Are B2B Companies Still Excited about Podcasts?

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: I launched the Marketing Spark podcast in mid-2020. It has been one of the most rewarding professional decisions. The only regret is that I didn't start a podcast earlier. Podcasts have become a huge part of the media landscape, and many B2B companies have jumped on the bandwagon. As a marketer and podcaster, I'm curious about the state of the podcast landscape, where it's heading, and how companies will embrace podcasts. To answer these questions and tackle some other marketing topics is Tom Hunt, founder of Fame, which starts and grows profitable podcasts for growth-focused B2B businesses, and Bcast, which hosts podcasts. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Tom Hunt: So much for having me. I'm very excited about the next 30 or so minutes.

Mark Evans: Let's start with your thoughts on the B2B podcast landscape. You and I both live in the eye of the hurricane. We live and breathe podcasts, you more so than I because it's your business. And my question is whether B2B companies are still excited about podcasts. That's a leading question, I admit. I know that companies love being guests on podcasts for the number of invitations that I see in my inbox. But I get the impression that not every company wants to create a podcast or they're afraid of creating a podcast. What are your thoughts in terms of the overall B2B podcast landscape? Yeah.

Tom Hunt: It's a great point, and I've got a couple of angles on this one. I'll take the first one, the most bullish of angles, which is what I typically use in sales calls as well if someone asks me this question. And it's that, well, actually, I'll punt it back to you, Mark. Do you know how many YouTube channels there are in total?

Mark Evans: Millions, I guess. That's my 5,000,000. There are 50,000,000. Right.

Tom Hunt: Yeah. Nearly about 170 million, apparently. And then, like, active... let's not do active, but, like, total podcasts, like, 2 to 3 million. And so if you really think about, like, what a podcast actually is, it's just an RSS feed of audio content, just like a blog is an RSS feed of written content. And so if, like, literally every business has a blog, why shouldn't every business have an audio feed, an RSS feed of audio content? Now, that's the most bullish. But what are the other angles that I can come at this question, which I like, maybe a bit more realistic or reasonable? The first is I think there is a drive for B2B companies to create their, like, audiences that they control, like an email list, like a podcast subscription list, because no one can stand in the way of that. I guess Apple or Spotify, et cetera, can stand in the way of that, but it's a bit more diversified. And then at the same time, so there's like this control, like no one can take that away from you, unlike like a LinkedIn following. But then the second point is that it's much cheaper for you to then get the attention of those people because you just released the thing versus having to pay Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube for the ads. So I think there is a drive towards owning, creating own media properties on the B2B side. That's one other angle. And then, actually, the biggest benefit I think of podcasting isn't necessarily building up the subscriber list or getting the downloads. It's like everything else that can come through, like learning about the niche, about building relationships with guests that could be customers or partners, and then also, those are the two big ones. Oh, yeah, all the other content that you can create from it, not just the audio. So there are a few different viewpoints on that question.

Mark Evans: That's a lot of topics to discuss in one answer. Why don't we step back and look at the suggestion that every B2B company should have a podcast just as nearly every B2B company has a blog? There are people out there that fervently believe that this should be the case, but, obviously, it isn't right now. So, a, do you think that this should be the case, that every B2B company should have a podcast? And what's holding companies back? When you look at the benefits, the obvious benefits, and the ROI of a podcast, why are many companies just sitting on the sidelines?

Tom Hunt: Well, yeah. The first question I think was about, like, why people should have the audio feed, and then I'll then take the second one. The first one, and I'll just zoom into one, and it's the ease of which you can build a relationship with someone through creating that content. Relationships are built by going on like a roller coaster with friends, like the friends you aren't traveling with when you're a young girl, like your closest mates. And so if you think about collabing on a blog post versus collaborating on a podcast episode, like, for example, this, like, we're going to become friends in theory or we're going to come closer after this, and it's taken us literally 30 minutes each, maybe a bit more for you for researching, et cetera. Whereas if we were gonna collab on a blog post, one of us is gonna have to write it. The other one is gonna have to review it or add stuff. That's probably gonna take more time. And so I think that's the biggest benefit here is that the host or someone from the B2B company is gonna get to know other people in the space who's gonna learn from them. And so why people are sitting on the sidelines is a great question. I think five years ago, it was quite hard. It was much harder than it is now. It's getting easier every year, like Descript, Anchor, et cetera. All podcast agencies are making it much easier and cheaper to do. So I think B2B companies think it's like a bigger effort than it than it actually is, which is great for my business, obviously.

Mark Evans: A couple thoughts here. One is that two or three years ago, I was intimidated by the idea of doing a podcast. The technical requirements, the costs involved, but the barriers to entry have come down dramatically. I spend probably if you don't include the time spent to edit and prepare, I spend $30 a month on my podcast. But the other angle is that I think a lot of marketers have a tough time selling a podcast to the CMO or the CEO because many B2B companies, it's all about data. It's all about KPIs. It's all about metrics. And when you go to a CEO and you say, I wanna do a podcast, and the CEO says, well, how are you gonna measure ROI? How are you gonna quantify whether this podcast is a success or not? You could turn, as you say, to its number of subscribers, streams, downloads, but that's not the number. So a marketer may say, but it's gonna build brand awareness. It's gonna help us build relationships. It's gonna build trust and affinity, and the CEO is gonna go, well, I can't really measure that. What's your advice to marketers who need to convince a CEO that this is a no-brainer idea?

Tom Hunt: First point, and you did touch upon this. In the short term, we always advise, like, the ROI in the short term probably isn't gonna come from the audience. Podcasting is actually not a great way to build an audience. It's a great way to build a better relationship with an existing audience. So if you

Mark Evans: think you're gonna start a podcast, everyone's gonna listen, then they're gonna buy your stuff.

Tom Hunt: It's probably unlikely. So what we say is that let's say we're doing a biweekly show. Over 6 months, we're gonna build relationships with 12 people, 12 guests. Now we're not gonna pitch them, and they might be ideal customers or they might be ideal partners, you're gonna build those relationships. And you make the guest experience amazing, and then you may expect, like, one or two of those people to, like, progress down your sales or partnership funnel. So that's what we typically say is actually don't look at the listener side for the first 6 months. Because if you then get a deal, let's say, from the guest side, you can reinvest into the content, make it better, build the audience, increase the likelihood of the ROI on that side. That's the first point. Now, the second point is that the way we're going to get the ROI from the listener side is not by tracking those numbers. It's by adding a free text field on the demo form saying, how did you hear about us? And then over 12 months, if we're doing things right, that should start to happen typically after 6 months. The third point, and this is something that I've been exploring recently in my own, like, world of B2B, is that I think that the new metric that B2B marketers should be tracking,

Mark Evans: and it's a

Tom Hunt: leading metric to revenue. And I think it's the closest thing you can get to measuring brand, and I'm calling this total targeted impressions. And so this is just the number of impressions that your content is getting every month. Targeted means that from people that ideally could be buyers, and one feed into that metric, I think, is the podcast download. An impression is essentially like them showing that they want to listen to your episode, basically. And so I combine that with, like, LinkedIn impressions, podcast downloads, impressions on any other social platforms, email opens. And these are metrics that I think are the great thing to measure to show the goodwill that is building for you in the marketplace, and so podcast downloads would feed into that. So those are the three things I would speak to the CEO about.

Mark Evans: Let me step back here. In the B2B world, everybody accepts the reality that content is king, that if you produce insightful, valuable content, that's a good way of building trust, establishing relationships, positioning yourself as the go-to resource in a particular area. And one of the things that I think many CEOs don't understand is that the content from a podcast can be repurposed and reconfigured in lots of different ways, and it can be your content catalyst. It can sit at the core of your content engine. Is that something that you think many business leaders aren't aware of because maybe they're not content people? They overlook the idea that there's a treasure trove of intelligence, insights, and content just sitting there waiting to be explored.

Tom Hunt: Yeah. You are totally right. I would expect why do people not realize that? Yeah. I'm not sure. I think it's just quite shocking the amount... well, like, when you do one video podcast episode, it's shocking the amount of information you can pull from that. And if you, so, a, you're gonna get a load of information from it, but then, b, because you're including someone else in the process of creating it, they're incentivized to share it. Right? And so I'm gonna bring this back to the third point of my previous answer where and I didn't actually make this clear, but if we think about total targeted impressions again, like, like, doing the podcast and getting all those video snippets and having someone else incentivized to share your post or comment on your post is gonna blow up. It's not gonna blow up, but it should increase that total targeted impressions metric over time. So I think you're right as to why people are not doing it and don't understand it. I think it's just something that you have to experience. The first time you record this, you realize you get the transcripts, you're like, okay. I could probably have 7 videos from this episode. So, yeah, I feel you make a very good point, Mark.

Mark Evans: The other question I wanted to ask you about podcasting before moving on to other topics is the idea of internal podcasts. I saw a Buffer post that companies should look at creating internal podcasts for employees to engage, inform, educate, maybe even entertain. And then I was talking to Steve Schmidt, a very well-known salesperson on LinkedIn, who was talking about the idea of you could use an internal podcast to bring marketing and sales together. The head of marketing and the head of sales can do a mini podcast every week and talk about the things that they're working on and the things that they've achieved. So I wanted to ask you about whether an internal podcast is maybe a way to get companies to get on the podcast bandwagon. My marketer might be paying

Tom Hunt: you for this consulting session. Like, that's such a good idea. Sales and marketing combined, I'm literally gonna go and pitch that to our clients. That's such a good idea. I think if we, like, back out, take a step back. Actually, to actually answer your question, yes, you're totally right. Like, people should start to experience, like, the magic. It's really the closeness you experience when you listen to someone else's show. Like, I listen to true crime podcasts all the time, and so I just know all of these true crime journalists, like, they're my best mate. I think if we step back and really understand what happens when you put someone else's audio in your ears is that you build this, like, incredible relationship, and you can use that to, how do I say, influence because it sounds dark, but you can use this to try to change people's behavior in a good way. And that's what we're kind of trying to do with the podcast externally because we're trying to influence the market subtly to come and understand the problem that our product solves. The objective is exactly the same internally. What are the things that you need to educate your employees about to influence their behavior, to increase productivity, increase job satisfaction, and increase employee engagement? And a show, just like should be part of an external marketing mix, I think should also be part of an internal marketing mix, which is basically internal comms/HR.

Mark Evans: I think it'd be a great idea. It's a great way to really engage your employees because that's one of the biggest things that we're struggling with right now is the fact that you've got a hybrid work environment. You've got remote workers. Some people are even working together in person, but they're not connecting. And maybe a podcast is a good way to make that happen. I wanna jump around a little bit into some other marketing topics. And to be perfectly transparent, these came from a post that you did on LinkedIn. You as a podcast guy, you obviously, this is an area of expertise, but you're also interested or passionate about a lot of different things. So why don't we bounce around, and I'll ask you some questions about some of the things that you talk about and give me some... you can elaborate on some of what you're thinking. You talked about something called interruption-based marketing, which is a term that I hadn't heard before. How is it different or better than other approaches

Tom Hunt: to it? Yeah. Understandable that you wouldn't have heard that before because I made it up. Now, so interruption, like, for Fame, the way that, like, the impact our business has on other B2B companies, I think our, like, enemy or the opposite of what we do is interruption marketing, which is the way I define the difference between interruption marketing and, like, value-add marketing is really the reaction to the ideal buyer as they see the thing. And so let's just take a really obvious example. A cold Facebook ad that's driving someone that's, like, getting in the way of someone's feed and driving them to get a demo of your software even though you they've never heard of you before versus a podcast they've been listening to for half a year. They see a new guest that they're really interested come up on their podcast feed, and they see that, and they click on it. Right? So this, I would say, of interruption. This, I would say, of, like, value-add. The screen that I would ask every B2B marketer to look through as they're going to

Mark Evans: be sending that email, as

Tom Hunt: they're gonna publish their ad, as they're gonna publish that blog post, is: Do I think that the reaction to this from my ideal buyer is gonna be a positive one or a negative one as I interrupt them with this thing? So maybe I need to think of a better name because, like, technically, whatever we send and put in front of our ideal buyer is gonna be an interruption, but it's more about the reaction to it. Do they see it as an interruption, or do they see it as something that's gonna improve their lives?

Mark Evans: That's an interesting concept because there are two kinds of interruptions. One annoys you. You see the ad. It does, or the piece of content, it's not relevant. It's not interesting. And in fact, it's distracting and causes you to break down in whatever you're doing at the moment. And the other one is, Uh-huh. That's interesting. I'm curious about that, whether it's the title or the content or whatever, and it can completely generate a different reaction immediately. It's an interesting game to play, and I think you're right. I think a lot of marketers really need to think through what kind of content, what kind of advertising is putting out there. You talk about CEOs understanding their customers.

Tom Hunt: And if you go through

Mark Evans: a LinkedIn feed, there are tons of posts about the value of understanding your customers and being empathetic to their needs and interests and talking to them. My take is a lot of it is talk as opposed to walk because marketers, in theory, love the idea of talking to customers and prospects, but they don't do it because they're busy or they got different priorities. But one of the realities of being a CEO, especially as the company's growing, is you get farther and farther away from your customers. When early days, you love your customers, and you're the CEO and the chief salesperson. So you have a very intimate relationship with prospects and customers. But as the company grows, you get busy and you do other things and you stop talking to customers. So my question to you is what are best practices to make sure that CEOs are aligned and connected with customers and prospects? How do they make sure that there's not this wall between them because a CEO has other responsibilities?

Tom Hunt: Yeah. I mean, step one is obviously host a podcast. No. I'm joking. That typically isn't necessarily the CEO, but he had a great question, and I did get a good reaction when I posted on LinkedIn because my view is exactly that, that I think the CEO needs to be the person in the business that knows the customer the most. And people responding were saying that with bigger companies, it should be like sales, customer success, they know that. So I'm still of the belief that the CEO needs to know the customer best because they are ultimately making the big decisions that impact, like, what products are being made and how they're being sold. So to your actual question, which is how did the CEO actually do this? I think, and I've thought about this a bit, I think the best way is for the CEO to create content because when you create for my life experience, pretty limited, but the best way for me to learn is to teach, which is why I write on LinkedIn, which is why I host a podcast. They're gonna learn about the thing that they're creating content about more as they create it. And then the great thing is that if they're creating it and posting it ideally from their own social profiles themselves, then they are gonna see the responses to that content and even get into the comments and interact and really learn from the people that are reacting to the content, which ideally are also the customers. I think that is probably the best thing. I guess the alternate is for, like, the CS team to set up calls for the CEO to jump on and ask questions, but I don't know if that's gonna get the deep enough knowledge that well, I essentially think that creating content could build deeper knowledge for the CEO, and the benefit there is also that it's gonna help grow the company.

Mark Evans: Yeah. As a content marketer, someone who totally believes in the value of content, I think the CEO should be creating content on a regular basis. But the pushback that I get when I suggest that is that they've got bigger things to focus on. It's not a priority. It's really not a good use of their time. So how do you convince a CEO that, yes, they should be creating content? And the other adjacent question is, do you think the CEO should be hosting podcasts or co-hosting podcasts, whether it's to an external or

Tom Hunt: internal audience? The reason why you get that pushback is because it's so hard to source or attribute the source of a good idea. A CEO is completely ignorant of the idea they could be getting from their customers that's going to completely change the direction of the business or how they sell their thing, and so it's so hard to track that. And so that's how I tried to get it across, but obviously it's not going to be that convincing. Maybe I would say, look, CEO, we're gonna do this for a month. If we don't see the numbers growing and if we don't feel like you're learning about the customer, then we can stop. Maybe I just say we can try it. Well, I'm actually gonna go full circle back to we're talking about podcasting versus writing blog posts. If you, like, nail down the process, as you were saying, Mark, like, this episode might take you, like, 40 minutes, including finding me and prepping the questions, and then, obviously, if you can hand everything over to an editor, et cetera, or to the marketing team, then you can get the time down for a CEO to record an episode to, like, 35 minutes. And so they're gonna learn from the guest. Ideally, they're gonna feed some feedback on the show or get a report from the marketing team about how it's doing, including, like, quality feedback. And, like, the CEO ideally is gonna be a pretty good host because they normally know the subject matter and have good communication skills. I think that is, like, one route to creating content for a CEO's podcast. Now we might be jumping onto another question, but

Mark Evans: I think there's, like, the best way to become famous in any B2B

Tom Hunt: B2B niche basically combines three things. It's very simple. Just start written posts on LinkedIn. They can have a video and image in them, and so the CEO can do this. They can get the insights from the show. Start hosting their own podcast around the niche, and then go guest on other podcasts in the niche. Do those three for 6 months, and that's gonna, like, make the CEO and the business famous. Admittedly, that is gonna take the CEO quite a bit of time. So where possible, we're gonna hand over some of those tasks to the marketing team, like the marketing team can get the books on the other shows, and marketing team can do everything for the podcast apart from the host. And by actually writing that post, the marketing team can prep the video, but the actual writing of the post, I would say, does need to be done by the CEO.

Mark Evans: On a related note, in terms of understanding your customers, you talk about how organizations need to become better listeners. And as a reporter, a lot of the best information I got during an interview was simply listening and not talking, letting people fill in the pregnant pauses with information that they would never have told you otherwise because they're uncomfortable with silence. So I think that listening is an awesome thing and an awesome skill. How do you teach people to listen better? How do you make them understand that it's not about talking? Because we all love to talk. And if you ask somebody a question, they'll talk until the cows come home. But what about listening? How do we improve listening from a business perspective and even from a personal perspective?

Tom Hunt: It's such a good point, and I don't know how much thought I've committed to understanding how to make people a better listener. So maybe I'll try and respond by understanding how I've become a relatively good listener, I think. It might have been like in my earlier career, I was starting small startups. Like, none of them worked. But I do remember reading, like, the Eric Ries book and the other one that inspired Eric Ries, so Lean Startup, and then the other one is called The Four Steps to the Epiphany. And they just hammer so hard on the fact that, like, your product, the product should be brought out of you by the customer. It should be pulled out of you. Y Combinator says this. They basically just say, 'Make stuff people want.' And so I think it was hammered into me from, like, the startup world. Reading those two books, it becomes very clear that ultimately the gold, the thing that you're going to create that people actually want. And I got this wrong for, like, five years, right? So maybe I learned through the pain, but maybe I'll recommend, like, reading those books. I'm not going to say that a B2

Mark Evans: B market manager in a big company should go and start their own company so they could learn how

Tom Hunt: to listen. So, but it's exactly the same in marketing. Like, the messages that are going to resonate don't sit in your head. Maybe they do kind of if you used to be the ideal customer yourself, if you used to be that buyer, but maybe you didn't. So you just need to sit down and listen to these people. So I don't know if that was a good answer, Mark.

Mark Evans: Well, I think it's a good answer, and I think what you're putting the spotlight on is the idea that if you listen to your customers, they will tell you what you need to know. They will tell you what they need to do their jobs better. They'll give you great ideas for content. They'll give you great feedback on your product. And so if you combine customer insight with listening, it's a powerful one-two punch. Going back to our original discussion about podcasts, I want to ask you about SEO. I listened to one of your other podcast interviews, and a big focus was SEO and the role that it plays in helping you promote your own podcast and those of your clients. How has Google's recent algorithm change impacted SEO when it comes

Tom Hunt: to. Yeah. So, literally, the only thing I know about the new algorithm is, like, what I read on a couple LinkedIn posts, and my understanding is that it's prioritizing content that people actually want to read, like interesting content. And I kind of thought they were doing that anyway with, like, scroll rates and, like, click rates, etcetera. So maybe they're just honing that. And it makes total sense. And I think, really, for the last, like, seven years of SEO, people have started to realize that you can't game it, and you literally have to make content that people like. The opportunity for businesses for SEO with a podcast is simply just to ensure that you are able to pull out and create a web page or a blog post from the episode that actually adds value to people. And so this typically consists of, like, the embedded player, the embedded video if you have it, the key takeaways, and the transcripts, and then links to the guest, typically. Now that's like the standard. And if you really think about the user journey there, like, somebody, I don't know. They're going to feed on a search post. They're going to click. Then they're going to click on the Apple link on the player that on their phone maybe, and then they're going to subscribe and listen to it later, which is fine, but then that's not really going to help with SEO. So we can, like, brainstorm a bit on how to make that page better if we want. So the first thing we want to do is try and get some backlinks. And so what we do here, we go to the guest and be like, 'Hey, we made the show notes page for you.' Maybe incentivize them somehow to get the link from their domain back to yours. What we've been testing is, like, writing a written summary of the post, giving that to the guest for them to post on their blog, and in that, we'd embed a link back to ours. We typically get, like, a tick box when the guest is booking, like, if we write a summary post on the blog, it's a yes, then we'll write it. So that's the first thing. Second thing is maybe I would like take out the we haven't tested this yet, but take out the embedded player or video and just link to that at the bottom of the post, and then tell the story of the episode in the blog post. That's something to test. We do still recommend putting the full, like, transcript, like, not if it's automated, but if it's a human-reviewed transcript, like, getting that on the page maybe with a click thing. So you click it to, like, fully release it. That will probably help with Google as well. But, like, to zoom out again, the way you're going to get more organic traffic is by creating information that people actually want. And so if you are able to, like, pull out good insights in your episode and then communicate them on a web page on your domain, then you should be able to get organic traffic.

Mark Evans: One final question that's around Fame. I described Fame briefly off the top, but perhaps you can provide a more full-blown description of what Fame does, who it serves, and the value that it delivers to clients. And I'm also interested in your approach to marketing these days. What kind of channels are you using? What works? What hasn't worked for you?

Tom Hunt: Great. Yeah. So Fame, a B2B company. In one line, we've started to grow podcasts for B2B brands, and the business started because I was head of marketing at a B2B SaaS company. We started a podcast. It went really well. I left. Fortunately, they became the first client,

Mark Evans: and then they're still a client today.

Tom Hunt: And we've just then taken that process we built in-house and applied it to 55 different B2B businesses. Now, in terms of marketing, it's such a relevant question, Mark, because I was literally spending this week working on this. And this is like a Chris Walker thing, but I've taken all of our growth programs, I call them, and I've added them into, like, into a Trello board that's like Ideas, Experiments, Positive Signals, Repeatability, Operationalize and Scale, Fully Integrated. And currently, we have nine on there. I'll quickly run you through them. Now nothing is past Repeatability yet, but in Ideas, we have LinkedIn Ads. Not started that yet. In Experiments, we have my podcast, did an experiment. Service-led growth, so this is how we can get exposure for Fame through the content we produce for clients. Well, if we get approval. We have LinkedIn Organic for another one of the team is in there. Then moving to Positive Signals, so these are things that we started working on. We're getting good feedback from. We have a community called SaaS Marketer, biggest SaaS marketing community on Facebook that I've had for, like, three years, so that's in there. My LinkedIn Organic is Positive Signals. Me being a podcast guest, how relevant here, is in Positive Signals, and then we just have two in Repeatability with Google Organic and Google Paid. So those are, like, all of the programs, and my job as CEO and CMO is, like, prioritizing and trying to move them through that Trello board.

Mark Evans: And what's your approach to paid these days? Because a lot of companies are pulling back on paid. They may not be seeing the results they want. They may not be seeing the engagement

Tom Hunt: Yeah. They're working. I like the ratio of paid spend to revenue. If only Google Paid, so people that if they're capturing demand, people that are googling for what we do, our ratio is, like, 1.5%. And so I'm trying to push that up while still maintaining, like, cost per conversion if they're acceptable, and we're kind of hitting this limit. So I wouldn't say we're scaling back. If I could find a way to pay more, maybe I just need to get better at Google Ads, I would. But I need to find someone who's going to do it with me. But that's how we're doing on paid.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks, Tom, for the great insight about podcasts and lots of other topics that I'm sure people will enjoy as we bounce around from topic to topic. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a glowingly positive review. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and, of course, share via social media. And to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and positioning and messaging guru, email Mark@MarkEvans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.