More and more brands are realizing everyday just how unique an opportunity podcasting offers to marketers. The B2B podcast wave isn’t slowing down, and there are fewer perceived barriers to leveraging one as a primary growth channel. In this episode of The Casted Podcast, we’re going to learn what a show looks like to a business leader with vast experience in SaaS brand building.
Stijn Hendrikse is more than a typical business leader. He’s an entrepreneur, a founder of the marketing agency Kalungi, Chief Growth Officer of Browzwear, author of the highly influential book T2D3.pro, and a major podcasting advocate — and co-host of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks — who has helped many SaaS startups get over the early-stage hurdles and grow into flourishing brands.
“As I helped a lot of smaller software companies — I ran a couple myself, I founded a couple of startups — it became clear that this pivotal moment after you reach product market fit and now you're ready to really scale and to pour more fuel on the fire, the biggest challenge is that you have to move from doing a couple of things at the same time to doing many things at the same time,” Stijn says.
“Keeping your customers, reducing churn, driving up retention, building your funnel into something that is scalable across multiple marketing channels, not just the one or two things that work to get you to, let's say, $5 or $10 million. They're organic or paid or ABM, but you need to do all of those things. And then, of course, you need to increase the size of your customers at the same time… and doing all those in parallel is hard for a lot of relatively small teams who may not have been marketers by trade to begin with.”
Tune in to hear Casted CEO Lindsay Tjepkema discuss business growth and how a B2B podcast can drive that growth with Stijn on this episode of The Casted Podcast.
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.
You can never lose sight of marketing basics: Your brand is here to solve a problem for your audience. However, your message and your brand’s persona have to go beyond the basics. “It’s about raising the bar, changing the narrative into something that your audience really cares for,” Stijn says and encourages you to take a stance and tell the world, “We think this can be done better.”
And that’s where podcasting becomes your channel of choice — or as Stijn explains, “a fantastic litmus test at the early stage of fast-growing companies to see if the founder, the owner, the executives are able to articulate” the why in a new way. As you can see, Stijn is a big proponent of leadership owning a branded podcast, the source of thought leadership content that will help a business grow faster through the early stages.
Your first value message is usually about your brand’s WHY (the solution to your audience’s problem), supported by the HOW (the products or services you offer to solve the problem). Looking at these two principles as applied to SaaS podcasting, the WHY is your show, and the HOW is the technique you’ll use to interview your guests and get into the details that your audience is interested in. That’s what produces the most effective thought leadership and turns your podcast into a “high fidelity” content engine for you to use across all your marketing channels.
Sure, you can measure marketing in a number of ways. For a B2B podcast, that might be starting off with audience growth and driving traffic to your website, but as your show matures and becomes more sophisticated, you find there are deeper metrics to pay attention to around listener behavior and engagement. Deeper still are the intangible outcomes that don’t lend themselves to measuring as well as tracking unique listeners and the amount of an episode consumed.
As Stijn describes in the episode, deeper engagement comes through audience feedback, the questions they ask when they’re really engaged with your topics or guests. When you know what resonates with them like this, you can not only improve the quality of your show, but you can improve the quality of all your marketing because podcasts serve as the strategic brain of your brand like few other channels can.
For more examples of B2B thought leadership, insightful SaaS startup advice, and podcasting advocacy from Stijn, be sure to visit the Kalungi website and check out his podcast B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks.
Want to skim through Stijn’s episode instead of listening? Read the transcript here.
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.
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