Author: Haydn Morgans

What’s the point of marketing? 

Whether you’re advertising your products and services or building brand awareness, the aim of marketing is to get your company in front of more people. Ultimately, it’s to grow your business. 

On Episode 14 of The Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Claire Stapley about how we can use marketing as a business development tool in recruitment. Claire is a freelance marketing strategist who specialises in the recruitment industry, with over 7 years in the industry. Read on to find out what insights she shared. 

The Benefits of Marketing in Recruitment 

There has been an overall change in mindset over the last few years within the recruitment industry when it comes to marketing. While it used to be seen as unnecessary, there has been a shift towards seeing marketing as a valuable tool for supporting consultants’ efforts in the field. 

Claire shared that “A lot of pressure has come from new consultants who are asking, ‘Why haven’t I got LinkedIn Recruiter, which is a simple piece of collateral that I can take to a meeting?’ It’s important to them because the competition is so high.”

Marketing makes you stand out in your market. With the number of recruitment firms out there, it’s important that you can make a meaningful impression with your audience. A marketer will be able to take your expertise and translate it into engaging content that brings people into your business. Gone are the days of pray-and-spray cold calls. Targeted marketing creates valuable inbound leads and saves your consultants time. 

Get Your Team On-Board 

To get the most out of your marketing, it’s important to get buy-in from important people in the business. If your management team is leading by example, persuading your consultants to put effort into their personal brands will be a lot easier. Always start with your C-suite. 

Claire also advises “talking in numbers”. If you can back up your strategies with hard figures, you’re going to gain the trust of your consultants. “Fluff stuff doesn’t resonate with a recruiter,” said Claire. “They want to know what’s in it for them.” Pitch your ideas in terms of how it’ll build their candidate base, the results they’ll get from it and the potential for growth or promotion that will come off the back of it. 

It’s also important to use your team’s feedback in your marketing. When your marketing team works closely with your consultants and sales teams, they can create collateral that helps the rest of the company do their job. Producing branded eBooks, email footers and LinkedIn banners is a great way to create brand awareness online, while personal branding creates meaningful connections with clients and candidates in your niche. Effective marketing will ultimately make it easier to sell your services, and a synergistic relationship between marketing and consultants is the best way to make your marketing meaningful. 

Creating a Marketing Compass

Your compass should always be aligned with your North Star. Figure out what your goals are as a company (such as improving gender diversity in the tech sector), then build a strategy that speaks to them. That could look like completing a salary survey that looks at the wage gap in your sector. and using it to engage candidates who are interested in moving into the space. Whatever your North Star is, always follow it if you want to create a strong brand. 

From there you can start to build your marketing strategy. Review what marketing collateral you already have, and try to keep what you can. If it’s fit for purpose, there’s no point in getting rid of something just because it doesn’t have your shiny new branding on it. Build from your existing baseline to fill out any weaker areas and create a unified company message. 

Talk to your team to figure out what their problems are too. Maybe they’re struggling to get candidates on board because nobody’s heard of them before. Then it’s time to work on your brand awareness through personal branding or advertising. If they need to build credibility in order to win over clients, whitepapers or testimonials would be a useful resource. Case studies and salary surveys can be used to engage different groups as well. Your marketing should always meet a need in your business. 

Final Advice

Claire’s last piece of advice is to be patient. She said that “You’re gonna get a lot of pushback when you introduce marketing. If you can work through that and build some great internal relationships, you’ll have a harmonious marketing team and a bought-in sales team, and it’ll feel like cloud nine.” 

To hear more from Claire, tune into The Skill Point Podcast here.

If you’d like to learn more about creating an airtight marketing strategy for your recruitment business, you can also get in touch with us at Search Stack for a free consultation. 

Email us on hello@searchstack.co.uk now!

Social selling is a topic that’s been sweeping the recruitment marketing circle recently. Whether you’re selling your recruitment company’s services or promoting your podcast, sharing it on social platforms is rapidly becoming one of the most effective ways to get the word out. 

On Episode 13 of The Skill Point Podcast we sat down with personal branding and social selling expert Jamie Rose, who is an ex-recruitment business owner turned Social Selling Coach. Jamie joined us to share his insights on using social selling to level-up your recruitment business, including how to use pain points to drive conversions. 

Read on to learn why social selling is rapidly becoming an essential skill for a recruiter!

What is Social Selling?

Jamie defined social selling as the process of engaging with people and using your relationship to sell to them. The process typically involves getting an email address, keeping in contact with them, and driving prospective buyers to your platform, content, or community. It requires an understanding of the different values that influence buyer behaviour, then building your reputation in alignment with those points. In essence, it’s about using your social presence to subtly convince people to buy from you. 

Is Social Selling the Future for Recruiters?

According to Jamie, the answer is yes. Traditional sales methods are becoming less relevant as buyer behaviour changes across various industries. He told us that ‘with social selling, recruiters can position themselves on the radar of clients and candidates without resorting to cold outreach.’ This approach allows recruiters to observe prospects, identify pain points and tailor their approach to provide value without ever having to provide an unwanted sales pitch.

The Role of Marketing in Social Selling

Marketing plays a crucial role in social selling by creating visually appealing and valuable content that prospects are likely to engage with. A strong partnership between recruiters and marketers can inform the content creation cycle and lead to the production of high-quality, value-driven content that effectively represents your brand and delivers the desired outcomes.

Selling to Your Audience on Social Media

To effectively sell to your audience on social media, it is essential to understand who your target market is and how you can help them. Everything else flows from this fundamental question. Once you know your target audience and the problems they face, you can create content that addresses their needs and pain points. Combining your solution to their emotions is an effective way to drive conversions as well. 

Using Pain Points in Social Sales

To effectively use pain points in social sales, you must consider the following:

• The problem your target audience faces
• How the problem makes them feel and behave
• If your content resonates with their emotions 

By empathising with your prospects and addressing their pain points, you can create content that is more likely to resonate with them and encourage engagement, which in turn leads to sales. 

TL,DR:

Social selling is a powerful tool for recruiters, allowing them to effectively engage with clients and candidates while providing value. By understanding your target audience, their pain points, and how you can help them, you can create content that drives engagement and achieves your sales goals. Embrace social selling and personal branding in your recruitment strategies to stay ahead of the curve and succeed in the ever-evolving recruitment landscape.

Want to hear more from Jamie? 

Tune into Episode 13 of The Skill Point Podcast here. 

Events are a powerful tool for recruiters to grow your talent pools and market your solutions. 

On Episode 11 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Elle Nash, the Senior Marketing Executive at Camino Partners Ltd, about how to create effective events that provide value for you and your audience. 

What’s Your Purpose?

Before you decide to host an event, it’s important that you define what its purpose is. 

Elle said that in her experience, “We knew that there wasn’t a space specifically for finance professionals in tech. There weren’t groups or webinars or anything like that at the time either, so we could see a gap in the market for it… [and] events would be a great way to engage that network.”

To define your purpose, sit down with key stakeholders in the business to determine your specific target audience and discuss how you can meet their needs. Find a niche that you can provide value to, then build an event that caters to them. You can find speakers who have worked in that niche or talk about your own internal expertise from working in the industry, but whatever you do needs to actively benefit your audience. 

Pre-Event Strategy

Events are a big undertaking, and take a lot of preparation to pull off. It’s worth spending time considering how well known you are in the industry and assessing the kind of audience you’ll attract using your current channels. Is your brand already popular with your niche? Are your consultants already embedded in these communities? Hosting a smaller webinar first could be a good way to gauge interest and test your outreach methods. 

Research your audience’s pain points and offer solutions in your event’s promotional material. This will gain traction with your audience, creating higher engagement and reach. It’s also important to build your brand awareness before you launch an event, because people need to trust you before they’ll be willing to go out of their way to see you. 

It’s also important to consider your venue. Would you attract a larger audience if your event was virtual? Would it create a more valuable networking experience if you hosted an in-person event? Consider the audience that you have and build your event accordingly. 

Live events have the potential for higher quality content creation. Getting a videographer to record key speakers and get b-roll footage of your event is a great way to generate testimonials, social content and future promotional material. It also creates a buzz during the event as people often want to take part in creating content and sharing their experiences online. 

Effective Promotion

If you already have an ample audience, platforms like meetup pages can effectively build out your guestlist. However, if you’re aiming for an exclusive, invite-only event, you’ll need to think outside the box with your attraction methods. Are you only inviting candidates or also allowing hiring managers to come and take advantage of your events? Curating your guestlist and having a screening process could be important depending on the type of event that you’re hosting. 

The main things to consider, according to Elle, are “How are you going to get people to the event? Who’s going to be responsible for promoting it? How many people do you want to attend?” You’ll never get 100% of your guestlist to attend, so aim to oversubscribe your capacity. No matter what promotional methods you’re using, having a clear strategy in place will ensure the smooth running of your event. 

Once you’ve decided who to target, gaining traction is essential. Advertise the value that you’re going to give people at the event and make sure you stay top of mind for when it rolls around. You can use emails or social media to promote your event to your existing audience, or host virtual webinars or roundtables as teasers for the big day. You can also use your consultants’ networks to personally invite key people to your event. Streamlining each of your touchpoints will keep your audience engaged at each stage. 

Maintain touch points with people who have signed up, both before and after the event. You can use your sign-up lists to gauge the ratio of people who attended, then assess which touchpoints they engaged with to create a better strategy for your next event. It’s also a good idea to share content afterwards so that people who expressed an interest but couldn’t attend still get something out of interacting with you. Keeping those touch points active also allows you to gather feedback, which results in positive testimonials or useful pointers for improvement. 

Elle’s Top Tips:

• Use email reminders to keep your event top-of-mind
• Share teasers for the event, such as speaker spotlights and key take-aways
• Create a diary invite that people can integrate with their planners
• Get engagement by asking for questions they’d like to ask speakers

Post-Event Strategy

Having a post-event strategy will help you establish how to get the most out of your event. Consider what outcomes you want to achieve, such as growing your talent pool, creating meaningful relationships with clients or generating leads. Tailor your calls to action at the event to promote those outcomes, and make sure they line up with the value you’re offering there. 

The content you’ll produce from your event is another consideration for your post-event strategy. Live-streaming your events can create a valuable resource for a widespread audience, but it can take away from the live experience. If you’ve set up hefty camera crews that block your audience’s view, you’re effectively damaging their experience, so consider the space and sightlines you’re working with before committing to a live stream. Having a single videographer that can create content from your speakers, networking time and venue set-up, providing valuable resources. 

Maintaining your touch points after the event can make a difference to the audience’s experience. If you follow up to thank them for attending they’ll feel like valued customers or connections. Sharing content with them will also create alignment, particularly if you were able to get great pictures of the event. Having a personalised message from the consultants that they spoke to will also improve the retention you get from the event. 

Want to know more about that videographer we mentioned? Reach out to discuss a quote for your next recruitment event. 

We bang our metaphorical drum about value-adding content all the time. It’s the key to successful marketing, because it’s the difference between screaming into the void and creating compelling content that drives conversions. 

Don’t just take it from us – Chris Cranshaw is a big believer in value too. Chris is the Founder and Director of Halt, another specialist recruitment marketing firm. 

We talked about it on Episode 10 of the Skill Point Podcast, then squeezed all the value out of the episode to give you this handy how-to blog.

How do you add value in recruitment marketing?

Valuable content is something that’s useful to your audience. To figure out what that is, you need to talk to your target demographics, whether that’s your clients, candidates or colleagues. Always have your audience in mind when you’re creating content, and make sure you’re speaking to their interests, pain points and daily experiences. Whether you’re offering a solution to their issues or sharing relatable and entertaining content that’s specific to your niche, it should always resonate with your audience’s lives. 

What makes a valuable content niche?

According to Chris, recruiters’ content should come directly from their day jobs. He said ‘you’re talking to clients, candidates and HR departments, so you’re building up knowledge of all these different trends, challenges and success stories, often without realising or documenting it.’ It’s these experiences that you can turn into valuable content, by making observations about the state of your industry or sharing your solutions to common problems in your sector. That’s where you can credibly build your expertise. 

Your expertise will often be niche because it reflects the sector that you work in. You might know things like the best way to attract talent in cybersecurity, which will be incredibly valuable to your target audience. People will recognise the specificity of your content and recognise you as an authority on those subjects. 

What are the next steps once you’ve made valuable content?

Create a clear plan for the content you want to share. Chris told us ‘that’s what you’re gonna become famous for; you’re going to be the place where people go to get information on X, Y, and Z’. To build a devoted audience, you need to be consistent and reliable. 

In order to build that reputation, you need to figure out a regular cadence for your content. Look at your capacity, skill set and budget before committing to becoming the next New York Times. 

Always do your research before you start making content, because the form it takes will impact how it performs with different people. If you’re trying to boost engagement, releasing interactive content like polls is a great idea. Scheduling this is important, because you also need to be able to respond to interactions and take the time to nurture your audience relationships. If you’re building your credibility as a source of knowledge, longer-form text posts could be the way to go. 

Planning your content well in advance can reduce last-minute workloads and improve the quality of your output. It also means that everything you make is intentional rather than scrambling to fill a gap in your calendar with something that isn’t valuable. 

What does great look like when a company is providing that value?

Ultimately, success comes from your conversion rate. Moving people through your marketing funnel takes time and meticulous planning, but when it pays off, it literally PAYS off. 

If you’re offering value to your audience on a consistent basis, they’re going to come to you when they need answers and solutions to their specific problems. Great marketing comes from meeting those questions preemptively and building your reputation as a reliable resource. 

As Chris said, ‘great is when your content or personal brand creates opportunities’. You can’t control conversions in recruitment marketing, but you can build an effective emotional connection that results in a higher rate of engagement, emotional investment and trust. That’s all done through regularly creating and sharing valuable content with your audience. 

To find out more about creating valuable content in the recruitment industry, tune into the Skill Point Podcast here. 

Reputation is an essential part of the recruitment industry. Because we rely on a relationship-based business model, how people perceive us will play a big part in how successful we are. Reputation can be a game changing differentiator, so how do we get it right as recruiters? On Episode 9 of the Skill Point Podcast we talked to Gordon Stoddart from The Recruitment Network about how we can build reputations to our advantage. 

What is reputation?

Gordon explained that reputation is how people think and feel about you. It’s the emotional connection that people have with you or your company as a result of the experiences they’ve had. It’s not how your marketing makes them feel, it’s a direct output of the interactions they have with you.

How can you build a positive reputation? 

In the recruitment industry, your reputation stems from your relationships. Whether that’s your internal culture or the connections that you have with clients and candidates, putting effort into those relationships will build your reputation in a positive way. An awareness of your reputation will drive your behaviours, because as Gordon said, “reputation is an emotional strategy.”

What does a great reputation look like in recruitment? 

If you’ve built an amazing reputation, your retention and loyalty will be high. You’ll also get referrals, introductions and feedback from the people that you’ve worked with. Clients will also be willing to give you exclusivity if they’ve had a great experience with you, because that will build your reputation and trust. They’ll be more likely to work with you again if you’ve provided an excellent service before, so repeat work is another way to gauge how strong your reputation is with your clients. 

Feedback is another essential part of measuring your reputation. Talk to as many clients and candidates as you can to understand which parts of your process are working and which ones have room for improvement. Gordon said that “how our clients and candidates perceive us is really dangerous, because our relationship with them might be at risk.” Not only that, unhappy clients could spread negative word of mouth and damage your reputation without you knowing. 

Can you repair a damaged reputation? 

Once a reputation is damaged it’s a lot harder to repair. When it’s a matter of underperforming your client’s expectations, there are things you can do to salvage that reputation. Offering alternative solutions or returning any payment can be a step towards preserving your reputation, as well as being honest about your limitations. Do whatever you can to turn the situation around and avoid a service breakdown, as long as it’s not costing your people. Well, rule number one, you do everything you can not to have a service breakdown. 

Feedback is the key to reputation repair. If you’re constantly gathering feedback from the people you work with, you’ll quickly see if something is going wrong, and be able to address any concerns before they become frustrations. Most people will recognise that things go wrong sometimes, so there will be some amount of leeway. It’s down to you to use that feedback to ensure that the same mistake doesn’t happen twice, because that will create a negative pattern and harm people’s perception of you, and therefore your reputation. 

Can you use feedback positively?

Feedback is also a great tool for creating a positive reputation for people who haven’t worked with you yet. If you’re able to showcase positive reviews or glowing recommendations, new customers are far more likely to buy into your offering. The most effective way to gather this feedback is from your frontline people, like consultants or customer experience professionals. They’re the ones talking to clients and candidates on a daily basis, so they hear how people respond to you. They can also directly ask people what’s working well and what isn’t. That creates powerful marketing collateral and evidence of how good you are. 

What strategies can recruiters use to build their reputation?

Firstly, gather insights. This works with the feedback to understand how you’re perceived. If you have a handle on that, you’re more likely to be able to manage expectations and meet them, which will create a positive reputation. 

The second strategy is to build an invested internal team. You need to find people who care about their role, then equip them to succeed. That starts with leadership and works its way down through the company until your whole team has a positive experience. Belief in your own excellence is the best foundation for a strong reputation. 

A third strategy is using a deliberate structure in client meetings to gain feedback. Whenever you meet with a customer you should be checking in to see how they’re feeling about your progress, and backing up your success with tangible statistics, such as the number of candidates placed and their retention rate. This will keep them excited about your work. 

Finally, using customer journey mapping will transform your reputation. This is an end-to-end understanding of the customer experience, which shows you which touchpoints people are interacting with successfully and which need more work. This is also where marketing comes in, which can manage and accelerate your reputation outside of your direct relationships. 

How can you measure your reputation?

Create a business dashboard. You can measure things like financial growth and inbound leads, but you can also measure things like retention, exclusive relationships, case studies and testimonials. Even simple things like your Google reviews can be indicators of how your reputation is shaping up. You should always ask for this kind of feedback or input from the people you work with, because not only will it strengthen your reputation externally, it will build a bond with them by showing that you care about their experience and want to address their concerns. 

Gordon’s last piece of advice was to ask ‘what a great reputation means to you, and figure out what you want to happen as a result. Take those things and measure them.’ that’s the best way to establish whether you’re meeting your own goals and upholding the standards that you set for yourself. 

To hear more about building a reputation in the recruitment industry, tune into the Skill Point Podcast here. 

Relationships are an essential part of marketing. As we’ve said before, people want to buy from people, so presenting your company as a human presence will create a far more engaged audience than stale, corporate branding. But how does that apply to the recruitment industry? On Episode 7 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Clair Bush about how she’s translated the psychology of sales into recruitment. 

What is Relationship marketing?

The term ‘relationship marketing’ existed before the onset of social media and the digitalization of relationships. It’s the psychology behind human connections, and the reason that reaching out to someone through a letter that explains your offer and the opportunity, then enables them to come back and say, ‘Yes, I’m interested’ on their own terms is more effective than cold calling. 

What does this look like in a modern day setting in the market?

In order to successfully use relationship marketing, you need a total end to end knowledge and understanding of your ideal client profile. It’s about being able to create impactful outbound marketing for a group of people that have the same characteristics and needs, and enabling them to come to you. 

When it comes to relational marketing in recruitment, these relationships have slightly different dynamics. You can get to know your clients by asking questions like:

• How’s your company structured? 
• Who are your hiring managers? 
• What’s your projected growth? 
• When’s your year-end? 

Having that kind of information will allow you to create groups of similar people and communicate with them around related topics. If you take an agency with 50 recruiters, there’s bound to be commonalities between their conversations. If all of those people reach out to around 20-30% of their contacts and say ‘We’ve got this topic, we’re going to tell you what we know about it’, that will put them top of mind for those clients, which means they can pick up open roles. It’s all about giving value to your audience so that they immediately think of you as the expert to go to when they need something. 

From a marketing perspective, you can use that information to reverse engineer a campaign. Clair said that these campaigns allow you to “collect insights and data, then also funnel it back into the greater content machine within the business.” The heart of marketing is understanding what industry conversations are being had. Relationships allow you to see where that information is coming from and where it’s going.

How can employer brands tap into the psychology of relationship marketing?

Clair’s view on employer branding is that it’s similar to ‘conscious parenting’. She said that “as a parent, I know what worked for me, and I know what really didn’t work for me. I don’t want to make those same mistakes for my child.” Employer branding is a similar space, because a fundamental part of any organisation is having an employee value proposition that is aligned with your business strategy. You’re paving the way for the people below you to have a better experience than you did. Having an understanding of what drives people to turn up for you every day (beyond their pay packet) is essential to building a successful employer brand. It’s more than letting people work from home three days a week. 

For anybody who hasn’t figured out their employee value proposition, think about this: 

• What are you doing that would be an exciting project to work on? 
• What are the pillars that you want to be able to talk about in a job advert? 
• What are the real reasons why someone would love and thrive in your environment? 

Marketing in recruitment needs to be less of a “spray and pray mentality” and more of a targeted, demand generated mentality. We should be moving towards a world where the people who apply are right for the role. The personalization makes filtering easier, which then makes shortlisting quicker, which then makes the decision faster. Using relationships and understanding your target demographic’s psychology to underpin your marketing strategy will level-up your workflow and bring incredible results.

To find out more about recruitment marketing, tune into The Skill Point Podcast or reach out to us on hello@searchstack.co.uk. 

You’ve probably heard of the term ‘candidate experience’ bouncing around the recruitment industry. 

Have you ever thought about your customer journey though? 

On Episode 6 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Rich Evans about how we can utilise the customer journey to our advantage across recruitment. 

The customer journey is where branding and marketing meet sales, and work together to give clients and candidates the smoothest experience possible. We can look at both a client and candidate journey, and use their experience to streamline our process. 

Wherever you’re looking to get more candidates into your market and interview for your business, every step between not knowing who you are to saying, ‘I want to come and speak to you about potential opportunities at your firm’ is part of their customer journey. It’s our job to break down that journey and support them through it. 

Here’s how to do that:  

Eliminating Friction

Friction occurs in the customer journey when people have to overcome obstacles to access your solution. 

Rich put it this way: “The more mental calories a buyer needs to burn during the process, the less likely they are to buy something. They’ll be looking for the next solution. It’s about clarity and digestible information.”

If you want to create an enjoyable customer journey, you have to anticipate their questions and have the information ready to go. 

Using Branding

The aim of branding is to make sales easier, whether that’s by creating brand loyalty so that new products are sought-after by loyal customers or by positioning yourself as an exceptional employer, where candidates are eager to apply for your roles. 

Successful branding communicates your purpose to your customers. Rich recommends building your brand around the questions “Who are we selling to? What are their pain points? What are their needs?” and “How are we going to position our business around that?” 

This will translate into purposeful content that directly addresses your clients’ pain points. Your sales team (or consultants in the recruitment industry) will have resources that are ready to share with prospects, removing that friction that we talked about earlier. 

Combining Marketing & Sales

Marketing and sales departments have to work together to create a successful customer journey. Rich’s advice was that ultimately, “your job during that journey, whether you’re marketer or a salesperson, is to help them buy.” 

The aim of marketing is to help consultants build a relationship with customers. You can do that by building trust in the marketplace and changing people’s perception of your business. 

Mindsets are one of the biggest obstacles in a customer journey. It’s the role of marketing and sales to change that, convincing customers that your solution will benefit them. It’s essentially education. 

Sales and marketing can also work together to use feedback. The consultants are the ones in the field, speaking to customers. They’re often receiving feedback about what your customers’ pain points are, and they know the points that are turning customers away. If that’s fed back to marketing, the two teams can work together to build those points into your solution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

Both teams are helping people decide to buy your product or service. 

Creating Conversations

The most important step of the customer journey is getting customers to talk to you. “From a marketing perspective, we’re not really selling the full solution,” Rich said. “We’re selling an initial conversation.” That’s the culmination of outbound sales, marketing and branding; one conversation. 

If you’ve got those areas of your business to work together, your customer will already have gone through most of the buying journey. They should already know what you offer, your price points, your turn-around time and how your product can help them. This conversation is just about giving them the opportunity to ask any really specific questions about their bespoke requirements. 

Customers should never have to work things out themselves during that conversation. It’s down to you to move them through to the next step of their journey. 

To learn more about the customer journey in recruitment, tune into the full episode of The Skill Point Podcast here. 

We all love a good podcast. 

They’re entertaining, educational, and easy to consume. They’re also surprisingly easy to produce. 

On Episode 5 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Hishem Azzouz, the founder and host of Recruitment Mentors, about his dos and don’ts for recording a great podcast. 

If you’re thinking of starting up your own podcast, read on to find out our top tips for new podcast hosts. 

What’s the point of your podcast? 

From a business perspective, a podcast should be in some way benefiting your company. Whether it’s creating brand awareness, generating leads from guests or used as a cornerstone piece of content, you should have a strategy behind your podcast. 

From an audience’s point of view, you need to be providing value with your content. If you’re just using it as a sales tool, or you don’t have a clear mission behind it, your audience won’t resonate with it. You need to be offering them something they want to consume. 

Who makes great guests?

Hishem recommends a 30-guest strategy for your first episodes. 

The first 10 people you have on should be existing clients – the people that you do a bunch of business with. That enables you to hone your interview skills on people that you have a relationship with. It will also give you a unique digital asset that your team can use to recruit for your clients. 

The second 10 should be your prospects or dream clients. If you can get them on board for your podcast, that gives you an opportunity to tell them about what you do and create a relationship with them. At least 50% of people will say yes if you approach it in the right way.  

The third 10 guests should be influencers or subject matter experts. These are the people in your industry that people want to listen to. Have a look at your industry and see who has the biggest brands in your niche. Get them on the podcast and piggyback off their brand to rapidly build traction. 

Another way to gain traction from your guests is to hijack industry events. If you can find the guest list it happens, get them on your show and release the episodes during the event build up. Other people will be looking at their activity then, so aligning yourself with the relevant experts will build your credibility and act as free promotion. Add a hashtag to get more involved in the event, and that’ll get you in the conversation. 

Taking your content further by creating a white paper of insights from your guests’ input. You can share it with the people you meet at events, email it to your mailing list or post it for your network. That helps to position you as an industry expert and a go-to for insights and advice. 

If you’re producing a high-quality podcast, you’ll naturally generate interest. People will start reaching out and asking if they can come on the podcast. The best way to attract guests is to put in the effort to make it a great listen. Spend time building meaningful relationships with people, and take the time to reach out to inspiring people on LinkedIn. 

How do you manage conversation topics?

Once you’ve found an interesting guest, look at their profile and journey and figure out what people would be interested in hearing from them. Always have a prep call and write up a document of topics that you want to talk to them about or any audience requests for the episode. This doesn’t have to be written out as a script, it’s just a helpful jumping-off point that lets you and your guest set clear expectations. 

Spend time building relationships with the guests beforehand. That can be on a call or over messages, but it’s best to build a rapport before you start recording. In your prep call, always ask your guest ‘Is there anything that you want to talk about? Do you want to sell anything?’ Give them a set time to talk about it so you’re not wrestling the conversation with them. They’ll feel more comfortable and you’ll have a better conversation. The purpose of the prep call is also to make sure that you’re on the same page about your priorities. 

While you’re recording, it’s best to let the conversation flow naturally. Have a rough starting point or first question to begin with, and then let things unfold. You can experiment with a quick-fire round to end the episode or have a high-impact question that drives home the point of your conversation. A great conversation is just that – a conversation. 

Top Tips for New Podcasters:

Over-prepare. Don’t feel like you can just wing it because you’re good at speaking, because hosting a podcast is a whole new skill. 

When you ask a question, stay silent afterwards. It’s a lot harder than you think. Letting the other person speak without ‘active listening’ will make a real difference to the audience’s experience. 

Listen to your own episodes. This will help you pick up on things that you might not even realise that you do. You have to be willing to learn and improve. 

Learn to keep control of the conversation. If you feel the person is really going off on a tangent, then you have to reel them back in. It’s like peeling back an onion. You’ve got to be good at listening, being present, and being aware of what your audience wants you to ask. You also need to draw out the high-level answers that actually add quality to your audience’s experience by saying ‘can you unpack that a bit more’ or ‘tell me more about this’.  

Always thank your audience for supporting the podcast. Whenever someone tells you they’ve listened or enjoyed it, ask what topics they want you to cover or which guests they’d like to hear from. Take the time to understand your audience and show your appreciation for them. Keep notes of your feedback and learn from it. 

To learn more about hosting a great podcast, listen to the full episode of the Skill Point Podcast, or download our eBook here.