Business podcasting is huge. There are lots of times when listeners tune into their favorite podcasts, whether they’re live podcasts or downloaded and listened to on a commute. However, because they’re so popular, there is also a lot of competition for listeners. Only by being the best can you ensure that you will grow. So, in this article, we’ll be going through some of the B2B podcasting best practices for you to get the most from your show.
B2B Podcasting Competition
To understand the importance of improving a podcast is to understand the competition and the audience. According to one US study, 51% of business owners and founders are regular listeners to podcasts, listening to at least one podcast per day.
In addition, 24% of audiences will listen to between two and five podcasts per week.
The reason for them to tune in regularly to podcasts is very similar across the surveyed participants. 36% of respondents were looking to learn new business skills or techniques, with 43% of participants using podcasts as their primary source of information.
In contrast, the average consumer listener tends to use podcasts for entertainment.
The survey also points out that sponsorship is more valuable within the B2B podcast market. Four in ten B2B podcast listeners will always listen to ads or sponsorships and six in ten will be likely to buy a service or product from a brand mentioned in the podcast. Host-read sponsorships are particularly valuable to listeners.
But because of these statistics, business podcasting has significant competition. According to some surveys, business is the fourth most popular podcast topic in 2024, with more than 321,000 active business podcasts currently online.
And most of these podcasts are releasing content every three to seven days. Therefore, there can be up to 600,000 episodes every week for business owners and decision-makers to consume. It is going to be impossible for decision-makers to do that, so podcast owners need to create a podcast that is going to improve their chances of being on the top of podcast recommendation lists and ones that audiences subscribe to.
B2B Podcasting Best Practices
So here are the 10 B2B podcasting best practices that you need to implement to ensure you attract and retain audiences as well as improve your revenues from your production.
Create an Audience Profile
There is no value in creating a business podcast without knowing who you want to listen to. If you’re providing recruitment advice, you’re going to want to speak to HR department heads, or hiring managers. Therefore, you need to determine who these people are, what topics they want, what they’re looking for in the conversations, and more.
If you’re going to be providing information that is more suitable for startup organizations, you need to focus on these individuals. Creating an audience profile allows you to determine many of the other factors.
For one factor, you can create a format that is going to fit within your audience’s expectations. You can also reach out to guests that you know are going to attract the right audience for you. Remember that your guests should have followers and fans, that they will reach out to which can help you bring in more listeners.
Research Other B2B Podcasts
In addition to knowing what you want to do, you need to see what others in your niche are doing. You can therefore avoid some of the mistakes that they’re making (like not being consistent) and replicate some of their success. For example, they might have a list of guests that have proved to be popular, and you can write down who’s brought on and reach out to them.
You might also see how they’ve covered certain topics and whether there have been gaps in their coverage. You might also want to consider avoiding the same content, to ensure you stand out from the competition.
You must never stop doing any research into your competitors. They might see a trend with their advanced analytics. If they’re getting more traffic, they will have more data that can lead to better conclusions. So if they notice that blog writing has become a big topic in the marketing niche, you can see that in their latest episodes and then cover those topics yourself in the future.
Invest in the Right Equipment/Software
As well as having the right topics, podcast format, length, and more you need to ensure the quality of the episodes is high. You need to ensure that you have the best podcast studio to record in. A good podcast studio is free from distractions and background noise as well as preventing echoes from being heard on the audio tracks. Suitable offices or rooms in your home can be found, but you might want to do some audio tests to ensure that these rooms are the best for you.
However, there is also the importance of your podcast equipment. You can buy equipment online at various price points, depending on your budget. But sometimes, compromising on the costs of the equipment can cause the content you produce to be of a lesser quality. For example, you can sometimes get echoes of the content.
You might also need to ensure that you have the right software. This covers editing software, so you can polish the episodes for the best output. The software can also include the apps or plugins that you need for your website for publication there. These often don’t mean the episodes sit on your website but are rather streamed from another platform, such as Spotify or YouTube.
There are lots of options for the equipment and software. And if you want peace of mind, then Produce Your Podcast offers an equipment check.
Plan for Costs and Time Requirements
When you’re starting a podcast, the excitement can often get the better of you. Therefore, you start to commit to several episodes or costs that aren’t realistic for your other commitments and budget. The result is that you fail on expectations that you’re setting and promoting which can ruin a reputation.
Therefore, you need to carefully consider your budget. What can you afford, what time investment can you provide the podcast and also what are you going to do about unexpected circumstances? For example, your podcast might bring in more customers, which you will need to service. Do you have the time to continue your podcast at the current production level if you have a 10% increase in work? What will you do – would you bring in more staff?
It would be better to consider and give yourself some breathing room. You will have more success in the long term if you can keep to the consistency that you’re promoting very early on.
Also, don’t forget that if you’re saying you’re going to release at a set time every week/month, you’re able to keep to that schedule. Decision makers will be using your time-keeping and consistency as a measure of whether you’re trustworthy. Failure to meet expectations can mean in the long term, you’re going to lose out on potential business.
Brand Stories Engage Listeners Better
One of the biggest mistakes that podcast creators make is that they focus too much on the product/service that they’re trying to promote. The result is that they create episodes that are stilted and boring for the audience.
Instead, you need to create something that is emotive and nothing does that better than creating brand stories for the audience to listen to. You can tell lots of different stories that can build engagement with the audience. Some of the stories that do well include some of these:
- How the business started, what inspired the owners to create their business.
- Case studies of how a client was serviced/helped and what benefits it gave the client.
- What lessons have been learned from past mistakes?
Not every story needs to be positive. But they should build a learning experience for the audience. As nearly half of all business podcast audiences are using shows as their primary source of information, these episodes can be a vital resource for many.
Be Entertaining
In the article, we’ve discussed the importance of relaying information and data to the audience. Most decision-makers and listeners are looking for ways they can improve their businesses. However, being informative is not enough. You need to be entertaining as well.
There are numerous options for entertainment. Conversations are one of the most interesting ways that you can build an entertaining environment, with conversations often resulting in emotional journeys between participants.
You should also try to incorporate humor into the episodes. Laughing inside episodes improves the immersive experience for the listener and helps to break up the monotony of the information being portrayed. Humor has also been known to help numerous listeners retain information and brand recognition better.
It can also be a great way to make challenging subjects more relatable to audiences.
Cross Promote Content with Other Podcasters
Having guests on your show can be a great way for you to promote your show to new audiences, but it is also a great way for you to help other podcasters reach new audiences. Cross-promoting is essential to help you build a strong reputation with other podcasters. It shows that you’re not interested in self-promotion, but rather in building a community that can help open new opportunities for your brand.
If people realize that you will help promote them, they will help promote you. And therefore, you can build a more effective marketing channel without really having to do too much work. In addition to this, you can be sure that you’re building a list of contacts that can help you promote your podcast in the future.
You might be able to cross-promote other than doing guests. For example, you might be able to do ad swaps, which can lower costs and fill in gaps when you’re starting.
Call-to-Actions Are Critical
While listening to your podcast is critical to success, so is the listener taking action after listening to your podcast. Therefore, you want to ensure that you’re providing an excellent call-to-action that will lead the audience to take another engagement with you. There are several different actions you might want to promote with your podcast. For example, you could get them to:
- Download a PDF or ebook that you can collect an email address for.
- Request from you a free service that you can then use to engage with them further.
- Share the podcast with a colleague.
- Listen to a previous episode.
- Share the podcast on social media.
Be sure you have a range of call-to-actions to promote during different episodes. Having the same call to action means that once someone has taken that action, the value in them listening to your podcast diminishes. However, having multiple call-to-actions to rotate allows you to attract people at different parts of the purchasing journey.
Request Reviews
One call to action that’s often missed, and should always be included, regardless of whatever call-to-action you’ve promoted earlier in the episode is for the listener to leave you a review.
Reviews are critical for success.
Reviews help you build a presence online, with many search algorithms including them in the factors that help rank higher. It isn’t just about the average rating – it can be about the number of reviews. It is relatively complex, how it all works, but it can sometimes be more profitable to have a 4.8 rating over 5,000 reviews than a 5.0 rating over 500 reviews.
It is also important to consider that audiences can be untrusting. Seeing that a brand has just a 5.0 rating can make them think that you’re hiding negative reviews and instead just promoting your top ratings. Research has shown that the ideal score is 4.5 stars. However, anything between 4.2 and 4.7 is more trustworthy.
Audiences are also looking at the 10 most recent reviews, rather than older reviews. So you need to constantly bring in new reviews to help you rank, build trust with audiences, and get audiences to know that you’re current.
Included in reviews, you should ask audiences to share your podcast with their friends/family. This word-of-mouth marketing can be highly successful in building your listener numbers.
Repurpose Your Content
Producing and building a podcast is a long, tiring task. And you have other content responsibilities to help your business succeed. However, doing all those activities can put a real strain on you. Therefore, repurpose your content to lessen the needs of your time and resources.
There are several ways to use your podcast content in other mediums to help you reduce the need to create new content. For example, you can repurpose podcast notes into blog posts. Or use snippets from your podcast episodes on LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube to help you create new content on those platforms.
In addition to helping you build new content on these platforms, you can also attract new audiences who don’t connect on podcasting streaming channels to find out about your show, and they might then listen to you.
Don’t Forget SEO
Organic search is still one of the best promotional channels for websites, podcasts, YouTube and social media. Therefore, you don’t want to forget your show’s SEO. Use keywords inside your show’s titles, descriptions, and even in the meta information on websites and images.
These little details can help your show be displayed on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) that will drive new audiences who are unaware of your brand. And this can turn them into lifelong listeners or perhaps even customers.
SEO can be challenging. It can take a year or longer for some pages to rank on the first page of any results. And there is a whole load of new activities that are important to do to get shows ranked high. But the long-term benefits can far outweigh the costs.
FAQs: B2B Podcasting Best Practices
How long should B2B podcasts be?
It entirely depends on your topic, format, and even audience on the best-length podcast. However, many podcasts are between 30 and 60 minutes long.
Can I make changes to an existing B2B podcast?
Yes, there are lots of podcasters who make changes to their show to better match their show’s audience. Making subtle changes can mean you do not alienate your current audience.
How often should I promote my B2B podcast?
You should always be promoting your B2B podcast. Whether using social media, SEO, email marketing, or word-of-mouth, complete at least two marketing activities daily.
Final Word: B2B Podcasting Best Practices
There are numerous B2B podcasting best practices. Utilizing these on your show can help you bring more people to your show, allowing you to charge more for sponsorship space. But it can also help you to sell more for your business.
However, it will take some time for you to be able to implement all these best practices. Getting help from a professional podcast production company can help you achieve your goals much faster.
Produce Your Podcast is a premier podcast consulting, production & marketing agency. Our team of experts provides comprehensive, full-service quality solutions for B2B clients to incorporate podcasting into their overall marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a reliable partner to help launch or grow your business-branded podcast and boost your sales and marketing goals, we’re here to help.
Click here to schedule a conversation with our team today. Let’s work together to create a high-quality podcast that takes your business to new heights!
