Podcast Booking Agencies: Why You Should Avoid Them

Dustin: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the seven figure leap today. I would love to answer one of our top FAQs. One of the things I get asked probably at least on a weekly basis, and that is, should I use a podcast booking agency? To get more guest appearances. So if you're not familiar with the podcast booking agency, there are lots of wonderful people out there, uh, who you can pay money to, and they are basically public relations companies, uh, sometimes specializing in podcast guesting.
And basically you pay them money and then they will get you booked on shows. So it sounds like a really good solution, right? It's like. That sounds much easier than, you know, finding the shows and sending my own pitch and all those sort of things. So the question remains, is this a good idea? Should you use a podcast booking agency?
And my answer to that is probably not. With some key exceptions. So I'm never like an absolutist, right? Like there are always some [00:01:00] things that are good, even though most of the time, maybe it's not a great idea. So I want to unpack this and give it. It's just due diligence here for you to be able to make a good decision for yourself.
So let me start with when it might actually be a great idea to use a podcast booking agency. So if you're in a situation, let's say you're publishing a book and the publisher says, Hey, We need you to appear on 20 podcasts and it's in your contract and you need to check the box 20 times and do these appearances.
And that's the extent of your interest in doing the podcast guesting activity. You should probably use an agency. You should probably just go pay someone to put you on some shows so you can check your box. Right? Uh, there are other scenarios, say, uh, your. Uh, university president and you have a bio, right?
You have a one pager, um, and you want to put some logos on it that says as seen on. And so you really actually don't have any KPIs. You're not trying to [00:02:00] generate leads. There's no like business case to be made here. You simply want to be on the shows for the sake of being on the shows. Uh, you should probably use a podcast booking agency.
Okay. However, if you're listening to this podcast, there's a very good chance that what you're actually trying to do is not be on podcasts just to be on a podcast. You actually want to generate leads, generate sales and add profit to
your business. If that is you, I would highly recommend scrutinizing this idea and probably not using a podcast booking agency.
And so I want to walk through. Three very specific strategic reasons why this is my opinion and something that I stand by and have, uh, kind of, of, of stood behind for, for, for a long time. And it's based on my own experience and in my experience of working with over 150 other entrepreneurs in this space of podcast guesting.
So let's take them in order. Number one, [00:03:00] two, and three. Number one is being strategic. Number two is being repeatable. And number three is building a business asset. So number one, you need to be strategic in your marketing activities. Okay. So here's a typical scenario for how a podcast booking agency might work.
Uh, they will charge you a fee. Uh, that will vary, you know, depending on their promises and the frequency of the shows you're, you're going to be on, you know, the quality of the agency, those sorts of things. But in general, you could probably think of 1000 to maybe 5, 000 a month, uh, that you're going to pay this agency and they're going to effectively send you booking links to say, Hey, we got you on these four shows this month.
Uh, here is the link to go schedule and do your appearance. Right? So that sounds amazing. Here are some of the problems with this approach on. I'm talking about number one. Here's strategy. There's typically actually in my in my experience, there's never any actual strategy behind which shows are [00:04:00] selected.
So you may say, look, I want to be on health shows. I want to be on business shows, right? You're probably going to direct Some sort of category, uh, in which they will pursue opportunities for you. Right. And then they're going to go out and pitch you sort of like a, a public relations agency would to try to get people to say, yes, here's the problem with that.
You are not actually choosing the shows based on any sort of business strategy, any type of lead that you want to get, uh, any KPI or key performance indicator, like you have no way of measuring whether you're winning By doing this. And so, uh, when I think of strategy, I think a great lens to look through is our five P framework.
So our five P framework, and I go much more in depth in a previous episode, it is purpose, plan, pitch, perform, and profit. Number one in there is purpose.
And that is really, really important. So why in the world do you want to be on a podcast as a guest in the first place? Like, what are you trying to achieve by being on a podcast only by answering that very [00:05:00] clearly?
Who's your target market? What's your message? What are you ultimately going to want the audience to do? What are some of the other, um, strategic reasons to be on a given show that go way beyond the audience only by answering that clearly did the other four. Makes sense, right? Like finding the right shows, which is step two, what we call plan only makes sense.
If you have a very clear purpose and strategy, you're being very intentional about which shows you select. And so with the podcast booking agency, that's not really part of their scope, right? Like they're not going to. Work with you, understand the transformation you provide your clients, really dial in your messaging, right?
They're, they're definitely not going to do step four, which is perform, which is really coach you up on how to be an amazing guest and actually get the results you're looking for from the show. So again, I'm not disparaging. I have great friends who have podcast booking agencies. I have nothing against them.
However, if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to grow a business through podcast guesting, the [00:06:00] first and foremost priority should be strategy. And you need to be very intentional about how you're using your time, your social capital and your relationship with this host. And so These booking agencies don't really do that.
So number one, it's going to lack strategy and a little insider baseball here. Uh, not all the time, but many times a booking agency is going to basically put you on the same shows they put most of their clients on because they already have
relationships with those hosts and it's easier, right? They're not doing it because that's the show that's really going to drive results for you.
And you know, There may be a bit of back channeling where it's like, Hey, if you let these three guests on their clients of ours, maybe get a little kickback, right? Uh, maybe there's some affiliate relationship there, nothing wrong with
that on the surface, but it's not serving your needs and your strategic vision for how you're trying to grow your business.
So that's number one. It's probably the biggest one, and that is if you use an agency, you sort of outsource this effort, you outsource this, this thought, you're just not going to get results. That's that's the [00:07:00] real bottom line,
because the shows that you're being pitched to be on and the ones that you actually appear on are not being selected strategically.
They have nothing to do with you, your sales funnel, your message, and your call to action. So that's a huge, huge gap. Number two to move on from that is repeatability. Okay, so let's say. For argument's sake, these agencies actually put you on amazing shows. Uh, and these shows are right up your alley and you have a great relationship capital that you build and you, you know, and it would generate leads.
What happens three months in, well, you're, you're going to keep writing checks, right? So it's, it's not repeatable in the sense that it's not sustainable. If. If you're paying, let's say 1, 000 to 2, 000 for every show you're on, that's only going to go so far with a given agency because they're going to run out of those relationships, uh, that to leverage to get you on.
And it does not become a repeatable system for you and for your business and affect your renting [00:08:00] attention. And renting attention is not bad. Sometimes that's a good way to get kickstarted if it wasn't for number one, which is it's not being done strategically, but number two, a huge hole in this whole model is it's not repeatable.
It's not sustainable because you have to keep paying every time you want to take another bite at the Apple and hopefully get another appearance. And that really ties directly into number three, which is a huge passion of mine. And that is that you're marketing, The system behind the way you drive leads needs to be an asset of your business.
So again, even if this worked really well, you're depending on an external force, this, this agency that you're gonna have to pay a lot of money to over an infinite amount of time to continue to generate leads to grow your business. It becomes
a major. Risk, right? Like, okay, so if they go away or if they are no longer effective, I no longer have leads.
I would not want that for my business. The other thing is if you bring it internally in the way I'll, I'll describe here and what I [00:09:00] recommend as an alternative to booking agencies, it actually becomes an asset. So the money and the time and the energy that you invest in getting this going, Inside your own business and not depending on this external agency adds value to your business because whenever this is a IP and intellectual property and you have S.
O. P. S. And you have these things as an operational system within your business. It's actually an asset of the business. I hope that makes sense. It's no longer like, let's just say you wanted to sell your business someday. The number one question they're probably going to ask is how do you get leads? How do you get new clients?
And if you're like, well, we spend five grand a month and we got this agency and so far so good, you know, that's been pretty good to us. That's going to be red flag because it's like, Oh, so like you actually don't have any control over your own lead generation. Your marketing is not actually an asset of your own business.
It's like totally dependent on someone else. And it's a sole source. That's a problem, right? And so to recap real quickly on why I [00:10:00] feel podcast booking agencies are not typically a good fit for an entrepreneur who is doing podcast guesting for business building purposes. Number one, and the big one, it's not done strategically.
Number two, it's not repeatable and sustainable as a marketing, Mechanism, if you will, a marketing system. And number three, it's not an asset of your business. You're renting attention and that attention is at the whims of an external force that you don't control. So in light of that, how should you do podcast guesting?
Well, that's the five P system, right? We, we do this. With all of our clients. I've done it for myself for numerous businesses in a very strategic, repeatable way that builds an asset for your business. And so we start with purpose. As I already said, like, why do you want to be on shows and getting really clear on who you serve?
What's the transformation you provide? What's the story around that that we want to tell and share with the audience? What can we teach that's going to actually become a [00:11:00] magnet to our ideal clients? That is strategy, right? So we start with that. Yeah. And then the repeatability comes into that. Steps two and three in our five P framework.
Step two is plan the step three is pitch. So finding the right shows and writing, you know, messages to compel those hosts to let you on that step two and three. And that's an ongoing process. Okay. And I want to talk about how we do that. Scalably. Step four is perform again. This is a huge missing link when you work with an agency, they're not coaching you on how to actually be interviewed.
Well, Right. How do you introduce yourself? What stories do you tell? What do you teach? What's the call to action at the end of the interview? And then step five on our framework, which is profit is completely missing from the equation of an agency. And that is how do I actually make money from each of these appearances?
Like, how do I monetize this amazing attention I've gotten by being on a podcast that is when we work with someone for 90 days in our accelerator program. [00:12:00] That's 60 days of it, right? Like that's almost all of it. That's two thirds of the time. It's not just about getting on shows. It's by getting on the right shows with the right message and then using that to actually grow your business and actually drive profit, right?
That's, that's actually why we do this. It's not just getting on shows for the sake of getting on shows. So that's our five P's steps one, which is purpose. And you know, step five, which is Profit are completely just, they're not part of the equation for the booking agency, the booking agency, and also step four, which is perform.
How do you do well as a guest? The booking agency is focused on steps two and three. They're focused on finding shows and pitching you to get you on the shows. Again, that's great. The problem is it's missing steps one, four, and five. Uh, the other problem is you're renting that attention and it's not an asset of your business.
So again, you know, this is, this is that repeatable asset side of this. So you may be thinking, okay, if I'm not using an agency to find these shows and book me on them, [00:13:00] how in the world does this become scalable? Right? Like, how am I going to be on more than like. Two shows because I don't have the time, money or energy to sit here and become an expert and devote all of my own attention into finding shows and pitching them.
Well, we have a solution for that. The way that we work with entrepreneurs is only the first time through. Do you take ownership of this part of the process, right? Because you're going to set the purpose. You're going to have, we're going to work with you to find the perfect shows. They're going to drive the results you're looking for.
And we're actually going to co create a master pitch. Okay, so that's really important because this is all custom to you, your and your message and your story and your business, right? Again, an agency is just going to template out what they do for all their clients. And you're going to sound like every crappy
dm that you get every, every cold pitch you get, because that's, you know, The business, they just send a lot of cold pitches.
So it actually damages your reputation. That's a whole nother, that's a whole nother, um, topic. But how do we address steps two and three, which are the [00:14:00] repeating cycle that create the marketing flywheel? How do we plan and pitch and find the next show and get on it? We do that. And we recommend you do that with a virtual assistant.
So in our program, we go through those first four P's in about 30 to 40 days. And that's with with the entrepreneur so that again, you have ownership of this, it's you, it's reflective of your brand, your vision, your words, it's you and it's personal and it's not cold and icky, um, and you are going to send out that those first couple of pitches using this, that code creation that we have and then about they, you know, 35 in this process, we say, now you want to do this repeatedly and you want to shift your role from the creator of this into So The person who shows up and does the interviews.
So this is going to start sounding like what the booking agency is going to prescribe to you. The difference is we're doing all this other work before we get to that point. And the way that we're actually executing this, it becomes an asset of your business and it's repeatable. That's where [00:15:00] the virtual assistant comes in.
So when you're working with us in the accelerator program, We actually will take a virtual assistant from your team that you have, I won't say own, but who is an employee or a contractor on your team, and we will take them over here to our world. And we will train them on how to do this the right way using your custom assets.
And we'll say this is how you're going to get your, you know, your boss, your expert from from this company to find and find the right shows for them and pitch them. In a really cool, warm way. And so we train the virtual assistant to do that. So after the first, you know, 30 days or so here, they do take ownership of that.
We provide the S. O. P. S. The standing operating procedures, and we provide the intellectual property that we've created, and it literally becomes an asset of your business. Right? And so the virtual assistant then is On their, um, pay scale and on their level of effort, they're doing [00:16:00] this on repeat and it is multitudes less expensive than an agency.
So that's good. It is extremely repeatable because they have They can do this way more quickly than an agency is going to do, um, on your behalf, because they're a contractor on your team and they're only doing this for you, uh, on a repeated basis. And they have very clear focus on who they're trying to target and they have the master pitch to work with.
So they can do this very quickly. In other words, and very efficiently, it doesn't cost very much at all to have them do this. And then going back to that asset, this is now. A business asset, right? Like, even if that virtual assistant leaves, you still have the S. O. P. S. The intellectual property and you can just plug another virtual assistant in.
You can plug them right back into our training. You have lifetime access to that. And so you always have a virtual assistant on your team running this process for you in a few hours a week. And it is. You know, 50 instead of 5, 000. Like it's, it's a multitudes less expensive [00:17:00] and it's more effective because you're actually doing it in a strategic way, an intentional way.
It's repeatable and it's an asset of your business. So that's how we address all of these shortcomings that often come with podcast booking agencies. So the final thing that, that may come up with you and I say, Hey, virtual assistant, you're like, okay, like that sounds cool, except I don't have one. Uh, or I have one and they're tapped out.
Well, We help people in our programs find the right virtual assistant. We have alumni of our programs who have virtual assistant companies, and we help do placement. We're not, uh, a, an employment agency. Uh, we're also not a booking agency for the reasons I've already decided, but what we are is an empower of entrepreneurs.
And so I hope that's helpful. This is kind of an in depth response to a question I get all the time, which is like, why don't I just like use a booking agency to get me on the podcast? Why would I? Need to learn this. Why would I need to like co create this pitch? Um, why don't I just outsource this? And [00:18:00] that is why it's not strategic when you do it that way.
It's not repeatable and it does not become an asset of your business. Again, all the way back to the beginning. If you want to be on 10 or 20 podcasts, because for some reason you want to say you've been on podcasts, you're not actually trying to drive profit from it. You're not generating leads from it.
You don't actually care about any of the real benefits of podcast guessing. You literally want to check boxes. You should a thousand percent use a podcast booking agency because they're really good at that. Uh, they can get you the numbers. You're going to pay a premium for it, but there's no need for you to be strategic, get your messaging dialed in or do all the other things that make this super effective.
And that allow us to help entrepreneurs add six figures of revenue right away by telling the right story on the right podcast. In the way that we love to serve and teach people to do that. So let me know if you have questions about this. This is sort of a hot button topic. I know I have friends who are booking agencies, uh, who may, may fire back at me on this, but I [00:19:00] think it's a pretty bulletproof argument.
I haven't yet to find someone who has made me, uh, change my mind about this. Uh, if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to build a business, I think podcast guesting is an amazing marketing channel. It's an amazing, uh, marketing system when it's created the right way. It is not. In my opinion, in my very experienced opinion, it is, it is not something you really want to throw out to a booking agency and trust that, uh, that they're going to be able to reap the benefits that you should be able to get from your efforts of being interviewed with the right story on the right shows.
So this is Dustin. I can't wait to FAQ. Episode coming up here because I think these are really juicy topics. And it's something I get asked so frequently. It's great to be able to say, Hey, you know, go check out this episode. You can take a deep dive and really understand how to make great decisions for you that are strategic for your business.