🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: YouTube
This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Victoria Bennion, founder of The Best Podcast Guest Booking Agency, which has been placing experts and non-fiction authors on podcasts since 2019. She works from Dorset, on the south coast of England. Most of her clients are in the US and Canada.
Jeremy put her in a hotel lift with the perfect client and asked what she’d say. She had it in one sentence.
“We help experts increase their visibility by placing them on aligned podcasts to help them connect with their ideal client.”
The rest of the conversation is what that sentence leaves out: who the host turns out to be, what a one-sheet can do, and who should not hire her yet.
The host is often the client
The first thing Victoria has to undo with a new client is the picture in their head.
“I think sometimes initially when we meet people they think it’s like mainstream media, so they might have in mind that they want to be on Oprah or Diary of a CEO or Joe Rogan, I think in America often.”
What her clients actually get starts on the other side of the microphone.
“Being a guest on podcasts, you make all the connections with the hosts. Like you and me are meeting now. It’s a great networking opportunity, and sometimes our clients find that the host is their ideal client and they end up working together.”
“It can also be great for your SEO, because a lot of hosts will give you a backlink to your website in the show notes. So some of our clients use it for that. Great to get all those backlinks coming and help people discover you.”
And the reason none of it needs Oprah:
“But where podcasts can be so niche, you don’t need to be on Oprah or Joe Rogan or whatever to see benefits from a podcast interview strategy. You can really, really hone in your marketing and talk to the people that need to hear from you.”
Cats, and the one-sheet that got read as a résumé
Jeremy raised salon owners, whose websites tend to be four pictures and three sentences because the owner was afraid to say more. Victoria’s answer was a coach who loves cats and says so on air.
“And she told us that after one interview went live, she had an inquiry from someone who said, I knew you were the coach for me. I really liked the sound of you as you were talking about how you love cats. I love cats.”
“That’s just a really simple way of putting it, but it gives you a chance to show that side of you and maybe what makes you different, and you’re going to attract the right people to you and also probably repel the others, which is fine.”
Her very first booking client was a business owner who worked in leadership. She pitched one show with his one-sheet.
“And they were saying, well, yeah, you can be on the podcast, but we’re looking for someone like him as a consultant, and do you think he’d deliver some webinars for us? So he got this business opportunity.”
“So they did their interview, and at the end they asked him if he would be a speaker at the conference, and they bought three hundred copies of his book.”
“So I realised that it didn’t work out necessarily in the way that you thought it was going to, but these other opportunities were coming through for him.”
From journalism to a hand raised in a Facebook group
Victoria trained in journalism, moved into communications, and went freelance in marketing after her daughter was born, about sixteen years ago. Around 2018 she was working with a couple of authors and took a course on new ways to support them. Podcast guesting was one of the modules.
“So I thought, this sounds really interesting. And there was a business owner in the Facebook group attached to the course who said, I really want to be on podcasts, having done this, but I don’t have the time to do it myself. Can anyone help me? So I put my hand up.”
“It was so interesting to me, because I didn’t really know what we were doing. We just were feeling our way around it, and it was the benefits that he got that I think made me quite enthusiastic.”
Jeremy asked what her life would look like as a colouring book. She’d never been asked.
“So is it messy? Is it ordered? No, it’s probably messy, I’ll be honest with you.”
Buy a microphone, leave the script at home
The first excuse she hears is equipment.
“Yes, it’s ideal to definitely have an external microphone, webcam, headphones, but you don’t have to spend a lot of money to do that. Just not using your computer’s in-built camera and microphone is going to elevate it.”
The second is polish.
“So yes, there is preparation you can do ahead of time, but I think that worry about perfection before you start: you don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to be the best speaker, you can just be yourself.”
Jeremy asked why her agency has a speech coach on the team. It came from one author, years ago, who had been a teacher.
“She showed up to the podcast interviews with a script. She was expecting advanced questions which she could then write a script for, and then she wasn’t expecting to deviate from that at all in any form of natural communication. So that took me by surprise.”
“This was many years ago, and that is why we got the speech coach on board, to help people prepare a little bit, to feel more comfortable. And also we give them a practice interview on our podcast.”
The coach has also caught a copywriting client introducing themselves with what Victoria called “very much a canned response”. Her one note for anybody going on a show:
“Share stories. Share stories. It helps you to be more memorable, helps to build connection with the listener. We remember stories far more than facts.”
Jeremy brought up the tension he’d talked through with Jake Melendy of Ignitvio: marketing wants you to say a particular thing, but the marketing you put out there is a representation of you. His fix, on air: “You don’t have to memorize who you are.”
SOPs, a speech coach and the first real holiday
Jeremy asked about the friction of going from freelancer to a team.
“And then it’s, who do you get to help you? Can you trust them? I think that can be an issue, of will they deliver to my clients the same quality?”
“So for me, it was putting together a number of SOPs for things, this is how we do things, and then the checks and balances.”
“And then I think moving from being in the business to working on the business, as I talk about, and how much time, because you need to be looking at bringing in the business, and then not spending all your time on the client work but overseeing it also.”
The payoff was a Caribbean cruise in February.
“I think it’s the first time, actually, that I was able to fully step away from the business, because I had the team members in place.”
AI pitches, and who should hold off
Victoria uses AI inside the business. Not in the pitch.
“But I also have spoken to hosts who are saying that they are getting so many more pitches now, very AI-generated pitches.”
“So certainly we use it within the business, we would use it in the background, but we don’t use it in our pitches. We still pitch fresh.”
Then the hard question: who shouldn’t hire her?
“If you’re very new, if you’re still figuring out your business, if, say, a host is going to look you up and they’re not really sure what you do, you’re not at that point, you’re really, really new, then no.”
“If maybe you’re not selling anything yet, or you don’t have a solid offer worked out yet, then hold off. Hold off on the podcasts till you do.”
Free SOP
I turned Victoria’s readiness test into a step-by-step you can run before your first pitch: Guest Readiness SOP: Get Booked on Podcasts Without Needing Oprah. Seven steps, from the hold-off gate to counting the host as the first win, plus a printable one-page checklist. No email required.
Victoria’s question for a future SEO guest on the network: “AI search: how do we show up in AI search? It seems different from Google search. So I’m open to any advice on that.” Jeremy is floating it to the next SEO expert on Unscripted SEO.
Connect with Victoria
- The Best Podcast Guest Booking Agency: thebestpodcastguest.co.uk
- Her podcast, The Best Guest, where clients get their practice interview
- LinkedIn: Victoria Bennion
🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: YouTube
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