1 year ago, Chris Walker answered my question about podcast guesting ROI.
👇 We applied his advice and here’s what happened:
As many young businesses, we needed to clearly define who we want to work with.
Mostly because we were having a lot of discovery calls in a VERY inconsistent quality.
– Sometimes we talked to a $100M company executive…
– Sometimes we talked to a solopreneur…
– Oftentimes people didn’t show up at all…
But there was ONE common denominator:
Most of them struggled to understand the ROI of appearing on podcasts as guests.
🤯
They asked questions such as:
💬 “How many leads will I generate after one appearance?”
💬 “What will be the exact reach of my podcast interview?”
💬 “I need clients. How quickly will I make my money back?”
Good questions when you run direct response ads.
Bad questions when you’re trying to build your brand.
And that’s where we made a mistake:
Instead of focusing on people who ALREADY understand the value of podcast guesting (as per Chris’ advice), we started coming up with angles to address all of these objections.
But that was a dead end because…
…How do you put a number to educating your ideal customer at scale?
It’s impossible.
And although people KNEW it was beneficial to educate potential customers via podcasts, the inability of assigning some metric to each interview made it impossible to justify the campaign investment.
That was REALLY frustrating…
But then, I heard Chris on his podcast prompting the listeners to send him a DM with the questions they have.
So I did.
(I believe I was one out of less than 40 people)
And in just 2 sentences, Chris helped me to understand what we were doing wrong all along.
“The people who are asking about the ROI aren’t your customer. Your job is to educate & attract people that already see there is an ROI.”
And I realized that our service wasn’t bad. We just talked to the wrong people.
💡
Having that in mind, this is what we did: 👇
1. We listed our best customers
2. We conducted less than 10 in-depth customer interviews
3. We found qualitative patterns in how they THINK about podcast guesting
4. We used this information to tweak our messaging and produce better content
The result?
🎉 Now, most discovery calls are with qualified prospects who already understand the value of podcast guesting and don’t need to be sold on the opportunity itself.
🎉 The sales cycles get shorter because people need less education and the calls are mostly about how our process works.
🎉 And we’re about to hit our highest revenue month ever because these opportunities close at a higher rate.
In a nutshell: 👇
It’s impossible to attach the ROI figure to every little thing you do in marketing.
And it’s okay.
Because oftentimes, what matters the most to your buyer is simply impossible to measure.
