How Professional Services Firms Can Use Podcasts To Connect With Leads

Many professional services firms do not have a marketing department or team. Quite a few don’t even have a single dedicated individual who focuses on promoting their company.

Often, sales and marketing fall to the owner, director, CEO, COO, or a high-level company leader. They already have their hands full, and building a successful lead-generation strategy quickly becomes an afterthought.

While you need tactics that generate revenue now — you also know that focusing solely on the “here and now” will leave you constantly chasing the next lead.

Organisations that are looking to grow need to strategize their lead-generation into something repeatable and reliable in order to have business stability and predictable growth.

That’s where podcasts come in.

With the right approach, you can use your podcast episodes to connect with potential customers and build a relationship long before they even signify interest in your services. Podcasting gives you short-term returns while building content and relationships for long-term growth.

Let’s explore the details of how to use podcasts to connect with leads and see how you can reap the benefits for your organisation. Before we do that, let’s even understand what Podcasting is.

What Is Podcasting?

A podcast is a series of audio content episodes, focused on a particular theme. In a world where everyone is constantly on the move and people crave more information, podcasting has become a great way to share content and an important piece of the marketing pie.

The purpose of Podcasting is to create conversations that help to solve the pain points or challenges that your ideal prospects and/or clients face. These conversations can feature different guests and thought leaders who have expertise in the subject area. Some of these guests can even be Clients or prospects and it may lead to sales opportunities in the future.

Podcasting opens a door for you to create genuine relationships with industry experts, thought leaders, and your ideal clients. Asking prospects and clients to be your podcast guest allows you to break the ice and get one-on-one time with your target customers while also sharing real insights from people who have real experiences on the topic of discussion. For example, I was recently featured as a guest on the Picha Podcast where i shared insights on Influencer Marketing. You can listen on Picha blog or listen on Soundcloud

What is Account-Based Podcasting?

Account-based podcasting is a podcasting strategy that concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market and seeks to help solve the subject challenge for that market.

3 Benefits of Account Based Podcasting

Benefit #1: One-on-One Time With Your Ideal Customers

If you’ve ever done any prospecting like cold calling or cold emailing, you know how quickly people will give you the cold shoulder. It’s rare to come across someone who will respond positively to your message.

No one likes to receive some random sales pitch from someone they don’t know, so you’ll be ignored or worse. These days, if they choose to take offence, they can easily call you out on social media.

With account-based podcasting, you can make cold emailing work for you in a way that you couldn’t before. Instead of a sales pitch, you’re offering to promote them on your show for free.

Most people are flattered when asked for an interview. Because of that, it’s relatively easy to get people to be a guest on your podcast.

Use a template like the one below when you do your outreach, and you’ll likely have your first few guests lined up in no time. I’ve included a template shared by Bernie Borges at the last HubSpot Inbound 2020 Conference.

Sample Outreach Template

Template in Action

Using this strategy gets you talking with your ideal customers fast, and it enables you to build relationships with them naturally. You stand a much better chance of converting them into paying clients in the future should the need arise for them to use your services.

Benefit #2: Each Episode Creates Several Types of Content

When recording your podcast episodes, don’t make the mistake of recording just the audio. Record your interviews using video so that you can get the benefit of creating multiple types of content simultaneously.

You can upload the video to your YouTube channel and publish it on your website with a blog. You’ll also get the benefit of turning your video into an audio-only file so you can share it on all the podcasting channels.

If you use a program like Descript, you can generate a transcript of the video for use on your blog or podcast show notes. Descript even lets you clean up your “ums” and “uhs,” and fix mistakes without re-recording the episode.

Producing and publishing all this content allows you to generate backlinks and increase your website’s search engine ranking. In the meantime, with your podcast, you’re building authority in your industry, creating brand awareness, and opening doors to potential clients.

Benefit #3: It Establishes You as a Thought Leader

Have you ever noticed that when you hang around experts, other people assume you’re an expert too? If not, you’ll definitely start to notice it when you launch your new podcast show.

Not only will people assume you’re an expert, but over time, you’ll become one. The longer you do the show and the more people you interview, the more you’ll learn about your ideal customers.

You’ll come to understand them and their industry on a whole new level because you’ll continuously hear insiders’ perspectives from your guests.

As a bonus, you’ll clarify your messaging and improve your services with the more you learn about your customers.

Get Started With Account-Based Podcasting

At Ziza Digital, we’re experts at digital and Inbound marketing and regularly work with Professional Services forms to help create awareness, engage with prospects and generate leads. We know what it takes to implement an account-based podcasting strategy, and we can help you do all the heavy lifting that producing and publishing each episode takes. Book a free consultation now so you can start account-based podcasting sooner rather than later.