How Podcast Exposure Impacts Valuation At Sale with Amanda Rogers

Amanda Rogers (0:00): Podcasting is sort of the the last thing that people think of because they think of it as like, oh, I couldn't do that. Like, oh, I would be too nervous. Right? But it's just a conversation. It's just sitting down and talking about the one thing that you're really passionate about because it's the thing that you started your company to do.

Tom Schwab (0:20): Welcome to the podcast interview marketing show where we explore big ideas with leading experts on how to grow your brand and business with targeted podcast interviews.

Tom Schwab (0:32): Welcome back to the Podcast Interview Marketing Show. I'm Tom Schwab and I'm so excited to share this conversation with you. See I sat down with Amanda Rogers. She's the co founder at Digital Storyteller and we talk about a topic that every founder, consultant, coach, agency leader needs to hear and it's why visibility is not just about leads it's about valuation of the company. You see too often smart business owners get distracted by vanity metrics, the shiny tools, and the marketing activities that look busy but don't really build a strong business.

Tom Schwab (1:16): Amanda brings a very sharp lens. She shares how targeted podcast interviews can do far more than fill the top of funnel. Done correctly, they build authority, strength and trust, create strategic visibility, and even make a company more attractive to partners, buyers, and acquirers. That's the real opportunity with Podcast Interview Marketing. It's not a megaphone making noise everywhere.

Tom Schwab (1:46): It's about being a magnet. Being heard in the right places by the right people with the right messages. Attracting ideal clients, not just random leads. So listen for how Amanda connects thought leadership, authenticity, and long form conversations to drive real business valuation. This one could change the way you measure your marketing success.

Tom Schwab (2:13): Amanda, this is like a follow on to a conversation we had about some of your experiences and the feedback you've had about visibility driving valuation there too. So can you unpack that idea a little bit?

Amanda Rogers (2:29): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, we're a marketing agency and we work with financial services companies and so they don't always know like the right questions to ask about visibility, about valuation, about how to, how to get the right people through the door. And we talk to them like, you know, you've got this, this limited tool belt, right? In terms of how you can get your message out there.

Amanda Rogers (2:59): You're not gonna, you're not gonna change the world on Instagram. You're not gonna influence on TikTok. Like they have a limited tool belt and we do videos with them and stuff like that. But so we were working with this one company and they really wanted to create an opportunity for their founder to be like a thought leader. And, you know, I'm, I'm looking at while we're doing videos and we're putting them on LinkedIn and, but it was, it was kind of slow going.

Amanda Rogers (3:30): And they found you guys and they were like, what about podcasts? And honestly, all I was thinking was like, I do not have the bandwidth with my team to go out and find the right people and find the podcasts. And how do I know what their audience is and how do like, I don't know what I don't know. And so anyway, they found you guys and you did all of that work for them. And what I didn't know was happening behind the scenes was they were setting up to sell, right?

Amanda Rogers (4:03): And they were looking at all of the different areas of their company, like training management so that the figurehead founder could step aside and the company wouldn't crumble. All of these different areas, right, that you want to build up when you're thinking about building up your valuation. One of the areas was they were like, we really want to help our founder show up more in the general conversation about accounting, corporate accounting. Right? So they were an outsourced, outsourced accounting company.

Amanda Rogers (4:36): So they started doing interview valet and, and they were getting leads, like really great leads from from the appearances that they were having. And and they were targeting, like, construction podcasts and nonprofit podcasts. And they went through the whole process with your team of, like, really nailing down the right demographic for for him and for what they did. And then okay. So then they you know, they're getting leads.

Amanda Rogers (5:06): They're like, this is great. And we're promoting it on LinkedIn. And there's all this great cross promotion with your podcasters who are so generous and so lovely. And then they get acquired. I was like, oh dear, well, we're out.

Amanda Rogers (5:20): But, in the postmortem from the, from the acquisition, the acquiring company sat down with them and they were like, you know, we were just seeing Jason everywhere. We were hearing about him. We were, you know, we were getting all this feedback that he was out there and we saw him on all these podcasts and we saw all of the reciprocal sort of ancillary social posts that we would do about it. It was on the website and on the podcasters, all the backlinks. And they're like, actively improved their evaluation.

Amanda Rogers (5:55): It was a major point in why we acquired this company. And it had never crossed my mind before that that was a tool in the tool belt. Right. That, that podcasting is a, is a really powerful tool in your tool belt and you do not have to do it yourself.

Tom Schwab (6:13): And it's interesting the way you look at that and kudos to you, you know, for digital storyteller, the, the marketing firm, that you founded and run, right? It's not just about leads. It's not just about activity. You're looking at how can we build the valuation of the company, right? How can we build their, their presence out there?

Tom Schwab (6:33): And you know, it's interesting today, it's not only clients, potential clients that are hearing you, but it's also potential acquirers that are hearing you. It's potential partners. Heck, even AI is listening to it right now and how they found us was through one of my podcast interviews. So it's not this magic funnel. It's just you want to work with the leader in the category.

Tom Schwab (6:59): You want to acquire the leading company, and so if you go out there and the thought leaders are the ones that are actually creating leading thoughts, right? If they're in the witness protection plan, do you really want to, do you really want to buy them?

Amanda Rogers (7:16): Well, you know, you were talking, we were talking in our previous conversation about like client churn as well, and like your own clients. They hear you on a podcast they're listening to, and all of a sudden there's a sense of pride and loyalty like, Oh, hey, that's the company that I work with. Oh, we use them. And they might even not know some of the services you provide, right? Like we had a client who we had had, I'm not kidding, for five years, who sent me a text message and said, Do you know someone who can design a trifold brochure for me?

Amanda Rogers (7:58): It's like, yes. Yeah. I totally do. Me. Like, our company does that.

Amanda Rogers (8:03): We offer full design services. How do you not know that? But because, you know, delegates responsibility and he's the owner of the company, he had no idea. Do you know somebody I could refer somebody I could be referred to? No.

Amanda Rogers (8:17): So even your own clients need the kind of insights that you're giving when you're in like those conversations about what you do.

Tom Schwab (8:25): And, we've had the same experience where somebody listens to one of my podcasts and then they reach out to a client account manager and say, oh, I didn't know you guys did the repurposing or you know, I heard Tom talking about his AI bot. Can you do that for me? And they're like, yeah, we, we sent you that email. We talked about that in that optimization call, but it was like when they had the need and they heard it, that's who they went to.

Amanda Rogers (8:51): Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, with all the private equity and all the VC money that's out there right now, like, I think, I think anything that you can do to be front and center, to be sharing the spectrum of everything you offer, your company culture, who you are as a company, like not just what you do, but why you do it. And when you're in a long form podcast, you can have those conversations over the course of thirty, forty minutes on a podcast that you're not going to do in a two to three minute. What is it?

Amanda Rogers (9:27): How do we do it? How do you get it? Type of video series. Like it really just offers a lot of options. One

Tom Schwab (9:34): of the clients we worked with, he had built a SaaS product, right? It was a calendar scheduling product and it was Squarespace's first acquisition. In the debrief, we talked with them, and he's like, yeah, they, they bought me because one of the big things was his churn rate was lower. Just like you said. Right.

Tom Schwab (9:58): He wasn't building his clients through a Facebook ad or being the cheapest one out there. He told his story. He told what he believed in his point of view, his passion. You knew where his company was located right now, his competitors. I don't know if they're in India, Bangladesh, but it, to me, his competitors are interchangeable, but Gavin and his company, they were the only choice.

Tom Schwab (10:23): Right. And if somebody else came out and it was, you know, a dollar cheaper a month, I'm not churning because of that. Right. I know this company. And so he really felt like it helped the valuation and helped him be the only choice, not just one to choose from.

Amanda Rogers (10:39): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and like we were saying before, right? You've got that limited, that limited toolset that you can use to communicate with the world.

Amanda Rogers (10:48): As email gets so inundated, like we're all just, I mean, I have unsubscribed mornings where I just spend twenty minutes every Thursday morning unsubscribing from things. And it's not because I'm not interested. It's just because I can't manage the volume. But if I've chosen to go and listen to a podcast, which I do all the time, you know, anytime I'm in the car, I'm listening to a podcast. Then I, then I have the opportunity to hear a whole message that I would never read through in an email or take the time to dig into.

Tom Schwab (11:27): It's interesting and you know that it's human content, right? You talk about emails there. There's so much of it that my first question is, is this AI slop? Right. When I get a phone call from somebody, is it a robo call?

Tom Schwab (11:43): Right. And when you're actually hearing somebody talk, I heard it referred to as, being authentically. Was it authentically human or authentically inaccurate? Right. There's certain times where you hear somebody talk and you realize they're going off a teleprompter, right?

Unknown Speaker (12:03): Because I hate it.

Unknown Speaker (12:04): There's no pauses.

Unknown Speaker (12:05): Every eye's tracking.

Tom Schwab (12:07): Well, that end everything is a perfect sentence. I don't talk that way. I talk in sentence fragments. I'm from Chicago. So, you know, ING just drop the G that's good enough.

Tom Schwab (12:18): Right. And so when people hear that it's like, Oh yeah, that is actual human content there.

Amanda Rogers (12:24): Yeah, and I know, listen, down the road they're going to be able to reproduce us and make us look like humans, but right now you can totally tell. Like, can totally tell when somebody is bit like, one of our clients tried out this thing that he loaded his voice in and a script in and read it, and I was like, dude, it's terrible. It's terrible. It makes me, it makes me want to not work with you. Don't do that.

Tom Schwab (12:54): That's interesting. So do you look at marketing as magnetic then? Right? Is this something that's going to draw me to you or repel you? And I guess, you know, if you're, I guess the best marketing should be magnetic, but in the right way, pulling the ideal clients to you and repelling the wrong ones.

Tom Schwab (13:16): But the way you talked about that, do you look at it as sort of that binary, is this going to help or hurt?

Amanda Rogers (13:22): Yeah. I mean, that's such a great way to put it. Like I'd never actually thought of it that way. When I think of two magnets pushing away from each other, think of my children at an amusement park. Scatter.

Amanda Rogers (13:33): Why? Yeah. But, Kelly, there is so much out there that's just kind of, even in being neutral, it repels people. Even in being like sort of benign and boring, it repels people. And if you're not telling the truth, if you're not speaking to something that resonates, actually, I like to use the, the metaphor of the tuning fork.

Amanda Rogers (13:59): So if you take a tuning fork and you strike it, it has its own tone, right? It has its own vibration. And if you bring a still tuning fork into proximity of that truth, of that vibration that that tuning fork is sending out there, it will also start to vibrate at the same frequency. And we're like that as people, right? When we sense that somebody is speaking their truth, that when we sense that somebody is authentic, we vibrate with that same frequency with them.

Amanda Rogers (14:29): And we feel that compatibility.

Tom Schwab (14:33): A beautiful metaphor, right? That like your story, it's not supposed to resonate with everyone, just your ideal clients, those people that are tuning forks like you, right? If you try getting the rock to, vibrate at that same thing, you'll just be frustrated.

Unknown Speaker (14:50): It's just cracking.

Unknown Speaker (14:52): That's right.

Unknown Speaker (14:52): Just can't handle that. It was too much music, I couldn't take it.

Tom Schwab (14:57): Well, love how you're focusing on valuation, not just on ego metrics or, you know, small metrics that won't make a big difference, six months from now, much less a year from now.

Amanda Rogers (15:13): Yeah. I mean, I I I do think that when you talk to founders who are used to being told their value, that they can sometimes focus in on We run into this with reporting. We can run into somebody who gets so hyper focused on the number of subscribers they have on YouTube. Right? They're like, I've gotta reach that thousand mark so I can live stream on YouTube.

Amanda Rogers (15:45): And you're like, oh, so that's not really going to do anything for you. Like a thousand followers on YouTube and you live stream, maybe six people are watching and two of them are your family. That's not going to get you where you want to go. And so getting, getting business leaders focused on the things that will actually move the needle, not only for bringing in leads and for building up their revenue, which of course everybody wants to build revenue. I mean, that's at the core of what we're trying to help people do, but doing that the right way and in sustainable way, that's actually going to improve the valuation of the company, get you in front of the right people in the right way.

Amanda Rogers (16:34): I mean, you know, you got a limited toolset to get that done. And certainly we found straight value like return on investment illustrated in the most beautiful, practical, tangible way was in the sale of the outsource accounting company that we were working with, who did interview valet, got acquired, and then got the feedback that it improved their valuation.

Tom Schwab (17:02): Yeah. And, as marketers, I think the community is at times talking about the toolkit, like you said, right? What's the shiny new tool that we can do here? But the owners, the founders of the companies at the end, they just want the valuation with it. And I think back on my own life I think the best thing I ever did for the valuation of my company was take four weeks off and go hike the Camino, right?

Tom Schwab (17:34): And it's like well how did that help? Because it proved that I've got a business. It can run without me. My team stepped up, took it to the next level. There was no vanity metrics in there, but it definitely increased the value of the company.

Tom Schwab (17:49): And I think that's one of those things where if we can have conversations from owner to owner, that's very powerful, but it doesn't necessarily get seen with a marketing associate that says, How did this landing page do? How much traffic did I get to it?

Amanda Rogers (18:06): That's my time on page. Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, I think, I think measuring the right things is important and not getting too obsessed with, with things that, that you're doing.

Amanda Rogers (18:19): And sometimes like with a, with a tool that you're using, whether it be podcasting or videos or the blogs on your site or, you know, whatever tool you're using, sometimes it takes a while to see that, to see that return. But if you know, you're doing the right things and you know, you're telling a story that is impactful and true and resonant, just do the right thing. And people will come. The right people will come. The right purchaser will come.

Amanda Rogers (18:52): The right clients will come. Do the right thing. Do it consistently. Don't give up. Don't get distracted by the next AI bot that you can put on your website that's going to be like, I see you are in Uzbekistan.

Amanda Rogers (19:06): Like, how did that help? That it was able to geolocate the VPN that the person was using to conceal their location and then highlight that on your website? Like, no.

Tom Schwab (19:19): I'm going to put on my devil's advocate hat here. When people say, well I can do these other things and there's perfect analytics that says if I spent this dollar today this is how much I got back on ad spend. So that must be the perfect marketing because they can measure everything. I can see that. Why should I go from this one that has perfect analytics to something that is harder to measure?

Amanda Rogers (19:54): So ads I think are the cherry on top, right? Like I have the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like in Amanda's hierarchy of marketing, you have all this organic build that sort of creates this stable pyramid of content and video. I think that podcasting is part of that. It's building that trust, that relationship that doesn't go away.

Amanda Rogers (20:20): These things are not going to go away. And if you decide that you want to spend a little money on ads, you should do it after you have built this solid foundation of organic outreach and whatever that means for your particular company. And I think interview valet is certainly part of that. That podcasting is part of that, especially the way you guys do it with the avatars and creating the right audience. But with ads, spend the dollar, you get the lead.

Amanda Rogers (20:54): You stop spending the dollar, you stop getting the lead. Right? It's very one to one. And maybe you spend the dollar and you don't get the lead and you spend $2 and you still don't get the lead and you spend $20 and you still don't get a lead. And then you go back and you realize, oh, I didn't have this connected to that.

Amanda Rogers (21:08): And I didn't get this. And it like, well, however it's working, it's rarely a one to one comparison, but I see companies pumping money into ads that have no business, especially in the B2B financial services sector, which is where we play. They have no business going and to outspend Morgan Stanley, trying to outspend Prudential. Like it's not gonna work. I've seen actually pretty decent ROI with YouTube ads.

Amanda Rogers (21:47): I'll just say that, but they just changed the algorithm and you got to have somebody who's really good at it because now they hide all these little selectors way, way down in the basement of the thing. But I think if you're having great results from ads, you're probably in a B2C space. If you're in a B2B space and you have tremendous results from ads, please comment in the comments below and tell me who you are because I would love to see this.

Tom Schwab (22:18): You make a very good point there that I think often people say, what works in the B2C space works in the B2B space and or they'll take a B2C product and say well I'm going to do my high ticket offer now and just ramp it up. It's like no it's a different totally different sale. Greg Alexander, wrote a great book called The Boutique How to Grow, Scale and Exit a Professional Services Firm. I love how he talks about services are bought, products are sold, right? And you look at, you know, Morgan Stanley, the bigger ones, big consulting firms, you know, Bain Capital is not out there.

Tom Schwab (23:07): Ernst and Young is not out there running Facebook ads to a funnel to get, you know, 7 figure clients. They're talking, they're having their executives out speaking at meetings, heck, they're putting on their own meetings and I love how you talk about there. Are you going to outspend them? Right. So if you've got all these different tools, pick the ones that you can do best, because if you try doing all of them, it probably won't work.

Tom Schwab (23:33): And it's, you know, your client there that, they had their founder out on podcasts. That, that was a great example, right? They had something that the big firms couldn't, right? They're not going to have their founder out there talking all the time. Whereas you had here somebody that wanted to do it, was excited about doing it, and really, yeah, he went from being CEO to more like the chief evangelist officer as the founder.

Amanda Rogers (23:58): Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, you're going to get, you're going to get in house marketing teams who hear, an interview like our conversation and go, Oh, we'll just do it ourselves. Right? We'll just reach out to these podcasters.

Amanda Rogers (24:13): We'll save the money. And I would just say like, there is absolutely no time to effort equation in which that makes sense. Like you guys have a system set up and the connections to all of the different podcasters and your one pager set up and your team takes people through it and the avatar list and how it's done is actually, I think a big differentiator. So the conversation about podcasts is important, but the conversation about which podcasts and what happens after the podcast and how do you promote it and how do you amplify it and how do you create those connections that are impactful? It's not only the forty five minutes that you're on the air with someone who has an audience of 50,000 or 250,000 or, you know, 10,000 of your ideal demographic.

Amanda Rogers (25:16): It doesn't really matter what their range is, as long as that works for your company. But the effort it would take an in house marketing team or an outsourced marketing team to try to build what you guys have built. I mean, Trust me, I looked at it. It can't be done. It's not worth it.

Tom Schwab (25:35): As you pointed out, it's not a numbers game. It's not just, Well, if I got on Joe Rogan, it would change my life. Not if you're an accounting firm. That would not be a good podcast for you. Right?

Tom Schwab (25:47): To sit down with a comedian for three hours, that would probably hurt your business. Right? Right. But, if you got the right audience there and making the most out of, we call it the talent, right? Out of the founder, the CEO's time there, right?

Tom Schwab (26:02): That's where the magic happens. And, always looked at it as there's a lot of things in this world that are easy to do. But hard to do well. And you know, the companies that are worried about their valuation and are trying to make an impact on the world, they realize that this is not their core, core, business. Right?

Tom Schwab (26:25): And so just like everything else, they hire specialists that can get it done quicker, easier, less costly, right? There's a window of opportunity. I think especially now with AI that AI is listening to all the podcasts, there's a window of opportunity where they're going to figure out who the thought leaders are and the people that get there early, they're going to get the leads from AI and everybody else isn't going to even show up. They're going to be irrelevant on there. And so could you take the time to figure it out?

Tom Schwab (26:55): Yes. But like I've learned so many times, it ends up taking me more time and more money and the results aren't nearly as what they could be with a professional.

Unknown Speaker (27:04): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know. I mean, I think like the, did you read that book? Who, who, not how?

Unknown Speaker (27:14): Yeah. By, Dan Sullivan. Yeah.

Amanda Rogers (27:17): Find your who. Right. Don't don't learn how it's that's that doesn't that's if you're at the point where you're thinking about the valuation of your company, you're big enough that you should just pay the two dollars You know, that was just doesn't make any sense any other way. Yeah, I mean, if you're at that point with your, with your company where you're looking at the valuation and you're trying to figure out, like, what do we need to do? Do we need to train middle management so that you can go and hike Camino?

Amanda Rogers (27:47): Do we need to do we need to promote our company culture? Do we need to do a better job of showing what it's like to to work with us as opposed to for us? Think podcasting is podcasting is sort of the last thing that people think of because they think of it as like, oh, I couldn't do that. Like, oh, I would be too nervous. Right?

Amanda Rogers (28:13): But it's just a conversation. It's just sitting down and talking about the one thing that you're really passionate about because it's the thing that you started your company to do. So you're not selling anything. You're trying to help the listeners of that podcaster's audience. You're trying to help them by giving them what great insights you've discovered over the course of building your company.

Amanda Rogers (28:41): Like anybody who says they're nervous to get on and do that, they're just not thinking about the fact that it's just going to be a chat.

Tom Schwab (28:48): I sometimes when I hear somebody say they're nervous, I love that. Right. Because that means they're taking it seriously. And we did a study with, Matthew Pollard who wrote, the introvert's edge, and we went to our clients and two thirds of them were introverts. And I really believe that those people that, have deeper conversations are great on one on one.

Tom Schwab (29:13): I think they do great at podcast interviews, right? The carnival barker that you ask them the first question, you know, tell me about yourself. And forty five minutes later, they're wrapping it up. That's not a good interview. But as you said, you know, we all have, you know, two things we love to talk about, right?

Tom Schwab (29:33): Our families and our business. And if you founded the business, if you're running the business, the business is like another child. So you're passionate about that and I think we call them interviews but it's really just a conversation. This is the same conversation if you and I were sitting together having a cup of coffee. Hopefully it would be in San Diego and not Michigan because it's nicer weather.

Amanda Rogers (29:58): It is really nice weather here honestly, but don't tell anybody. Housing prices are way too high.

Tom Schwab (30:06): That's why I said visit, right? Yes. What would you tell somebody that was considering this either for themselves or an agency saying, What tools could we pull out of the marketing belt for this client? What would you tell them?

Amanda Rogers (30:24): I would say to a fellow agency owner who's looking at their tools and going, some of these are not working as well as we would like them to, or what can we add to our tool belt? They should just get on a call with you and have a conversation about what Interview Valet can do for a CEO, a founder, a leader in the company in terms of getting the word out there. And I think there's a great collaboration between a marketing agency and Interview Valet where everybody, you know, the rising tide raises all ships. Everybody shines when you bring in a tool that's as effective as our experience has been with working with you. And then if you're a founder and you're a CEO or CFO, and you're thinking about what you can do to increase valuation, if you're thinking about what you can do to not only increase revenue for your company, and of course you want to meet your annual goals, but really kind of holistically increase the value of your company.

Amanda Rogers (31:44): I would say also, ask your marketing team to reach out to Tom, reach out to the interview valet team, because the process is so effective, easy, painless, and the results are so measurable and so lasting that I don't think I could recommend it highly enough to anybody else who's considering it.

Tom Schwab (32:09): Thank you Amanda, and we've loved working with you and Digital Story Teller. We always say all we do is podcast interview marketing, right, so there's no overlap. Our goal is to make you and other agencies look like geniuses for bringing us in, to help out. It's always your client there and we can be as involved with the, day to day or uninvolved and invisible. But we just want to make sure that you know, these people get hurt because they're, they're changing the world, right?

Tom Schwab (32:41): What they've got, it's ordinary to them, but it's amazing to others. And you know, it's one conversation away from them meeting their best client, meeting their acquirer, getting heard by AI. If somebody wants to learn more about you and Digital Storyteller, where can they go?

Amanda Rogers (32:59): Well, they can go on our website. It's digitalstoryteller.io, like Indian Ocean, because I'm a nerd, and, I thought that was cool long before dot ai was was all the rage. And, yeah, send us an email. I'm amandadigitalstoryteller. Io.

Amanda Rogers (33:19): Just reach out to me directly.

Unknown Speaker (33:22): Thank you, Amanda.

Unknown Speaker (33:23): Awesome. Thanks, Tom. This was fun.

Tom Schwab (33:25): Amanda did a great job of reminding us that the best marketing isn't about doing more. It's about doing what matters. In this episode, you heard why podcast interview marketing can be one of the most effective tools to build trust, deepen loyalty, attract ideal clients, and increase the long term value of your business. The best. The big lesson here is simple.

Tom Schwab (33:54): Visibility is just vanity if it's not targeted. When your ideal audience hears your voice, your stories, your strong point of view, and your passion all in a real conversation, you stop sounding interchangeable. You resonate and become the only choice not just another option. That's how great businesses grow. It's also how great brands become memorable to clients, referral partners, acquirers, and even the AI systems that refer clients today.

Tom Schwab (34:29): So here's the next step. Ask yourself, where are my ideal clients listening? And what conversations am I uniquely qualified to lead? Then focus on getting your clear point of view in front of them consistently. Not louder, not broader, just more intentionally.

Unknown Speaker (34:50): Because a single great interview is not going to change everything. But a focused strategy repeated over time can absolutely increase the valuation of your business.