If you’re reading this, I assume that you listen to podcasts, and even better, if you conduct some.
In fact, there are 850,000 active podcasts and over 30 million podcast episodes as of January 2020.
Jump Directly to
1 . What Is a Podcast, Anyway?
2. Why Should B2B Content Marketers Care about Podcasts?
3. What Marketing Goals Can a B2B Podcast Serve?
4. Podcasting for B2B marketers: Best practices
5. How to get started with Podcasting?
So, what’s the big thing about all this B2B podcasting?
Let’s catch up all about B2B podcasting here!
What Is a Podcast, Anyway?
Podcasts are audio or video broadcasts or an episodic collection of downloadable audio documents that consumers can stream or download to listen conveniently. It has a style usually somewhat close to that of a radio or TV broadcast.
A podcast can consist of a single episode or a series of episodes devoted to a specific theme or subject. A podcast series usually consists of one or more regular hosts discussing specific topics or cutting-edge events. Podcast productions can take a variety of forms.
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Since a podcast only requires a small amount of equipment to record and the Internet serves as its dissemination medium, almost everyone can make one. You have the ability to share your ideas and views with the world.
There is a wide range of podcasting styles; it can be challenging to find a description that includes all. So, here are top forms of podcasts you can emulate:
1. Narrative Storytelling
Probably this is one of the hottest formats, but it’s trickier to implement and adopt. The narrative storytelling format of podcasts tends to be dominated by journalists profound in gathering in-depth and informative knowledge from their domain and subjects.
2. Interviews/Panel Discussion
Interviews/Panel Discussion have one host, one person interviewed by one guest, with either a single guest interviewee or multiple guests during the broadcast.
3. Repurposed Content
Repurposing content is another excellent way to conduct podcasts. The content of ‘repurposed podcasting can include workshops, conferences, and other interviews, which can actually help improve the audience’s experience.
4. Hybrid Podcasts
A hybrid B2B podcasting has a set host, and other guests and speakers contribute to the broadcast. It generally begins with a statement or monologue from the host and then switches to a panel conversation, interview, or contribution from participants.
Why Should B2B Content Marketers Care about Podcasts?
Today, content marketers have an excellent chance to focus their content marketing strategies on conversations – and that’s where podcasts can prove to a core adjoining every other content marketing opportunity.
Podcasts can give us a goldmine of content ideas that brand marketers can employ to strengthen their content marketing strategies further and captivate their audience through conversations.
How?
The conversations from podcasts can be used as a guiding light to propel your entire content marketing funnel—blogs, whitepapers, e-books, social media posts, emails, and more.
What Marketing Goals Can a B2B Podcast Serve?
“According to a study by BBC Global News, brands that advertise their products and services using business podcasts see 89% elevation in brand awareness, attract 57% brand consideration, lift 24% brand favorability, and enjoy an average 14% rise in purchase intent.”
Podcasts are super effective to entice and attract customers and set the course of their customer journey. You can utilize your podcasts to create brand awareness and demonstrate thought leadership in your niche.
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Considerable, high-value content amalgamated in your podcast can help you make your brand stand out and inspire listeners to develop a connection with the brand.
Podcasting for B2B marketers: Best practices
B2B podcasting is now perceived as a strong marketing tool that allows companies to be heard on a more effective and profitable scale. However, there are several errors which companies may commit while they are way out on their B2B podcasting strategy.
Those errors may tally with these—not defining goals for the podcast, deviating from keeping things short and to the point, compromising the quality of podcasts, or maybe not identifying the right distribution channels.
1. Keep things short and to the point.
You are doing B2B podcasting to entice your audience and provide them valuable experience. Therefore it is critical to consider the podcast duration to keep your audience engaged. Ensuring a 20-40 minutes duration is a perfect criterion for snackable episodes.
2. Diversify your hosts’ onboarding
Try bringing in diversity in terms of your hosts, like having different subject matter experts onboard to glean a multi-dimensional perspective. Audio quality is an important hygiene feature of B2B podcasting.
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There are tiny, silent, soundproof areas. Pop filters for mics are also available. It removes speech failures and saves time for useful editing.
3. Prioritize quality
“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” ~William A. Foster
Audio quality is a vital hygiene aspect of B2B podcasting. Besides working on bringing quality content to the table, consider eliminating speech glitches or other technical problems early on before conducting or recording podcasts. It will let you save tons of time when editing the same.
4. Determine the right distribution channels
It is essential to identify distribution channels, either organic or paid. However, B2B marketing space relies, particularly on organic distribution. For your B2B podcasting, you can choose your distribution channel from many available players like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
In addition, B2B marketers can build and submit podcast RSS feeds to other platforms, such as SoundCloud, Stitcher, etc.
How to get started with Podcasting?
1 . Comprehend your niche
First, you should determine the demographic of the audience you want to reach through your B2B podcasting sessions. It would be best to choose an audience for whom you are enthusiastic about resolving challenges or pain points. It will help you build more meaningful and personal relationships with them.
Before you dig in, I suggest doing niche research and recognizing who the competitor is and how they are faring as far their podcasts are concerned. Ideally, you want a niche that isn’t too tough. Look for who is ranking in the top 100 in your niche and listen to their podcasts to learn what makes them popular and captivating.
2. Get yourself the right equipment
When it comes to quality B2B podcasting, it needs to get you all the required right equipment.
Sure, you can get away with a bare-bones setup, but that will garner you just the marginal benefits. So, you need a minimum but solid resources and would push you out of the bare-bones version of whatever you have.
Therefore, invest enough to make a high-quality podcast, see how people like it, and then proceed from there.
3. The recording or the interview
There are a few final steps to preparing for your podcast before you hit the record button.
Podcast Format: How would your podcast look?
Podcast Content: What are you going to discuss or convey through your podcast?
Your best bet for a structured and professional podcast is to use it first by understanding what you’ll say and consider including an overview of your podcast. That will set the mood and will convey the intention of your podcast.
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However, avoid stressing about writing down everything as far as your script is concerned. Get just a road map to see where you go and what you want to achieve through your conversations in your B2B podcasting sessions.
4. The editing process using DAW
If you’ve already done podcasts in the past, you might be aware of the most commonly used podcast editing tool known as DAW – Digital Audio Workstation. It is a good way of doing ‘audio editing’ like a pro.
DAWs also allow you to record in them. Therefore these are a pretty handy tool, just like having a complete recording studio on your system.
Audacity is the most common DAW for beginners. It’s famous as it’s totally free. And it is also more than decent enough to build your podcast.
But suppose you would prefer more professional ones for B2B podcasting. In that case, Adobe Audition or Reaper could scale up things for you with an almost unlimited range of features and capabilities.
5. Now distribute, share and repurpose
When it comes to promoting a podcast, it’s worthwhile to try new ideas and monitor the results. It would be best if you considered conducting several tests to identify the strategies that succeed.
Furthermore, to begin with, the promotion and sharing of your podcast, a lot will depend on the distribution channels you choose. Distribution channels like Soundcloud, for example, have a comprehensive range of collaboration and sharing features built-in.
You can easily share your podcasts directly on Twitter, Facebook, and other major social media platforms, and you can easily embed the audio directly into your blog posts as well.
Embedding audio is an effective way to sync your podcast with your blog posts. Many imminent blogs use their podcast as an extra blog post, inserting the audio straight into the body of the post and including either a complete transcript of the podcast or an overview of topics and highlights discussed in the podcast.
Happy Podcasting!
B2B Podcasting is expanding as broadcasting platforms are becoming more and more incredible, and it’s not too late to rotate the strike.
Every month, top podcasters and B2B marketers reach millions of users and monetize their audiences to support thriving businesses.