Business podcasts are one of the top-streamed subjects, partly because there are many niches in the topic. You could create a business podcast about many subjects like HR, recruitment, accounting, sales, marketing, operations, and startup processes. However, there are also a lot of people who could create content based on these topics.
What you need to do is position yourself so that you have the best for the topic and attract audiences to listen, subscribe, and return to your show. For that, you have to be a great show. So in this episode, we look at what makes a great B2B podcast.
Why B2B Podcasting is Tough
To understand why you might need to make changes to improve your podcast, it is important to realize the challenges facing you. You need to understand your competition and audience to ensure you’re offering them topics that are important to them and marketing this effectively.
According to a US study, more than half (51%) of business owners and founders regularly listen to podcasts and may listen to more than one per day. And in all audiences, a quarter of the US population listens to between two and five podcasts per week.
Podcast audiences have various motivations behind tuning in regularly. However more than a third are looking to acquire new skills or techniques to help them improve their business performance. And 43% of those surveyed were using podcasts as their primary source of information.
Other audiences have significantly different motivations. The average podcast audience member wants to use podcasts for entertainment and not education. And this is something to remember when writing scripts and episode ideas.
Podcast listeners are valuable resources for promoting your brand’s sponsors. Forty percent of podcast listeners will always listen to the ads or sponsors on a show. And 60% of the audience is likely to purchase a product they’ve heard on a podcast.
Host-read sponsorships are very lucrative as the trust built with hosts means that sponsors can earn more from them.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t competition for audience shares. Business podcasts have significant competition from others in the niche. Business podcasting has the fourth-highest number of topics, with more than 321,000 active podcasts producing episodes.
The average business podcast is also releasing more content, with some shows releasing new episodes every three days with more than 600,000 episodes released every week.
It is an impossible amount of content for audiences to keep up with.
What Makes a Great B2B Podcast?
So if you want to attract new audiences to your B2B podcast, you need to ensure that you’re creating the best content for your audience. Here are some of the tips and insights into what makes a great B2B podcast.
Knowing Your Audience Inside-Out
If you want to attract a relevant audience, you need to know who they are. For example, if you’re creating content about accounting, you want to attract accountants, financial directors, CFOs, and CEOs. So you need to know who these people are, what topics they want to listen to, and where they’re looking to get this information. You need to profile them.
Creating an audience profile allows you to determine who you’re attempting to reach and what content they will want to read. It can help with knowing how to write eye-catching titles and thumbnails as well as detail which guests to bring to your show. And these elements can make or break your podcast very early on.
Another advantage of your audience profile is that you can determine what the audience’s expectations are going to be. For example, you can see what type of content will be most expected, the length of time for episodes, and when they’re going to be online to view your content.
Using the audience profile, you can also find guests who are a similar audience. This might help you attract a larger audience earlier as you get the guests to promote their appearance on your show through their social media and email marketing channels.
Research the Market
If you want to get ahead and know what makes a good B2B podcast, then it is best to start by looking at what others are doing in your specific niche. Look for podcasts that are targeting the same people, have the same guests on their show, and have some of the same content ideas.
Looking at these other podcasts, and seeing the results can tell you a lot about the audience. For one, you can see who has been a guest on the show and how many people they’ve brought to the podcast. Look for episodes with spikes in viewership and you can see how successful they’ve been at bringing in new listeners.
At the same time, you want to see what keywords they’re using in titles, what topics they’re covering, and how they’re getting user engagement.
All these little details can help you avoid some of the mistakes they’ve made in the past and speed up your podcast’s development. For example, if you see that a podcast episode on past Google products had no views, then this is a topic that has either no interest in it or can be very challenging to rank in (or both). Therefore, you don’t want to waste your time on the content.
Likewise, if you notice that the episodes that perform best are often in the last week of the month, then this is where you want to release your best content to get the most views.
You can also look and listen to the content to ensure that you can cover certain topics in more detail. Or you can find gaps in their topic discussion and ensure that these are covered quickly.
You might also want to look at what topics they’re really into. If they’re covering one topic a lot, you might want to avoid it to prevent clashing with them and to differentiate your podcast from theirs.
While competitor analysis is done when starting a podcast, it is an activity that should never be stopped. As they continue to publish new content, they’ll get new data, and being ahead of you in their lifecycle, they will likely have more data that lead them to certain behaviors. If you can determine what these behaviors or trends are, you can start to take advantage of them.
Invest in the Best Equipment & Software
As well as having the best topics, guests, format, length, marketing, and competitor analysis, you also need to ensure that you’re producing the best quality episodes. Whether you’re doing a video or audio podcast doesn’t matter, investing in your equipment can enhance the performance of your episodes and help attract the audience you want.
At Produce Your Podcast we have a set process that we help clients to get the best equipment for them. We start with an audio and visual diagnostics session with an engineer.
They will test the quality of the equipment and your internet connection. Once the diagnostics have been completed they will make recommendations for the equipment whether that is a complete new setup or upgrades to your current equipment.
Our team can help you to order and track your order until it reaches your office or home, depending on where you’re based. And then another diagnostics session can be set up to ensure that your new equipment has been installed properly.
In addition to making sure that you have the best equipment, you need to ensure that you have the best software and recording room. A good podcast studio is free from distractions and no background noise. There are numerous rooms that you can find in your office or home that can double as a recording studio. Remember that if you’re planning to do a video podcast, then you also need to ensure that you have a good background.
If you’re looking to buy the equipment yourself, remember that while there are numerous price points for you to purchase the equipment at, the compromise on price can affect the quality. And the higher the quality of the sound and video, the better the performance of your podcast.
Plan for Costs and Time
One big mistake that is made by podcasters is that they don’t think about the time or cost investment it takes to go through every episode, record, edit, publish, and market. If you don’t properly plan for this, it can mean your production process is slow and can be harmful to your reputation.
Instead, you need to speak to those who’ve already produced podcasts and get them to detail for you how long each episode will take to record, edit, and market. Produce Your Podcast can help you plan for this, and even help you fulfill the obligations of the production to help you make your B2B podcast great.
What you need to do is to look at your budget and time constraints on you and what you can give to your new podcast. From this, you can start to enter into a system or production schedule that you can keep up with. It might mean that instead of publishing a new B2B podcast episode twice a week or every week. Instead, you might need to roll down production so it is only once every two weeks.
Setting realistic expectations for yourself, and then conveying these to the audience sets your expectations and theirs and helps to improve your reputation.
Brand Stories Engage Listeners Better
Don’t think that promoting your product/service is going to promote your business, product, or service. Instead, you need to think of engaging the audience in a story that tells them how what you want to promote has helped people. Brand stories and work-related incidents are some of the best engaging pieces of content that you can use in this scenario. Why? Because they engage the emotional needs of the audience and give them something that they can relate to.
There are numerous emotive and exciting stories that you can tell your audience from your work. And these can be engaging with the audience. And when you have guests on your podcast, you can talk to them about their experiences and stories.
Here are some ideas about some of the stories that you might want to talk about on your B2B podcast:
- 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 that you publish on the podcast needs to be positive. A lot can be learned from the negative experiences or from what has happened in the past. And these can help others from not making the same mistake and be one of the best resources that your listeners have.
Be Entertaining
Relaying information is one of the most important aspects of running a B2B podcast. However, that doesn’t mean that information is going to be everything. The best-performing B2B podcasts have entertaining hosts who provide information in a fun and unique way.
For this, you need to have humor or unique ways to present the information. Conversations between you and a co-host/guest are a great way to achieve this. Audiences hearing people on the podcast laughing has improved the immersive experience and helped to break up the monotony of the information being portrayed. Adding humor has helped numerous listeners retain information and brand recognition better, resulting in a better listener experience. And it can also help with getting sponsorship more results, something that can help you increase your sponsorship packages.
Cross Promote Content
If you want to be successful within a B2B podcasting niche, you need to get social proof of your podcast. There are numerous ways that you can do this, which include encouraging audiences to leave you a review on various podcast channels, sharing the content on social media, or commenting on your podcast.
But there is only so much that your audience can do. Instead, you need to think about getting other podcasters and people in your niche onto your podcast. These individuals can have a massive impact on the success of your podcast. For instance, they will market their appearance on your show. But also, they will have a reputation and that reputation will be passed onto you.
As a result, you will get a boost, and audiences who already enjoy podcasts will be directed to you and will see more value in listening to your episodes.
What you need to do is to promote their podcast and brand as well. This creates a cooperation that can help both of your podcasts grow and makes it more likely that you will be recommended by the guest on their podcast and in passing.
Add Call-to-Actions For Impact
Getting an audience is only part of the journey with podcasting. You want to make sure that you are then getting your audience to take action, which is all about ensuring that you have excellent calls-to-action that can persuade the audience to do something specific that builds your business in a specific way.
To help you create excellent calls to action, you need to consider what you want the audience to do. Do you want them to buy something, download a free guide, or just share the news of your podcast?
Then you need to give them a reason why they should do this. If it is about downloading something or making a purchase, you need to tell them how it is going to impact them. What are they going to get from the purchase/download? If it is about sharing, then you can persuade them by telling them how much their action will mean to you and the podcast.
In reality, you might want to encourage more than one action. You might add calls to action throughout the podcast. Successful YouTubers tend to tell audiences to share, comment, and subscribe at the beginning and end of the episode. They will then have a product placement or an episode recommendation at a couple of points throughout the episode.
Using this style can help you take advantage of the emotional journey the audience is on when they’re listening.
And remember to not always have the same call-to-action in every episode. Switch them about. Get them to listen out and keep them relevant to the episode.
Request Reviews To Build Trust
Building trust with your audience is critical to success. However, it isn’t always easy. Audiences are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one, but audiences also don’t trust reviews when they seem too positive. Yet reviews act as social proof.
Reviews also help with your podcast’s ranking on Google and other search engines. And this can be important, the higher you rank on search engines, the more traffic you get.
It is challenging to work out how the algorithm works. But it can be better to have a 4.8 rating over 5000 reviews than a 5.0 rating over 500 reviews. And it helps with audiences trusting you. Research has demonstrated that an average rating being between 4.2 and 4.7 can be more trustworthy than a rating of 5.
It is also important to consider the most recent reviews. Research has shown that audiences tend to look at the most recent reviews. So if your reviews have dropped lately, you need to see why that might be and then look to collect more reviews.
In addition to getting your podcast reviewed on sites like Google and Spotify, you should look at building reviews on Facebook and other sites. This doesn’t need to be a full review, but a share of your channel or the latest episode can be a good way to get people to leave a recommendation, and because it is coming from a trusted individual, it does mean that you can build trust.
Reuse, Recycle, and Repurpose
If you’re looking for success with your podcast, then you will want to repurpose content that you’ve got on your podcast. Using podcast clips, you can use the content to market your podcast without having to take the time to produce brand-new content.
As a result, you can make the process of marketing/building your podcast more enjoyable.
Snippets can be shared on numerous platforms. For instance, you can use the snippets on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and more. You can also use snippets on your website.
You might try to use a video in a Facebook advert.
This will help you in several ways. For instance, you will get more traffic to your podcast episodes. But it will also bring more people to your other channels which can help you grow your brand quicker and more effectively.
You can also ensure that you’re attracting the relevant audience. With Facebook, you can look at how your ad is bringing in traffic and then make small adjustments to see improvements. For example, you might see that male community members are more likely to convert into subscribers, so you can focus on that audience. Or you might find that 95% of your audience is between 45 and 65 and therefore you restrict advertising to that age bracket.
Don’t Forget SEO
One aspect that is often forgotten is the SEO of your episodes. There are many ways that you can improve the SEO of your episodes, but it comes down to using the right keywords in the right way. You need to use keywords inside your show’s title, description, and even the meta information of website images and pages.
These small details are critical. You should also look to create regular blog post content. At least once or twice a week.
While linking has been important in the past, it is no longer essential for long-term website growth.
Email Newsletter
You must look at building an email newsletter. This can help you to promote your episode by publishing a newsletter every time a new episode is released. It can also be a good way to increase the value of your sponsorship packages by getting sponsors on the email newsletters.
Email newsletters can take time to build up, especially when you have not got an email newsletter yet. However, for every $1 that you spend on your email marketing campaigns, you will earn between $38 and $44.
FAQs
Is it possible to succeed when it comes to producing a B2B podcast?
Yes. But you need dedication and good systems to help you reach the heights that you want to get to.
Does a podcast production company help get your B2B podcast to the top?
Yes, a podcast production company can help you with production and marketing that can help bring in audiences and raise revenues.
Do you have to publish content weekly?
No, you don’t have to publish content once a week. You can do it on a schedule that is best suited for you. Some of the best podcasts produce content only once a month.
Final Word: What Makes a Great B2B Podcast?
When it comes to getting your B2B to the top, you have to know what makes a great B2B podcast. Above are some of the top options for getting your podcast show to the top of listings, resonating with audiences, and more. Use some of these you might already be doing, but some you might not and you should incorporate them in as soon as possible.
Produce Your Podcast is a full-service podcast production, editing, and marketing agency specializing in helping brands launch, grow, and monetize successful podcasts that impact their bottom line. With 30+ years of experience in broadcasting and business development brought to every project we work on, our team of experts is a reliable partner to help you achieve your goals with your show.
Click here to schedule a conversation with our team today and let’s bring your show to life!
