Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Robert
[00:00:07]
Hey eCommerce marketing podcast. Listen, I wanted to let you know that we have created the six month guide to marketing your eCommerce store. You can download this guide by visiting. Get osi.com/guide or by texting. Get OSI to 3 3, 4, 4, 4. This guide will show you how to demo traffic sales and conversions for your online store. Get the guide right now by visiting. Get osi.com/guide or by texting. Get OSI to 3, 3, 4, 4, 4.

Robert
[00:00:43]
Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Today’s guest is Tom sch and we’re going to be talking about podcast interview marketing. Tom shup knows how to build an online business and marketing at its heart is really about starting a conversation with someone who could be an ideal customer. Tom built his eCommerce business from a regional player to a national leader with this strategy. Now he helps small business owners, entrepreneurs, and solar entrepreneurs turn their listeners into leads by getting them featured on leading podcasts. Their prospects already listening to Tom is the author of podcast guest profit. Grow your business with a targeted interview strategy. Welcome to the podcast, Tom, how are you doing?

Tom
[00:01:27]
Hey, Robert, I am thrilled to be here.

Robert
[00:01:29]
Thanks for being here. And I’m excited about talking about podcast interview marketing, but before we get into it, why don’t you give us a background about your online business that you’re working on, that eventually you used podcast interview marketing as a marketing strategy for

Tom
[00:01:47]
Yeah, so we started a eCommerce business in 2008, 2009. And if anybody remembers back that far, that’s when the, the great recession was hitting. And actually we were in Michigan and the state of Michigan sort of led the country into the recession there. So one of the things we saw was we wanted to build this business, but we had to find creative ways to do that. And we were at that time, just a regional business, more brick and mortar. And so we thought, well, let’s go online. Let’s do it more eCommerce. And this was direct to patient durable medical equipment. And one of, one of the things that we saw was that, you know, we didn’t have the funds to, to buy the attention with all the ads. And I actually, I, I went through a phase where we built it with paper click, and I said, this just isn’t, isn’t scalable.

Tom
[00:02:35]
And so with that, I had read a, a book by two smart guys out of MIT called inbound marketing. And what they were talking about is using content to get the word out there, you know, using, using content to attract visitors and engage leads and really delight customers. And so we use that to take our e-commerce business from a regional player up to a national leader. And, and then, and then we sold that company. But one of the things we looked at is that content is king and, you know, content used to be just blogs. You know, now content is all kinds of things. It could be social media posts, it could be videos. Or one of the things that we’re finding works out best is using, you know, podcasts and podcast interviews, cuz ultimately we’ve all got a great product or service, right? It could, it, it could help somebody no matter where you are right now, there are people that you could help.

Tom
[00:03:30]
The biggest problem that most of us have is that those people don’t know about us, right. We’re obscure. And so, you know, changing, changing something, isn’t gonna help if they don’t know about you. Sometimes I, I use the analogy of, you know, you could, you could have the best store, but if it’s in the Sierra desert, you know, nobody’s gonna find it and changing the sign on the store or anything like that, isn’t gonna help because you know, you’re obscure. So really you’ve gotta find a way to get your message out there to go from obscure to acclaimed. And that’s one of the things we’ve seen, that’s so possible to do with podcast interviews.

Robert
[00:04:05]
Okay. So why don’t we jump into it and you can just lead us and show us how businesses eCommerce businesses can start. I’m I’m assuming start getting interviewed on different podcasts and then eventually they can use that those interviews to start getting customers, but you’re the expert. So why don’t we jump into it? And then you just let us know how you use podcasts to get more customers and grow your business.

Tom
[00:04:31]
Sure. So podcast interview marketing is really broken down into six steps. It’s it’s prospecting, pitching preparation, the performance progression, and then promotion. And if you don’t remember all these, don’t worry, just there’s a infographic that explains all of them. So if you’re, if, if you’re doing different things, you can get this infographic. I’ll just put it up at interview, ballet.com/ecommerce and everything that Robert and I talk about will be there. But the first step is really prospecting, right? There’s 400,000 podcasts out there. You just want to focus on the ones that your ideal customers are there. So from that standpoint, you don’t need to be on every podcast. You don’t even need to be on the biggest podcast. You need to be on the podcast that your ideal customers are listening to. So for example, somebody, the other day told me about pickle ball. I had never heard of it before.

Tom
[00:05:24]
It’s some, it’s something like tennis, but inside in like a squash court, but whatever, if you were, if you were selling pickleball equipment on eCommerce, there’s right now, eight podcasts dedicated to pickleball. So you’d wanna get on those podcasts and start to talk about your products, how you can help. And the same thing, if you’re selling dog equipment, you’d wanna get on pet lover shows, things like that. So trying to prospect and find those shows that your ideal customers already listening to. So prospecting’s the first step pitching is the second step, right? So how do you get that host to notice you and none of us like a cold call. So you want to, to find a way to make a warm introduction. And Robert is a podcaster. You know this, if, if somebody just comes up and says, I wanna be on your podcast, probably not.

Tom
[00:06:17]
But if they’ve already reached out to you on social media, if they’ve listened to some podcasts, maybe if they’ve shared some stuff, left a rating and review, and then they reach out and say, Hey, Robert, I’ve got this information that could help your audience. That’s the right way to do a pitch. The next step, really, after you get the host to say, yes is the preparation, right? This is your time to be in front of your ideal customers. And you want to prepare yourself. So you wanna have listened to a couple episodes of the podcast. So you know what the flow is, what questions they ask, what the tone of it is. And then the other thing is preparing the host, right? The host is busy. They’re not gonna spend hours researching you and your company. So make it easy for them, get them everything they need to do, need to know about you.

Tom
[00:07:05]
Your job as a podcast guest is not to go there and sell your product. It’s really to make the host look like a genius for having you on, right? Because that will get people to know like, and trust you and get ’em back to your site. Now, really the fourth step is the performance. And we even tell all, all of our clients that this is the one step that you can’t outsource, right? So we work with clients and we say, you’re the guest, we’ll take care of the rest, but they’ve gotta do the performance. And so the performance is doing things like, you know, getting on and, and telling stories, not just trying to sell something. And it’s also giving them more resources. And I’m gonna pull back the curtain here and, and show you exactly how it’s done. You’ve got to do something in order to move people from just being passive listeners, to active visitors to your site.

Tom
[00:07:56]
And if you remember back Robert, one of the things I said at the beginning was, Hey, there’s a infographic that it says all of this, and you can find that back at the website. You know, I could also say that, you know, we’ve got a checklist, that’s the six secrets to get on your first podcast. Well, that’s also, I can put that back on that, on the webpage. So these are things that add more value that help move people. So if you want that, you know, the six secrets to getting on your first podcast, I’ll, I’ll put that on that same page that I’m making for [email protected] slash eCommerce.

Robert
[00:08:31]
And like, what’s the goal with when, when you, when you try to turn them from passive listeners to, to active customers by you pointing them to that webpage or telling them to go here, what’s, what’s the goal with that action,

Tom
[00:08:48]
Right? And that’s really, it’s it’s to it’s to progress them along in the relationship and the sale. And we’ve done a lot of testing with this. We’ve had over 3000 different podcast interviews over 200 different clients. And what we’ve found is that when you’re on a podcast, you just don’t want to send somebody to your welcome page or to your homepage, right? Because that’s gonna change with time. We’re recording this in 2017, but chances are, there’s somebody now in 2020, that’s listening to Robert and I for the first time now I, I, if the homepage is changed on your e-commerce site, you’re gonna lose them better to send them to a dedicated page and not just go for the sale from the very beginning, you know, but give them other ways to say yes, sometimes in the progression, we talk about our clients to give ’em three ways to say yes, you know, a small, yes.

Tom
[00:09:38]
A medium. Yes. And then heck yes, I’ve got credit card in hand. I’m gonna buy something. So like here, you know, I give a, I, I talked about, you know, the, the checklist, the, the infographic, well, you know, the, the heck yes, could be, if you wanna work with interview valet, if you want to, to download the free book or, or go to Kindle and buy the book, having all of those things on the page, and you’re trying to get them to move from listeners to visitors, to leads and ultimately customers. And so that’s sort of that progression. You don’t wanna just say, go to my eCommerce store and buy, now give them a reason to go there. And then also we call it a welcome page because it’s not like a, a typical landing page or a squeeze page where it’s, you know, buy this, do this, or, or just leave.

Tom
[01:10:24]
Now we want ’em to get there, get in involved. And you know, if you wanna see what, what a page looks like, just, this’ll be a great example, you know, interview valet.com/ecommerce. And I’ll tell you what you’re gonna see on that page. When, when we make it, you have no idea who Tom Schwab is. You’ve never seen me. You’ve never been to my website, but you know, you know who Robert is and you know what the podcast eCommerce, marketing podcast looks like. So the first thing that you’re gonna see there is gonna be trust seals, right? Not a better business bureau or anything like that, but Robert’s picture cuz you know, like in trust him, it’s gonna be the eCommerce marketing podcast logo there. So you’re gonna be think, oh, okay, I’m in the right place. And then it’s just gonna go through and talk about, you know, if you’re on this page is cuz you heard Robert and I talking on the podcast, you know, here’s the things we talked about on the podcast. So it’s really moving them along in that progression. Okay.

Robert
[01:11:22]
And, and then yeah, go

Tom
[01:11:24]
Ahead. So, and then finally is the promotion, you know, podcasts are evergreen content. You don’t wanna just record ’em once and then forget about it. No, share that out with your community when it first goes live, but then also, you know, throughout time, because as people find that it’s gonna bring value to them.

Robert
[01:11:42]
Okay. So I have a, a couple of follow up questions. What are some tools that eCommerce businesses can use for this strategy?

Tom
[01:11:53]
Sure. And really you’re right. This is a strategy. So it’s an overall light arching thing. Then you’ve got the tactics of how to go into it. And really it doesn’t need a whole lot of tools from the standpoint, you’re communicating back and forth with the host via email, you are searching for the podcast, just through Google, through iTunes, looking for podcasts. There probably the busi easiest way to automate a lot of these things is just on the promotion and the social media. So that once you’ve been on a podcast to, to load it up into something like we use meat, Edgar, and you can also Hootsuite does the same thing where you can get the promotion out of the, about, about your interview and, and put that out there. But there’s other tech tools that you can use, you know, content is king. So if you, how have a hard time writing blogs, well you could do podcast interviews and then trans transcribe that interview for a dollar a minute with something like rev.com and now you’ve got the basis for a blog. And so you could repurpose that audio interview into, into a blog.

Robert
[01:13:02]
Okay. And the goal I’m guessing with podcast interview marketing as a strategy, the goal is to get the listeners into that progression, progress them into the funnel, get them to the funnel. And then from there eventually lead that to the heck yes. Credit card. Yes. But the goal, not only is it to expose your brand, but it’s to just start setting up and filling up the funnel for your business.

Tom[01:13:32]
Very much so Robert, and one of the things that we’ve seen with our, our clients is that after they’ve heard on a podcast interview marketing that the traffic converts much better than other mediums. You know, a blog will convert one to 2%. We’ve seen with our experience podcast interviews, converting visitors to, to leads and customers at about 25 to 50%. Right. Which is understandable. If somebody’s heard you for 20 minutes, they get to know like, and trust you. And really, if you think about, you know, how our grandparents did business, how our grandchildren probably will, who do you buy from? You buy from somebody that, you know, like and trust, and really from somebody hearing your story, hearing why you chose to do the eCommerce you business, you did really focusing on that. They get to know like, and trust you. And that makes for great traffic back to your site.

Robert
01[14:25]
And what are some mistakes that people should avoid when they’re doing podcast interviews?

Tom
[01:14:31]
Yeah. One of the, the biggest things is thinking that bigger is better on a podcast that if I get on a bigger podcast, it will do better for me. And really this is not a shotgun exercise. This is really targeted. You know, I always tell people there’s more fish in the ocean than there are in a barrel. But if you can find that barrel of your ideal customers, man, those are the ones that you wanna talk to. Almost the example. Would you like to talk to, to everybody that’s watching the super bowl for five minutes or would you rather talk to, you know, your ideal customers, a conference room of your ideal customers for 30 minutes? Well, just talking to everybody on the super bowl, chances are none of them care what you have to say, but if you could get a conference room, an auditorium filled with your ideal customers, boy, that would be, you know, that would be like fishing in a barrel. So from that standpoint, one of the biggest things is bigger, is not always better.

Robert
[01:15:28]
Okay. Thanks for being on the podcast and sharing this strategy podcast, interview marketing, you had shared the link again. Can you share it again?

Tom
[01:15:38]
Sure. So you know, everything that Robert and I talked about, I’ll put [email protected] slash eCommerce, and I’ll, you know, put that checklist. I’ll put the, you know, six secrets to getting on your first podcast. I’ll tell you what, even that podcast guest profits, if you want the PDF version, make that free for the listeners here. And if there’s any way that we can help you at interview valet to allow you to be the guest and us to do the rest, we would love to work with you. We, we work with a lot of e-commerce companies getting their message out there and, and really starting to turn listeners into customers.

Robert
[01:16:14]
Okay. And can you quickly, I know we are running out of time, but can you quickly talk about the book, your book podcast, guest profits.

Tom
[01:16:22]
Yes. It’s all the secrets and all the strategy and the steps that we’ve used in order to grow our business. Like I said, we’ve been doing this for almost four years and it’s the system behind that. I openly share this with everyone because I really think podcast interview marketing five years from now, Robert is gonna be common as email marketing people will say, yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t you go on to, to podcast to get your message heard? And there’s no better place to do that with interviews because you know, doing a podcast is a lot of hard work, Robert, and I appreciate all you do. So really it’s our playbook that we use that tells you exactly how we do it at interview valet. And from that standpoint to, it’s almost like a best chef giving you is recipe book. Well, this is our recipe book, knowing that a lot of people like to cook themselves. Other people just say, Hey, do it for me. And that’s what we do at interview valet. So it’s really a guidebook that tells you exactly how to do it. Step by step with a 30 day plan. And like I said, if you want the, the free PDF download on it, you’re more than happy to go to interview valet.com/ecommerce. And it will all be there. Or if you wanna buy it, the, the hard cover on Amazon, it’s there too.

Robert
[01:17:34]
Okay. Again, Tom, I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you.

Tom
[01:17:38]
Thank you, Robert.

Robert
[01:17:41]
Thank you for listening to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Join the eCommerce marketing podcast, Facebook group to learn, connect, collaborate, and grow other eCommerce [email protected] slash FB. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for eCommerce marketing portal. And please leave a rating and review. Thank you for listening. See you next time.