B2B Podcasting: The Criminally Underrated Content Marketing Channel
Yeh, we’re all busy these days. If you’re a content marketer, you know the pain of trying to get hold of experts or leaders in your business to help build your content marketing strategy. Especially in the B2B space.
“You want me to do what for TikTok?”
Not gonna happen. But guess what? CFO’s and CEO’s are on TikTok too.
That’s why we’re always shocked at how few companies are taking advantage of the absolute best hack for creating large amounts of content with minimal founder/exec/expert input.
Podcasts.
You’ve surely seen the clips all over your TikTok and IG Reels from the likes of Joe Rogan, Steven Bartlett, Grace Barry and, dare we say it, Andrew Tate.
All of these people are ‘influencers’ whose primary objective is to increase viewers and listeners, to then make money from advertisements.
Why are we not seeing the same thing from companies? Why are B2B fintechs not utilizing this absolute superpower of content creation to reach their ideal clients? They don’t need millions of people to watch their TikTok or listen to their podcast, they just need a handful of the right people to do it.
This is a huge opportunity.
The benefits of podcasting
Podcasting has gone through waves of popularity. During the pandemic lockdown period, Amazon microphone sales went ballistic as everyone and their neighbor started a podcast. Problem was, everyone had more time to make them, but less time to listen to them.
Without a commute, podcast listenership sunk to crazy low levels at the same time when hundreds of thousands of new shows were being launched.
Many got disheartened at their low listener numbers, and gave up. That’s the first benefit to starting a podcast right now. Listener numbers are bouncing back and many shows have given up the ghost after trying to make it work for a year or two.
So that’s the background, but what are the benefits of a podcast in general? Essentially there are 2 key factors that make podcasting an almost unfair advantage for your business.
Networking
No other form of content marketing allows you to get face time with your ideal customers. No matter how good your blog, TikToks or LinkedIn posts are, you’re sending them out with the hope that the algorithm will serve them up to some of your target audience.
With a podcast, you get that same impact from the distribution, but you can identify your ideal clients and sit down with them for 45 - 60 minutes.
Imagine you’re selling corporate treasury software. How likely is it for you to get the CFO of a Fortune 1000 company to ‘jump on a call’ with you for an hour?
Practically zero.
But what about if, instead, you invited them to be a guest on your podcast - “Treasury Talk”?
That will at least get your message through their PA, and the chances that they agree are pretty bloody high.
Now, you’re not going to give them a sales pitch during the podcast, but you have the opportunity to learn all of their pain points, their successes, what’s working and what’s not. Not only that, but they’ll learn more about what you do, and you’ll build a huge amount of rapport during the interview.
You want to manage this carefully (no sales pitch DM’s as soon as the interview finishes), but if you continue to build this relationship over time, you’re almost guaranteed at least a shot at their business.
But the benefits of a B2B podcast don’t end there.
Repurposing powerhouse
If you want to make the most high quality content in the shortest amount of time possible, you just can’t beat a podcast.
You’ve got 40 - 60 minutes of industry experts discussing the latest news and trends from the space. You can get them both on video, bringing their A-game because they know they’re being recorded.
So what do you do with that?
Load it onto your podcast hosting service and hope for the best? Hell no. That 60 minutes is an absolute gold mine for repurposing. Like we said earlier, you’ve probably seen how this works with influencers and major podcasts on your own social feeds, but it can work just as well for niche audiences.
Imagine a 30 second snippet that shows a CFO explaining their biggest pain point, and then your host giving two options for how to address that. Imagine getting that snippet in front of 100 other CFOs. Imagine their ears pricking up at an organic solution to their own pain point, delivered right in front of them by one of their peers.
That is very, very powerful.
You do that through repurposing. A 60 minute podcast episode could easily be repurposed into over a dozen pieces of individual content. We’ve created this graphic below which shows just some of the ways it can be used.
And this is just scratching the surface.
B2B Podcast Best Practices
To get this process right, there are definitely some best practices you should follow. These are the aspects of a B2B podcast that you need to get right in the initial planning stages, the recording and the follow up and distribution stage.
Show details
You want to be able to stay consistent with your show. It’s basically the most important thing. In order to do that, you need to know how you plan to run it.
How often will you release episodes? It doesn’t have to be weekly, fortnightly or monthly is fine.
Will you do seasons or have it ongoing? Highly recommend ongoing - even if it means reducing the regular frequency.
How many hosts will you have?
How many guests will each episode have?
All of these details make sure that everyone involved in the creation process are on the same page.
The right equipment
Let’s clear one thing up. You’d don’t need to spend $50,000 on a full studio setup to run a successful podcast.
You do need a setup that consists of more than a broken Airpod.
For under $250 you can get all the software and equipment you need to create a great sounding podcast. The Samson Q2U is a brilliant USB microphone that costs less than $100, a set of decent quality wired headphones from a brand like Audio Technica can be had for around $75, and another $50 will cover stuff like a boom arm.
Getting the best guests
It goes without saying that the make or break of a podcast is the actual content you’re able to create. To get this right, you need awesome guests. Not necessarily just people who have large social followings or high powered positions, but people who have unique and specific insights to your target audience.
For a B2B podcast, you want your listeners to feel like they’re either listening in on how their competitors are doing things, or getting a free consulting session with an expert service provider in their niche.
Every guest should provide value in one of those ways.
Double ended recording
You know how video calls on Zoom often glitch, break up and sometimes cut out completely? If you’re trying to record your podcast like that, the quality is going to suck. Even if the connection stays stable, the audio and video quality is massively reduced as it’s transmitted.
To avoid that, you want specific software that will complete a local recording on both your side and the side of your guest. It means that you get the full audio and video quality of your camera and microphone, and if the internet connection goes funky it won’t impact the end product.
Plan your episodes
Don’t fly into an episode without a plan for what you’re going to talk about. In our experience, the best way to do this is to have a theme for each episode. Once you’ve researched your guest, find out what they’re best known for or which area they have the most experience in, and build the episode around that.
You can still talk about their background and a few different topics, but having a central theme makes the distribution process much easier, for things like naming the episode and creating shareable snippets for social media.
Keep in mind that you shouldn’t script the episodes too carefully. It’s best to have some broad questions or ideas to discuss, but then allow the conversation to unfold naturally.
Document your repurposing plan
Get this outlined from the get go. When you know how the content is going to be reused, you can structure your questions and the flow of the episode around that plan.
For your editors, it also makes the process much more efficient because they can follow each of your episodes and will know the types of content they're trying to pull out for repurposing.
Provide shareable resources for guests
A huge part of the repurposing process is to get your guests to share with their network. Not only are you tapping into their expertise and building a potential relationship with them, but they’re likely to have a network that is very similar to the types of people you want to work with.
A CFO is likely to have plenty of other senior executives as connections on LinkedIn, for example.
You want it to be as easy as possible for them to share the content. You can create resources for them and tag them in all the content you share, and the likelihood is that they’ll repost to their own social media.
This is a fantastic example of targeted content marketing. The view numbers might not be huge, but they’re going to be very tailored to your ideal client.
Next steps
This should give you a solid outline of what you need to in order to create a high quality podcast that provides excellent ROI for your business.
If you want to get a show up and running but don’t want to do it yourself, Hedge can help. We offer a complete, end to end podcast production and hosting service that includes everything from naming and graphic design, equipment sourcing, episode production and distribution and repurposing across platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
If you want to learn more about working with us, you can find more info here.
