It seems like an obvious relationship in B2B podcasting: The more your audience grows, the more your brand grows. Whether you’re just starting out with the goal of brand awareness or you're setting your brand up to be a thought leader in a particular area, a podcast or video series can reach new audiences like no other content marketing channel can.
While that’s true, there can be a period of disorientation between successfully launching your show and knuckling down on expanding your audience. It requires a bit of a mind shift as you get one huge task complete (creating and launching your podcast) and leave Stage 2 of the B2B Podcast Maturity Curve and enter Stage 3: Audience Growth.
In this episode of How B2B Podcasts Grow Up, Casted CEO Lindsay Tjepkema welcomes podcast authorities James Gilbert from Flip, Stephanie Cox from Lumavate, Vern Tremble from Wunderkind, and Michael Lynn from MongoDB to discuss the best ways to drive and refine podcast audience growth as well as brand growth.
And if you don’t know where your podcast fits on the maturity curve, take our quick assessment and enjoy the show:
Digging into Key Takeaways
For each episode, we like to highlight some key takeaways. Think of it as a podcast outline or live show notes. Here are just a few of the takeaways that really stood out to us in this episode.
Math Lesson of the Day: Audience Growth = Brand Growth 💫
Brand awareness is one of the most common reasons a B2B brand launches a podcast or video series. If you’re a startup, it’s one of the best content marketing strategies you can leverage to get your name out there and start building trust with your audience. Often you’re picking topics to discuss and then finding the best authorities to invite on your show to discuss them.
Stephanie Cox, CEO and host of Real Marketers at Lumavate, has been there and brought in interesting guests from well-known brands, which built instant credibility for Lumavate. These guests also shared their appearances on episodes with their networks, which grew the audience for the show and the brand. In fact, a B2B podcast is an essential part of any brand’s overall growth engine.
(For more on podcast strategy and show tips, check out Stephanie’s episode on The Casted Podcast.)
One of the Biggest Missed Opportunities for Podcasts Is the Lack of Reaching Out for Feedback 🎧
The creative teams behind B2B podcasts have a lot of responsibilities. Writing, recording, producing, and promoting show content takes up the majority of their time. They’ve also got performance tracking and reporting to take care of. With so much to do, we sometimes forget to check in with the people we’re doing all this for — our audiences.
Your Podcast Shouldn’t Feel Like a Lecture! Have Fun, Take Risks, Entertain and Educate 🥂
It’s true. Your show cannot be boring. That’s where your team or your host’s passion can really come through and create that engaging environment where people talk like… well, like people, interested in having an unscripted yet knowledgeable conversation.
In B2B podcasting, no one understands the entertaining aspect better than Vern Tremble, Sr. Director of Marketing and host of the Individuality Unleashed podcast at Wunderkind. While meeting all the business goals a content marketing channel contributes to, Vern prioritizes entertainment in every episode he and his team create, and it’s driving audience growth.
(For more on putting your audience first and relying on your creative team, check out Vern’s episode on The Casted Podcast.)
Want to See Where Your B2B Podcast Lies on the Maturity Curve?
If you’d like to see which stage your brand’s podcast is at, what you can do to reach the next stage, and how Casted can help you along the way, take our quick B2B Podcast Maturity Curve assessment.
And for more, stay tuned to Casted’s new series How B2B Podcasts Grow Up for a stage-by-stage discussion of how a B2B brand takes a show from launch to mass marketing amplification, and all the expert strategies, tips, and insights you need to create and grow your own audio or video podcast to serve your brand and drive growth.
Want to skim through the episode instead of listening? Read the transcript here.
About How B2B Podcasts Grow Up
As Season 3 of The Amplified Marketing Podcast, How B2B Podcasts Grow Up will cover the five stages of the B2B Podcast Maturity Curve, where we discuss the best strategies and models for creating a new show in a new channel, for growing and engaging your audience, for expanding across all the channels your audience prefers, and for integrating your podcast program into your overall content marketing strategy. And of course, we’ll discuss all the ways you can create meaningful content and then get the most traction from that material by wringing it out and amplifying it across all channels.
