Why is it a good idea to start a B2B podcast in 2021 (or any other time, for that matter)? Well, when you look at the industry’s massive growth, you can’t help but see the value it holds.
Not only is it attracting more brands to start a podcast—it’s also generating more listeners each year. There are more than 32 million monthly podcast listeners and over 22 million listening to podcasts weekly.
But what makes B2B podcasting more appealing is the opportunity it presents to connect with your target audience. Not only does it help to improve your SEO (organic traffic), you’ll also find it doesn’t have a ton of competition.
You can’t say the same for other mediums—social media, blog content, and YouTube are all saturated markets with lots of noise. It’s not like that with podcasts. Sure, there are over 1.7 million podcast shows (compared to over 80 million Facebook Business Pages), but when you narrow down the shows by category, the numbers drop drastically.
The more niche your B2B podcast, the easier it’ll be to separate your content and brand from the masses. Today is a great time to be a B2B podcaster—it offers convenient consumption for your audience, unlocks tons of great content for your brand, and it builds your brand’s visibility and authority. Win-win.
So we’re going to explore the perceptions 10 marketing greats have about B2B podcasting (and why it’s a must-have) in a 2-part series. First up will be Mike Volpe, Meghan Keany Anderson, Dave Gerhardt, Mark Kilens, and Muhammad Yasin. Stay tuned next week for our other other 5 marketing greats!
Mike Volpe - CEO of Lola.com
Mike Volpe started as one of the first marketers for HubSpot before becoming their Content Marketing Leader. He later became the CFO of Cybereason and is currently the CEO of Lola.com. Not only has he helped grow one of the most notable brands (HubSpot), but he knows a thing or two about creating compelling and innovative shows for his audience.
Here’s what he has to say about podcasting and its use in connecting with your listeners:
“It’s a great way to reach people. I think, again, it’s like podcasting can be used in a lot of different ways, so you can use it to add more personality to the brand. You can use it to get a deeper connection with a smaller audience that was like the HubSpot TV podcast model. You can use it to reach folks that are harder to reach through other means, but people that typically have a commute or things like that. You can be trying to reach folks in a different way. It also can be a great way to add other voices to the brand.”
Listen to the full episode here.
Meghan Keaney Anderson - CMO, The Wanderlust Group
Meghan Keaney Anderson is CMO at The Wanderlust Group, and former Vice President of Marketing at HubSpot and also a former host of “The Growth Show.” She was a part of the podcast for five years, which is dedicated to helping mid-level marketers, as well as higher-ups like CMOs and VPs.
Here’s her take on how podcasts are effective vehicles for reaching broader audiences:
“The beautiful thing about podcasts is when people sit down to listen to a podcast, they listen all the way through it. You’re getting their attention, their full attention, in many cases, for 20, 30, 40 minutes. And that’s so rare there. So certainly those listenership and growth numbers are what we’re looking for. We’re looking for distribution and access to a broader audience.
But there are all sorts of secondary benefits to doing podcasts. And for me, one of the biggest ones has been for “The Growth Show” in particular, it’s created access points to some of the most incredible business leaders and stories that I’ve ever come across. We just wrapped a season where we did stories of companies that pivoted after the crisis hit. And those stories, I have resurfaced and reused in scores of different ways, on blog posts, in speeches, in just lessons out of that for our own company and team. And so it just creates this conduit for exposure to really exceptional ideas.”
Listen to the full episode here.
Dave Gerhardt - CMO at Privy
Dave Gerhardt is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Privy but is also a podcasting veteran. He first started podcasting back in March 2014 with “Tech in Boston,” which helped him connect with 60 entrepreneurs and CEOs throughout Boston. He also successfully built an email list of 5,000 and sold sponsorships to help grow the show.
Here’s Dave’s view of podcasts and why approaching them with intention is vital:
“When I started at Privy, it was the first thing that we did, and it was intentional because we wanted to create something that was an anchor for the brand. The short answer is I think it’s the most important piece of a brand opening strategy, not an overall marketing strategy. You’ve got to generate demand, and your podcast is not going to be a direct response marketing channel, at least in the early days. But, from a brand-building standpoint, it’s the number one strategy. I would do this for any business, any company.
If I got into business with my father-in-law, who I see down the driveway right now—he’s a carpenter—the first thing that I would do to try to help build his brand would be: we’d start a podcast. We would literally make a show about building houses, and he would be the star of that show. Because, if you start with that podcast, then you have audio, and ideally you film that all, so you have video too. If you have those two things, then you can easily—you can get so much content out of that one episode. You can get blog posts. You can get video clips. You can get decks. You can get graphics.”
Listen to the full episode here.
Mark Kilens - VP of Content and Community at Drift
Mark Kilens is the Vice President of Content and Community at Drift. Back in 2010, he became an avid listener of podcasts. It wasn’t until a few years later when he started experimenting with podcasts. At the time, he was with HubSpot. Then in 2015, he joined Drift and its podcast.
Here’s a look at his view of podcasts and their role in storytelling:
“For me, podcasts, it’s a storytelling function, and the best businesses and marketers and brands really lean into storytelling. So what do I mean by storytelling? For HubSpot and Drift but especially Drift, we were creating a new category. There was this new category that came about, but keep in mind, Seeking Wisdom didn’t establish the category.
That was about brand building, and it was through storytelling and learning from your guests. I think that’s the power of podcasting. It’s being able to create a captive audience through bringing people onto your podcasts, that will educate you about maybe your potential customers, that will educate your customers in some way, through the power of real experience.”
Listen to the full episode here.
Muhammad Yasin - Executive VP of Marketing at PERQ
Muhammad is the Executive Vice President of Marketing at PERQ. And he hosts not one but two podcasts—one for PERQ (The Bridge) and one on the side (Agile Marketing). Both podcasts are geared towards marketers and used to churn out many other pieces of content. Or, as we like to say—he’s wringing out each episode.
Here’s Muhammad’s view of podcasts and how they help build more content:
“It’s a lot of work to create a piece of content though, and one of the reasons that I love podcasting in particular is … for some of these organic conversations to happen. You can pivot in the moment, you end up with a much more, I think, authentic piece of content, and then, you can use that on the back end to write blogs if you want.
Even something as simple as a transcript, or you give that audio to your content manager, and they’re able to maybe pull four, or five, six topics out of it with quotes that were out of that podcast, and have blogs for weeks, or months sometimes, and then, you mix in some audio clips maybe with that, and you’ve got some great audiograms for social media.
You’ve got snippets of quotes you can use that you can turn into images that you post on social, or on your Instagram, and your stories, or whatever. This is a great spot to start with really authentic content that you can remix into other formats down the road versus the other way around, which is far harder.”
Listen to the full episode here.
Hosting a B2B podcast can yield all sorts of great benefits for your brand. But it works best if you’re wringing out each episode into different forms of content. At Casted, you can use our platform to attribute each content piece to traffic and conversions. So if you’re looking to make the most of each podcast, request a demo with us today!
