The marketing executive goes through LinkedIn to reach his next meeting. In his feed, three podcast snippets pop up, all of them hosted by industry professionals talking about how to grow their businesses. They skipped all three. Not because the topics are irrelevant, but because the conversations sound familiar.
That is the challenge facing every B2B podcast today. As more companies continue to invest in podcasts to educate and reach decisionmakers, merely releasing another episode will not cut it anymore. A B2B podcast should be able to make its listeners stop scrolling and make them listen.
This article explains how to make your podcast different in the B2B landscape.
Viewpoints Are the Only Remaining Differentiators
The B2B podcasts must challenge the prevailing notions and discuss the impacts of industry change on the business or offer another view to the decision makers right now.
It does not imply that every podcast needs to offer some newfangled points of view. Instead, it should have a viewpoint that is supported with facts and useful insights. For instance, instead of talking about AI's impact on the industry, the podcast can talk about the inability of the company to prove its value.
Having one clear perspective gives a good reason for listeners to tune back in. If listeners know that a podcast is going to challenge conventions, give well-informed opinions or raise important issues, then there is a good idea of what is to come in future shows.
Building Recurring Research and Ideas Only Your Podcast Owns
1. Transform Questions Asked by Customers into a Podcast Series
Listen to the questions that you receive from your sales, marketing, and customer success team. This is because such questions show what business expects and experiences.
For example, if your clients constantly question you on calculating ROI of their MarTech stack, create a podcast series on technology, tools, attribution, and performance.
2. Develop a Signature Framework
Create a method for examining industry problems. It adds consistency to the editorial tone and enables the listener to connect your brand with a perspective.
An AI B2B podcast can review each use case for AI with three basic criteria: What business problem does it solve? How is its impact measured? Who is accountable when it fails?
3. Create an Archive of Learnings
Identify recurring topics in the interviews, research, and discussions conducted in the industry. This helps in creating future episodes as well as determining the POV of the podcast.
For example, following the 20 interviews with marketing experts, the podcast team realizes that more often there is discussed the problem of data quality and consistency rather than budgeting issues. This insight results in an episode dedicated to the challenges of transforming data into action.
4. Leveraging Original Findings Through Various Mediums
Use original insights through LinkedIn posts, videos, newsletters, and reports.
For instance, an AI survey can become an episode of your podcast, LinkedIn posts which utilize original insights, newsletter on the survey, and an interview with a leader about the insights.
Podcast Should Expand into Community & Live Event
1. Create a Community Based on Industry Issues
A LinkedIn group or a community forum works well as long as its objective is clearly defined other than the promotion of new podcasts.
A B2B podcast based on MarTech should create a community for marketers who would discuss issues such as data quality and costs associated with technologies. After the discussion of MarTech sprawl podcast, users should discuss their experience with evaluating duplicate tools and retaining them.
2. Engaging your Listeners for Future Podcasts
Your listeners can contribute to their queries or help you decide what the future topics will be.
For instance, the audience on LinkedIn for a HRTech podcast can be asked to choose any one topic out of the following three: AI skills gap, employee data privacy, or workforce planning.
3. Link Your Community Chats to Your Content Strategy
The issues that arise from community chat sessions can be considered as content ideas for your editorial calendar.
When several of your audience bring up their issues measuring the AI productivity, your team can organize a survey, do interviews with business leaders, and then release an episode on that topic.
Recommendation Now Outweighs Discoverability
Regarding B2B podcasts, existing connections are one of the key factors of success in growing podcast audiences. The fact is that when the guest sends the episode to his network of professional connections, it is sent to those people who have an interest in the subject matter. For instance, an episode where a marketing professional talks about attribution issues becomes relevant when it is shared in a marketing community compared to sharing it through promotional campaigns.
This also changes how podcast teams should approach promotion. They should not concentrate solely on the number of downloads and visibility. They should think about how interesting it would be enough to share. This can be achieved by creating arguments, original research, and discussion on business pain points.
What B2B Podcasting Will Be Like After the Shakeout
Podcast market may be overcrowded, but this does not imply that B2B podcasts do not carry any importance anymore. With the growing selectiveness of the audience, dependence on predictable material will become unsustainable.
