Turning Passion Into Profit: Why Podcasting Is A B2B Marketing Powerhouse
Just a couple years ago, Devin McDonnell, Executive Producer of Devenio Podcasts, found himself pitching the value of podcasting and videos to businesses. Now, his position has shifted from education to adoption, as he helps marketers turn podcasting from a “passion” project into a legitimate marketing channel.
To help marketers better understand how they can harness the full potential of this lucrative marketing channel, I sat down with McDonnell to discuss the growth of podcasting, how it fits into overall marketing strategies and what the next evolution might look like.
Kelly Lindenau: You mentioned that podcasting has matured from a fun experiment to a legitimate marketing channel. What specific shifts or trends have driven this evolution in the B2B marketing landscape?
Devin McDonnell: It’s part of the natural progression of any new content format: At first, it’s experimental while organizations try to find what works for them and their audience. Oftentimes, we see podcast start off as a fun passion project for a marketing department or executive, and it has little to no budget. And then before you know it, they’ve built this large, engaged audience tuning in every week.
As many organizations reach this maturity point, they realize that podcasting is not just a fun experiment anymore — it’s a legitimate marketing channel. And once they reach this step, they often get tripped up when figuring out how to build it into a key marketing channel.
Podcasting is not just a fun experiment anymore — it’s a legitimate marketing channel.
Lindenau: You emphasized the distinction between podcasting as a “channel” rather than “content.” Can you elaborate on why this mindset shift is essential for businesses, and how it impacts their approach to podcasting and video?
McDonnell: I’ve always felt this was a major misconception. A podcast isn’t “content;” it’s an evergreen channel that you funnel content through on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. And the best part about this channel is that it notifies your audience on the phone in their pocket when a new piece of content — aka an episode — is published. It’s literally a direct channel right to your audience’s phone. Once we’ve shifted our mindset and embraced this format as a channel rather than a piece of content, we can now start to fully position it within the overall marketing strategy.
Lindenau: What are some practical ways businesses can integrate their podcast and video channels into their marketing efforts to create a cohesive, multichannel presence?
McDonnell: Once you’ve shifted toward a channel-focused mindset with podcast, the real fun begins. We usually recommend reviewing your content calendar or conducting a full content audit to identify the premier assets you have scheduled for the year. Once you’ve identified these “big rock” pieces — whether they’re webinars, live events or annual reports — you need to home in on key topics to position individual podcast episodes.
For example, if your webinar is titled “5 Keys To ABM Success,” you can publish five episodes leading up to the live date, each one previewing one of the five keys that will be covered on the webinar. If you’re having an industry influencer speak on the webinar, you can even set up a “speaker preview” episode where the influencer can tease some of what they will be covering on the live webinar.
This is the power of amplification at work: These episodes would run alongside your email marketing campaign, digital advertising and partner marketing strategy. Ideally, they’d play a part in amplifying your wider marketing campaign and driving registration to your webinar.
Once you’ve shifted toward a channel-focused mindset with podcast, the real fun begins.
Lindenau: Beyond teeing up episodes to align with campaigns, are there are any other elements marketers can include to expand the reach of their podcast and engage an even wider audience?
McDonnell: There’s a huge segment of audience you’re leaving on the table if you don’t leverage video, and you’d be surprised how easy it is to incorporate into your plans. If you’re recording these episodes virtually via riverside.fm or Zoom (as most folks are), you can record video simultaneously with no extra work. These can be published on YouTube or social media and will capture the folks who prefer video content. You can even grab quick 30 second clips of your episodes and drop Videograms with animated transcriptions on social feeds, which will hook potential listeners/viewers into the episode.
There’s a huge segment of audience you’re leaving on the table if you don’t leverage video.
Lindenau: Given the traction ABM has gained in B2B, how do you see podcasts and video fitting into ABM strategies, and what are some best practices for alignment?
McDonnell: Podcasting was traditionally seen as a primarily top-of-funnel initiative that was used more for branding, thought leadership and awareness. And while that’s all true, we’ve seen some really creative ABM strategies that position podcasts lower in the funnel and more closely tied to revenue.
By nature, it feels like the podcast format was tailor-made for relationship building. The intimate, personal conversations on each episode pull back the curtain and connect your brand with audiences. They develop a personal connection to the host of the show as they look forward to hearing from them each week. And while the host is developing a relationship with their audience, they are also developing relationships with their guests, and this is where ABM strategies in podcasting really shine.
Take a look at your account list and create two lists:
- A list of dormant accounts, which are clients that may have gone dark and you’d like to reactivate; and
- A list of target accounts you’d like to start building a relationship with.
With these lists, you can identify key contacts and reach out with a proposal to be a guest on your show. This keeps the guardrails down and is a great way to break the ice. Once on the show, you can use this time to establish (or reestablish) the relationship building process with the guest, continuing through to co-marketing initiatives for the episode, further strengthening this relationship. With this opening of communication, you can now look to nurture them for business in the future. This strategy has been so successful, we have clients who use this as their only source of ROI for their show.
By nature, it feels like the podcast format was tailor-made for relationship building.
Lindenau: With leadership increasingly focused on ROI, how can marketers effectively demonstrate the tangible value of podcasting and video initiatives to upper management? What metrics of KPIs should marketers focus on to assess the impact of these channels.
McDonnell: Unfortunately, up until now, we haven’t had a very good tool for podcast analytics that will give us the essential data we need to really understand the impact. Sure, we have data like the number of downloads each week, which episodes have the most listens, the estimated number of subscribers, etc., but things like account or contact level data, attribution and journey tracking is impossible with traditional podcast analytics. Up until now, all podcast listeners have been anonymous.
With that in mind, we’ve been really excited to partner with Casted to offer our clients our Advanced Hosting plan, which leverages the Casted platform to dive deeper into these analytics and track things like attribution, account level data and who is actually listening to each episode. This allows you to track the journey of each podcast listener and find the point of origin for each new lead or customer. As B2B marketing teams mature their podcast channel, this is a must have tool to measure the impact its having on their brands bottom line.
Lindenau: Looking ahead, what do you think the next stage of maturity for podcasting and video in B2B marketing will look like? Are there any emerging technologies or approaches that excite you?
McDonnell: I think the Advanced Hosting plan we have been able to offer will be a game changer for B2B marketers that are publishing podcasts, so we are really excited about that. It will really help sell the story to leadership that the podcast channel is a key player.
We haven’t even discussed brands expanding from one show into multiple, effectively establishing a media network that can create new revenue streams for their business. Or the wider implications for enterprise companies using the channel for internal communications, PR announcements and more.
We’ll also see more lines blurred between video and podcasting.
We’ll also see more lines blurred between video and podcasting. Previously, podcasting has been known as an audio-only format, but at this point, I feel like if you’re not producing a video episode alongside your audio, you’re missing out on a large potential audience. In fact, in the spring of 2024, YouTube fully embraced the RSS feed and finally integrated it into its architecture. You can now publish podcast episodes directly into YouTube natively and YouTube Music has been a major podcast player since. This is yet another channel to potential audience!
link
