Here’s a tough question: is your B2B podcast successful?
The question shouldn’t be that hard. Especially considering all of the time, money, and energy that you’re putting into this particular piece of content. Our objective as B2B marketers is to drive tangible business results through content, but what happens when the content is there but the results aren’t able to be measured?
Podcasts have risen in popularity in the B2B marketing space over the past couple of years and with good reason; Podcasts give brands a literal voice. It allows brands to interview prospects, customers, and thought leaders in their space and share their own wisdom as a brand. Yet, here we are at the end of the day with 1,000 downloads to report as our success to our leaders. We measure every other piece of content in conversion, but we are still measuring podcasts in listeners.
The truth is a lot of B2B Podcasts die in the first 6 months because despite knowing in your gut that it’s working, it gets terribly hard (not to mention frustrating) trying to prove it.
If a podcast influences a sale, but there’s nothing there to report it, does it even make a sound?
Of course it does. However, you can amplify that sound if you can prove the dollars and cents it’s bringing to your business. The days of measuring your podcast with downloads, anecdotes, and your gut have to come to an end or else your podcast will come to an end.
Dollars and cents have long made the marketer uncomfortable. Attribution and influence are called into question. Who owns a particular lead often causes organizational rifts larger than an iceberg in a hull can cause. But at the end of the day revenue is everyone’s job and marketing is the tip of the spear. Attribution matters.
So how do you take something as anonymous as podcast listens and associate it to conversion? That’s a complicated question but the answer boils down to; Own your audience.
Would you focus on earned media alone?
I’m going to guess, no. Earned media is a great place to get more reach and certainly should be used to grow your audience, just like iTunes and Spotify. But you have to own your content. That means incentivizing listeners to come to you and giving them reason to stay. Owning your audience means understanding what they do next. In content marketing what happens next is EVERYTHING.
This is no different with your podcast. Knowing that a prospect listened to 67% of your podcast and then went on to read 3 blog posts means something. When you own your podcast real estate you can understand your prospect and listener’s journey more completely.
Podcasts lead to better engagement.
Why is Casted writing about this?
The easy answer is, well… it got you here. The longer winded answer is that we are solving exactly this problem. We want to see the relief on your face as proving the value of your podcast becomes effortless. We want to bridge the gap between sales and marketing that we see.
We want to make podcasts your cornerstone.
With Casted podcasts become brand builders and engagement drivers… and we can prove it.
