Podcast Strategy Basics: Choosing Your B2B Podcast Publishing Frequency
When a business sits down to create a podcast strategy, one of the first questions to be answered is: what will be our publishing frequency, or how often should we publish? There are a number of options but not all will be appropriate for your objectives. In this article, we’ll take a look at the most common options and give context to help you decide what frequency you should consider vis-a-vis your goals.
First things first…
Stop thinking B2B podcasting is like the content marketing explosion of the mid-2000s when the world believed the route to content marketing success was through weekly blogging. We call this strategy “publishing for the sake of publishing” and it is not an effective one for your business.
The listening behavior of the B2B podcast audience is different from B2C. It is unlikely that your listeners will tune in every week to catch that new episode. If you’re looking to grow your podcast and build an audience, podcast promotion is a better way.
Consider your budget
Production quality is an essential part of B2B podcasting. Budgets for typical B2B Podcasts range from $3k-30k per month depending on scope and the level of involvement. While some companies may have lower hard costs by working with just outsourced audio editors, that typical comes at a tradeoff of much higher management overhead and time from internal team members.
These are steep costs for any business. It doesn’t make sense to put out weekly content for an audience that may only tune in when they see a topic of interest. Eventually, you will get to a point where your podcast doesn’t produce ROI and it will be looked at in budget cuts.
B2B listeners want targeted content
If you need to show ROI from your podcast, then you need to slow down, rethink your strategy and understand that people in B2B are looking for targeted content. There are certain cases in B2B where you will be building up a show and a community, but the majority of the B2B audience are looking for specific content that will be valuable to them in terms of thought leadership, sales enablement or customer education. It has to address a purpose, a question they need answered or a new trend they need to learn about.
Have an objective for each episode
When you understand the behavior of your potential audience, it is easier to plan your publishing cadence. Then you start to ask the right questions, like, “What is the objective for this specific episode?” Not the objective of your podcast but the objective for every episode and content you put out there.
It all depends on your business goals. It could be thought leadership about a particular topic to show that you’re leaders in a particular space. It could be to interview a strategic partner to build a relationship with them. It could be to promote a new product you’re launching or it could be an educational episode to teach your audience about how some of your lesser-known offerings can help their business.
With this context in mind, let us look at some common scheduling.
Once per week
This is ambitious for a lot of B2B companies. We’ve seen many smaller B2B companies do this, but once it gets to the enterprise level, many companies struggle to maintain this schedule. This is due to a number of reasons, one of which is getting final approval, which can be a headache as the company grows.
To pull this off, as we’ve seen with startups and mid-market SMBs with weekly shows, you need to use an account-based marketing approach where you interview your ideal customers or potential clients. This approach focuses on external interactions, and it can be a rewarding strategy. Interviewing a new guest every week means opening the door to new relationships. By the end of the year, you can connect with 52 potential customers or partners. Imagine what your business could do with 52 new relationships every year!
It can’t be flexible in terms of strategy as you cannot afford too much complexity. The goal is to interview one potential customer every week.
Twice per week
If you’ve got a lot of content to repurpose, podcasting twice a week could be an option. However, with the amount of work that goes into producing a quality B2B podcast, we don’t recommend this, especially if you need to go through multiple layers of approval and feedback.
This option works with conferences, live events and webinars because once these are recorded, they can be repurposed. Although the same can be said for publishing weekly. You can repurpose a podcast episode into Twitter threads, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, quotes, social videos and social media posts. Then you’ve got a backlog of content.
But if you have to record, create content and think up a strategy, we do not recommend this approach.
Twice per month (best cadence for B2B podcasts)
This is the sweet spot and probably the most common cadence we see with B2B companies and larger enterprises. It’s the most realistic option.
With this cadence, it lessens the burden on the side of your business or, if you’re using an agency like Content Allies, on the side of the agency. In this timeframe, it’s not so difficult to get an episode reviewed and approved.
This type of scheduling allows you to explore your strategy and experiment with different goals and objectives. You could try an account-based marketing approach where you interview your potential clients or you could try a thought leadership approach where you position yourself as an expert in your industry. One of our clients tried something different. They interviewed influencers and authors in their industry.
You’re also going at a pace where you can try different interview formats without getting bogged down with the operational side. One of the most important aspects of running a B2B podcast is guest scheduling and, with this cadence, you can coordinate better, create room for rescheduling and even try a panel discussion where you interview more than one guest on an episode.
With this rhythm, you can really slow down and ask yourself: What is the purpose of this episode? Are we putting out content to educate our audience this week? Do we want to support a product launch? What PR initiatives are there for us to latch on to? This rhythm allows you to go in many directions.
Once per month
This is where you can get into detail with each episode you put out. With this cadence, you’re not in audience-building mode, rather you’re putting out content for a very specific and strategic purpose.
You’re looking at how each episode can help support your business initiatives. It could be creating thought leadership content, a customer case study or a success story. You’re focused on creating evergreen content that will remain relevant six months, twelve months, two years or three years down the line.
With this type of scheduling, you can even look at building full marketing campaigns behind each episode. This can be done by creating content targeted around an SEO keyword and ranking organically on Google.
There are certainly other publishing schedules we haven’t mentioned here, but these are the most common. The most successful B2B podcasts consider their goals and budgets when choosing their publishing schedule.
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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 atContentAllies.com