Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.

Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marquee Spark. Let's talk about something that's transforming how companies build trust, reach decision makers, and stand out in a sea of sameness, video podcasting. For years, podcasts have been a go to content format, but the game has changed. YouTube has emerged as the number one discovery platform, thumbnails have become mini billboards, and the smartest b to b brands are turning each episode into a month's worth of high impact content. In this episode, I'm joined by Sergei Ross and Joe Newton from SwayOne, who recently published a comprehensive report analyzing 75 plus b to b video podcasts, from bootstrap startups to global enterprises. They break down what the top shows are doing differently, why executives should absolutely be hosting your podcast, and the biggest mistakes companies make when they hit record. If you're thinking about launching a show, revamping your current one, or want to understand how video podcasting fits into a modern B2B content strategy, this conversation will give you a front row seat to what's working and what's next. Let's dive in. Welcome to the podcast.

Guest: Thank you, Mark. Great to be on the show.

Mark Evans: Let's start with the big picture. Why has video podcasting become such a powerful tool for b to b brands right now, and how is it different from traditional podcasting or content marketing?

Guest: We've seen the trends of platforms going into video. More people consume video. It started with TikTok. It probably started before TikTok. The video was the format that a lot of consumers preferred to get their news content, and podcast couldn't be left behind. We've seen that more shows prioritize a video, and that means when we started with podcasts, a lot of them were audio only. People were uploading to YouTube sometimes, and they had artwork and just an audio, and there's nothing happening. But because the new video era coming and LinkedIn pushing videos quite hard, especially recently, having a video when you're recording a podcast made a lot of sense. Now, we're seeing more podcasts not just recording an interview in the video format, but they're also using short videos. They are creating trailers. They are creating mash up sequences from an interview. The viewers want that. It gets much more engagement and because it gets stronger distribution. Those are the primary factors based on the trends.

Guest 2: From a discoverability point of view, YouTube is so much stronger than the dormant Spotify podcasting platforms. It gives the host, the podcaster, a lot more reach, but also it's much easier from a consumer's point of view to find and discover new podcasts and new shows, new episodes when it's on YouTube. That whole discovery phase of discovering a new show, discovering a new episode, finding a cool episode with a cool guest is just so much easier on YouTube. Whereas on Spotify, you already have to know a show exists to search for it. That t piece is just so different on these older podcast platforms.

Mark Evans: It is interesting. A lot of the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis are now heavily promoting their YouTube channels. Some of them, for example, Pod Save America is putting content exclusively, or at least they're doing special content on YouTube that you can't get in the audio format, but it is interesting to see the pendulum swing from audio to video. It leads me to my next question. Your report shows that YouTube outperforms Spotify and Apple Podcasts for podcast discovery. The $64,000 question is, why do you think many b two b companies are still ignoring YouTube as a primary channel?

Guest 2: Just as a quick response, I'd say you'll have a great answer here as well.

Guest: I think

Guest 2: it's a black box. YouTube for a lot of b b two b marketers is this scary channel still where it's seen as a buy box.

Guest: It's a cultural and mindset. Thanks. Those are the hardest to overcome because YouTube has been treated in a certain way for many years. Why would it be treated any differently? YouTube is treated by b to b companies as almost like a hosting platform. You put it out, and then you can embed it on the website, and that's how it was. Why would it be any different? Typically, b to b companies are notorious for moving a lot slower and making changes. Another factor, what Joe said, one of the really key ones, is expertise. YouTube requires a lot of expertise. It requires a lot of understanding how it works. If you're not investing a lot of time into it, then it's just a very surface level understanding. We're going to upload the video. We're going to put a thumbnail probably repurposed from a webinar. Then we're gonna put a title similar to what we put on the website. Not enough time have passed and not enough expertise for companies to view YouTube differently, but that is starting, thankfully, to change because of this massive discoverability algorithm and the fact that YouTube accounts for 60% of searches on Google. And the most important thing, and we will talk about it more, right now, majority of b to b search terms are open. Nobody occupies them.

Guest 2: If you put videos with your industry terms and somebody searches for them, you will be number one, number two, number three.

Guest: That is free. At 60% of Google search, that means people search for you, they will find that video, they

Guest 2: will find that piece of content. How much companies right now are spending on paid?

Guest: A lot. Right now, this is free. If done correctly, this is free for now. It could be up for grabs. A lot more folks need to look at that, and we could post general numbers that this is available. Start making this change.

Mark Evans: Joe, let me circle back on your comment about YouTube being a black box. Many people from the outside looking in see YouTube as a very user friendly platform. Video is accessible. Why is YouTube a black box? What don't people or b to b marketers understand about YouTube? What are the biggest mistakes they make when they approach YouTube? And as Sergei said, they simply see it as a hosting platform.

Guest 2: I think a lot of it stems initially from no one really knows what success looks like on YouTube. There's no kind of at least I've not seen any stats. There's no, like, industry benchmarks of what does a good view count look like, what does success look like, what does the downstream funnel metrics look like from YouTube. It's when you think of YouTube and b to b, and we reference that these guys all the time, a address, and I think probably Slidebean are another good example, but there's, like, virtually zero examples of b to b companies that have made YouTube work. But I think a lot of it just stems from no one knows what good looks like, so that's a problem. But also, there's perception barrier in people's minds, but particularly marketers, right, when they look at YouTube. They look at mister beast and all of these massive big consumer creators. I think it, in a way, scares them off, and it makes them think, oh, do we have to go to that level to make YouTube work? If that's the case, we have no idea where to even start with that. I think it's benchmark and then also this perception barrier that exists.

Mark Evans: You make an interesting point because you could argue that podcast analytics have been a black box for years. If you looked at the way that many b to b companies assess the value of their podcast, you could say subscribers or downloads or maybe conversions, but I don't think that was a metric that was valid. A lot of marketers leaned into brand awareness or the fact that they could take a podcast, particularly with video, and they could repurpose it into blog posts and LinkedIn and Twitter. The way to quantify the success of a podcast was part science and part art, part numbers and part guessing. How do we establish as marketers, how do we establish benchmarks for the success of podcasts, both audio and video?

Guest: I think it's so unique. It may not be an industry standard or an industry benchmark that a lot of marketers are looking for. It may not exist. It doesn't often exist with top of the funnel content that is purely brand that is difficult to attribute. Some of it is about the views and subscribers, some of it is around relationships, some of it is around things that are happening behind the scenes that you cannot see, what kind of benchmark we could put behind it. It's very difficult. There are probably some numbers that could be put together, meaning, if you're getting a 100 views on LinkedIn, and if you're in this b to b industry, that's pretty good. But that is also very relative and could also be proven wrong. Because if you're getting a 100 people from outside of your target audience, that benchmark is completely irrelevant.

Mark Evans: What maybe did devil's advocate because in my world, ROI matters. Everything is measured. We live in front of our dashboards. If you're a b to b marketer and you say to your CEO, I wanna do a podcast, and they respond, that's great. How do we measure success? And you say, there's no benchmarks. It's really hard to quantify. But believe me, it's gonna be a good thing because we're gonna do the podcast, and then we're gonna take all this video, and we're gonna cut it up into clips, and we're gonna rate blog posts and link posts. It's gonna be great. It all sounds good. Podcasts can be an a valuable asset. But at the end of the day, if I'm looking at making an investment in a podcast and I'm the CEO or the CFO, and you as a marketing leader can't tell me the ROI, I'm gonna be very reluctant to give you the green light. But, obviously, a lot more companies are leaning into podcasts. The question is, are they a leap of faith? The management team saying, yeah. Okay. You can do it. I'm not sure whether you can measure it, but it sounds like a good thing.

Guest: Mark, you're right. That's a good point. But I was actually answering only very specific question. I was only talking about industry benchmarks, not the justification for the podcast. So there's a big difference between what am I going to get as a CEO versus answering the benchmark parts, because what you're going to get is not that difficult to quantify. You're going to get certain relationships built with your key accounts that you're looking to sell to, that's one. Two, you are going to get very strong distribution with your ICPs over LinkedIn, over website, over YouTube, over email. We're going to get sales enablement assets in the hands of our team. We're going to get

Guest 2: a lot of really high quality value content pieces that right now

Guest: the content team is working on. That's not super difficult to justify, and those will be seen. How we're going to track that? We're going to look at the views, we're going to get the reaction, and we're going to ask our audience that's following us, and in a sales conversation, how did you hear about us? What do you think about the podcast? It's not going to be necessarily that difficult to track. Now, it's not going to be based on Google Analytics. There's not going to be this mega chart, but it will be trackable, and it will be justifiable. That is one of

Guest 2: the reasons a lot of p two

Guest: b companies are running a podcast, and they will be running a podcast, and they're looking to invest more. But specifically about industry benchmarks, that's slightly different.

Mark Evans: I'm gonna be the bad cop here and suggest that a lot of the things that you suggest around quantifying the success of a podcast are what I would call soft metrics as opposed to hard metrics. If I'm a marketer and I'm very data focused, I'm looking at conversions. I'm looking at all kinds of KPIs. What you're suggesting is you can create some content. You can ask customers whether what they think. And it all sounds really good. I love podcasts. Don't get me wrong. I'm a big advocate for the power of podcasts and their ability to spawn lots of great content. But the measurement tools are not super focused. I'm not gonna look at a podcast dashboard and go, oh my god. Look at these arrows going up. Look at these arrows going down. How do you

Guest 2: justify that? What's important and just to double tap on it, and maybe this isn't the hard data metric that everyone's looking for, but that this is why that when we talk with clients, the first things we speak about are guest relationships that turn into clients. That's a really critical thing for a lot of clients that we work with is that the podcast has becomes a very good tool to invite key prospects, invite key partners. That's a really clear metric that we lead with. What a lot of execs and founders care a lot about now is building a personal brand because they realize the value. And what we've seen is that a podcast is the best way to enable you to build a personal brand. It's a really frictionless way to create a lot of content to position your exec as the key man, key woman in the industry. It's starting with the things and the outcomes that really matter to them. If we can show of a podcast that we've been able to convert 20 guests that have been in the show, five have converted into into key accounts, that's a key metric for a company. So it's leading with things like that.

Mark Evans: Let me switch gears and put on my good cop habit and say that there are lots of marketing channels that cannot be quantified in a very specific way. I'm working with somebody, and we're leading it hard into radio ads and billboards. You can't directly measure the success of a radio campaign or a billboard campaign. You can measure how many cars drive past a billboard, but you can't measure the impact of you can't correlate billboard viewage to actual activity unless you use some specific URL. There's lots of ways that marketing can be measured and lots of ways that it can't, but they're all part of the marketing mix. But let me shift gears. You mentioned the role that executives and the c suite can play in not only justifying the existence of a podcast, but as your report suggests, the role that executives can play when they host a podcast when they host a podcast. Once that jumped out, was that podcast with executive hosts get six times more views. Why do you think that executive or expert led hosting is so effective? Why are many companies still hesitant to put their leaders on camera?

Guest 2: Because they have the best thoughts. It come down to that a lot of the time. Not always, but in most b to b companies, the founder, the exec, the c suite, they have the leading force in the industry. They have definitely the leading force for their company. They own the narrative. They understand the narrative, likely better than anyone else in the company. By nature as well, not always the case, but founders, even if they're quite introverted, do tend to be good storytellers and communicators. I think it's a combination of those two things. But most importantly, they have the substance and the thoughts. We've seen over the years a lot of podcasts inside companies that have been started by the marketing lead, the marketing manager, the content manager, which they tend to not perform too well because fundamentally, that person doesn't really have the insights and the expertise to to to be able to drive a conversation for thirty, forty five minutes.

Mark Evans: I'd also suggest that one of the weaknesses of executive led podcasts is they're not good interviewers. They're good Leaders.

Guest 2: They could be.

Mark Evans: They're good talkers, but they just don't know how to shape our conversation. I've spent thirty years asking questions as a reporter, podcaster, marketer. I know what questions to ask. I know how to drive a conversation. Of course, I'm blowing my own horn. But conversations interviews are hard. You have to listen. You have to be prepared. Sometimes it's a skill that you don't have or you have to learn it.

Guest: You could have executives in in an interviewee role or in a host role, which is a demanding and difficult one. But if you have them on the show with somebody else, that that works well too. You're totally right. The role of the host is extremely difficult. Picks it very hard, and not a lot of executives could do that. But if they are acting as as a thought leader who knows a lot and is great to listen to, but they're not necessarily moderating the conversation, that's a good format.

Guest 2: One format we've seen work really well, particularly with execs, is more of a cohosted commentary style, which we've mentioned in the report. It's not necessarily where there's someone interviewing anyone in particular. It's just two cohosts talking about I mean, if something is happening in the industry, and it's more it comes across more of just a conversation between two people versus just like the typical podcast interview style. There's also understanding the format that you're using and not always going to the interview format if you're using an exec style host podcast.

Mark Evans: I wanna follow-up on that. Joe, you mentioned in terms of formats, podcast using multiple formats, interviews, roundtables, commentary, have nearly two times the virality. What would you give advice to companies that are stuck in that single format rut?

Guest 2: Don't go too crazy too early. Ward, before you run, we always say this when we chat and we talk to clients. There's like a podcast scale of difficulty. Right? On this end, you have the standard interviewing is very hard. But if we're just running a very simple question answer interview, that's probably at this side of the scale. And then we have on the other side a a narrative based podcast That's really difficult to execute. I'd say take it in steps. If you've currently if you're currently running an interview standard show, which is what most companies do and have been doing, introduce just every couple of episodes at a panel. Or introduce a a co hosted. Bring on your exec or bring on your CEO or founder, and just do a more of a co hosted style for an episode. It's slowly introducing it. I'll give you an example just to make it a bit more tangible. So over a year ago now, we were working with a company called Seedtag, and they're in the ad tech publisher space. A lot of the episodes we were doing initially would just interview. Dal, the host. He was like the VP of partnership for C We were just doing a lot of interviews, and that was the typical style. Slowly, over every month, we started to introduce a just basically, a state of the industry episode. So we'd bring on someone else in tag in the company, and it would basically be this cohosted commentary star where they talk about something that was happening in the industry. I remember one episode, it was the whole Barbie and Oppenheimer thing. We had a whole episode between two people inside C tag talking about it, and it wasn't as much of an interview. Was just two kind of people who are friends talking about something that's happening. That's a real life example of what

Mark Evans: it looks like. Great advice. I wanted to talk to you about frequency. A lot of companies that launch podcasts do a bunch of episodes. They launch the podcast. They publish weekly for a very short period of time, then it's biweekly, and then it's monthly. Then you look at the podcast, and it hasn't been updated in months. They've lost their enthusiasm and maybe resources or just trying to find the right guests. They run out of steam, and that's just a recipe for disaster. I wanted to talk about the ideal cadence for a podcast, and you're finding that publishing biweekly actually delivers better engagement than weekly episodes. It's a classic less is more approach to marketing. Why do you think that less frequent publishing wins? How should teams balance quality versus consistency?

Guest: Ideal cadence is the one that companies can maintain. This is the most important thing. You could maintain the cadence. This is the right cadence. This is a really good way to think about that. In the report, the fact that the biweekly shows do better than the weekly, just quality preparation, quality production, quality of conversation, quality of assets that are created after that, slide decks, short clips, things like that. That is done better because there are more resources that have been spent. The reasons that companies are abandoning their shows is because they have not been clear on or they didn't quite understand their process. They don't have somebody who is clearly communicating the expectation, and they did not define what that looks like. What is this experiment? How long is this is it going to last? Six months? Let's see how many episodes we can do. Let's see what resources do we need. Let's go and get it done. A lot of times, it's just let's see what happens. It's very dangerous thought. If we are creating a podcast as an experiment, every good experiment needs to be defined when it starts, when it ends, and what does it look like. If a company is doing an episode and it gets zero results, which is very unlikely if it's done well, then let's stop. But most of the time, it's because the expectations have not been defined, the cadence have not been defined, and their production and time requirements from the team have not been properly discussed. This is a very common thing with executives when they say they will do it, but then actually they don't because they don't have the time.

Mark Evans: We talk a lot in the industry about the one page marketing plan and what that should include. But let's look at the one page podcast strategy plan. I'm a company. I wanna launch a podcast. I need to make sure the key elements are in place so we're all aligned in terms of what we're doing, why we're doing this, what success looks like. What would that one page podcast strategic plan look like? What would need to be on it so that the c suite and the marketing department and the sales department all aligned on how to move forward?

Guest: It will need to include the most basic things. How long are we going to do a podcast? At least six months. How many episodes can be produced? What is the the simplest way to get started? Like Joe was talking about that we don't go too hard into experimenting. Who's going to be producing it, how we're going to distribute that, who has enough time to actually be on the podcast. If this format that we are defining right now, let's say we're doing an interview with guests, if this format doesn't work for some reason, it takes a little bit too long, what is the other format? What is the contingency option, just given the fact that it may not work exactly the way you expect? The podcast concept may not work exactly as you expect. Is there something else we could do? But it's about the production. It's about the production requirements. It's the frequency. It's the theme of the show. It's the concept of the show. It is who's going to be a part of that. Who's going to be producing it? What would be the calendar look like? Who the key points of making it happen, and the timeline. How long are we going to spend before we actually get ready to launch? Then after we have launched, what we're going to do? What will be the set of actions? Who's going to be doing them? Probably not going to fit on a one pager, but with AI, I think we probably should manage.

Guest 2: One absolutely critical thing to nail up front is the general overarching theme. If you look at most b to b podcasts, this is where it really is missed. You wanna be careful with a theme because you don't wanna box yourself in too early. To Sergei's point, there's gonna be experimentation. We might not just stick to one format. We might have to shift from an interview to something else. You don't wanna make it too boxed in from day one. How I've always viewed the power of podcast is a really good way to share your company's point of view and narrative. Right? What you don't want a podcast to turn into is something where, particularly if it's an interview, where the guests just drive the narrative and the conversation, which is what a lot of podcasts turn into. I think being really clear upfront about what's the over what's the overarching narrative and theme if we are gonna pick guests to come on? Do they align with that, like, narrative and theme? Right? I always think about that with our podcast video that we run this way. I'm not gonna invite someone unless they clearly align with how we think about the industry and the types of topics we wanna talk about. I think just being very clear with that upfront and not letting the podcast divert too far away from that clear theme. In my opinion, that's

Mark Evans: where it goes wrong with podcasting. We've talked a lot about strategy and goal setting and quantifying success. Wanna spend the last part of this conversation looking at the mechanics. Let's get in the weeds. You mentioned earlier in the podcast about the fact that a lot of marketers don't understand YouTube and the way it works when it comes to podcasts. In the report, you talk a lot about optimization, titles, metadata, thumbnails, time stamps. What does a fully optimized b to b podcast episode look like? What are some of the simple steps that brands can take to quickly improve their current setup?

Guest: We'll assume that we could improve the previous episodes that exist, plus we'll improve the ones that are coming up. What should they improve? Thumbnails and titles. Those are two of the most important things in YouTube. They need to be optimized. When we talk about the title that is YouTube, it needs to have a certain structure, it needs to have a certain point, strong opinion, capture and attention, and it needs to have some industry terms that you could rank as we've discussed earlier. And the title the thumbnail, and the thumbnail is YouTube optimized. A lot of b to b companies use titles from a webinar or from banners from LinkedIn, and they put them on YouTube. Usually, people are very small, there's a lot of text that nobody reads. That's not good. There's a lot of good examples on YouTube of thumbnails that we could use. There's lots of there are a few podcasts that do well on YouTube. Taking them as an example, applying that design language to a company is good, and it typically means a very simple style of the thumbnail. B to b designers like to overcomplicate things. One thing you need for YouTube is actually remove that complexity, because the whole purpose is for people to click on it. They're not going to stare at it like a painting. That's not the it's not for that. The other part is fundamentals. Trailer and intro. Something that captures attention, something that has a sequence of highlighted moments at the very beginning, that will be really nice. That's nice to drive to get people in. And then when the interview starts, is preferably, it doesn't start with a predictably boring part of tell me about yourself, tell me about your job. It starts with a little bit something more interesting. So there's a little bit of that structure if it is one person interviewing another person. And then there's summary, there's an outro that summarizes the conversation or gives CTA to people of, hey, go to this place. It's one end card strategy, meaning that you're directing people to another piece of content after they finished watching this one. That could be another episode, it could be something else, but one. Just one specific, not two, not three, just one. And then description, title a description, and you also have the timestamps with square brackets. They will help a lot with navigation. Doing these things actually make a substantial difference on overall optimization of the channel.

Guest 2: With YouTube always working back from existing performing content that's already on the platform, a lot of b to b marketers, not just with podcasts, but with YouTube, with content they generally post on YouTube. They've not worked back from what's actually already working and what's already ranking. I think just spending the time to look at existing performing content in whatever industry or category niche that you're in and deciding to do a few episodes around those, as long as they do fit within what you wanna talk about, I think it's smart just to kick start the algorithm and to make sure that you are actually going after what people want to watch.

Mark Evans: If a company has a podcast, there's a couple of options. One is you go to an agency or a podcast specialist, and they do everything for you. They produce it through the thumbnails, the meta tags, the whole shebang, and that's great. If you're trying to do a podcast yourself, if a marketing team has the mandate to do everything in house, aside from YouTube as your distribution channel, can you recommend tools that BB marketers should be using for recording, hosting, creating video clips, captions, anything in your toolbox that you could recommend?

Guest 2: Obviously, the platform we're using right now, Riverside, use that for recording. The only thing I will note is that, and Sergey will definitely mention this, is that it's always better with podcasts to record locally. For quality purposes, like, if even if it's a virtual recording, generally, it's better to put in a bit of extra work and just record locally on on the iPhone. The quality is gonna be better, and you're not gonna face any issues that can happen, as we know, occasionally with these platforms. In terms of tools that I'd recommend, there's things like Descript, which can be incredibly helpful for pulling transcripts. I I would be careful about when things like clips and things like assets that you're creating from a podcast. I think there's a really cheap way to do it, which feels great. I've got 50 clips now that I can post on LinkedIn, and I can post on shorts, and great. Amazing. And that's great, and that works. But I think for most teams, they would benefit from actually putting a bit more effort into some of the creative former clips from the podcast.

Guest: What we'll say on Opus, and this is perfectly normal. This depends on how certain companies think. And when they create clips on on Opus that get one to two likes, let's see how that goes for a few months, and we'll we can chat after that. My point is that you have an interview, and interviews are already quite a diluted piece of content. They're not super well choreographed because of such a conversation. When you're cutting out certain pieces, they need to be really good. They need to be really good. It's not just about, oh, I put this piece of content in the feed, net success. Not really, because we want to have consumption. So it needs to be a really good one, just important to consider. You we could use AI tools like Opus. Maybe they do a little bit of help on peak in the moments, but we haven't seen a lot of success on that. But it's just about whether this piece of content will be consumed or it'll just going to be ignored.

Guest 2: That's the critical part of podcasting for a company. A lot of companies and vendors, people in the space have pushed podcasting as a pure efficiency play. You do a podcast, you get 50 pieces of content off the back of it. Great. But if they're not being consumed, there's no exactly an efficient use of resources.

Guest: How good are they? Because you could do we talked about it on our episode that we could do a thousand clips. That's awesome. For, like, the next twelve months. But do they deliver? Like, the quantity is great. They could be done at, like, a cheap cost. But do we really care about the cost? We don't really care necessarily about how much it costs. There an outcome that you could present to the CEO, to the VP of marketing and say, hey. This actually contributed to this pipeline.

Mark Evans: I've been doing my podcast for four years, and my go to tools have been Descript, which is amazing for transcripts, captions, clips. I clip everything myself. I don't rely on the robots to do it for me. Recently, I switched over to Riverside from Zencastr. Zencastr used to be a very simple, clean tool. And as I added more features, it got increasingly complex and less user friendly. I couldn't figure out how to use it anymore. And switch over to Riverside. So far, so good. There's some things that I really love. Great tools can save you a lot of time and money. Final question. Looking ahead, where this is the loaded question, the big picture question. Where do you think b to b video podcasting is going? What innovations or trends are you most excited about over the next, I don't know, twelve to twenty four months?

Guest 2: More companies will spend a lot more time really thinking through the actual podcast structure and content. They will bring in experts or even hire internally and spend more time on how do we actually make the conversation itself more engaging, the storytelling of it, dev working on training the hosts better. I think the podcast itself is where I think we'll see a lot more, quote, unquote, innovation. Companies will try and just improve how do you keep someone hooked from the start, how do we just get better at moderating the shows.

Guest: The YouTube fundamentals of creating engaging content that hooks you in, keeps you engaged, and gets you to do something will be applied much more to b to b podcasts than ever before. Because so far, before and now, a lot of b to b podcasts have just been created. The first step, it's done, it's created, it's published with not much regard to fundamentals of the content consumption and how people consume it. Do they click on it? Do they stay engaged? Do they really like the conversation? How's the theme? Is the guest related to this whole to this whole situation? Maybe it's not even a guest, maybe it's something else. A lot of these things have not been done, and a learning curve is high, and it's understandable, but we are going to see more principles of good content that are not that different to Netflix or movies. Virtually every YouTube creator who's successful will use us. It will be applied to b to b podcasts, and we're going to see that. Probably shorter episodes, more variations on formats, more engaging, more fun to listen to, better produce, certainly better produce. That's going to take a bit of time, and obviously, YouTube. It will be on YouTube. It will be better optimized because right now, you could occupy your niche with industry terms for free. It's a great time to start.

Mark Evans: Final final question. Where can people learn more about you, Sway, and get their hands on the report that you just published?

Guest 2: Follow both of us on LinkedIn. The report is on our new video first resource hub on the site, which again, we can have the direct link for after this episode when it goes live so people can go and check it out. Really in-depth report. It's 30 pages. There's 10 unique insights that we gathered within it. I think for anyone starting a podcast that actively has a podcast in b to b as a marketing leader, I think it will be really valuable.

Mark Evans: Thanks, sir Guy and Joe, and thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Marquee Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, and leave a review if you like what you heard. Marketing Spark captures the stories, insights, and strategies of b to b SaaS founders and marketing leaders. I'd love to hear from you if you're a CEO, entrepreneur, or marketing leader with a unique perspective or an interesting journey or story to share. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co to get in touch.