How to Get Featured On Podcasts for PR: The Ultimate Guide

This guide will teach you how to get featured on podcasts as a guest.

It’s written for two types of people:

1. PR professionals booking their clients or colleagues as guests on podcasts
2. Founders/experts/authors/spokespeople etc. booking themselves as guests on podcasts

Why? Because podcasts are the new media. And as someone who values PR, your job is to get your stories featured in the most relevant places for your product or service. Right?

To miss out on podcasts as a PR medium is to miss out on a huge opportunity.

Here are a few stats to get you going.

Want our proven Podcast Pitch Templates? They’ll get you booked on podcasts - get them here.

Why bother with getting on podcasts?

If you’re investing time and money in something, you better know why.

Here’s why.

People really listen to podcasts

And I mean really listen. 80% of people who listen to a podcast episode, listen to most or all of the episode. Compared to text or video content, this kind of engagement is completely unheard of.

It makes sense, though – most people listen in the car or at the gym. Or while they’re doing something else.

They’re captive and not at the behest of a million tabs in Chrome. On top of that, a placement on a podcast grants you a target audience for an interview that typically lasts 20-30 minutes, or more!

A lot of people are listening

144 million Americans (50%) have listened to a podcast. 90 million (32%) have listened in the last month. Here’s something interesting: an average episode of The Joe Rogan Experience (a popular podcast) is listened to 20-30 million times.

To put that in perspective, that is more people than the number of people who watched the final episode of Game of Thrones.

The media landscape has shifted and no one has noticed yet.

The audience is well-off and educated

45% of monthly podcast listeners have a household income of over $75K vs 35% for the total population. 27% have a 4-year college degree vs 19% for the total population.

Audiences are laser targeted

There really is a podcast for everything. You can go popular and broad if you like, or you can go super-niche and speak to the exact audience who would need your product or service. The choice is yours.

They’re growing like crazy

Podcasts are being touted as “the new media” and growing in listenership by 10%+ per year. And all of this is happening while traditional media is in decline.

The time for podcasts has arrived.

Sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2019/11/18/podcasting-is-going-mainstream/#25a95c921699

https://www.thepodcasthost.com/listening/podcast-industry-stats/

https://www.podcastinsights.com/podcast-statistics/

Want our proven Podcast Pitch Templates? They’ll get you booked on podcasts - get them here.

Who am I and why should you listen to me?

My name’s Simon Thompson and I’m a multi-time entrepreneur – PodSeeker is my current venture.

My previous business, Content Kite, used featured podcast interviews as a primary lead generation channel. That’s where I found out about the power of being a guest on a podcast as a PR outlet.

We also ran “podcast guest outreach” as a service for our clients, and I’ve been involved in the PR and media industry in general for about 8 years now.

It’s also where I learned about what podcast hosts and producers are looking for, and what they’re most likely to respond to in a pitch email, which we’ll get to.

You can listen to some of my appearances here, here, here, here, and here.

And here are some of the responses I got to pitches, and the types of responses you could expect if you use the principles in this guide.

So, enough about me, let’s get on with the guide:

How is getting on podcasts different to regular journalist outreach?

Fundamentally, getting featured in news publications and getting booked on podcasts is the same concept. You get yourself in front of a new audience through content – not ads.

But how you approach it is wildly different.

For starters, you don’t just pitch stories – you pitch guests. Maybe that’s yourself as the guest. Or maybe you’re doing PR for someone else. No difference.

Sure, sometimes a podcast host may feature your story independently of having a guest on the show, in the same way a journalist would feature a story in an article.

But more often than not, a podcast host will actually interview someone about your story or topic.

That means you or your spokesperson is in the listener’s ears for 20-30 minutes. That kind of engagement and exposure is golden, and where podcasts have an edge over other media formats.

Secondly, the outreach methodology is very different.

Podcast hosts and producers aren’t scouring the web and their inboxes for press releases and stories. Although they do have high content demands, they don’t have the same content demands as journalists.

They look for quality and personalization over quantity/corporate sounding press releases.

Thirdly, contact details for podcast hosts and producers have been much harder to come by (until now).

Mainstream journalists will often make their contact details publicly available, or they’ll be in a database like Cision PR or a multitude of other databases.

Until now, such a database hasn’t existed for podcasts – which is why we created PodSeeker, to solve that problem (click here to sign up).

Ok. So that’s why you want to get featured on podcasts. They’re powerful. Very powerful. So let’s get into how you actually get them booked.

What do I need for a successful podcast outreach campaign?

There are 3 things you will need to successfully get booked as a guest on podcasts:

1. List

Like any good PR campaign, you’ll need a curated list of podcasts that have an audience of people you’d like to reach. You’ll also need their contact details.

2. Pitch

A good reason for a podcast host to speak with you or your interviewee. As mentioned before, it’s got to be personal and punchy (and of course, ethical – we’ll get to this). No press releases, and no “corporate” language. Email is the preferred format of podcast hosts and producers.

3. Interviewee

The “talent” if you will. Someone who can talk about your topic/story of choice. They don’t need to be a media personality, they just need to be competent and able to talk at length about the topic at hand.

Ok. Let’s dive in to how to run this campaign.

Want our proven Podcast Pitch Templates? They’ll get you booked on podcasts - get them here.

Step 1: Build a podcast media list

Conceptually, there’s nothing new here for people who have worked in PR before.

Put simply, you build a list of podcasts that have an audience you want to access.

It could be a broad category like “tech”, or it could be a sub-category like “artificial intelligence”.

You also need to know who to reach out to… Is it the host themselves who handles the guest booking? Or do they have a producer who handles that? Or a booking agent?

It’s different for every show, which is why it’s a good idea to send your campaign to multiple people involved in producing the show. PodSeeker has multiple contacts available for each podcast (at least the big ones), so you’re covered there if you use our product.

How many contacts do you need?

It depends. If you have a guest who would be genuinely great for a particular show, you will be very surprised at how high the acceptance rate will be.

Podcast hosts and producers are typically starved for great guests, especially if they have guests once a week or more and have already gone through a lot of the industry experts.

What’s a “great guest”? It depends on the show.

Here’s an example: Mike McDerment is the founder and CEO of FreshBooks – an accounting software company. They typically serve SMBs and entrepreneurs in helping them with invoicing and bookkeeping etc.

FreshBooks might not be a household name. If Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks tried to pitch himself to The Joe Rogan Experience, he probably wouldn’t have much luck.

But if you’re an SMB or startup, you’ve probably heard of FreshBooks. Well, Mike McDerment basically has free reign to appear on pretty much any podcast for SMBs and entrepreneurs that he wants.

I personally know a couple of podcasters who have such podcasts, and have experienced the outreach from his comms team.

They said they received the email saying that the CEO of FreshBooks would like to offer value to their audience of entrepreneurs, and they jumped at the opportunity to interview Mike.

Because close to 100% of their audience has heard of Mike, and would find him an interesting person to hear from.

And why wouldn’t they? If you have a well-known figure or expert in an industry, offering their time to deliver value, to a podcast host or producer who has a never-ending need for content, they would love to hear from you.

Remember, the podcaster’s imperative is to continuously produce great content.

By offering a great guest, you’re giving them great, free content.

The podcast audience gets value by hearing a successful entrepreneur talk through their mindset and how they became successful, the podcast host gets free content, and FreshBooks gets exposure to the exact audience they want to be exposed to.

Win-win-win.

That all goes to say: if you have someone like that – someone who your target audience would want to hear from – you could run with a list of 10 niche podcasts and reasonably expect to be accepted on 5-8 of them.

That might be more than enough (remember, that’s 30 mins x 8 interviews, which might be more than your spokesperson has time for).

Below are some rules of thumb for acceptance rates, if you run a good email outreach campaign (we’ll get to the outreach in the next section).

Note this is not a scientific study with hard data, but is a good indicator of the ballpark you could be looking at. This is based on my own campaigns in the past, and conversations with other PR professionals running podcast outreach.

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Now, what you might notice is these acceptance rates are actually pretty high. Especially if you compare it to getting your story published in a text publication.

I should mention this is the result of a multi-email outreach campaign. You may not get a response on the first email – you need to follow up. But I’ll touch on that more in section 2 on outreach.

Sure, getting on a major podcast like WTF or the Joe Rogan Experience might seem difficult, but it’s really about timing – if you have an expert on a topic they want to cover at that time, you’re in business.

How do you know what they want to cover? Generally, trial and error. If you keep reaching out to different podcasts at different times, you’ll increase the probability that you hit them at a time where they want to hear from you or your guest.

But when you think about it, even if your acceptance rate is at the low end, say 2%, that means if you send 50 emails you’ll book a spot.

That’s a lot of emails, but it’s not absurd.

And a booking on a major podcast can be huge. Like, 1 million+ people listening to your spokesperson intently for 30 mins+. This ain’t no passing mention in an article.

To put it in perspective, an ad spot on a major podcast could cost you anywhere between $5k-20k for a 60 second read. Compare that to the “cost” of sending 50 emails, and the ROI starts to look pretty damn good.

And the acceptance rate only gets better as you move into more and more specific, niche podcasts – which by the way, you should do.

Which brings me to my next point:

Go for audience-specific podcasts before you go for the major podcasts

Often when I speak to PR professionals they want to get booked on massive podcasts. Like WTF, or the Joe Rogan Experience, or something like that.

This is not the correct approach.

Yes, those podcasts have huge audiences, but they don’t necessarily have the right audiences.

They’re also very difficult to get booked on if you don’t have a celebrity to offer up.

The podcasts that will be most beneficial are the more industry or niche specific podcasts.

If you want to reach accountants, go on podcasts for accountants.

If you cover multiple industries, go on multiple podcasts within multiple industries, and tailor your interview topics around them.

They’re less “sexy”, but they’ll yield better results.

Ok, so once you have access to contact details, add them to a list or export it as a csv.

Like I said, this is why PodSeeker exists – to get these email addresses for multiple stakeholders on the show, and do with them what you please.

If you don’t want to use PodSeeker, you could find the host, producer and/or booking agent on their website, Linkedin, or other sources. You would then need to find their email address, which there are many methods for which I won’t get into in this guide.

Note: often producers or booking agents act as third parties, so their email domain may be something completely different to the show’s website. And if it’s the host you’re trying to find, they often have different email addresses to that of their podcast website domain. This is because the podcast is often adjacent to something else they do. Maybe it’s their content marketing asset for a business they run, for example. And that business might have the email domain URL you need. That all goes to say, there’s a bit of digging that needs to be done here if you’re doing it by yourself.

So a few ways to go from here. You can add your newly found email addresses to a spreadsheet, or if you’re using PodSeeker you can add them to your media list, export it, and voila! You’re done! A well curated, targeted podcast list for your outreach campaign.

It’s now time to move on to the outreach itself.

Step 2: Send your podcast outreach pitch

The way you pitch a podcast guest is different to how you pitch a press release or news feature.

In a phrase, it’s less corporate. More conversational. The value-add is clear. It’s to the point.

It starts with the person’s actual name: “Hi Simon”, for example. It’s an email from one person to another. I repeat: it is not in the style of a press release.

The very basic formula is this (but please read on as there’s some nuance to this):

[1. Intro – something legitimately personalised]

[2. Relevant topic suggestions]

[3. Brief background of your guest and area of expertise]

[4. Attach a one page media kit – optional]

If you like, I have an exact pitch template in another post.

Want our proven Podcast Pitch Templates? They’ll get you booked on podcasts - get them here.

There are a few key considerations:

Personalisation and relevance

The pitch is won or lost in proportion to how personalised and relevant it is to the podcast.

Remember, podcasts want your guest on the show – if they’re relevant and can provide value to their audience. It’s up to you to show them that’s what you’ve got to offer them.

These days, hosts and producers get pitched quite a lot.

The good news for you is that 95% of those pitches are god-awful. Which means it’s actually not that hard to stand out if you put in some homework.

So, before you reach out, do yourself and the host a favour by checking these basic items:

• Does the show even take guests?
• Is the show currently publishing episodes?
• Is your guest an “instant no”? E.g. “The Marketing Book Podcast” only interviews authors of marketing and sales books. If your guest is not an author, they’re an instant no.

This is the baseline. You must check these things, otherwise you will get a “no”, or no response, and damage your reputation with this podcast.

The next step goes a little further.

You need to make sure that now is a good time to reach out.

For example, if you’re reaching out to a B2B marketing podcast, and you have an email marketing expert as your guest, check to see that they haven’t featured an email marketing expert recently.

If just 2 episodes ago they were speaking with an email marketing expert, you can be certain they will have no interest for quite some time to interview another one. So please take that into account.

If they haven’t interviewed an email marketing expert, incorporate that into your pitch – that will impress them. For example:

“I was going through some of your past episodes and I noticed you hadn’t covered the topic of email marketing. I’m working with XYZ and he/she’s a renowned expert in email marketing, and has published a book/created a blog/hosts a podcast on the topic. Based on what I can see about your podcast, I thought it would tie in nicely with the other episodes you’re producing. He/she can speak at length on any of the below topics related to email marketing.

• Topic 1
• Topic 2
• Topic 3

Would this be valuable to your audience?”

One thing I will say is this: use dot points for topic suggestions. Dot points draw the eye. We need to assume that some people will just skim it (even though it’s only 100-150 words).

• Dot points stop skimmers in their tracks.
• Use them wisely.

Remember: if you’re offering a great guest, with great, timely content, a podcast host/producer really wants to hear from you. Make it easy to say yes by being personal, relevant, and helpful to them.

Tone and format

The number one tip I have for this kind of email in terms of tone is this: write like you talk. Be a human, and for goodness’ sake don’t over-corporatise it.

Keep it to ~100 words or so. 150 absolute max. Longer than that and your email just won’t be read. Would you read a long email from someone you don’t know? Remember – these aren’t journalists who are waiting to hear from you. They’re not waiting to read long stories from PRs. You need to be punchier.

Which leads to our next point:

Offer to promote the content far and wide

Podcasts want to grow their audiences. Generally speaking, that is their #1 goal when it comes to their podcast. It helps them get better sponsors, better guests, better production value, better lead generation if that’s relevant – the list goes on.

If you can help them achieve a bigger audience, let them know. The best way to do that is if you have an audience.

That could be in the form of an email list, a Twitter following, a large personal network, a lot of Linkedin followers – whatever it is, leverage it. If your company has a large newsletter list of 10,000 people, say you’ll send an email featuring the interview to the list when it’s published. That will be music to the ears of a podcast host or producer, and will make you stand out from everyone who is not offering that.

Media kit

A media kit is an outline of why a podcast should feature your guest.

It should make the person look good, and add some professionalism to the mix. It should be no more than one page, and it should have all of the details a podcast host or producer would need to know before having your guest on their show.

A good media kit needs the following:

• Short bio and area of expertise
• Headshot
• Who to contact for podcast appearances
• Relevant links: social media, website etc.
• Potential topics
• Meeting booking links (e.g. Calendly)

It should look nice, but not overloaded with content. One page.

Pro tip: when you write a cold outreach email, it can be beneficial to reduce the “ask” to the lowest point of friction possible in the interest of getting a response. So instead of asking if they would have your guest on their show, you could ask if they’re interested in seeing your media kit. This is a lower friction ask and you’re likely to get more replies than if you just go straight for the booking. Then, once they’ve asked for your kit (and therefore indicated interest), you can maneuver the conversation into a booking.

Follow up, follow up, follow up

Very, very important. The first email often goes unread. You are leaving many bookings on the table if you only send one email.

You should send somewhere between 3-6 follow up emails, each separated by about 4-5 working days.

To some, that sounds like a lot. Like it would be annoying. But I promise you that you will significantly increase your success rate (by at least double) if you send 3+ follow ups.

People are busy. They get carried away. Timing is everything.

And since you can’t guarantee when will be a good time to reach out, you need to play the odds a little. If you keep the follow ups brief and well spaced apart, and you have a relevant guest and topic, you will not annoy anyone. Many will thank you for your persistence – trust me. I know this from experience.

Use something like this for the follow up:

“Hi Joe, circling back on this, do you think your audience would find value in any of the topics I mentioned? Let me know.”

And do that 2-3 more times. About 4 emails, over about 3-4 weeks. Don’t be annoying, just persistent. If you’ve never run multiple follow ups on your emails you will be baffled at how many people respond positively on the 3rd or 4th email.

Scaling up with some automation

Like I said above, it’s very important that these emails are personalised and relevant.

Which would make it sound like automation’s off the table. But it’s not. At least not entirely.

To be sure, it’s definitely not ok to load up a list of 10,000 podcasts and blast out a single generic message to all of them.

It’s unethical, a poor experience for the host/producer, and not mention completely ineffective.

But done sparingly and tactfully, automation can be your friend.

There are cold email outreach tools which allow you to automate what can be automated, and keep the personalised feel.

The emails come from your actual email account, in the format of a normal personalised email you would send to a friend, but you can scale it up and personalise what needs to be personalised.

One such tool I recommend is called Mailshake. You can upload a CSV, write out your pitch template and follow ups,  and then set the cadence (e.g. send follow ups every 4 days).

Then, here’s the cool bit: you can choose to add some personalisation to individual emails.

For example, you can set up a template to send to 50 people, but then you can go into each individual email and personalise some of the email for each recipient.

It’s the best of both worlds. You write your own pitch which is mostly the same for everyone (assuming all of the podcasts on your list are similar in nature), and then add a few lines of personalisation so the specific host/producer knows you’ve done your homework.

This will cut down hours in personally sending all of those emails, and then tracking who you need to follow up.

It’s up to you. But a little automation, without overdoing it, is a good thing.

Set up those campaigns to run over a few weeks, and boom! If you have a relevant guest, you reach out to the right podcasts, and you use the pitch in the templates post, I can virtually guarantee you will get booked on some shows.

Want our proven Podcast Pitch Templates? They’ll get you booked on podcasts - get them here.

Step 3: Podcast interview

Ok – you’ve booked a spot on a podcast with your target audience listening – great job!

Now what?

It will depend on the show to some degree, and for the bigger podcasts they will typically have a producer get in touch beforehand to prep your guest and let them know what to expect and what to prepare.

Outside of that, the crux is that your guest just needs to be able to talk competently about the topics at hand. Ideally, these are the topics you have pitched, so should be in their realm of expertise.

It’s a conversation

Sometimes you’ll get the questions in advance. Others you won’t.

In any case, this isn’t like a 6 minute TV interview where every second is scripted and planned.

They’re typically at least 20 minutes (and up to 2 hours sometimes!), and will be conversational in nature.

There’s no point trying to plan the interview minute by minute in a perfectly structured way.

The key is having a decent, well-rounded knowledge on the topic at hand, so you can speak freely and confidently about it. Like a normal person, speaking to another normal person.

If you’re pitching an accounting expert to a podcast aimed at small businesses, for example, this won’t be an issue – it’s just a matter of talking shop.

The host will ask you questions as a curious observer, and your guest will answer them. It’s a conversation.

Or maybe your guest is more well-known, and the host wants to hear their story. How they got to where they are now.

Again, that’s going to be fairly straightforward – tell the story.

The point I’m making is this. The guest you put forward needs to be competent at speaking conversationally, in an unscripted way, about a topic of expertise or interest.

They don’t need to be a “media personality” (although they can be).

If you listen to most guests on podcasts, they’re quite “normal”. They’re just people giving their advice, stories and opinions.

Have a story

It’s hard to say what you should prepare for (if anything), because every show will be so different, and like I said – it will be a natural conversation more than anything.

But if there’s one commonality that’s likely to come up in any podcast you do, it’s your backstory. How did you get to be where you are now? Why are you the person to listen to on this issue?

Have a think about that. Put some structure to that story. Make it interesting. It will need to be brief so don’t overthink it, but put some thought into it.

A typical story structure might be:

• “I started my career doing A”
• “But then B happened and everything changed”
• “So now I spend most of my time doing C”

Hero’s journey kinda thing. Hero, obstacle, goal.

Obviously, this is going to depend on the context of the show – that structure might not be relevant (and it might not apply to you). If that’s the case, do something else. But if you can fit that model, it’s a nice way to start things off.

Don’t pitch your product or service

Unless it’s very relevant to the part of the conversation, or if the host asks you to.

Even so this should be done in a humble manner, and should be more of a passing mention than a pitch. Don’t over do it.

People are not listening to a podcast to be sold something. They want education and/or entertainment. Give them that, and if they like you, it will naturally lead to further investigation about what you do.

Trust me on this. Value first. The return will come.

Have a call to action

At the end of the show, the host is very likely to ask you something like “where can people go to find out more about you?”

This is an opportunity.

Many people will say “you can visit my webpage”.

Or, “follow me on Twitter”.

That’s nice and all, but you’re leaving a lot of audience on the table.

If you have the time, the optimal thing you can do is create some sort of giveaway. A leave behind. A “lead magnet”.

Something of additional value you can direct the audience to go and find.

If you set up a landing page with an email opt-in, and genuinely have something of value for the audience, you can earn more authority in the audience’s mind, and at the same time collect some email addresses so you can further market to these people.

For example, if you’re the CEO of an accounting software company, and you spend 30 minutes talking about “streamlining your accounting process” on an accounting podcast…

You should give the audience something related to streamlining your accounting process.

Maybe it’s a discount for your book on this topic. Or a guide. Or in the case of software, you could give away a free trial.

It’s just got to be a) additional value and b) relevant to the audience.

If you do those things and they provide you with their email address, you can bring people over from the podcast’s orbit, into your orbit.

With their email address happily provided to you, you can communicate with those people on your own terms now, and that’s valuable.

Logistics

Again, there will be some variation here.

If it’s in person, it probably means the podcast is the real deal. You’ll very likely have a detailed set of instructions on where you need to be and when. Get a good sleep, drink some coffee, dress nice.

Then have a conversation.

If it’s remote, the one thing I will say is this: get a good microphone and accessories. This rig will cost you a little over $100 and is very, very worth it:

• Audio Technica ATR-2100 USB Mic. It’s a great USB microphone and plugs directly into any computer. No mixers and amplifiers necessary. Sounds like a professional mic (Tim Ferriss, #1 podcaster, uses this mic). You can get it on Amazon here.
• Simple desk boom. You don’t want to hold the mic in your hand because the sound of it moving in your hand will come through on the recording. You also want free hands. A desk boom will ensure you have free hands and clear sound. The Heil Sound PL-2T Overhead Broadcast Boom does the trick nicely.
• Pop filter. Attach this to your mic boom and cover up the mic. This helps block excessive “P” sounds and air coming through the mic. It’s more important than you think. This one here is good.

Like I said, for just over $100 this setup is very worth it if you want to come across as professional.

There is nothing worse than hearing a great expert talk through terrible audio quality. Don’t be that person.

Conclusion

And that’s it!

List, pitch, interview. This doesn’t need to be so hard, but it does need to be different from your traditional journalist outreach.

Just remember to be more of a human when you pitch, do something to stand out, and have a normal conversation in your interview. Don’t be a robot. Don’t be “corporate”. Be real.

Again, you’ll find some great pitching tips in our templates post, including the exact pitch template I’ve used before on dozens of podcasts and I know for a fact works.

Want our proven Podcast Pitch Templates? They’ll get you booked on podcasts - get them here.

Also, as mentioned – if you need a podcast media database to get all of those contact details for hosts and producers, that’s what PodSeeker was built for. You can sign up here.

Thanks for reading, happy outreaching.

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