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In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Marketer, Tom reveals his insights on B2B podcasting and the key factors that contribute to a podcast's success. The discussion revolves around the meaning of success in podcasting and how it goes beyond monetary return on investment. Tom sheds light on various aspects such as guest selection, budgeting, consistency, gaining listenership, production, editing, logistics, and automation that are crucial for running a successful B2B podcast.
B2B podcast success hinges on strategic positioning, guest selection, and consistency, with ROI as the primary metric and enjoyment as a secondary measure.
Successful B2B podcasting requires a niche focus, strategic guest selection, and consistent content production. While ROI is the primary success metric, learning and enjoyment are valuable secondary benefits. A minimal budget can suffice, but the host's time is often the most significant investment. Content should address audience pain points, identified through surveys. Promotion strategies include leveraging existing networks, collaborating with guests, and utilizing platforms like LinkedIn. To maximize ROI, incorporate calls-to-action and track listener sources. Ensure good audio quality, prepare thoroughly for each episode, and maintain a regular publishing schedule. With persistence and strategic execution, a B2B podcast can become a valuable asset for brand building and lead generation.
Q: What defines success for a B2B podcast?
A: The primary measure of success is Return on Investment (ROI), with enjoyment and learning as secondary benefits.
Q: How often should a B2B podcast release new episodes?
A: Weekly or bi-weekly episodes are recommended for consistency and growth.
Q: What's the minimum budget needed to start a B2B podcast?
A: A minimal budget of about $500 per month can suffice, covering hosting ($15/month) and editing ($100/episode).
Q: How can I grow my podcast audience?
A: Focus on retention first, then use strategies like guest collaboration, leveraging email lists, social media, and strategic paid advertising.
Q: What's the ideal length for a B2B podcast episode?
A: Episode length can vary from 10 minutes to 1 hour, depending on your content and resources. The key is maintaining quality and addressing audience needs.
Q: How can I find good guests for my podcast?
A: Use LinkedIn for organic networking, ask current guests for referrals, and reach out to active participants in your industry's online discussions.
Q: How quickly can I expect to see ROI from my podcast?
A: It typically takes at least 6 months of consistent effort before seeing measurable ROI. Focus on building relationships with guests and providing value to listeners in the meantime.
Q: What's the most important factor in B2B podcast success?
A: Consistency in producing valuable content that addresses your audience's specific needs within your niche.
Thanks for listening and hit me up if you have any questions!
Positioning, strategic guests, consistency. And if you do that, you'll do better than 90% of B2B podcasts. I'm Sky Cassidy. And today we'll be talking with Tom Hunt about success in B2B podcasting. I can't wait to hear this one. I think I need some tips. Tom is the founder of Fame and the co-founder of Bcast. And basically he starts and grows B2B businesses.
Tom, thanks for jumping on today. My pleasure, Sky. I can't wait to hopefully give you some tips. That's my secret really. I have people on so I can learn from them how to be better myself.
Now, there is a large B2B podcasting world out there. I don't know. When we started a handful of years ago, there wasn't much compared to now.
It seems like it's exploded into a joke almost sometimes we're just running joke that everybody has at least one podcast and there's such a glut of podcasts out there, which for businesses, most are looking not just for somebody to listen to them, but for some sort of an ROI, for some sort of... They have a purpose beyond vanity typically for the podcast.
So excited to hear kind of your tips and formula for making a successful B2B podcast.
I guess I'd start out by saying, what do you define as success with a B2B podcast?
Yeah. So before that, I think just to address the glut of podcasts, I think it's interesting to understand why a podcast actually is.
And really, it's very similar to the blog, right?
It's just an RSS feed of content. A blog is obviously written as a podcast as audio. And so if you think about it, let's say 95% of businesses that are on the internet have a blog.
And yeah, like some of them get no readers, but the businesses still do it. I think it's probably just going to be the same in the podcast world. I would say that like, I don't know, 10% of podcasts that have a website, they're on the...
No, 10% of businesses that have a website have a podcast. And I think it's probably going to get to 95% because there's a bit more heavy lifting to create audio versus written content. But that's like the comparison that I like to make. Going into your actual question there, which I seem to have forgotten.
So wait, so on that glut though, you're saying that there's another 85% to go still.
We think there's a lot of podcasts now, but you think it's going to get up to the level of blogs?
I don't think we'll get to blogs. I think we'll get to like 50% maybe.
Yeah, I don't know, maybe less. Because it is like significantly more work to record audio than it is to write words, I think. Record and release audio than it is to write words, but it is getting easier.
So the question was what, when you say the topic today, B2B podcast success, what does success mean?
Does that mean you're a commercial success?
Does that mean it's...
I mean, there's a lot of different ways to measure. Most people think if you're making a profit off your podcast, which I guess would be ad revenue.
But what are you measuring success when you're saying, hey, here's how to make a successful podcast?
Yeah, so I think the clearest definition of success is ROI, EG, more money out than time and money that you put in. Secondary measure of success, I would say is enjoyment. Whether that's for the host, the guests, or your own company. And then third would probably be learning. It's typically for the host or the people that are reviewing the content to learn from the people that you're interviewing.
But I think the one that people are most interested in, the most common definition of success is cash, ROI. Interesting. So just for transparency on our podcast, the reason we put it out that we're still around after years here is we are not looking for cash. And we've probably made $0 off our podcast. And yet we continue to be around.
And the reason for that is our goal with the podcast was to create content. As a company, we needed content. Some people make TV commercials, people make all sorts of things to put out there. A podcast was the simplest thing we figured we could regularly put out there, much like a blog. So the ROI is immeasurable. And we're creating content that's used in marketing.
But it's very difficult to track any direct ROI from the content aspect of the podcast.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So essentially, you are doing the podcast to get an ROI. You're just using the podcast to create other types of content, which are in theory delivering an ROI. But it is quite hard to track. Right. It's like a brand umbrella that hopefully trickles down to ROI, but you're not quite sure.
Yeah, exactly. And it's quite hard to attribute everything in the B2B world. Right. Because not everything can be tracked by computer code. Especially when it's brand being created.
I mean, it's almost like the old school radio days.
Sure, you can say, hey, call in now and track the number of people calling in. You get an idea of what kind of exposure you're getting, but you don't really know what impact it's having for people listening. It's incredibly difficult to measure the effectiveness of a billboard. Exactly. And then you also, one of the secondary measures of success I mentioned was learning. Right.
And you mentioned at the start of this call, maybe on every episode, but definitely on this episode, Scott, you're going to learn something, right?
Hopefully.
Well, this episode happens to apply directly to the exact medium we're doing here. So I hope so. I better learn something. Let me say that. You're the guest. I better learn something. But that's something I've talked about in the past as well.
The saying that it was an unexpected benefit of doing a podcast was I realized at one point, wait, I'm learning so much because I get to invite these experts on and just have a one-on-one class with them and ask them any questions I want. And then a couple of times, only a couple, nobody will know who it was.
I've invited people on just because it was a topic I wanted to know more about. And I thought, well, this is a good topic for us. And I'd really love to know more about this. So let me just invite an expert.
That's still fine, right?
Because it's like a fair transaction.
You guys, you might be doing it for learning. They might be doing it because they enjoy it or because they are going to get some exposure to the audience. There's nothing wrong with that, I think. Yeah.
No, I didn't see it. If there's something wrong with it, I wouldn't mention it out loud. And in this case, something like with you, Tom, I believe your people reached out to us and that's how most of our stuff is booked is we just constantly get reached out to and then we can cherry pick what we want. But that aspect is definitely there.
The learning aspect for the host and then for anybody, we've had episodes that we push out to clients, that we push out to people in our company saying, hey, you need to listen to this episode. It's on this topic that came up in the meeting today or whatever it is. So it's like these mini courses on these different marketing topics that can come up.
And then we say, hey, also here's the contact who's on the episode. If you have any other questions, just reach out to them directly. So the learning aspect is huge.
But should we dig into the financial ROI part?
Absolutely. Yeah. Cool. So what I like to like, essentially, like if a business is starting a podcast, in the short term, any ROI is more likely to come from relationships with guests. And essentially, what we're trying to do is like convince the CFO or convince the CEO that this is like a worthwhile endeavor.
Now the problem is if you go to the CFO and be like, we need to do this for 18 months, and then we're going to start some people coming, start seeing people coming through our demo form being like, I heard you on the pod. The CFO is probably going to be like, no, you've got six. And so what we recommend everyone to do is just to be strategic about guests.
It's not like just bringing on guests to pitch them. It's bringing on guests that A can teach you something, B could potentially be a customer in the future, C could be a partner, or D have like an audience of people that you can sell to.
And so then if we get like one partnership signed, and maybe one person moves into the sales process after six months from the guest side, we take that to the CFO, CFO unlocks the budget for the next 12 months, and we can actually build an audience. So that's how we like split ROI, cash ROI out from the guest and listener side.
So let's assume we've done that for six months, and we'll talk more about how to get actual people to listen later on in the episode, maybe. But we have that we're rolling audiences growing, then we can look to get an ROI from the listener side.
The way we typically do that is we just hold off on ads, but then we're going to put our own ads like a very smooth CTA typically to like the main CTA on your site where that's like reaching out for a free trial or getting a demo.
And then we just want to have something open, like we try not to make it too complicated, just have an open text field on that demo form saying like, where did you hear about us?
And then we're just looking for the web podcast. Or on free trials, we find putting a promo code in there giving something extra, you can track and see where they came from that way. Exactly. And it gives you some view. So you mentioned telling the CFO like get six months.
Okay, that's really quick. So you have to get a quick win here. We've been going for years and never I guess our approach was a little more of a slow burn with minimal investment on it, rather than saying we're going to throw 10,000 a month and it is for six months or something like that to get traction.
So I'd say another way, although your content has to be a lot better, you have to be a lot more savvy and how you use it would be to just go super minimal budget because it costs almost nothing to make a podcast now. So ROI on what ROI on the time is probably the most expensive thing and the CFO might overlook that. And just you're definitely right.
CFO is like, that might not get added into calculation.
Typically, the most expensive thing for a podcast is the time of the host. Yep. Simply someone like a senior in the business. We always recommend it to be from someone in the business as well, by the way. So those relationships can be built by somebody who is in the company. Right.
Of course, I'm the CEO of my company and I'm doing it. That way I didn't have to get much approval from the CFO. Still have to get approval. Still have to get approval. That is necessary. But I think if you minimize the cost, it can make that more effective.
And then maybe another thing to piggyback on for listeners, a tip is if you are jumping in with a budget and you need a win, look to your sales team.
What accounts are they working on that they could use help with?
And if you can get some high level guests from those companies, you can help them basically assist in the close of those deals. And maybe you can piggyback on the win as part of the source, at least to help justify the ROI. For sure. And the other flip side of that is just bringing on people that are already paying you.
So you can ideally build that relationship and maybe they'll pay you for longer or they'll buy more of your stuff. Yeah. People buy more from people they like. Exactly. Yeah. So the direct financial ROI. Yeah. I guess that's a big deal. The finance department wants to see that.
What else do we have in that area?
You mentioned initially helping close deals. Then there's the ad space, your own product, actually putting ads on for other companies. And I know some of these answers. I'm asking for the guests.
So how do ads get on that?
Let's say you do 10k plus a month and let's jump back to that even. Oh my God. This is me. The longest question in the world.
If they're looking to do that six month push, what kind of budget should they be trying to get for?
So from the CFO in order to run the show for six months. Yeah. Like doing it all in house, you wouldn't need any cash really. Maybe you'd have to pay like $15 a month for hosting software. I probably wouldn't have the editing in house. So I'd probably like to pay a hundred. You can pay anything from like 20 to $500 per episode to get it edited. So I probably go mid range.
And so then I just have time from a core marketing contact and then someone senior in sales marketing or leadership to host. So in terms of actual cash, let's just say it's a hundred dollars per episode to edit $30 a month for software. If it's a weekly show, that's going to be about $500 a month. That's $3,000 over the six months. That's like in-house to like to do a super lean approach.
You can get agency, you can pay between I think two and $10,000 a month to do it. I was thinking the majority of the budget would be to market it. If you were looking to get traction and have it go somewhere in that first six months measurable would be looking to get listeners, which I guess is maybe it's the next thing we're going to jump around a lot of people.
Just like I was mentioning earlier, if you have questions after the show, we'll have Tom's contact info.
You can reach out to him and say, what about this?
So getting listeners, the ultimate goal, the more listeners you get, obviously you can have a client or two on and get some ROI directly that way.
But what about building that listener base outside of mass marketing campaign or maybe include that as well?
What techniques can people use for that?
Yeah, I think it starts off like the fundamental lesson of marketing, I think, which is retention is a foundation of growth. Whenever you're advertising anything, you're basically stealing someone's attention to try and get them to commit to something.
That's great, but if the thing that you're getting them to commit to, whether it's a piece of information or something they're buying, if that thing is rubbish, then you're just going to be in an endless chase to get attention. So before we look to grow any shows, we always look to retain the existing listeners, e.g. make the thing better.
So the question is, how do you make the episode better?
The first thing to do is to ensure that you are niche enough. The wider you are, the harsher the competition.
If you have a business podcast, you're against Tim Ferriss, you're against all these people that are paying like $40,000 an episode, right?
Because they have to pay a guest 20 grand. Just a general business. And they also have massive name recognition. They've got books and they go on tours and they're invited to shows and stuff like that. Exactly. So the best example I like to give is let's say you have an email marketing agency or software company. You have three options for your podcast.
You could start podcasting marketing and compete with big players like you guys. You could start a podcast on email marketing. I guess we are general B2B marketing. That was a niche when we started.
B2B, there was almost no podcast in the space and they kept disappearing. We were actually trying to guest on someone's podcast, but every time we'd reach out, the podcast wouldn't be there anymore because they weren't getting an ROI after two weeks. So they canceled it. So we said, crap, we have to start our own. So the first option is marketing. Second option is email marketing.
And there you might be up against like, I don't know, ConvertKit or these other players.
The next option is email marketing open rates, right?
And so I don't know if they're the email marketing open rate podcast, but I reckon if you're consistently posting for six months, you could be number one. So the first thing is just creating information that's like where the competition is, not like where you can basically become number one in six months is what we recommend. So we're going to start with that.
Next thing we're going to do is just be, yes, we're being strategic about guests from an ROI standpoint, but we also want to be strategic about guests from two other criteria.
A, do they know the thing?
And then B, are they good at communicating the thing?
Yeah. You mentioned the content, like how can you make it better, I think you said better episodes. Having bad guests is a really quick way to have crappy episodes because your host is probably going to be not so good to start with because they're not, you're probably not getting a trained host. But we're coming to that though. We're coming to hosting partners. Okay. Okay. Sorry. So I could continue there.
You want to have good content. You want to go really niche. Let's say you go so niche, you're like subject line, email subject lines, but you can only have so many episodes on that.
I guess you can always expand once you're getting traction, right?
But it's hard to niche down farther. Exactly.
Like the, it's always much easier to get the early audience more niche and then broaden out later. Once you have that base of business. Once your CFO is okay for another three months. Exactly. Once it's signed off. So number one is get the niche right. Number two is get the guest right. Number three, and now we're going to get really actionable with the tips guy is get your hosting right.
So a couple of tips on hosting, to be honest, I probably hosted about, I'm not like a super expert. I haven't done thousands, but I've done hundreds, probably maybe about the same as you. So maybe we can both collaborate on this. Hosting what I like to do is share, like not everything that's going to be discussed.
So research, don't spend too long, I find, but share not everything that's going to be discussed, but like key points, just so the guests have an idea, bring them on, make them feel comfortable. I think you did that well. And then Rolf is the discussion points, but not like not in the order and not necessarily using all of them and adding extra ones or jumping around. Because it is a chat.
Like this is more of a conversation, right?
And you've actually engaged, you're actually listening, I don't know, like we probably jumped around all over the discussion points you had prepared. So I think right now you're like AF 10. I have bullet points and I encourage the guests to do as little research as possible and have bullet points if necessary, because I don't want the guests having a slide deck prepared and stuff. It makes for super boring content.
And if you have to have a whole presentation, then maybe the subject isn't something you know enough about to come on the show as well. They're sending a sales person to give a presentation.
I'm like, great, this is going to be a crap episode. Okay. So I love that. So you have some general topic stuff. It's so far I'm getting affirmation that we're doing stuff all right here.
Yeah, exactly. And then finish off. Yeah. I just like, and as a host ending with a summary of a couple of things you liked and then like a call to action for the audience to go and check out the guests. I think that's pretty solid. There's some stuff you can do. Like you can take a transcript and then calculate how many filler words you're using.
Like I used to write and you know, so that's what I'm working on. So that's like a good exercise to do that is very useful for the host. We also have editors just chop out ums. That's part of our editing to make us, so people are listening and they're like, wow, this host is really, he's really above average. And I'm like, no, I'm way below average.
We're just chopping out all the times I sound dumb. That's all. And we do it for the guests as well. Yeah. That's the beauty of non-live content. Right. It can be edited. So you asked out to promote podcasts and I told you three reasons how to make the content better.
And now promotion, should we move on to that?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let me see how to make the content better. Let me see if I can add one piece of equipment. We both have sounds, it seems like above average mics. They sound good early on. I'm thinking back to like, what were we really messing up early on in the show early on the show, we were messing up the equipment big time. Like really mics were a disaster.
And then we mics were a disaster half the time it wasn't connecting and we didn't know we were trying to use a soundboard and we didn't know how to use it. And I think good audio, it's a lot easier now than it was years ago, but just having above average, listenable audio is really important. And we didn't, Zoom didn't exist when we started.
So we played around with all these other applications, trying to figure out how to get a good recording. So it is a ton easier now, but just listening to the audio yourself and making sure you have decent audio, I guess your editing company can help with that. But we've had some episodes where the audio was so bad, you couldn't edit out how bad it was.
Yeah, for sure. That's it. They mentioned that because it was kind of basic. Now you can do a Zoom and a Blue Yeti. Yeah. But you can go more complex, more expensive. They really like any blog post that can explain how to do that. It's not too complex. Yeah. Just don't use your laptop or your computer and built-in microphone. Anything beyond that these days.
Yeah. I've seen people, even though that is a huge step up from when we started what people were using for some of their stuff, but yeah, just have decent enough sound that people aren't annoyed trying to listen. That's a really easy way to lose listeners if I've gotten 30 seconds into a podcast for them and like, wait, this is going to be the whole time I'm out. I can't listen to this. Yeah. Okay.
So sorry for that interjection moving on. So yeah. And then once you have this like locked in and you're quite happy with the content and the way you track how good your episodes are is you log into podcast connect in Apple and look at the average consumption per episode. We like to average that per month for the average amount of all episodes listened to in a month.
And we just want to feel that climb slowly. Once that's climbing slowly, then we can start working on actually trying to get more people's attention to see if they want to come and listen. Okay. So on that, there's quite a lot of pretty basic stuff that if you Google how to promote a podcast, you'll find on many blog posts.
It's like pulling out snippets, ensuring your tank correctly, getting the guests to share, running paid ads, but there's probably three, which I think are topical and or the two. Yeah. It's probably two that are topical and different now, I think. So I think I'll share them. Excellent. Cool.
So like five, seven years ago, you could pay an Instagram influence of like $50 for a shout out to their a hundred K followers because they didn't know what they were worth.
Right now, I think this is happening, but in the podcast space. So if you Google Beth's B2B marketing podcast or Beth's email marketing podcast, they'd be like 20 to 50 blog posts of typically just bloggers looking to get that traffic and they don't really know the value. And so you basically want to A, write your own to try and rank, put your show at the top.
Then B, go to like the top 20 and be like, hey, can we pay you to get included?
And you'll be shocked at how low the prices will be. But now I keep saying this, they're probably going up slowly, more people bidding.
And then, or you can do a backlink exchange to get included. Or we even like to bring their author of the post onto our show in exchange for including us. So that again, it's not going to get your shadow listeners overnight, but it's like slow compounding if you can get featured in most of those. That's the first one. The second one is a little bit, little bit sneaky.
When the guest books in typically through Calendly, you ask them, if we write an awesome summary of this blog post, would you be happy to post it on your own blog?
If they say yes, and we found like 60, 70% of guests will say yes to that. You'll have to write it for them, get it posted. You're going to put a backlink to your own domain to the blog post about the show on your own domain. Also a backlink to podcasts to get the backlink, which is just great for SEO.
And then you'll also typically, when a blog post goes live on a business's website, it gets put into their social posting schedule. So then you'll get the social share from the business as well, as well as the guests. So you are just going to reach out directly. So those two are a little bit different that you probably won't find in podcast blog posts that we've been experimenting with recently.
And one thing you'll notice after this airs, we'll send you an email that has a, Hey, here's what you can do with it. And then we also have pre-prepared posts for Twitter and LinkedIn, I guess, just generic. And then maybe one specifically for LinkedIn depends on the different lengths or Twitter, I guess, has its own because of the character length.
But we try to make it as easy for the guests as possible to promote it. So sometimes the guests themselves don't really have time and it's not their thing, but if we make it really easy, maybe they'll just copy and paste posts. And then also giving them images to make it more visually interesting to post something. Yeah. Okay. So that's awesome.
So you're working with the guests themselves to try to get them to be amplifying their episode, which is in their best interest since they're on it. So I guess then, the guests and the companies themselves that have a larger reach are going to get you exposed to more and more and more new people.
Yeah, exactly. Yes. This is like content marketing 101. If you co-create content, then whoever is included in the content has an incentive to promote it. You'd mentioned inviting the bloggers on and in my mind, inviting them on was almost like a quid pro quo where you were like, Hey, we'll invite you on if you'll put us into your blog.
And I realized, Oh, if you invite them on, of course they're going to, because that's what they do is blog and it's about them. So that's kind of a given that if you invite them on, that's going to become part of their blog posts.
Is it something that needs to be specifically arranged or do you just assume that they're going to then blog about it?
Well, so these existing posts, so that this B2B marketing blogger has written a blog post that has like 17 best B2B marketing podcasts. We're currently not included. So we're going to reach out and be like, Hey, we'd love to get included in here in exchange. We'd happily bring you on the show to talk about topics.
So you do, you make sure there's an exchange, not just kind of, yeah, we're going to be clear. Yeah. We noticed early on when we just thought, Hey, if we have them on the podcast, they're going to mention it somewhere. If we don't push them, a lot of people just move on with their lives.
Yeah, exactly. So you're finding those people that have those things going and saying, Hey, we'd like to have you on an exchange for this. Excellent. So we got the general marketing email you'd mentioned, then you got kind of the tricks here. These seem like a low to no budget time release way of steady growth. The last couple you mentioned.
Yeah, I think you'll find the majority, like, they're even really, I guess, with anything in life, like a hack, it's like slowly improving their content by 1% an episode is just being very consistent with the promotion, like these smaller things. And if you just get that right over the six months, then the audience should start to grow.
Okay, excellent. So we've got some audience growth going here.
Any other audience growth tricks or methodologies, anything like that, that we want to cover?
So going to the host. So we have one promotional pillar we call partnerships and communities. It used to be relatively easy to like to go into places and get free exposure for content on the internet. It's getting a bit harder these days. Now like Facebook groups used to be good, Reddit used to be easier.
But one of the strategies here is going as a guest yourself onto other related podcasts, just doing a thing, adding value. And then at the end, when they ask you where they can find you, you can give them the name of your podcast they searched for, maybe if you market in Apple podcasts. So that's another one. Also means you get the backlink from their domain for your podcast and for your domain.
Paid. I wouldn't say we've completely finished this. We have run strategies on various different platforms.
But again, it's really like understanding where your ideal listeners are and where you can actually target them. And then give them a small, engaging, exciting, controversial, valuable clip of content, whether that's written image or video, and then have a CTA to subscribe to the show. Right. So you're talking about paid as in paying for Facebook advertising or any other platform.
And that's, boy, when you say something controversial, the more you can get, and I think this is where you see magazines and everything has gotten really good at this over time. But the clickbait type titles, even newspapers and stuff, you'll see someone will say like, oh, this was a really bait and switch title.
And then they'll find out that the writers rarely write the titles for the articles, because the editors and their people want control of that. Because they know that's what actually drives traffic is the subject line of an email. The title of the article gets people to read it. And then you read it and you're like, oh, that was bullshit. That wasn't what they made me think it was at all.
And you're like, of course, damn it, I fell for it. That was their thing. So having that subject matter that I guess you can have is salacious or interesting or just something that draws people in title without straying too far from what's actually being discussed in the podcast.
So maybe the more controversial guests you can have, or the more controversial they want to be kind of the better you're going to draw people in.
Yeah, yeah. It's the fine line between lying and embarrassing.
But yeah, it comes back to the content again, right?
How valuable is content?
And then can you dress it up a little bit to get a click but without deceiving too much?
Right. I guess if you're the New York Post or New York Times, I don't even know if I'm naming a real newspaper here, your articles are going to be seen in news feeds and whatnot. So you can do that bait and switch sometimes and get away with it. People aren't necessarily going to leave you.
But as with a podcast, I feel like if you bait and switch people with the titles a couple times, it's really easy for them to never see you again, to unsubscribe. And they're like, well, this is never giving me what I'm actually looking for. So it seems like the content really has to match what you're advertising more than a lot of other mediums maybe.
It's that movie or TV show where you saw the preview and it looked awesome. And then you started watching it and you didn't even get through the first half. And you're like, never mind. I'm not checking out another episode of that. It was not what they made it look like.
Yeah, exactly. Like the less brand equity you have, the less of a chance you have to add value to this person. Add the value you mentioned. So I think we're nailing it in this episode. Some of our episodes are more philosophical, giving people things they can walk away with and apply, especially in B2B podcasts. They're typically not looking to be entertained with a crime novel or something like that.
They're like, I want something I can apply that makes me better at my job or make more money or whatever it is, make my job easier.
So what about the adding value part?
Other than just entertaining, you can't be super boring. You can't suck. But you also have to, particularly in the B2B space, I think, bring them some ROI.
So how can the podcast make sure it's giving the listeners ROI that brings them back?
Yeah. So I think this is situation dependent. Right. So it's also the same as any other content marketing campaign.
It's like, understand, really understanding what the problem is that your ideal listeners have. And then finding somebody that can solve it and actually getting the answers out of that person. So it starts by surveying the audience, understanding what the problems are...
Ideally, you have an audience so you can get that information and you lift out the top 100 or top 10 problems they have and then base episodes around those.
And then ask yourself honestly, at the end of the episode, did we actually help a potential listener here solve that problem?
Unlike getting guests to actually answer the questions can be tricky sometimes. But remember, you do have full editing rights as the host. So I guess sharing the discussion points that are focused around the actual problems that are going to be solved beforehand helps. And then maybe editing or just keep asking until you get the answers that will help the audience. Let me try again here, Tom. I need three ways.
Come on, man. We really do like the topics that have a number in them.
I mean, I look at our topic and usually we come to the guests with a very descriptive topic. And then by the time we roll this episode out, it's probably not going to be titled B2B podcast success because that's boring as hell. And nobody really cares to listen to that. Even if it was just like three ways for instant B2B podcast success. But then you have the issue.
If you come up with that after hand off, oh, when they listen, they're like, what were the three ways?
I didn't hear three ways. I thought it was going to be broken down into three ways. So I guess if you're going to do that, you kind of have to have those ahead of time. If you want to include the number, you can still say ways for instant podcasts. Just can't throw the three in there anymore. You said surveying the guests.
What about surveying the listeners?
So this was surveying. So like when you're trying to create content for anybody that's actually going to help them, you need to understand. You did say listeners. Right. Okay. Sorry.
Oh, so like you said, surveying the listeners, we'll edit that out.
We won't, but surveying the listeners, how can you go about surveying?
Cause it isn't like when somebody subscribes to your podcast, you get their email or something. You have no way of knowing who they are and directly contacting them.
Do you need to just build it into an episode, send them to the website or something?
How do you, yeah, typically a podcast is not an ideal way to survey. You can put a little add in with a simple URL to the survey and put it in the show notes. But ideally you have an email list or you have social followers to get that. That's probably easier. You're going to get a higher conversion. So you can promote the podcast to your email list.
Assuming of course, if you have a list as a business, your target audience and your podcast are hopefully the same people.
Otherwise, if it's different target audiences, we've skipped over that step because it was so obvious. Yeah. Make sure your target audience for your podcast is the same as your business, unless it's purely just for fun for yourself. The CFO is going to be really pissed.
So that list, you can assume if you promote the podcast to them, some of them are the listeners and then you don't know who necessarily are listeners, but you can reach out to them directly saying like, Hey, what do you think about this with emails related to the podcast?
Is that the idea?
Yeah. Like if you're, I don't know, like going back to the email marketing open rate, like problem example, the, your ideal listener is probably an email marketing manager at a company with over a hundred employees. So you just need to find any of these people and get them to answer your survey.
Ideally, you have some of them follow you on LinkedIn.
Ideally, you have some of them on your customer email list, or you can just go cold to people. You can offer to pay them to fill the survey, but you just need to understand what the biggest challenges are right now. That's step one. Step two is finding the people that can actually help solve those problems.
And if you don't know, I would say if you don't know where to find those email marketing managers and SaaS companies with that, just go to top data search.com and run a search. Cause that's what we do. We're a data company. We just inserted a commercial there. All right. Nailed it. Yeah. If you need an audience, of course you have your internal list.
You can always go to a data company like ours, grab a list. I love that idea of surveying them while simultaneously promoting the podcast to them.
Basically, Hey, here's this podcast. Boom. Assume you're obviously listening. So I'm sure there's a handful of ways you could market with that and outreach to the target audience that would be listening to your show, but it seems like it could serve a double function there. Yeah. I put it on the thank you page of the survey.
Oh, by the way, thanks so much. We really appreciate it. If you want to subscribe to the podcast that we're going to answer all those questions in, then click here. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. Let me take a quick step back and say, people are listening and a lot of them are thinking, yeah, I need to start a podcast. Great. Here's how I'm going to do it.
Who should stop in their tracks now and just listen for entertainment purposes?
Because it's not for them. You were saying maybe 50% of businesses will have a podcast.
Is that because only 50% of them actually are going to end up doing it or to half the people out there?
Is it not something they should be doing?
Yeah.
So we, I think if you are not going to niche down, I wouldn't do it. If you get uncomfortable by going, if the podcast is going to be more niche than your business, then I wouldn't do it. If you don't have somebody internally who has basic communication skills and is willing to do it, then I probably wouldn't be bothered.
And then if you're not willing to go six months without direct ROI, then I also wouldn't do it. I think those three things. So no niche, no host or no time. Don't bother. Perfect summary. So any of those three, those are basically immediate disqualifiers. Yeah.
It seems like everything's great, but there's nobody in your company that can get in front of a mic or that wants to, or that it's like, okay, it's a point of failure. There's a lot of ways for this to fail. Tons of ways, just about all the ways. So if you don't have those three core things down, then don't waste your time.
Yeah, exactly. Now for everybody else that's still listening, we'll continue on. We've got those things nailed down.
What else do we need to cover here for our instant podcast success?
So I think if we have all those things lined up, right, we have the right guests, the right positioning, the right, well, we're improving our hosts, we're consistently actioning the promotion strategies, and we're actually adding value to the listener. Then it's just about being consistent. And so we can talk more about how you can actually make yourself consistent. Okay.
Yeah, let's do that. Consistency. I love it. The key here is you're obviously going to be more consistent if the costs in terms of time to you, time and stress is reduced, assuming we have the budget approved by the CFO.
So then the question is, how do we minimize the amount of time needed to produce a show?
And what we recommend here is building a system or a set of processes that take away a lot of the simple or like tasks that could be automated. One example is having guests book in onto your show through some cool booking software. And then as soon as the guest does that, you're obviously asking them questions about what they think they can cover.
And then that will trigger tasks for the episode to be prepared for, produced, and promoted to the relevant people. Excellent. So kind of automating some of this simplifying and automating at the same time.
Yeah, exactly. And then having people do those tasks.
So let's say you're a marketing manager, you've got your CEO to be the host, you don't want to be like writing out all of the discussion points, right?
Or you don't want to be editing the audio or creating the video snippets or doing the visual design, or like uploading the blog post onto your site or emailing the guests, maybe. And so you want all of those tasks to be done by people either within or without your company. And then that process is just triggered automatically, but just by connecting hourly with Vapio and Trello and Slack and Google Drive, etc.
So I recommend doing that. On the guest side, it's always hard at the start when you don't have a show, but as you mentioned, you've been running a show for a while now, you get a lot of inbound, you can just filter through those. And I like to tie this in on the guest side with LinkedIn organic posting.
So I've been posting a lot and I also comment a lot on people's profiles. And so when I needed to guess for a show, I just pinged for people that had been commenting on my post that I'd been commenting on. And they all said yes in like 10 minutes. So that is part of the networking, organic LinkedIn strategy I use for guessing as well.
It seems if they're active on social media, they're showing that they're looking to put themselves out too. So you're hitting the people, like if you look at somebody's LinkedIn profile, and they don't post anything and comment on anything, they're probably not also going on, they're just not active. That's exactly the wrong target.
And just by commenting, they're going to see your face and so they're going to be so much more receptive to your inbound requests. So that's a good guess strategy. You can just run code outbound on LinkedIn is what we typically do as well to find guests. It's going to be effective with the copy.
And then over time, if you're consistent, you will start to get inbound, you could just filter through like most probably won't be relevant. But there will be some gems in there. And I always say you'll feel bad too, when you start seeing them, because I see them every day, and you'll feel bad ignoring them because you can't respond to everyone.
And then you just have to realize they're all from contacts reaching out to you saying, here's my guest, you don't have this person on with this topic, blah, blah, blah. And then they see you and they're like, I don't have this person on this topic, blah, blah, blah. And then they send you two or three follow ups.
But also, that's not them. Don't feel bad ignoring them. It's just a bot that's on an automatic roll through and inviting.
One other thing I found for guests is when you have specific topics, let's say you're doing the niche of email open rate, you can search for posts on LinkedIn about email open rates, find people who are actively talking about it, and then invite them because now you obviously have somebody who's, again, putting themselves out there for this like, hey, I love this post about blah, blah, blah, blah, I'd love to have you on the show.
That's something when we're looking for a specific topic that we've done before, and it's probably near 100% success rate.
Yeah, exactly. And then obviously, every guest that comes on, you want to ask them if they're happy to refer to other guests. You can then also even include that in the episode itself.
So who one of the best closing questions I like to use is who in the world of email marketing open rates, would you most like to take for lunch?
And then you can both tag that person on the LinkedIn post. But then you can also go to them and be like, hey, Jeff said you're awesome at email marketing open rates.
Do you want to come on the show?
But they're going to say something like Sally from marketing. They're like, oh, damn it. That's not what we meant.
Yeah, exactly. So we're getting our guests nailed down.
Now, what kind of volume are we looking at here?
Our show is bi-weekly.
We've gone weekly for a while and then back to bi-weekly because of the time component, just how much time are we going to invest into this every week?
Some people do an episode every single day.
What about the length of the episode and how frequent you're doing?
You need to be consistent. If it comes out once a month, have it out every month. I've seen ones that disappear for a couple of months and then come back. And then I don't think that's going to bode well.
But what about the frequency and the individual episode length?
Yes, as long and as frequent as you can maintain the quality for. So if you can create audio that people are going to listen to every week in their 60-minute episodes, then great, do that. But also be aware of the impact that's going to have on the cost of the show, including the host time.
But then just scale that back based on the availability of resources and how you can keep the quality for that time. So it could go down to 30-minute episodes bi-weekly. I typically never recommend monthly. It's just so hard to grow a show three-monthly. And so we typically say weekly or bi-weekly. The length of it too.
I've seen shows where the format was very successful with a 10-minute episode because that's what it was. It was just the purpose of the show. So it doesn't have to be an hour. It doesn't have to be 10 minutes. Or I think our show lends to being a 45-minute to an hour show because we get pretty deep on these topics.
But some shows are just, hey, what's the best subject line you've ever seen?
It takes less than 10 minutes to introduce the person and say, hi, yeah, here's the subject line. Here's why. Talk about it for a minute and you're done. And that can be done pretty quickly and easily.
If that's all somebody's really looking for, is there any sort of rules around the content?
Like, can you do just a little quick bite?
Yeah. I think it goes back to what you learned about your customers when you surveyed them. If they said, if you specifically wanted beginners in email marketing open rates, and they just needed to know the basics of how to sculpt a good subject line and how to split test this in email marketing software, then yeah, I think 10-minute, just super specific answers to questions could also work.
That also translates nicely into an SEO strategy, right?
Because you're going to ask that question in the audio, in the video, and in the written content on a blog post on your site, which could help rank. I imagine the SEO people love it if you have a podcast going and you transcribe it, because you're basically giving them a ton of content they can then use for SEO. Yeah.
And then also the YouTube video, right?
Which they can upload the transcript to. And then that typically will rank in written organic search results above the blog post on your domain, because I think Google are prioritizing that. Prioritizing their own property. That's weird.
Yeah, that's weird, isn't it?
I think that's come up in a past episode here. We dug into that a bit and how important it is to put stuff up on YouTube, because it just bumps up higher than everything else naturally. Okay. So what about people are worried about, they're going to be at an event and somebody's going to mention they have a podcast or they're going to bring it up.
And then they're going to realize that they're being the hipster that has a podcast, like everybody else. And they're just this cliche.
Yeah, we have a podcast too.
Should people be concerned about their being embarrassed that they're starting a podcast, I guess, these days?
Good question. I think it's like... That was not a good question. Come on. It's a silly question. You don't have to say it's good. I think I've got a good answer there. I think that people think that signing a podcast is like a bigger thing than it is. It's just like a blog. It's just a feed of content that is audio instead of written.
And so it used to be like a big thing because it used to be so hard to do it like 10 years ago. And so if you had a podcast, you'd find listeners because there's more listeners than there were podcasts. Now it isn't a big thing because it's so easy. There was a barrier to entry. Yeah.
It's blogs when they first come out with WordPress and it's like now anybody can have a blog instantly.
Yeah, exactly. So I don't think it's a thing. It shouldn't be a thing.
It shouldn't be a thing to be embarrassed about because I'm just hearing the tone of voice of something like, oh, you have a podcast?
Tell me more about it.
Ooh, look at you. I feel that sometimes when somebody comes up and I'm like, yeah, but we were doing it before it was cliche and everybody and their mom had a podcast.
Again, I told you, not a good question, but still something to talk about. Let's move on. So podcast ROI, we've hit on a lot already. We only have another minute or two here.
Anything else that you want to make sure the listeners take away here?
I guess we're down to kind of the last tips time.
Yeah, I think it's probably the three things. It's like nail the positioning, try and find a good guess and then be good and strategic guess and then just be consistent.
Ooh, so you did three things. Now we can use that in our subject. That's it. Yeah.
Click, click bait. Positioning, strategic guess, consistency. And if you do that, you'll do better than 90% of B2B podcasts. Awesome. And then any other questions, I guess I'd say listeners have, hey, reach out to Tom directly. They can find you on LinkedIn.
Anywhere else they should be looking for you, Tom?
Yeah, of course. Search for Confessions of a B2B Marketer on Apple podcasts. Awesome. Yeah. And we'll have links to that in the show notes, your LinkedIn profile as well.
Again, the name is Social Confessions of a B2B Marketer.
That's a, I feel like I want to dive into that name now.
Why social confessions?
I know it wasn't maybe mis-her-me-as, just confessions of a B2B Marketer. I'm making up words. Let me have a drink of my coffee here before we finish off. All right. One other tip I'd add in, hosts, be sharp when you get on the show. Get sleep the night before. Don't go out partying because you will suck and it will be embarrassing.
I am joking about needing to be sharp here myself a minute ago, but I've done it before where I came in exhausted and I was like, I don't know how I'm going to work through this. If it's not fully scripted, it is not easy to sit and have a conversation back and forth without getting lost.
I still get lost sometimes even when I think I'm on top of everything, even with bullet points. So have your wits about you and have, I guess, an out.
So the bullet points half the time for me, the purpose is when I lose where we are in the conversation, I can just jump to a question that I had ahead of time we hadn't covered yet and not have to really screw over the editors.