

Use a service like Descript to easily turn audio clips into mp4 video files optimized for social media.

Pro tip: always add captions. Not only does this make your content more accessible, but it also ensures that even if someone is scrolling without sound, your message still gets across.

5. Transcribe the interview and create a blog post.

Audio content is still not as easily indexed as written content (though with automated transcripts on platforms like YouTube, this is improving) – so it pays to have the interview transcribed and crafted into a blog post. Here you can also link out to resources mentioned during the interview, or other information that the show deems relevant.

Again, here tools like Descript provide an easy way to extract automate transcripts from your audio files, and allow you to edit out filler words (and even fix misspoken words).

For maximum effectiveness, you’ll want to also embed the audio file in case the reader decides they do want to listen to show instead of reading it.

From there, you can even create a summary of the interview or identify key moments, for use in other promotions. This is the type of text processing task that ChatGPT excels at, so you can speed up the more mundane parts of marketing.

Learning to repurpose content is more than just copying text from one place to the next, so make sure you're doing it effectively.

6. Deploy the interview as a resource in your sales process

One of the best parts of a podcast interview is the realness of the content. The listener gets a feel for your personality and expertise as if they were in the room with you. If you’ve ever listened to someone on a podcast, and then met them in person, it’s like meeting an old friend because your brain has already registered that voice as a trusted authority.

Because of this, podcast interviews should be leveraged in the sales process. Use them as follow-up with prospects who may have gone silent, or as an introduction to a company who may benefit from your services.

Consider the following example:

The key to this is thinking about the show in advance so you can frame the interview and topic.

For example, if one of the Simple Strat team members was on a podcast talking about how we used HubSpot to grow our web traffic by over 200% in 2017, that would be an excellent piece of content to send to a prospective client who was considering our HubSpot services.

You can create a page on your site to house these podcast interviews, which is beneficial because when you send the episode to a contact, they’ll come to your site to listen rather than heading to iTunes, Google Play, or other podcast host providers.

7. Give other companies and contacts a shout out in your interview

When you’re recording the interview, see if you can sneak in mentions of other (non-competitive) brands or contacts. This allows you to tag them once the interview airs and you may be able to score some additional promotion from their company as well.

Loved recording this #podcast episode with @GinaTrimarco! We talked thought leadership, marketing, and process. Plus we gave a shout out to some of my favorite shows (@HowIBuiltThis @DrewMcLellan @S_M_Examiner) https://t.co/536zcigp7X pic.twitter.com/HFnWXMF1Xz

— Ali Schwanke (@alischwanke) January 23, 2018

This is a hack for sure, but has to be thought of in advance!

Promoting your podcast episode has long-term benefits too

As the author talks about in this article on Forbes about being a good podcast guest, you’ll find that podcast hosts LOVE when guests promote their interview. And when done right, it just might land you on the “top favorite guests” lists and open doors to more connections and invitations.

To ensure you’re going to be one of their favorites, here’s a quick review of how you might promote your guest podcast interview:

• Promote on social media (multiple times)
• Send as an email campaign
• Add to your email signature
• Create short soundbites
• Transcribe the interview and craft a blog post
• Deploy it in your sales process
• Give other companies a shout out

Still looking for more ideas? Tweet us your question about how you might promote your podcast episode, and we’ll be sure to tweet a few ideas back!