How MeetEdgar uses podcasting to grow.
MeetEdgar is a tool that makes scheduling social media posts easy. It was created by Laura Roeder in 2014, to solve her own pain. She wanted a way to make scheduling social media content easier, so she bootstrapped MeetEdgar and 6+ years later, the company is thriving.
We reached out to Laura, and she graciously agreed to be our very first guest. What we didn’t know, was how powerful podcasting had been for MeetEdgar’s growth. And since Laura always strives to be generous and bring as much value as possible to listeners, this episode is tactical, practical, and full of takeaways.
Highlights
The power of podcast tours.
“Pound for pound, I think a brand is always better off being featured as the content rather than the advertiser.“
Laura doesn’t hide the fact that getting invited on as a guest to other people’s shows is the #1 way MeetEdgar has gained customers. At one point, she makes the analogy that podcast tours (being a guest on other shows) is like guest blog posting, but without all the work of writing and editing an article.
Essentially, when you’re a guest on someone else’s show, you get to talk directly to the audience they’ve worked hard to build up. Which is an amazing opportunity, but also a weighty responsibility. One that she takes seriously.
Bringing value to listeners.
“Be like-able, be authentic, and be yourself. I don’t come in with talking points where I’m trying to promote my company. No one wants to listen to an advertisement. I find that the value of podcasts is forming a personal connection between the people behind the brand, and the customer.“
Given how powerful podcast tours have been for Laura and the ME team, it might be temping for some to just “rinse and repeat” that process. But Laura is always very thoughtful about her guest appearance.
With each one, she strives to do 2 things:
- Drop any canned pitches/selfish focuses, and be as authentic and relatable as possible.
- Bring as much value as possible to the listeners.
This means that for each interview, she’s thinking about who the audience is, and trying to bring insight or value that will make their lives better.
She also points out that podcasting is uniquely powerful in that, unlike almost any other medium, it allows listeners to feel like they “know” your company. By listening to Laura talk for 30+ minutes and hearing her story, listeners are able to better relate to MeetEdgar and the values it stands for.
As we’d say, it “builds trust” unlike any other medium.
Everyone should try podcasting, in some form or another.
“I just think for so many companies it’s worth a shot. Audio is such a low resource medium.”
MeetEdgar has since started it’s own show, and Laura recommends that every company try audio in some form or another. She points out that if you have customers, they probably listen to a podcast. Which means you can reach them there.
You don’t have to do podcast tours (like she did) either. There’s ads, creating your own show, or even creating an employee-focused show.
But she does recommend that everyone try it as a marketing channel.
And loads of practical tips.
Besides the main takeaways, Laura shares really nitty gritty practical things, like how she devotes 1 week every month as “podcast week”. During this week, she books as many as 4 interviews a day, and 20 in a week. This allows her to knock out a bunch of interviews in a short time frame, so she can get back to doing other work the rest of the month.
Check em’ out
Full transcript
Erik:
What's up everybody? It's Erik here. I'm super excited for this one. This episode is with the founder of MeetEdgar, Laura Roeder. Laura has used podcast guest appearances to grow MeetEdgar in such a way that she told me during this interview, which you'll hear, it was the number one source of new customer signups based on the data that she reviewed, the survey followups and the conversations that she had with customers and asked, "Hey, where did you hear about MeetEdgar?"
And she said predominantly the number one answer to that question was the podcast guest appearances that she was on and that she did. She did at least a hundred. We talked a little bit. She didn't know the exact number, but it was definitely at least a hundred and probably closer to 200 interviews over the years talking about her experience running and growing MeetEdgar, which led to a ton of inbound leads and new customer signups.
Erik:
In this episode, we really covered how she did it. How did she get these guest appearances lined up? How did she think about performing her best during the interviews? Because it's one thing to get the interview, but how do you actually go about the interview itself, and expressing yourself and your company in a way that is very dedicated to listeners but also to talking about your company. We also talked about how to attribute the results from something like this, because podcasting is a little bit difficult sometimes for attribution. We covered a lot in this episode. I had so much fun talking with Laura. She was awesome, and I know you guys are going to love this one. Enjoy.
Laura Roeder is here with me today. Laura, welcome to the show and thanks so much for being here.
Laura:
Yeah. Thank you, Erik. I'm excited to talk podcasts with everybody.
Erik:
Yeah, likewise, likewise. I'm super excited to chat because I've really noticed from afar paying attention to what you all have been doing and the guest appearance strategy you've used with podcasting as a marketing strategy, and really just kind of excited to dig in on the impact that's had for MeetEdgar here. And so, maybe just starting off, could you just give an overview of what MeetEdgar is and why you launched it?
Laura:
Yeah, so MeetEdgar is a social media marketing automation tool. It's really for entrepreneurs who market via creating content. Whether that's a podcast or a YouTube series or good old-fashioned blogging, you are a creator, you're creating content that promotes your business and you want to make sure that you're spreading content on social media. That's what MeetEdgar does for you automatically.
Erik:
That's amazing. And I know it was actually something that you created out of your own need, right, back in the day when you first launched it?
Laura:
Yeah, absolutely. Before I launched MeetEdgar, I was in the social media marketing space as a teacher, a course creator, teaching small businesses how to do social media. And I mean the problem back in 2014 is the same problem that people have in 2019, which is that social media is just a lot of work, especially if you're a solopreneur, you're the owner of the business, and you're also doing all the social, which is very common for our customers.
Laura:
Keeping all these channels updated with all this content, I saw that so many people, like myself, were creating original content, original status updates every day for the rest of time. It's like, "Okay, I'm supposed to post multiple times a day on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook." We didn't even have Instagram then so we could forget about that one at least. LinkedIn, and I have to come up with all these original updates.
Laura:
And I started looking at the social media stats on my accounts and I'm like, "Wait a minute, 5% or less of the people that follow me see the status update, why don't I just send this again?" Especially if it was effective, right? Especially if it got shares or got people to click. I started putting together this complicated spreadsheet that I would teach other people how to use with all of your social media and categories, and then you're cycling through it.
And then it was like, "Wait, why do I have a spreadsheet and I'm paying for social media software? Why doesn't my social media software just do this for me?" That is really the heart of why Edgar was created so that you can repurpose content, whether that's a different status update about the same blog post or whether that's sending the exact same inspirational quote over again on Facebook and it gets the same amount of likes and comments six months later, which is something that we see a lot.
Erik:
That's amazing. Yeah, and could you give a little context from where you started to where the company is today? Just in terms of team size or customers or revenue, just for some context there?
Laura:
Yeah, so we started five years ago and we have over 5,000 active paying customers today.
Erik:
Yeah, that's incredible. And someone so deep in social media marketing and marketing in general, this is what I'm super curious to talk about today with podcasting being a mix for your growth strategy. Just for a broader zooming out perspective, what marketing strategies, in general, from a high level have you used to kind of get to this point where you have 5,000 paying customers, which is a monumental achievement? And then we can kind of dive into podcasting specifically, but wanted to touch on that first.
Laura:
Yeah. For us, it has very much been about organic content marketing combined with social media marketing. We've played with a lot of marketing channels over the years. We have done and still do paid ads, but that's never been our primary driver of growth. When we look at our Google analytics to see where we get the most customers from, right now it's organic. It's always either organic or the frustrating category of direct, which actually as we can talk about that can actually mean podcasts.
A lot of the time, someone's listening to a podcast, they're probably either typing in your URL or they're doing organic, right. They're searching for the name that they heard on the podcast. Yeah, we've always been big on kind of just those basics of online marketing, of blogging, writing a really interesting, compelling email newsletter, and using social media to promote that content and grow our audience.
Erik:
That's great. Yeah, and let's dive in a little bit here on podcasting and the guest appearances you've done. I know you've invested a lot of time in this just from seeing how many interviews you've done, and I've listened to a lot of them, which have been awesome. I highly recommend everybody going and checking those out. But in terms of just a ballpark number of how many interviews you think you've done since launching MeetEdgar about five years ago, what would you say that is? And what really started this idea for you to invest your time and energy and resources into this strategy in general?
Laura:
Well, I've definitely done over a hundred interviews. I should try to figure out the exact number so I can impress everyone with that. But yeah, more than a hundred. It could be 200. I've I've done a lot of them.
And I would say kind of where the initial idea came from... Well, I used to teach an online marketing course called Creating Fame, and Creating Fame was all about how to make yourself famous in your field. How to use online marketing to be the go-to person for whatever you do. And in Creating Fame, we would talk about something called OPC, other people's content. If anyone knows the real estate world, they like to talk about OPM, which stands for other people's money, leveraging other people's money to do real estate deals. In the online marketing world, OPC is other people's blogs, other people's podcasts.
When I initially started teaching Creating Fame back in 2009, it was very much about guest posting. That was a really popular strategy at the time where you would write a guest post on someone else's blog, which by the way is still a strategy that can work really well. But then it was much less about social media and it was much more about the company's blog or person's blog as their main property.
The whole idea of OPC is, okay, you can build up your own channel, right, your own blog. It takes a long time to get traffic to your blog. It takes a long time to grow your listening audience for your podcast, or you can just leverage OPC, right? Because when I'm on someone else's blog, I didn't have to work for 10 years to build up that audience like they did. I just get to show up on their blog and I get to take advantage of that readership that they have there, right?:
Same thing with a podcast. As all the people listening, you know, that have started podcasts know, it is a lot of hard work to build up your audience for a podcast, right? You put your blood, sweat and tears into every episode and promoting them and growing your audience. You can do that for yourself and/or I can just jump on here with you, Erik, and I can get to have a little shortcut for all the hard work that you've already done, right? You've already built an audience.
When I started MeetEdgar, guest posting was becoming a little less of a thing, but podcasts were much more of a thing. I thought, "Well, I could start my own podcast... " And these strategies aren't mutually exclusive. You can absolutely have your own podcast and to be a guest on other people's, but I'm like, "Man, especially while I'm starting the company, why don't I just jump on other people's podcasts?"
And what's so cool about being a guest on a podcast is it requires little to no preparation. If you're writing a guest post, you have to write the thing. There's probably going to be some back and forth with the blog, making changes. A podcast, I don't have to do the changes. The host has to do all the hard work, right? There's editing, but I don't have to do that editing. I get to just show up and talk about things that I love to talk about anyway. I just thought it was this way that I could really leverage my time to promote the business to a larger audience.
Erik:
Yeah. I love that. And so since you've been kind of pursuing this channel for five years basically, right? It sounds like right when you started the company. What trends have you seen change over that time, if any, with this?` Have you seen an increase in shows and an increase in quality content and opportunities for you in podcasting or is it kind of remained the same level? What have you really seen from that perspective?
Laura:
Well, the bar is definitely being set higher now, which is a great thing. Podcasts are just getting more professional in every way. It is harder to be a guest than it used to be because podcasts used to just all be so desperate for any guest. That you could sort of pitch any of them.
And now, some of the podcasts that I'm pitching, I mean, I certainly get turned down for some of the ones that I pitch. How I Built This, I would love to be a guest on. I don't think that's going to happen at this point in my career, maybe later. I'm not going to spend my time pitching that one.
When I started, those really professional-level podcasts, like How I Built This did not exist. Podcasting was much more homemade. That was just much, much smaller. I love that the quality of podcasts have improved, the thought that people put into their podcasts have improved. But there are more of them that do have a higher bar for being a guest, which is a good or bad thing, I guess, depending on how you look at it.
Erik:
Yeah, for sure. Ultimately, I think it's a good thing because better quality content is kind of a flywheel effect. Well, it'll just attract more listeners. The supply of shows is increasing, but the demand is also increasing. The listenership is continuing to grow, that we've seen at least, quite a bit year over year. And so just more people are getting interested in starting shows, but the competition now is quite high, to your point. You have to actually really care about that content and how you're putting that out there.
Erik:
And this show's all about from the brand perspective. Not so much from individuals out there who have their own solo businesses, but more so from the brand perspective. And I'm curious, do you have any opinions on how brands should determine if podcasts guest appearances or podcasting in general is a strategy they should invest in? Is this something you think, based on your experience, every brand should be doing to some capacity or only those that fit a certain criteria?
Laura:
Well, podcasting is obviously a great channel to reach. I mean, I would think pretty much every audience. I think there's a podcast for everybody, right? I can't really imagine a demographic that isn't listening to some podcast. I mean, if you're over 70, I guess there's less people listening, but I mean there's still people listening.
Laura:
I think it can definitely be a great strategy for most brands, and I think the way you look at it sort of depends on your strengths and your resources. For us to MeetEdgar, we're a bootstrapped company. We're a small company. We didn't have the MailChimp budget to invest in sponsorship. If I were a larger brand, that might be a place that I would start because you can just throw money at it and you can make some really cool creative ads, and you can get your brand in front of how I built this type of podcast, right, in front of really huge audiences. That wasn't an option for us.
If you're working with less budget or if you're smaller, pitching yourself as a guest is a way that you can get even better exposure than an ad, of course, because an ad is an ad and people skip over them. A guest is, of course, the content of the podcast. Pound for pound, I think a brand is always better off being featured as the actual content than they are an ad, although both can be valuable.
I think at that point, it's just looking at the talent in your company and seeing who's a good fit for it. I'm someone who enjoys public speaking, so podcasting is just super easy. Public speaking, is just even easier and less stressful. And so I think find someone like that at your company who enjoys speaking, who likes being on the stage, the virtual stage in this case. And yeah, I'm sure there is valuable content that you can share that's related to your company.
Erik:
Totally agree. Yeah, and that's the beautiful thing is it's a long-tail kind of medium. There's a show on almost every topic no matter what your target audiences that you're going to reach. Some have less shows than others. If marketing is your niche, there's hundreds of marketing shows. But if HR is your niche, there's going to be less, but they're still there.
And so, yeah, I think that's great advice and actually kind of perfect segue into some of the nuts and bolts of this. How do you actually go about getting these opportunities lined up? You mentioned you pitch, is this you pitching yourself that you've created some emails that you send out or someone on your team does it, or do you outsource this? How do you actually source these opportunities in terms of just finding the shows and the contact info and the pitches?
Laura:
Kind of a mix. The most important thing that I want to point out is that we do pitch. A lot of people have the idea that you have to just sit around and wait to be asked to be a guest on a podcast. And I just want to be very clear, that is not what I've done. That's not the case. I have actively pitched myself as a guest.
The way that works, sometimes it's me, sometimes it's someone else from my team. We haven't used any agencies, although those are out there. What the pitch overview kind of looks like is thinking about how you will add value as a guest and what their audience is interested in specifically. We always customize every pitch, but it's not written from scratch for every podcast. We kind of have a list. Basically, it's the list of talking points that I think would be a match for their particular podcast. There might be 10 different talking points and we might pull like three or four of them that would be a match for that podcast.
Something else we haven't touched on, but you can look at different parts of your audience, right? For us, we are a tech company and a SaaS company, so we can take that angle and be on those podcasts. I am a woman and a mom, so I can be on a Female Founder and Mompreneur and those podcasts. We have a lot of customers who are freelancers, so we can be on those podcasts, which is really cool, right? There's a lot of different ways you can go. And obviously, you want to customize your pitch based on what the podcast is, what their audience is. My pitch for just a straight-up, we are a tech company, and here's how we function as a tech company is going to be very different from the pitch for I'm a working mom and here's what that looks like for me.
But the overview is, keep it short. You don't need a long history about yourself. They just sort of need to know one or two sentences about why you're a person anyone would be interested in listening to you. But it's really more about those talking points of what you're going to cover and what you can offer to their audience. Because it doesn't really matter if you have this really impressive pedigree because they're like, "Okay, cool. You have five degrees from Harvard, but what are you going to talk about on my podcast?"
You want to make sure the pitch is focused on, yeah, what are you going to talk about that's going to make their listeners click on that episode, right? That's what they're looking for. They're looking to release an episode that the listeners can see it on Stitcher, on Apple Podcasts and go, "Ooh, that one looks good. I'm going to listen to that one."
Erik:
And then when it comes to getting the yes, obviously there's going to be some no's, but then when you do get the yes, I actually read that you like to have a batch week out of every month to record these interviews. And I thought that was a really smart strategy because getting them scheduled and kind of scattered all over the place can actually be... Especially when it's a proactive strategy and you're doing a lot of them, the level of context switching that you could have throughout the day, I'm sure is enormous, unless you kind of have some strategy around that. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Laura:
Yeah, so I do batch them. I do one week per month that is podcast week, and I've done this for years. And the beauty of that is that if it doesn't work out this month, it can be next month, it can be the month after. A lot of people are recording really far out anyway, so setting a date for three months ahead of time is not crazy. And if it doesn't work out this week or you have to reschedule or whatever, it's usually not a big deal for people to go to the next month.
And as we all know for scheduling anything, giving people constraints is actually super useful rather than doing the any time, any day, any month. It just gets a little out of control. I do always have someone else in my company do the scheduling part. Sometimes I will pitch myself or sometimes it comes from someone else, but then I hand it off to someone else for the scheduling to make sure, because I'm not so good at making sure that will happen, and I want to make sure that happens.
And then the person who scheduled it, right now it's [Priya 00:20:02] at our company, she puts it on my Google calendar. If there's any questions I've been sent in advance or show notes, she puts that right in the calendar entry. I always ask for the person's email address in the calendar so that I can get in touch with them directly if there's any problems. It becomes this little self-contained thing where then the day before I can just look at my calendar for the next day and I can have all the information I need about the podcast that I'm doing.
Erik:
I think that's so smart. But one question I have with that is, running a company like MeetEdgar, the team you have and all the customers you have, allocating that week, I'm curious how many interviews you're typically doing throughout the week and how you manage the actual day-to-day operations during that week as well? Is this just something you bake in? The team knows that, "Hey, Laura is going to be kind of tied up doing all these interviews," during that time, so you've put some strategies or people in place to help carry that load? Or how do you actually make that work?
Laura:
The most I've done is four a day, like 20 a week. And I don't know that I've actually had a week that is booked out with 20 in a week. It's usually not that many in just one week. That's kind of the max that it can go. It does leave you time for other stuff. If I did have four in a day, of course, that would only be a half day of work. I mean, I don't always work full-time and I've had different roles at the company over the years. I'm actually out of the day-to-day at the company right now, but I have been more active in the past when I was also doing this podcasting strategy.
Yeah, it's just something, when I was more hands on, it's just something that people expect. I'm still there for several hours every day, so it doesn't feel like I'm totally absent and as someone who has always been very conscious of not having my company rely on me. If you are in a place where your company relies on you, maybe this is a great constraint for you. Just to have one week a month where people are knowing that you're a little less available and maybe they need to solve problems without you. Maybe that could be a great thing.
Erik:
It's a forcing function. Yeah, I love that. Let's kind of talk a bit about the outcomes you've seen and actually helping facilitate those to the highest degree possible. And what I'm curious about is two things. One, how do you navigate these interviews in a way that you actually turn listeners into customers, it gives yourself the best option and ability to do that? And then what have you actually seen? You mentioned earlier that when you look at the numbers and the analytics, it can sometimes go into this direct bucket and that's hard to measure, but can you talk a little bit about how you are able to measure this?
Laura:
Yeah, so as far as leveraging a podcast, I am not strategic about it. The best thing you can do is be likable and be authentic and be yourself. I don't come into podcast with talking points in the sense that I'm trying to promote my company. Like I said, sometimes I have talking points because they're valuable for that audience, but I'm not going, "Ooh, I want to make sure that we mentioned this feature of MeetEdgar, and I have to get that in the interview." Because no one wants to listen to an advertisement, right? That's not why they're here.
I find really the value of podcasts is just forming that personal connection between the people behind a brand and the customer. If that's the founder, that's great. I think people love knowing founder stories, people love connecting with a founder, but it certainly doesn't have to be the founder. People just like knowing the real people behind a company. And hearing someone that's authentic and likable and relatable, it's amazing how much that increases people's affinity for a brand.
Erik:
I couldn't agree more. Yeah, and especially if it's a first time doing interviews, I think takes some reps to get that comfortability and just being yourself. But being yourself is the best thing you can be for this and not having the agenda, like you mentioned, because that comes across very easily during interviews and it kind of turns people off.
Laura:
Yeah.
Erik:
And so on the measurement side or on the outcome side, can you talk a little bit about what you've seen from this? Any sort of boost or lift or direct customers or mentions on social media from your interviews? Or what have you really seen from all these interviews you've done?
Laura:
I want to say what hasn't worked because I see a lot of people go down this road. What has not worked is creating custom landing pages, email sequences, whatever, for each interview. I have gone down that road before and you end up, one, creating a lot of work. And two, now you've made like 40 landing pages for yourself that you have to keep updated. You have these rogue emails sequences that you have no idea what they say and are totally out of date and they're not right about your product anymore.
I would not recommend doing custom things for each podcast because it's just too time consuming. I mean, a lot of the ones that I'm on, do have a small listenership, right? I might form a really strong kind of relationship with those people that listen, but it's not thousands of people, right? It's not really worth the time to create something custom. It's more that thousands of people add up between all the different podcasts that I do. I don't create any kind of custom landing page or anything like that.
The number one way we know that the podcasts work for us is just asking customers how they heard of us. People say podcasts more than anything else.
People say either a friend told them or they heard us on a podcast, or both. And that's the other thing I think that we often forget. As marketers, we like to pretend that there's this linear path, right? We look at funnels. We're like first they hear us on the podcast and then they go to the website and then they give us their email address. That is not how real customer journeys happened at all.
How they really happen is someone sees MeetEdgar mentioned on Twitter and they think, "What is that?" Then they see an ad. They're like, "Is that the same thing?" But they don't click on it. Then they hear on a podcast and they're like, "Is this the woman from MeetEdgar? Is that the same... Oh, maybe it is." And then their friend mentions a month later and they're like, "Oh, I think I heard her on the podcast. Maybe I'm going to look that up." This is a real customer journey and we know just from asking our customers. Unfortunately, it's not data that we can see in analytics or Mixpanel a lot of the time. But when we ask our customers how they heard of us, podcasts very frequently come up.
And I think something that's very special about podcasts is people give them a lot of attention. You're often at the gym or in the car, right, listening to a podcast. And you're often really immersed in it, I think, in a way that people aren't when they're reading content online and trying to read four articles at the same time.
I think podcasts often get a lot of attention. And just hearing someone's voice, it feels a lot more personal than reading an article. Listening to a podcast where I'm talking about and explaining MeetEdgar and reading a blog post about MeetEdgar is just a podcast is much more memorable, especially if you already like that podcast, like the host, right? Maybe the host was asking the kind of questions that you're asking too. I think people tend to remember podcasts.
And I suspect that a lot of the people that say they hear about us on a podcast, maybe that wasn't the first time they heard of us. Maybe that wasn't the only time they heard of us, but they remember that, so that's what they're telling us.
Erik:
That's incredible. And it's something that we talk about a lot too, which is doing a bit of a tour like you've done here, that multiple touch points between different marketing channels. Maybe they've read a blog post, maybe they heard from a friend and then they've also heard your podcast.
Another thing that we've seen is people listen to multiple of your interviews. If you're going on similar shows, people will listen to two, three, four different interviews with you and they're just doubling and tripling down on learning more about you and the company. Yeah, I couldn't agree more at that. That makes me so happy hearing that podcasting is one of the top channels for you when you hear from new customers. That's amazing. I love hearing that.
Laura:
And it does get overlooked though because of the data, right? Because the only way we can know it is what people say, which is funny because we tend to be like, "Oh, well, what can you do with that?" But it's like, "Well, no, that's pretty valid." Just asking people, it's not fancy but you're getting whatever they perceive as the real answer to be.
I was listening to a podcast. I was listening to Wistia's podcast the other day, which is a great one, and they had a guest talking about how sometimes people would say... She was doing a lot of subway ads. And sometimes when they would ask people how they heard about the company, they would say from a TV ad, and they didn't run TV ads. It's still interesting because that's their perception. Even if you're like, "We don't run TV ads," the customer thought that they saw you on TV, and that's kind of an interesting data point.
Erik:
That's hilarious. And so do you guys capture this just with a form literally at signup or is there some sort of other sequence you do to get that information?
Laura:
We just do it every so often. It's not something that is asked of 100% of customers, just over the years. I mean, some of it is literally just talking to people anecdotally, and then over the years we have done more formal polls asking people. Or when they get the first email, asking them how they heard of us. Yeah, that's how we know.
Erik:
Awesome. Yeah. And then, so looking at the future here for MeetEdgar with podcasting and then just brands in general, what is your opinion? Are you continuing to double down on podcasting as a channel and where do you really see it going?
Laura:
Our strategy now... Well, one, we finally did launch our own podcast. It's called the Social Post.
It's still very new and small, but you can check it out for social media marketing, a quick, specific kind of tactical podcast. That's one thing we've done. We're definitely more all in on podcasting in that sense. And the other thing we're doing is just going after larger podcasts that maybe take a little more time to pitch. You have to be much more specific in the pitch that you're giving them. You want to listen to a few of their episodes before you're talking to them to really get a feel for what they're all about.
Another tip for that is looking for a referral for a podcast. I mean, this applies to any big or small. But if I'm pitching a larger one, I always want to be referred by someone else. That could be that I know someone who's been a guest on the show or that I know someone who knows the host. And what I'll often do is just write my whole pitch up directly to the host, and then I'll ask the person to pass it on because that's a lower commitment than introducing us.
Because making an introduction, now the host kind of has to deal with me. But if I'm asking you just to forward a pitch, if the host doesn't feel it's a fit, they can just ignore it. They don't have to worry about responding to me or me sending them a hundred follow-up emails that they don't want. That's the downside. I don't have their email address, so I can't follow up with them. But I've found that asking someone just to forward a pitch, people will almost always say yes because it's such an easy, low commitment thing to say yes to.
Erik:
Yeah, totally. And it's super interesting going down the large show route right now for you, And this is something we see and talk about a lot, especially when you're just starting with the strategy. Not swinging for the fences right away. Kind of getting a lot of reps in with small, if it makes sense niche wise, and category wise but medium shows. Medium shows are great. And you can really get some reps in there, build up some credibility that you can point to as social proof and really perfect your ability to give interviews before you go for these super large shows.
And so it's super interesting hearing you say that. I'm sure you've done some large shows to date, but kind of having that be the proactive strategy now after a hundred plus interviews, I think is the absolute perfect approach. And I'm excited to hopefully see you on How I Built This one day.
Laura:
Oh yeah. If anybody out there is listening and wants to introduce me, here I am.
Erik:
If we ever get a connect there, I'll try and make that hookup for you.
Laura:
Awesome.
Erik:
But yeah, kind of wrapping up here. If you had one final piece of advice for a company trying to decide if podcasting was a channel, just in general, guest appearances or their own show or advertising, anything you've seen work for yourself or others, what would you say as they're evaluating that decision?
Laura:
I think for so many companies, it's worth a shot because audio is such a low-resource medium. Obviously, if you're looking at video that is very, very cost heavy. You need professional people, you need professional equipment. It's harder to be good on video than it is to be good on audio, right? And audio, you can buy an amazing microphone for $60 bucks. You can spend $40 more dollars doing some soundproofing in your office, which I don't even have any of this stuff, just being a guest on one. The person who hosts ours has a little more of the fancy stuff for the one that we produce.
Laura:
But to me, it seems like why not just try the ones that are very targeted to you? Like you said, looking at that demographic, looking at that niche. A friend of mine hosts a podcast that just about... It's literally just about books. It's called Reading Glasses, literally just reading books, which seems kind of a funny-
... very abroad, but they have a very devoted, passionate listenership of readers. If you're an author or if you're a brand like Penguin, Random House or whatever, why would you not spend the $100 of resources to get a really nice audio setup to go on a podcast like that, right? Or maybe you want to create an ad that sponsor a podcast like that. It's just so targeted and it's so easy to do that it just kind of seems like a no-brainer to me.
Erik:
Awesome. Yeah. I love, love, love, love that advice and couldn't agree more. Super thankful for you taking the time here today, Laura. I know this is probably your batch week, so you have a lot of interviews going on. I won't keep you any longer, but really appreciate your time and super excited to continue following you and MeetEdgar. If people wanted to kind of keep up with you or the company, is there a specific place that'd be good to do that?
Laura:
Yeah, so you can find us at MeetEdgar on all the social media channels, meetedgar.com. We do have a coupon code for podcasts, so something else you can mimic at your brand is just PODCAST, all caps, and that gets you your first month free. As I was referring to before, we don't do specific tracking per podcast, I won't know which one you came from. And while we're being meta here talking about podcasts, we also find that people don't always use that coupon code, so I wouldn't use that as a super accurate metric for people who came from a podcast. But if you would like to use that coupon code, you can enter a PODCAST in all caps and get a month free to try out MeetEdgar.
Erik:
Awesome. Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks again so much, Laura. Really, really appreciate it.
Laura:
Thank you.
Erik:
Thanks for listening. I really hope you guys got a lot out of that. I know I did. Just hearing Laura's story and how she was able to systematically go about these podcasts guest appearances and use it as a very proactive channel and proactive strategy.
A lot of people think you can't get podcast guest appearances, unless someone asks you to be on their show. And we have found, and Laura saw, that the opposite is true. That you can actually line these up, and podcasters are looking for really good people to come on their show. And if you let them know you are one of those good people, and you raise your hand and do it in an authentic way, you can get those opportunities.
But always remember the first and foremost thing to think about when doing your guest appearances is think about what you're saying from the listener's perspective. It is not an opportunity to be self-serving, but more so focus on helping the listeners improve their lives or businesses. That's number one, and a byproduct of that will naturally be impact to your business. But don't think of these as a webinar. Think of them more as you giving advice to a friend, because that's ultimately the type of relationship you're looking to cultivate with listeners.
That's my two cents on that. Stay tuned for the next episode. We have some really great stuff coming out for this podcast, and really looking forward to getting feedback from you all. Hit me up, let us know what you think. I'm erik@lemonpie.fm. Feel free to shoot me an email or @erikbison on Twitter and Instagram. But regardless, I hope you all are having a great day and I will catch you all on the next episode.
