So, what makes a great B2B podcast?
Like most things, it’s all relative. What’s captivating for one listener may not be for another. The key is to develop a podcasting strategy and content that works for your brand and your audience — not simply replicating what you see executed on Apple’s Top Shows list.
What makes a podcast unique? Examine your show from every angle, from ideating topics to series promotion, from audience engagement to format and post-production. It’s worth taking the time to really consider what you’re dishing up (and for whom) and how you’re putting it out there.
How do you know if you’re building the best possible show for your listeners? Take it from a few of our favorite podcast hosts and business leaders, who know a thing or two about building content that resonates.
Get to Know Your Audience
Generating ROI comes from meeting the needs of the people who fund and/or support the investment. In the podcasting world, that means putting out content that uniquely fits the desires and personalities of those who have sought out your show — namely, your audience. Here's advice from Tom Webster, former SVP of Marketing and Strategy for Edison Research on keeping your listeners and viewers foremost in mind:
"For every choice that you make and every decision, every aspect of content that you decide to put in or leave out of your show, really make it an audience-first decision and not a company-first decision, because people will smell that," Tom says. "That's not what people are looking for. So if you genuinely make audience-focused decisions, if everything is on the side of the audience, then you can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. But that also means learning more about your audience. And I think it can be a dangerous thing for a company to start a podcast and not know enough about its audience before they really start going into it."
Perhaps your audience doesn’t want the same thing from you as the top B2B podcasts out there, Tom suggests. Not every listener has time for an hour-long show or endless banter at the episode’s start. Read the reviews, observe which shows perform best, and serve up content that keeps your audience coming back for more.
Would YOU Listen to Your Show?
Meet the “Golden Rule” of podcasting: “Podcast unto others what you would want podcasted to you.” (Okay, that’s not official.) The point is that if you wouldn’t listen to irrelevant, unstructured content, then how can you expect others to?
Jeremy Donovan, host of the Hey Salespeople podcast, takes this approach when he interviews guests: Instead of coming to the table with a list of structured questions that guests must generate an answer for, he probes them about what challenges/topics they most want to discuss. Here are Jeremy's tips for podcast interviews:
"I align