2144 - Leveraging Podcasts for Effective PR with El Bee PR's Larissa Banting

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05with us right now it's larissa banting larissa you are uh the owner of lbpr and there's a couple websites both of these are linked in the show description to our friend that's listening uh number one is lbpr is e lb e pr.com and your personal website where you do a lot more and that is at LarissaBanting.com. Larissa, it's great to have you. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. I'm excited to be here. Well, with a background that you do both in dance and entertainment, and you work for the entertainment film industry, I would love to hear or know what are you watching? Have you seen any movies, TV shows?

1:48What are you listening to? Any books? Anything that kind of stands out over the past month or so that you've been into? Well, I have to admit that I have the sin of what most people who work in the film and television industry do, that we don't watch TV and film much. Oh, right. If you're watching TV, you're not making TV. Yeah. But I'm just finishing a book called The Future. And it's a great book. I'm sorry, I don't remember the author. I'm in a book club, and I'm great at the titles, but I always forget the author. the future she's a new york times bestseller and naomi alderman yes yes exactly and it's fascinating it's such a great read i didn't know that off the top of my head i did a google search so much much as i'd like to be appreciated for knowing that i don't but there it is very okay very popular very popular it looks like absolutely looks like a book club kind of book it is but it's a great read it's fast paced and i i think i definitely highly recommend it as for music i am i'm a child of the 80s and i'm kind of i'm still stuck you and me both my friend listen i i and just recently too um not normally big on my radar um but i for whatever reason i've been really getting back into the cars which has never been like i mean i like the cars they got some hit songs or whatever.

3:16But, you know, I, we saw a Cars tribute band here locally, and I was already kind of re-digging into them and appreciating that they were actually quite influential because they came along in the late seventies and really were this transition from guitar rock to more keyboard oriented rock, which of course we had in the eighties, you know, a lot of new wave or whatever. And they really were just a great bridge band for that. And, you know, we start digging into their catalog, you know, a lot of great stuff. I mean, Rico Kasich is just a fantastic songwriter and a lyricist. When you read his lyrics to like one of my I'm sorry, I'm going on and on here.

3:59But like he's got this one line. Bye bye. Love is like probably my favorite car song. And, you know, when he's he's he's morose over the fact that, you know, he's losing his girlfriend and he's looking out and the words he uses it's an orangey sky and I'm just like I love that line for what I can't stop thinking about that it's an orangey sky to describe how he's feeling and I just I just thought that was so cool anyway um what are some of your favorite 80s artists oh well well I uh actually I flew to Edmonton last November to go see Depeche Mode for my fifth time i saw that tour as well the momentum maori tour fan we had in tampa excellent been a fan since the first uh speak and spell came out so i've seen them like yeah five times over the last four decades and then the year before that we went i took my daughter to see the cure she's a huge cure fan yeah 16 at the time she was 16 we flew to montreal to go see them and it's just so i mean i saw them in 1985 in toronto i never ever would have um imagined that i would be there 40 years later sitting in the audience with my daughter enjoying and and then what a show what a show so yeah we've seen we went and saw tears for fears i noticed a trend that we're like we go and we see bands but yeah so i'm i mean huge tears for fears, Depeche Mode.

5:26You know, who else? The Cure, Suzy and the Banshees. I kind of like that. Well, so, you know, like, I wish, you know, I really need to do a music show here because the story between Suzy and the Banshees and Robert Smith of the Cure is really, I mean, really for someone who appreciates like rock history and like, you need to look at that relationship, there would be no cure if it weren't for Susie. But similarly, there almost was no cure because of Susie and the Banshees. And I'll let you kind of search YouTube and kind of watch, you know, for our friend that's listening. Larissa, we need to get to talking about what you do.

6:02You are a public relations professional. You know, my love, my background, I just believe in PR so much. You know, Bill Gates famously said if he was down to his last dollar, he'd invested in PR. So tell me a bit about how you work with your clients and where you, like kind of the outcomes that you specialize in. Okay. Well, my really quickly, my background, I've been in PR since 1993, when we were still using fax machines, you know, and sending the press releases through to the main office back in the day. So, and I got my accreditation with the Canadian Public Relations Society in 1999. So I've done pretty much everything.

6:43I was in charge of the crisis communications for the city of St. Albert for Y2K. If you remember when the whole world was going to disappear on the stroke of midnight. So I've done quite a wide range. I was a journalist. I had my own column in a couple of magazines. So my agency, we have a boutique agency called LBPR, and we are really focused on bespoke publicity in the sense that, you know, we're not throwing spaghetti against the wall. We're really trying to find like, what are those interesting stories, those great hooks, getting them out into the print media and also podcasting. Like podcasts are really our sweet spot.

7:26And so we've gotten some amazing results for our clients. Like one of our clients had a thousand new subscribers in one week of being on a particular podcast. Cause it was just super, she was super niche and we just, you know, got the right podcast with the right niche audience and it just magic happens and that's why I love podcasts because you can just you can dial it in to a degree that you can't with with print so I you know we try to take an omni-channel approach and and find what is like is there a possibility to do some news jacking you know like it's like what's happening in the news cycle is there an opportunity to to get our clients there in into the discussion with a new point of view that is appropriate to what's what everyone's talking about at that moment.

8:13Yeah. Well, listen, your lips to God's ears on this. And I'm such a devotee of what you're talking about. My last company, Savings Angel, became a six-figure a month company. And I spent$0 in paid ads. Everything I did was PR. And newsjacking is exactly what I did. But it really was from the approach of, you know, my job is just to serve, serve, serve, serve the producer, serve the talent, serve the station, serve the viewers, you know, really got into radio and TV pretty early on. But, you know, with that kind of an attitude, when it's more about what can you do for others first and play the long game on this, that's, it wasn't like I was in, you know, 2 ,500 different outlets.

8:56It was mostly, you know, the, you know, eight outlets that I've gone back to hundreds of times, you You know, and then a bunch of, you know, one offs and stuff here and there. But but, you know, you can absolutely do this now. But you were talking specifically about podcasts. And so obviously I'm a fan. What are realistic expectations? So like when you're talking about and you have a program and I'd like for you to maybe share the structure of that, because it's it's a pretty compelling offer just in terms of volume of shows. But maybe you could dig a little bit more into what podcast PR is appropriate for, but also, listen, let's manage expectations here.

9:43It's probably not going to be X, but you are going to get Y and Z. right so i think what happens a lot of people look at the way like oh my gosh i want to be on entrepreneur on fire because they have like millions of listeners um which is great for an authority perspective but being on as large podcasts uh it's not going to move the needle forward necessarily in your business because i always use this analogy imagine that you want to go you want to fish for tuna and you're going out to the ocean you're throwing this huge net and you're when you pull that net in you're getting everything from octopus to to crab to whatever but you're not really getting the tuna well that's the equivalent of going on these giant podcasts that have just a massive audience as opposed to going on the smaller niche outlets where your ideal audience is hanging out and you're speaking the same language to them that's where the needle really moves because you don't have to you're talking to you're talking to the tuna people right and to use that analogy and we've had like one of our clients for example um my gosh she teaches women how to take old chairs and refurbish them into beautiful usable pieces of art that is a very specific niche we got her onto and she'd been on entrepreneur on fire was great whatever we got her into a podcast called thrift diving which is exactly her people people who are taking secondhand stuff right i can see where this story's going so this is so crazy she had a thousand subscribers within a week of going live on that podcast she opened her her cart for her 400 course two weeks later because of the affiliate link she could track she had 34 purchases from those initial thousand subscribers so that was a five figure podcast from like within a month the youtube channel that accompanied that interview has it's up to 123 000 views on youtube and i mean and that's and that was three years ago she's still getting on new subscribers coming in and new purchases and that's the power of podcasts like i love print but podcasts you've got the evergreen you've got the seo you have the ability to have a you know some sort of a lead magnet inside the show notes you can't do that with print they're not going to you know you have a whiff of anything promotional and they're like, uh-uh, like they'll do maybe a link to your website and that's it.

12:06But it's like, if you want to do anything promotional, go buy an ad. Oh yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. So, but, but with podcasts, you have that flexibility. So you, you have a show notes, so you can take that and use that in your blog. You can repurpose it for your social media. There's just so much you can do with it. And it just kind of keeps working in the background for you. The other thing is now they're talking about, remember how it used to be, you know, eight to 10 touch points before somebody was ready to open their wallet because they had to get to know, like, and trust you. I've heard anywhere between 20 to 70 touch points now, Josh, like that's, how do you break through?

12:40People are busy. They're distracted. There's noise everywhere. There's content everywhere. You know, people are, you know, inundating themselves with AI conversations. I'll speak for myself. You know, there's a lot going on there. There's a lot of data being transferred right now. So you're absolutely right with everyone's busy schedules and priorities. You know, it's, it is, it's unrealistic to think just because you have one conversation with, and I'll speak specifically for sales. You know, you can have a conversation with someone and they might go, yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds fantastic. That doesn't mean anything until they've paid and you've begun and things are going.

13:20That's when the business is done until then. your job is just yeah yeah you gotta stay in their life well and that's why the you know like when i'm talking to clients like this is why you want to get onto podcasts because if think about it you're having a 30 minute 60 minute conversation going in depth into your business into your knowledge showcasing how you're an authority on something by the time someone walks away from that interview they probably have a pretty good idea if they know i can trust you enough if they want to move forward with you. You can't, I mean, so that 70 touch points, boom, you've got it right there.

13:54The other thing that I find really fascinating is that the statistics show 85 % of people who start an episode on listening to podcasts will finish that episode. You don't get that with any other media because people are able to multitask. They can be driving the car, they could be walking the dog, they could be, you know, doing whatever. And again, you can't do that if you're reading you can't do that if you're watching a youtube you know it that's why podcasts are so popular and um you know there's like there's almost four million podcasts in the world right now and um so what we do with our this offer i was i was telling you about we call it 30 and three what we do is we we get 30 podcasts they have to be top tier meaning minimum 10 000 monthly listeners and minimum top five percent because i don't know if you know this josh but only uh only was it 10 % of podcasts that get, but people start producing only 10 % ever make it to episode 21.

14:54Yeah. Yep. That, that just in case anyone was like, Oh, no, no, what go ahead and rewind. That is absolutely a known fact. Can I ask you just opinion? Why do you think that is? I think it's like, it's the same as, you know, January where everyone heads to the gym and come February there's tumbleweeds rolling through said Jim because it's hard it is really hard and people think it's like field of dreams oh if I build it they'll come no you have to build your audience and it's hard work and then you have to produce it get those you know like it's just it is so much work and I think people go into it thinking oh this is going to be great it'll be so much fun and then the realization hits them oh my gosh this takes a lot of time and you know They're not seeing the audience building quickly.

15:40And so they lose interest and yeah, gone. So that's why we have that criteria because, you know, I've seen, you know, there's, there's podcast company booking out there and they're like, yeah, we'll get you like two podcasts a week, but it's, it's small podcasts and there's nothing against everyone has to start somewhere. But where we're coming from, it's like, look, my client's time is like super valuable. We're going to get 30 bookings confirmed, not meaning you're going to do the interviews in three months, but you get the bookings confirmed in three months. And then according to your schedule and the podcaster schedule, you set it up.

16:13So usually I realistically between four to five months is when you'll have like all the podcast bookings done, but we do everything. We do all the pitching. We come up with the story ideas, create the media kit, do the follow-up, have everything on a spreadsheet, color code it. Cause I'm a little bit OCD that way. And so basically all that our clients have to do is just show up and speak. yeah well and so obviously you know while i think there are hopes and dreams of being featured on a stage and then the podcaster publishes it um that's not all right i mean there's more value you can get from that appearance right oh yeah yeah absolutely i mean the thing is is yes okay obviously you're hitting a very wide audience but uh we've had clients who have ended up doing um partnership you know joint ventures with the podcaster doing affiliate marketing with a podcaster the podcaster host introduces them to somebody else and podcast host has hired our clients like oh my gosh you're exactly who I'm looking for um but you can leverage that like once you have these podcasts you can leverage those because if you want to be a speaker what's the first thing that the bookers are looking for what is your media footprint you know where have you absolutely right it's between you speaker a and speaker b and speaker B has been on no, there's no media footprint, they're going to go speaker A, because they want to make sure that they have that credibility, they have that authority.

17:38If you have podcast bookings, and you can show, hey, here, here I am in action, here's how I speak, here's how I present myself. You know, on top of that, you've also you can take those interviews, cut them up. Now you've got lots of like, material for your social media, you can use your the transcripts for emails for blog posts for social media. It's just, it just keeps going and going. It's like the gift that keeps on going. And I'm going to give everybody a little tip. There is a great software called missingletter.com. That's M-I-S-N. Oh, missing letter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's missing the letter E at the end.

18:19So missing letter is just you hook it up to your blog post, your blog. So every time you put a post out, it'll automatically create a year's worth of social media posts. As soon as you just kind of go through and you prove it, it'll just be working in the background, driving traffic to that particular blog post. So that's another little, I just think that's a brilliant little piece of software and it definitely makes life easier. Yeah. Well, Larissa Banting, your two websites, LBPR, E-L-B-E-E-P-R.com. Now, this is where you offer a little bit more of a bigger engagement, right? Do you mind explaining the difference between your offers?

19:02Sure. So, I mean, traditionally, you know, public relations, it is, I always say it is the marathon. It is not the sprint. And we need to have the long runway, especially when we're dealing with large print outlets. So traditionally, public relations works on six-month retainers, six-month to one-year retainers. So this is what we do with LBPR because we are offering our clients print, television, radio, podcasting, blogs. We do ghostwriting as well. As I mentioned, I used to be a journalist. So those are for companies that want to have a full media footprint. Now, the other thing that we have, which is available through my LarissaBanting.com, by the way, fun fact, I am the only Larissa Banting in the world, which is also could be a good or bad thing, I guess, on social media.

19:50But that is where we offer the podcast only booking service, which is a 30 and three. because, you know, out of all the media outlets, yes, it's great to get into print, but where the needle is really going to move the fastest for if you want to scale your business is with podcasts. Again, because you can get so super micro niche down, you can really resonate with the people that you need to, your ideal clients. You can have your lead magnet, you know, you can be a little bit promotional in it. So that's why we offer the 30 and three through that. You don't have that long-term commitment because most small businesses aren't in the position where they can say, yes, I can commit to a six-month retainer for PR.

20:37All right. The websites LBPR and LarissaBanting.com. Larissa Banting, it's been a joy having you. Thank you so much for the conversation. Have a wonderful rest of the day. Thanks, Josh.

20:56Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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