B2B Podcast Growth: Practical Ways To Grow Your B2B Podcast
Starting a B2B podcast is a great way to raise your profile as a thought leader in your industry, connect with other leaders and potential customers by inviting them on as guests, and also to increase brand awareness for you as a host and for your company.
But a podcast is only worth doing if you have people listening to it. So how do you achieve growth in your listener base? There are many proven strategies and tactics you can use to maximize your growth trajectory and build your podcast audience.
Work Your Podcast Like It’s Your Job
Not doing this one thing is what we see as one of the biggest obstacles to growth in the B2B podcast industry – treating your podcast and the promotion of it like it’s your job. It doesn’t have to be your personal job, but if you have a business podcast, someone in the business needs to take ownership of all the time and tasks required for the podcast to be successful.
A big mistake we see at Content Allies, the leading global B2B podcast production and strategy company is companies entering into podcasting with good intentions, but the day-to-day management of the podcast becomes additional work put on somebody’s already busy schedule.
Do an honest assessment of how much time you’re going to spend on planning, production and promotion of your podcast and determine if you, or the person you’re assigning that work to, has enough time to give the project the attention it needs for success.
If you find that assigning that work to yourself or someone else in the company is unrealistic, all is not lost. There are plenty of full-service podcast production agencies out there that can handle most or all of that work for you and your team.
Be Consistent in Publishing Your Podcast
How often you publish your podcast isn’t nearly as important as being consistent about when you publish your podcast episodes. If you decide to publish your podcast every Tuesday at 10 am Eastern, or the first Tuesday of every month at 10 am Eastern, you need to make sure that happens on time, every time.
One of the main ways to get ahead of the consistency game is to get a backlog of episodes in your publishing queue. If you are going to publish weekly, it is a good idea to get three to six episodes completely finished and ready to publish before launching.
This gives you a month or so of cushion to be able to publish each podcast episode on time. It’s not easy; when a podcast is new it is natural to want to publish right away to hit the ground running. But be patient. It will pay off when you (or the host) take time off for any reason.
If you’re publishing once or twice a month, you have a little more breathing space, but you still want a reserve of two or three episodes in your back pocket.
Get Listed in All the Podcast Directories
You should probably be familiar with all the leading podcast directories, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon, but you should be aware that many people get their podcasts from smaller directories like Castbox, Stitcher and Pandora.
Your B2B podcast may eventually get picked up by all the smaller directories, but you should get proactive about getting listed and manually submit your show to all the directories so you don’t miss out on any potential podcast listeners.
Don’t get directories confused with hosting services. A podcast is like an audio RSS feed, and podcast hosting companies are set up to handle the bandwidth challenges inherent in hosting hundreds or thousands of large media files.
The directories all stream from your hosting service when someone hits play on their phone or in their browser. You only have to worry about uploading each podcast episode one time once you’re listed in all the directories.
Promote Your Podcast Heavily on Social Media
Promoting your B2B podcast is natural for a social media channel like LinkedIn, which is a business-oriented channel. Take advantage of this channel by actively promoting your podcast.
Treat each episode as an opportunity to do at least five LinkedIn posts to your profile. A common and successful formula is to do an announcement post when a new episode goes live, two quote block posts and two audio or video posts.
This is five opportunities to build your network, five chances to maintain or increase awareness of your brand and five chances to tag your guest, providing them with added value beyond just their appearance on your show.
Use this technique for all your social media accounts. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are all great platforms to get the word out about your show.
Have Your Guests Promote to Their Network
Ask your guests if they will promote their appearance on your podcast to their social media platforms. If your show is in an interview format, most guests are more than happy to agree to promote their appearance, it is free content for them and they come off as thought leaders in the industry.
However, agreeing to promote their appearance and actually doing it are two different things. If they truly are an industry leader, they are likely very busy, and promoting their appearance could get lost on their to-do list.
The key is to make it as easy as possible for them. Modify the same five LinkedIn posts you did for yourself, and make the post from your guest’s perspective. Send them or their marketing team a document that has five social posts ready to go with just a simple copy and paste.
Repurpose Your B2B Podcast Content
In addition to doing social media posts with quote blocks and videograms, you can repurpose your podcast content in several different ways that can help you grow your podcast’s popularity.
You can post a transcription of your podcast to your company or your podcast website to get the SEO boost that comes with written content. There are several transcription services available online at varying costs, depending on how accurate you want your transcription to be.
You can also write SEO-rich articles about the topics you discussed on each episode. Break out individual articles and post them to your company blog to increase traffic and awareness of your podcast.
You can also ask your guests if they would like you to provide an SEO article about their appearance to post on their website or company blog. Once again, you’re adding value to your guest’s experience by offering free, relevant content for them to use online or in a newsletter.
Most of the tips so far have been based on the assumption that your podcast is new and you will be implementing these strategies from the beginning. If your show has been up and running for a while, and you’re looking to boost your growth, don’t be afraid to repurpose older, existing episodes in the same way. As long as the topics are still relevant, more content means more potential listeners.
Become a Community Contributor
Online communities within your industry are a great way to increase the growth of your show, build your network and position yourself as a thought leader. Communities exist through many different channels online, and they can include Facebook Groups, Slack Groups, Reddit, Discord and even a community you build through your own company newsletter.
The key is to be a contributor, not just a lurker. Answer questions. Give advice. Post links to interesting news articles and content relevant to your community. By contributing to the groups, you’re positioning yourself as a leader, and posting links to your podcast will be seen as helpful, not intrusive.
Gaining the trust of others in these communities is a tried and true way to build your network, meet potential guests for your show and build your show’s audience numbers organically.
Position Your Podcast as an Industry Trade Publication
We have clients at Content Allies who have followed these growth strategies, and their podcast ends up becoming a trusted trade publication and source of information for everyone in their industry.
Think of it this way – while there still are some trade magazines printed on paper and distributed through the mail, most trade publications these days are completely digital. Digital content doesn’t have to equate to written content. Podcast consumption of your audio content counts just as much.
Use your platform to explore all different kinds of topics that affect your industry, and you’ll soon become a leading voice and a platform where industry leaders want to go to discuss the state of things, brainstorm ideas and solve problems.
Some people are hyper-focused on using their B2B podcast to generate revenue through business development, and a podcast is a powerful tool for doing that. But to take your show to the next level, think outside of Account Based Marketing and into the realm of positioning yourself as an industry leader.
Be an In-Demand Podcast Guest
A great way to increase your audience growth is to appear as a guest on other podcasts within your industry. Often this happens in the form of a guest swap, where you have podcast hosts on as guests and, in return, they have you on their show.
This is a win-win for both podcasts. It doubles the amount of valuable content you can create and use, by having two completely different episodes on two different shows to mine from. It may take a little bit of planning to have different topics addressed on each show, but that usually doesn’t take long to figure out.
Don’t think of other B2B podcasts in your industry strictly as competition. Collaborating with other hosts helps you build your community, increase the size of your network and grow your podcast audience.
Consider Podcast Advertising
If you have the budget, you might want to consider podcast advertising as a way to grow your B2B podcast. There are several different ways you can go, with different levels of effectiveness.
Google Ads
Your company may already have a Google Ads account set up for the goods or services you offer. You could do the same for your podcast. If you don’t already have an account, it is easy to set one up in just minutes.
One good thing about Google Ads is that you can set your budget so that the ads turn off when you’ve reached a certain amount of money spent over a set period. Also, you only pay for ads that receive a click, and you can track the actions after that click, so the effectiveness can be pretty attractive.
Podcast Advertising
You can advertise on other podcasts to get the word out about your own show. These ads can come as canned, pre-recorded spots or as ads that are read live during a taping by the host. This is a more traditional style of advertising based on impressions, and it is much harder to track your results with any accuracy.
CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING
Contextual advertising is the new kid on the block when it comes to podcast ads. With targeted, contextual ads, listeners are fed relevant ads for your podcast episode based on keywords matching with articles they are reading online.
For example, if you have a car repair podcast, you can use contextual ads to target articles in major publications about oil-changing practices. When someone is reading this article, the keywords trigger an ad for your episode on oil changes, and there is a player embedded in-line in the article that the reader can click, to immediately start listening to your episode.
There is no clicking away to another website, and you only pay for clicks that result in a listen to your episode. We use this advertising method at Content Allies for some enterprise clients and the results we have been able to report have been impressive.
Be Patient
Podcast growth and building an audience for your B2B podcast can take months or even a year or more. Sometimes it can feel like nothing is happening, but the key to success is to stick with it.
There are a lot of podcasts out there, and there are likely many B2B podcasts already in your industry. Consistency is the key factor when it comes to achieving significant growth. Be consistent in your social media messaging, in your SEO article, in being a guest on other shows and in your advertising, and you will see results. It may take a while, but it is a marathon, not a sprint.