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I jumped on the MarTech Podcast to talk about growing and monetizing a podcast. Podcasts are certainly proving to be one of the best ways to expand your business’ reach while leveraging the reach of industry leaders. For B2B businesses, adding podcasts to your marketing portfolio not only helps with the cultivation of a targeted audience, you get access to the insights required for future business growth.
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The way that B2B buying works that someone could listen to the show in six months. They remember their episode when they finally need some sales management software, and then they go, that's never gonna be tracked. It's more just like almost releasing the need for this super clear, quantifiable measurements and just ensuring that you're putting out amazing content and then almost expecting that to come back in revenue.
Today we're gonna talk about growing and monetizing a podcast. Joining us is Tom Hunt, who is the founder and CEO of Fame, which launches and grows some of the world's most profitable B2B podcasts. Fame clients includes companies like Workday, ideo, and Bevy. And today Tom and I are gonna talk about growing a podcast monetization.
Tom, welcome to the MarTech Podcast. Thank you for having me, Ben. I mean, 1,200 episodes. I'm honored to be on such a a p with such a great back history. I feel like when we started the MarTech Podcast about five years ago, I had less to talk to you about because not only have we been doing this podcast for a while, We've launched two other podcasts I've had to rebrand the company where now I hear everything and we are doing content as a service, so we're helping brands make their content scale monetize.
Honestly, it's something that's sort of very much in the wheelhouse of fame. I feel like you're a little bit farther along. In the content production business. So let's exchange some notes and figure out a way to be buddies instead of compete with each other. How's that sound? Sounds perfect. All right, good.
What's the secret sauce? ? How do you get clients and make podcasts to make everybody happy? I think so at one point I wanna flag is that I actually don't see us in the content production business. I see fame as executing a growth process. Go on, I'm listening. Maybe Specif Ify tell a story. So I spent like seven years starting going online es I had a podcast back in the day that probably did better than the business.
I was bootstrapping alongside the show. That's how I ended up here. Yeah. And so that was actually a daily show of like 10 minutes a day on like how I was building the company. But then that story got like a bigger following or actually made more money than the business. Anyway, fame started when I was head of marketing at a B2B SaaS.
We started this show because I wanted to learn more about this specific persona that I was supposed to be selling to. And before I had the podcast idea, I just messaged him on LinkedIn and I was like, can I grab 15 minutes of your time so you can tell me about yourself and your industry? Obviously no one replied, so then we were like, okay, well we'll start the persona we were targeting with sales ops.
When don't we start the show Sales Ops Demystified, and instead of me just trying to get these people to get on a call with me, they can actually come on and be on the show. So that started like quite slow, very low production quality. But then we started getting some like inbound seo the guests were sharing.
We had our perfect customers like coming into our office. This was before Covid to get interviewed when previously they would be ignoring me, but then something magical happened and the 13th guests. I think with the VP of sales ops at a B2B SaaS company. We know it was actually completely random. They got chatting with the CEO after on LinkedIn, and then about four months later bought our sales software for that all 183 of their sales team.
So this was like a significantly like profitable experience for that company. For me, the holy gra, B2B marketing, you got the long term brown building value add benefits, and then short term attributable. So I was like, I'm leaving. Would you like to be a client? I'm gonna do this full time. I've just landed this client.
Now I'm out of here . I did 200 episodes hosting that show. There's still a client, someone else is now the host. But the reason I tell a story is because I actually think that the way we run our client shows is there's a little bit less focus on content production. Obviously you have to create good stuff in order to get a listeners, but it's more about how you can bring in marketing and operations in order to run this growth process, which is a bit more than simply just produc.
This like 20 minute audio. It's funny, I was just in monday.com today and I was renaming some of our workspaces to be a little bit better aligned with what the purpose of the workflows and automations we have are. And basically I tried to use one name descriptions of everything that we do, and one is obviously our operations, content production, marketing, and advertising.
Lead generation and then customer success where we're managing our sponsorship relationships. But there is very much a process that we're following, not only to build our shows, to reach out to other companies, to help them understand their shows. And you bring up an interesting point where the content is only a piece of the puzzle.
I feel like when people that are new in podcasting get started, I feel like there's two camps. One, there's. riverside.fm anchor. I'm just gonna do this myself. I'm gonna press record. I'm gonna talk into a microphone, I'm gonna publish it. And I think people are gonna start listening. And then there's the other camp who are sitting there saying, we need the highest production quality.
We've gotta spend tens of thousands of dollars to make each individual piece of content so shiny and so glossy and so wonderful that everybody has to listen. And everything that I've learned about podcasting is you need to be somewhere in between. You need to be able to create content at scale that is high quality, but doesn't have to be a hundred percent shiny and polished.
Just like what the photography everybody gravitates towards on social media. It's not the professionally shot photos, it's the ones that you shoot from your iPhone, and then there's all this other stuff that goes along with it, which is great. Now you've got the content. How do you syndicate the content?
How do you reach out to the people to contribute? How do you get that content to be viral? How do you monetize that content? It seems like you're doing a great job of not only figuring out how to create the content, that initial content production, but those other pieces as well. Talk to me a little bit about your podcast growth and monetization Strateg.
Yeah, so we have, there's six pillars and some we like to work through the pillars sequentially. I don't think we should go through them all, but should I just pick out a couple of things that I like working well? Like now Fire away. The number one best, and I don't know how long this is gonna be good for, because I'm telling people about it, so it's gonna get more expensive, but it's the combination of P graph growth and seo.
Ideally, every B2B client has their podcast, like a podcast page on their own domain, right? That people can. So all you do, if you Google like best niche podcasts and depending on how popular, the niche, you'll get between like five and 500 blog posts lifting these shows. And so then if almost like the Instagram influencer Dave, like 10 years ago or five years ago, where you can spend like $50.
For a post to like a profile with 200,000 followers because they didn't know the value. Now all these bloggers, they literally dunno their value. They're like getting significant organic traffic for these topics. And you can pay them $150 to put your B2B show or your, like any niche, whether it be c, B2B, at number one with a backlink to your site, that podcast page on your site.
So it's both podcast growth and FBO growth for your business. And I don't think these bloggers know their value, but the more people do this, the higher it's. It's an interesting strategy. You're talking about SEO to drive podcasts, and one of the things that we've struggled with is converting people from being a listener or visiting our website to being a subscriber.
So when you're trying to get somebody to the website, obviously they're targeted, they're interested in content, they're looking for top X podcast. So chances are they're a podcast listener, but bridging the gap from, I'm on your website to, I'm on my phone, most likely subscribing to the podcast. So then I start listening, or two different tasks.
How do you drive subscribers when your marketing strategy is primarily seo? The strategy to drive subscribers that I think is probably working the best at the moment is a page approach. And it can be eventually any paid platform where you can target just iOS users. And I'm not sure if you're aware, but you can deep link into Apple Podcasts.
So you can preload the RSS feed in a little popup so you can, for example, if you have a BT marketing show, you can like target in the. People are interested in B2 marketing. Narrow that by people that like podcasts. Then also only target iOS use the deep linking strategy. So you essentially only target iOS, but then you put podcasts instead of HTTPS on the URL of your RSS feed.
So if someone clicks that on an app, on an iOS device, auto opens Apple podcasts and then pops up a little pre-loaded thing for the hit one button to subscribe. Now, obviously like it's a little. I don't know. You have to give them enough information or value in the ads so they actually kinda get a massive drop off at that point.
But that is the best way I'm seeing to grow subscribers at the moment. Yeah, it's interesting. We have had an internal debate with some of our growth partners about what the landing page experience is, whether you should be targeting people on iOS with Apple Podcasts, or should you be landing 'em on an interstitial page that says, here's the list of all the podcasts where you can find us and let them select their podcast players.
Obviously Apple. One of the dominant forces in the podcasting game, but there's Spotify, there's Overcast, there's a million different, it's called them pod catchers that can build an app, grab your RSS feeds, and publish your content. So making the assumption that everybody is going to Apple Podcasts, it seems like that's an assumption that you're willing to make and that you've seen good success driving people.
Just deep linking into the individual show and episode. Well, there's no other podcast app where you can guarantee that everybody that you're gonna be targeting is gonna have the app on their phone. You could target Spotify than interest on Facebook, for example, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee that everyone that's interested in Spotify has Spotify on their phone.
And then, yeah, Alan's, Spotify, number one. And so like if you have a podcast. I would suggest sending most of your traffic to Apple and Spotify. The other benefit of the Apple, like Thrashy is that they have, in my opinion, the most sophisticated and beneficial ranking process. So if you do rank in a category in Apple, then you're more like to get more listeners.
I like Spotify does have rankings. I don't really understand them or like, no, if significant, but from my experience, that ranking in a category within. Is good for your show. And so when we're promoting shows, especially during launch, we want to push as much to Apple to get that high ranking. So you can use that as social proof in the future, but then also it will bring you more listeners if you get to the top 10, say, in marketing in the us.
Apple's algorithm is a little bit of a fickle beast where I have an SEO podcast as well. And so a lot of it is, I'll steal your word, demystifying Google's algorithm. You know, what are the factors that you need, the ranking factors you need to consider to be able to rank for a given keyword, and apple is tricky as well.
There's a couple different factors that. I think are relevant. It's number of reviews. It's new subscribers, it's actual listeners, it's people that are listening and then press subscribe. There's a couple different factors that Apple's going to be look at. It's also, how long have you been producing the podcast, right?
How many listeners, what's the overall audience side? They tend to favor. The larger podcasts with their rankings, because there's credibility there. Logically, when you think about growing your podcast, you're focusing people towards Apple. It's not just about getting people to listen to the show, but also getting value out of the content.
That also brings revenue to the content producers. Basically, I'm talking about either monetization or lead generation. For the customers that you're working with, how do you think about making sure that when somebody. Subscribe and listen to a podcast that that's gonna be of value, not only to the listener, but also to the content creator.
Like first six months, we're not really looking to get any value from the listener side for the client. This is like the crucial stage where you actually just wanna see like steady month on month download growth. Typically 10% unless we have paid spend is what we aim for. So what we're doing then for the first six months is that, again, you can't pitch anyone that comes on the show, but we just wanna make sure that.
The people that we're bringing on the show, if they have guests, both of them do, they're like good people for them to know. Whether that could be through partnerships or through customers. Like no one gets pissed cause you can't really do that. But if there's a weekly show for six months, that's six times four, like 24 good relationships for the business, you can then go to a CFO and say, we've got one partnership and two people have exited into the sales funnel.
This is why we should continue investing in this asset. So that's the first six. Then after that, once we do have like a steady growing audience, then we are gonna be looking for, ideally to see some value from the listener side. And we experiment a little bit like we put ads for the client into the show without any significant tracking.
But then we're gonna be, if they have a demo or like proposal request form, we won't have a free text field there. Being like, how did you find us? Ideally, within the first year, we wanna see some action through that form, mentioning the show. So first six months, like guest side, and then we're looking for more from the listener side.
Once we have the show that's. Okay, so the derived value out of a podcast for the companies that you're working with first is relationship building. You're building a relationship. You have a reason to connect with people that are influential in your industry. And then the second is trying to get the audience to take some sort of action, show some sort of lead generation.
I think the common practice that most people think about when they think about podcast adverts, And deriving value from the content production is, like you said, ads. I feel like most people are thinking ads is a promo code, it's a vanity url, as opposed to being tracked at the end post purchase. Why do you favor the, Hey, how did you hear about us form post purchase over either the pod sites type of analytics that tells you how many website visitors were exposed to your content, or just using a vanity URL or a coupon code.
That post purchase the most valuable to you? Again, there could, these B2B companies is typically like pre-purchase, so when they're requesting a demo or signing up for a free trial or requesting a proposal, it would be there. I think maybe if just like lack of trust of those mechanisms that we haven't really seen those tracking mechanisms work that well.
Also the way that B2B buying works that someone could listen to the show in six months. They remember that episode when they finally need some like sales management software, and then they go, that's never gonna be tracked. And so it's more just like almost releasing the need for this super clear, like quantifiable measurements and just ensuring that you're putting out amazing content and then almost expecting that to come back in revenue.
It's like a leap of faith. You know, I recorded a great podcast a couple of weeks ago. I cannot remember the person's name, so apologies if you're listening to this podcast, and this was your idea. But basically the premise of the conversation is that marketing attribution is totally broken. That with our marketing attribution systems, we're always giving credit to.
Last click or some sort of a end of the road. All the marketing that happens to build awareness, to build context, to build purchase consideration is basically pushed aside for, well, then someone went to Google after they knew what they were looking for. Found my brand, clicked and bought something. And the argument was the most valuable way to track marketing attribution is, as you said, asking somebody who has gone through some sort of a purchase flow, whether they're buying a software product or they're just signing up for a demo.
It might be a microtransaction, but asking them what was the most influential marketing channel that drove them to take this step as opposed to what was the last thing you did to get over the last 10 feet of the. So I totally agree with you in terms of figuring out how to evaluate the value of a podcast.
You need to actually go talk to your leads. You need to go talk to your prospects and ask them, how many of you have been impacted or consumed content? How big of a factor was that content that we were creating? And how much did it influence your decision to start working with us? And I think what you'll find is that podcasts content, this sort of new media is exponentially better than what your last click attribution or your MM.
Models would show. That's exactly right. I think you may have been referring to Chris Walker if you had him on the show. Thank you. Chris Walker. Really smart guy. Absolutely. Who I was talking to and I was thinking about Chris Savage from Wtia. I knew it was a Chris. Chris. Apologies for forgetting that the conversation was.
So Tom, we've talked a little bit about how to grow a podcast, how to derive value out of podcasts. One thing that I want to ask you, you're working with lots of companies that are interested in podcasting. Is there a specific type of class that B2B podcasts work for? How do you think about who is a good fit for podcast and moreover, who isn't?
My experience is limited to b2b, so I won't talk to bbc, but I would suggest that any, do I think any B2B company to start a show? That's a good question that I don't know if I've pondered before. I guess the kind of hidden benefit that we haven't discussed, which I think is valuable for every B2B company, is actually learning about these people, whether they're the people you sell to or the people that have an audience, or the people that sell to either of those types of people, either the two different types of podcast guests, typical.
They gonna have insights that you need, like if you're gonna grow your company, you need. So that is one argument for why I think every B2B business should have a show. Now there may be caveats where if you are just like a two person company, you have one technical person, one non-technical person, it probably wouldn't be the first thing I would do in like the marketing approach.
But I think that ability to learn from. In the niche that you're trying to grow into is super viable. So I think it should definitely be considered at some stage in the early journey of a B2B company. It's funny, I was a one person company running a consulting business, and our business was focused on lead generation through my personal network.
So I had to know you. We had to be LinkedIn connections for me to try to sell marketing services to you, and at some point I reached the end of the rainbow. I had talked to all 1500 of my LinkedIn connections and told them what I was doing and I wanted to go build my profile, build my network to be able to find more consulting clients.
So even as a company of one, I started a podcast thinking it was about lead generation. And what ended up happening was, sure I expanded my network and yeah, I found some other. I built an audience. I got some social proof for myself as a marketer, but what I wasn't thinking about was the relationships I would cultivate with the people that were my guests, and also how much I would learn throughout this process.
When I started a podcast, I was a marketing consultant and I had a couple tricks up my sleeve, but I really didn't have a view. Of what was happening over the entire industry. Now, having done this for five years, I would consider myself to be more of an actual expert in marketing and in MarTech because it's not that I have this experience where I've done and tried everything, but I have had an opportunity to talk to all the people who are leaders in the industry.
So I have a little bit of a better finger on my pulse of what's happening. And I think that that to me is over the long. The most valuable part of having grown a podcast is the learning that you get and the network that you build from being the content creators. Tom, I appreciate you coming on the show.
I wanna bring you back a little bit more and talk to me about how you're building so much content at scale. So let's bring you back again tomorrow. Cheer, Ben.
All right, and that wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Tom Hunt, the founder and CEO of Fame. If you can't wait until our next episode and you'd like to learn more about Tom, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is Tom Hunt io.
That's c O m H u N t I. Or you could visit his company's website, which is fame dot, so f a M e dot. So Tom also is the founder of bcast, which is the company that fame runs on, which is a hosting platform. So if you're starting a podcast and you're looking for hosting, check out bcast.fm.