Any successful marketing channel should either be making your audience aware of your brand and how you can solve their pain points or producing thought leadership around the topics that interest your potential customers. The most powerful channel for achieving these goals today is podcasting. However, some brands are reluctant to commit to the channel, in part because they believe brand awareness and podcast engagement are too difficult to measure.
Eric Quanstrom believes otherwise. As CMO at the B2B lead-generation brand CIENCE Technologies, Eric is a firm believer in the importance of brand awareness, and as the host of the Enterprise Sales Development podcast, he knows just how much a podcast can draw prospects to CIENCE. Likewise, he knows it’s a longer play over a sales cycle that can be 12-18 months long.
“If you're looking for a direct one-to-one of like, ‘Hey, I did a podcast and it led to a sale,’ that's dangerous,” Eric points out. “I would even say misguided, because that's never the point, right? If you do a podcast and all of a sudden you've raised awareness amongst your target population that would have never heard of your brand otherwise, that's a rip-roaring success in my opinion.”
Tune in to hear Eric share his expertise in building successful marketing strategies and the central role B2B podcasting plays in brand growth with Casted CEO Lindsay Tjepkema in this episode of The Casted Podcast.
Digging into Key Takeaways
For each episode, we like to highlight some key takeaways. Think of it as a podcast outline or live show notes. Here are just a few of the takeaways that really stood out to us in this episode.
Measuring Success Through Directing Traffic to Your Website 🏆
One indisputable way to measure the success of your content is whether it drives traffic to your website. A podcast is the perfect content format for this. Each episode should be full of thought leadership, and all that direct traffic is proof of succeeding at brand awareness. The challenge is that the traffic isn’t always clearly linked to the content that’s driving it. It’s dark social, dark traffic, dark funnel.
As Eric shares in the episode, he knows CIENCE’s podcast is bringing people to their site, but to shed a little light on the dark aspect of this connection, CIENCE has added a “How did you hear about us?” question on their conversion forms which shows a much clearer podcast attribution to driving conversions.
Podcasting Not Only Serves Your Marketing Initiatives but Your Company as a Whole 🎙️
Marketing ultimately serves sales. Therefore, a brand’s podcast and what it can do to drive growth is by no means limited to marketing. Audiences and the potential customers in that audience develop brand associations from consuming podcast content, and to Eric, “All these brand associations matter.”
They fuel sales and ABM, especially when you can see which brands are engaging with your podcast and the topics they’re interested in. But as Eric explains, a brand’s podcast can also serve as internal enablement for your SDRs and help educate staff about what the podcast is covering, which companies are tuning in, and overall best practices in marketing and sales.
How to Leverage Podcasts for Outbound Lead Generation and Brand Building 🚀
“Most companies, I would argue, especially in the B2B space, are fighting the battle of awareness and brand building always,” Eric says. “The more associations, the more familiarity, the more you can attach to that story, the better off you are.” Brand awareness secures meetings and kicks off the sales cycles.
With a podcast as a primary brand awareness engine, Eric recommends using the podcast as a way to learn more about the brands in the industries you’re trying to target, but not in a direct quid-pro-quo way where you invite specific brands onto your show in the hopes of getting a sales opportunity out of it. Instead, Eric sees CIENCE’s podcast as a tool for researching these industries by having guests who can talk about their pain points and goals and then taking those learnings straight to the outbound team.
“If you really want to understand the personas that you sell to, a podcast is a damn good way of getting a half hour or 45 minutes of what would otherwise be super-busy, over-scheduled people that wouldn't give you the time of day,” Eric explains. “Podcast guesting is a thing, and if you use your podcast to figure out what are these personas all about, that can be really effective.”
Interested in More from CIENCE?
For more on lead generation using sales and intent data, targeted ads, and multichannel prospecting, be sure to visit CIENCE. And if you’d like to hear how a podcast can drive brand awareness, build customer relationships, and enable your own employees, check out Eric’s Enterprise Sales Development podcast.
Want to skim through Eric’s episode instead of listening? Read the transcript here.
About Season 9 of The Casted Podcast
The Casted Podcast is THE destination for the most innovative and forward-thinking marketers and podcasters in B2B. We're discussing the future of marketing, and each episode takes a deeper look at how B2B podcasts and video can be leveraged to reach revenue goals, amplify a brand’s voice in the marketplace, and ultimately drive real business results.
Subscribe to The Casted Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
