Q&A: How to Use B2B Podcasting to Grow Your Brand

Brands That Podcast

In this Q&A episode, Jeremiah covers various ways you can use B2B podcasting to help your company grow. We’ll cover everything from how you can use your podcast to empower your sales team to how it can fuel ongoing market research.

We’ll also cover examples of great B2B podcasts you can use to emulate or take notes from, and we’ll provide you with a couple of agencies and tools we’d recommend to help you get the job done.

Key Takeaways

Use your podcast to empower your sales team and shorten the sales cycle.

Build a library of episodes that cover common concerns your sales team hears from prospective clients. This way, whenever that question comes up in the sales process, your team has multiple, long-form episodes they can share with prospects for them to consume asynchronously without the pressure of a sales call. This also gives clients the opportunity to share internally with the rest of their team so everyone can get on board.

Having a B2B podcast helps you build serendipitous relationships.

The people you interview on your show can eventually become industry partners, collaborators, co-sponsors, or even future customers. Your B2B podcast gives you the platform to connect with leaders in your industry and create mutually beneficial relationships due to the trust that is built throughout the interview process.

You can build an audience and community around your brand.

Think of your podcast as an audio version of your newsletter. It gives you the opportunity to build an audience that’s connected with you and wants to hear what you have to say every week, outside of social media. While social followers are looking for quick insights, podcast listeners are allowing you to take up 40+ minutes of their time.

Your podcast helps you stand out from the competition.

Your competitors are likely all on social media or have a newsletter. But depending on your niche, they may not have a podcast yet. This means you could be the first in your industry to capture the power of audio with your branded podcast. Even if there are 10 other shows in your space, you still have the opportunity to be the best, to provide the most value, or to be the most creative. It also helps give your brand a voice that listeners can grow an affinity towards.

B2B podcasts act as amazing content marketing engines.

Your podcast can either drive or supplement your content strategy. For established B2B businesses with long-standing content plans, a podcast can help drive more content into their channels and can supplement specific topics or themes they want to cover for the month. But for B2B startups without a strong content team, your podcast can drive your entire strategy, meaning you take the content from each episode and turn it into 20-30 pieces of content for each of your marketing channels (articles, newsletters, videos, social posts, etc.).

Your podcast can fuel long-term market and customer research.

Similar to your marketing team listening to sales calls to better understand your customer’s pain points, you can use your B2B podcast on a wider scale to learn more about how top leaders in your ICP think about specific topics, what their day-to-day is like, what content they consider valuable, what they do to grow their business or their careers, or common pain points they all share.

Avoid “podfade” by setting realistic expectations from the start.

Most businesses give up on their podcast after 10 episodes because they don’t see results as quickly as they’d like to, which is why it’s important to set your expectations before you start. The average podcast gets about 175 downloads per episode, so if over the course of your first year, you’re able to get to 500 downloads per episode, then you’re doing really well. As you continue to grow, if you can get between 500 to 5,000 downloads, you’ll perform better than 90% of existing shows, which can have a huge impact on your business.

A great way to grow your B2B podcast is by guesting on other shows.

The idea here is you guest on as many related podcasts in your niche as possible that reach your target ICP. When the host asks where people can find you, you can mention your podcast, the hook of your show, and one or two episodes you think will appeal to that specific audience. This gives listeners the ability to continue to learn from you, for free, without feeling like they’re being sold to.

You can grow your podcast by sponsoring an episode drop in another show’s feed.

Another more unique way to grow your show would be to sponsor other podcasts in your space that you know your target ICP is listening to. But instead of paying for a typical 30-second ad read, you could suggest sponsoring an episode drop, meaning you’re paying to have one of your episodes dropped on their feed with an intro read by their host. You benefit by exposing an entire episode of yours to their audience, and they benefit by having fresh content on their feed with no production time.

Make sure your B2B podcast has a web presence.

This is where so many B2B brands go wrong. They launch a podcast and do a terrible job of promoting it on their own sites. Make sure you create an episode directory on your site with episode pages, show notes, embedded audio, graphics, etc. And be sure to add your podcast to the main navigation menu or mark it clearly under your resources/education section. Don’t just bury it in your blog.

Examples of great B2B podcasts:

• Drift Insider (Drift) - a podcast network tailored to their diverse ICPs
• Design Better (InVision) - a podcast designed to reach every level of management, as their SaaS tool expanded
• Metrics & Chill (Databox) - niche, specific show custom-tailored to attract their target audience
• Breaking Brand (Buffer) - a great example of an innovative, storytelling and narrative show

Production agencies we recommend:

• High cost, high production: Pacific Content or Pineapple Street Studios
• Middle cost, B2B-focused: Caspian Studios
• Lower cost: Hatch

Mentions:

• Descript
• Podcast Guesting Guide
• Podcast Tour Strategies
• How to Build a Podcast Website