How To Effectively Market and Promote Your B2B Podcast
Podcasting is booming and there’s no end in sight for the growth in popularity of this medium. Luckily, if you’re running a B2B podcast, you’re not competing with the thousands of entertainment, sports, mystery and other consumer podcasts that are being published every day.
With a B2B podcast, you have a specific target audience, usually thought leaders and decision-makers in your industry or potential customers in industries that your company serves.
Still, tapping into that potential audience isn’t just going to happen on its own. You need to be proactive in marketing your podcast to build that potential audience into active listeners and subscribers.
How do you market your podcast? There are many ways to get your show in front of the right people to build your audience and make your podcast a voice of authority in your industry.
Create a Target Listener Persona
Creating buyer personas has become standard in the e-commerce industry, and you can adapt that targeting technique to create listener personas for your podcast. Putting the puzzle together to get a complete picture of your target new listeners, will help you in all your marketing and promotion efforts for your podcast.
Demographics
This is basic information identifying the group of listeners most likely to tune into your podcast based on age, gender, income level, industry, location and level of education. You can jumpstart the process of identifying your target demographics by looking at your current customers as well as the thought leaders and peers in your industry network.
You don’t want to dismiss people who don’t exactly fit your demographic profile, but you can use that profile to guide your podcast marketing strategies to refine your voice and approach to your marketing messaging.
Psychographics
Studying your listener psychographics is a good way to segment that group based on similar attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, values, and goals. You have to be careful when analyzing your listener psychographics to not let your personal biases cloud your judgment. For example, you may find that your ideal listener is an extrovert who attends a lot of gatherings and meetups and is very active on social media. If you’re an introvert homebody who stays off Twitter and Facebook, don’t let that color your decision-making when it comes to marketing choices.
Consumer Choices
This means something different in the B2B podcasting world than it does in traditional marketing. Traditional consumer choices would be what brand of toothpaste someone buys. Promoting your podcast requires identifying choices your potential listeners make when it comes to consuming information. What podcasts do they listen to? What kind of TV shows do they watch? Who do they consider thought leaders? Use this information to refine your messaging to fit their lifestyles.
Submit to Podcast Directories and Aggregators
As soon as you publish your intro episode, submit your B2B podcast to every directory (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Google Podcasts, etc.) and every aggregator (Overcast, Stitcher, Podcast Addict, TuneIn, Downcast, etc.) by hand as soon as possible. It can sometimes take up to a week or ten days to go live on the directories, so don’t wait for them. Be proactive and get your podcast episodes out there to anyone who will link to it.
To Get Subscribers, Just Ask
If you have a new podcast you need subscribers, pronto. There is an easy way to make this happen: Ask people. Let your entire professional network know about your new show, and ask them to subscribe. Then ask them to repost to their network and ask their friends and colleagues to subscribe.
You might be surprised at how many subscribers you can get when you’re new just by asking. There are a couple of benefits to this. First, the ranking algorithms of the podcast directories reward shows with healthy subscriber and download numbers. Second, when people do come across your podcast, having a healthy number of subscribers makes them more likely to think of your show as being something worth their while, too.
Create a Standalone Website
Unless your new B2B podcast is with a large enterprise company that is a household brand, at least within your industry, building a podcast website is a great way to give a big boost to your marketing efforts.
Having a dedicated podcast website gives your show instant legitimacy in your industry. It also creates a brand for your podcast that is separate from your company’s brand, which helps with Account Based Marketing (ABM) efforts when you are interviewing potential customers on your show.
If you stick with it and play your cards right, you can eventually position your podcast, with its own brand and website, as a leading industry media outlet, not just a company podcast. This makes appearing on your podcast far more attractive and desirable to industry leaders and decision-makers.
Partner With Industry Associations and Publications
Once you have a few episode titles of your B2B podcast published, reach out to industry trade associations and publications to explore partnership opportunities with them. The most obvious partnership would be for the trade association or publication to co-sponsor or co-present the show.
The leverage you will have in the partnership is that you are already taking on the time and expense of producing a show relevant to your industry, and by co-presenting the podcast, they will receive a lot of ready-made content to use for free.
This is especially important for trade publications. They are often overworked and understaffed, and an offer of free relevant and engaging content is a win/win for both parties.
Include Your Podcast In Your Company Newsletter
In our work at Content Allies, a leading podcast production company, we have found that featuring your new B2B podcast in your company newsletter is one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to your show.
Your company newsletter is full of contacts who are interested at some level in what you do and what you think as a leader in your industry. The click-through rate to a podcast from a newsletter can be quite high, and it is an easy way to boost your visibility and traffic.
Don’t have a company newsletter? Consider starting one. Not just for your B2B podcast, but to have a regular touchpoint with your network, customers and peers. The mailing list you create through publishing a newsletter is very powerful.
Repurpose Your Content
Content is king when it comes to podcast promotion, and having regular interviews with thought leaders and decision-makers in your industry is content gold. There are many ways you can repurpose your podcast content to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, drive traffic to your podcast and increase visibility in your industry and beyond.
One of the easiest ways to repurpose your great content is to publish a transcript of the interview or episode. There are many transcription services, both automated and human-verified, that can provide a transcript quickly. The quality will vary depending on how much you pay, but if you’re going to publish it on your company blog or podcast website, spend a few extra dollars to get a human-verified transcript to increase accuracy and eliminate obvious mistakes.
Break the episode down into individual topics and publish them as blog posts. Your interviews and new podcast episodes are likely to be rich with industry-related keywords, and posting them on your company blog or website will boost your SEO rankings where it matters. You should be able to get three to five 400-600 word blog posts from each 25-35 minute episode, complete with authoritative quotes from your guests. You can also offer up those blog posts to your guests for them to publish on their website. Just make sure you choose one location or the other so you don’t run afoul of the search engine algorithms by having duplicate content.
Don’t overlook the power of video. Most podcasts are consumed as audio experiences, but you should consider recording video while you’re at it. If you don’t already have a company YouTube channel, start one. You can post YouTube videos of your episodes there, and you can use video clips as videograms for powerful social media posts.
Promote on Social Media
There are few free tools as powerful as social media channels for marketing your podcast. For most B2B podcasts, the social media platform of choice is LinkedIn, but Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are all fair game to use for social media promotion.
The formula most of our clients use at Content Allies for LinkedIn is one announcement post, two quote blocks, and two videograms for each episode. An announcement post is simply a notice that you have published a new episode. Quote blocks are short (less than 150 characters) quotes from your podcast guest that are relevant to your industry. Videograms are short video clips, usually less than two minutes long, featuring your guest.
We have found through experience that split-screen video clips, which show both the podcast host and the guest, perform better when it comes to engagement like reposts, likes and comments.
It is easy to repurpose those quote blocks and videograms for other social media platforms to get more mileage out of them. Just make sure you use different copy in the body of the posts to avoid redundancy.
Give Your Guests Promo Material
Most guests will readily agree to promote their appearance on your podcast. It’s good for their business and it’s good for their ego. But following through with that promise is another story.
The key to getting your guests to promote your podcast is to make it as easy as possible for them. Send them the quote blocks and videograms you created for your own use. Some people even write the social posts for their guests, so all they have to do is copy and paste them into their LinkedIn profile or on their company’s Facebook page.
Also, always tag your guests on your own social media posts. On most social media platforms, they can share or repost your high-quality content with one click. This will boost your reach and elevate interest in your podcast within your industry.
Do an Episode Callback
An episode callback is simply mentioning a previous episode during an interview. This can be especially effective once your podcast has become popular to get traffic to older episodes that might not have generated much interest back when you first started. When you mention a topic that you covered in an older episode, take that as an opportunity to link to that episode or to your podcast landing page in the show notes to make it easy for your podcast audience to find.
Be a Guest
As you build your audience and grow your podcast, you’ll naturally build your network and it will likely include people with their own B2B podcasts. Offer yourself up to be guests on their shows. It’s not unusual for podcasters to strike a mutually beneficial deal to be guests on each other’s podcasts.
This is even more effective if you can join as a guest on popular shows that cater to your target audience. The promotional boost that you get by appearing on other good-quality podcasts is definitely worth an hour of your time, and it will help establish your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.
Link Your Email Signature
Adding a link to your podcast to your email signature will take you a minute to do, and it will pay off by putting that link in front of everyone you exchange emails with from that minute forward. It won’t take many clicks from your email signature to start building followers, subscribers and downloads. This subtle form of email marketing can be quite effective.
Consider Paid Advertising
Using paid advertising can be an effective way to build your audience and promote your podcast, but it can also be a total waste of money. You’ll need to do your research on what is effective and what isn’t to get the most bang for your buck.
A great place to start is Google Ads. You can pick the relevant search terms and set your budget to cut off your campaign after you spend a predetermined amount of money. Everything is tracked, so you can analyze your search results to see what terms have been most effective to get clicks through to your podcast.
A new and exciting advertising technology is contextual ads that come with built-in players that allow people to click on your podcast right on the page where they were served up the ad. Those pages are articles from leading websites that include keywords that are relevant to the subject matter of your show. This type of advertising only costs money when someone actually clicks and listens, so the payoff is unlike anything else available.
Use some combination of these promotion and marketing best practices to grow your audience and build your B2B podcast into a powerful voice within your industry.
Have a topic you want to see us cover on the podcast? Write to our host at jake@contentallies.com
This episode is brought to you by Content Allies.
Content Allies helps B2B companies launch revenue-generating podcasts. From startups to Fortune 500s, we have helped some of the world's leading companies build and run profitable podcasts. Contact us for your free podcast consultation at ContentAllies.com