In this Q&A episode, Jeremiah covers various ways you can use B2B podcasting to help your company grow. We’ll cover everything from how you can use your podcast to empower your sales team to how it can fuel ongoing market research.
In this Q&A episode, Jeremiah covers various ways you can use B2B podcasting to help your company grow. We’ll cover everything from how you can use your podcast to empower your sales team to how it can fuel ongoing market research.
We’ll also cover examples of great B2B podcasts you can use to emulate or take notes from, and we’ll provide you with a couple of agencies and tools we’d recommend to help you get the job done.
Build a library of episodes that cover common concerns your sales team hears from prospective clients. This way, whenever that question comes up in the sales process, your team has multiple, long-form episodes they can share with prospects for them to consume asynchronously without the pressure of a sales call. This also gives clients the opportunity to share internally with the rest of their team so everyone can get on board.
The people you interview on your show can eventually become industry partners, collaborators, co-sponsors, or even future customers. Your B2B podcast gives you the platform to connect with leaders in your industry and create mutually beneficial relationships due to the trust that is built throughout the interview process.
Think of your podcast as an audio version of your newsletter. It gives you the opportunity to build an audience that’s connected with you and wants to hear what you have to say every week, outside of social media. While social followers are looking for quick insights, podcast listeners are allowing you to take up 40+ minutes of their time.
Your competitors are likely all on social media or have a newsletter. But depending on your niche, they may not have a podcast yet. This means you could be the first in your industry to capture the power of audio with your branded podcast. Even if there are 10 other shows in your space, you still have the opportunity to be the best, to provide the most value, or to be the most creative. It also helps give your brand a voice that listeners can grow an affinity towards.
Your podcast can either drive or supplement your content strategy. For established B2B businesses with long-standing content plans, a podcast can help drive more content into their channels and can supplement specific topics or themes they want to cover for the month. But for B2B startups without a strong content team, your podcast can drive your entire strategy, meaning you take the content from each episode and turn it into 20-30 pieces of content for each of your marketing channels (articles, newsletters, videos, social posts, etc.).
Similar to your marketing team listening to sales calls to better understand your customer’s pain points, you can use your B2B podcast on a wider scale to learn more about how top leaders in your ICP think about specific topics, what their day-to-day is like, what content they consider valuable, what they do to grow their business or their careers, or common pain points they all share.
Most businesses give up on their podcast after 10 episodes because they don’t see results as quickly as they’d like to, which is why it’s important to set your expectations before you start. The average podcast gets about 175 downloads per episode, so if over the course of your first year, you’re able to get to 500 downloads per episode, then you’re doing really well. As you continue to grow, if you can get between 500 to 5,000 downloads, you’ll perform better than 90% of existing shows, which can have a huge impact on your business.
The idea here is you guest on as many related podcasts in your niche as possible that reach your target ICP. When the host asks where people can find you, you can mention your podcast, the hook of your show, and one or two episodes you think will appeal to that specific audience. This gives listeners the ability to continue to learn from you, for free, without feeling like they’re being sold to.
Another more unique way to grow your show would be to sponsor other podcasts in your space that you know your target ICP is listening to. But instead of paying for a typical 30-second ad read, you could suggest sponsoring an episode drop, meaning you’re paying to have one of your episodes dropped on their feed with an intro read by their host. You benefit by exposing an entire episode of yours to their audience, and they benefit by having fresh content on their feed with no production time.
This is where so many B2B brands go wrong. They launch a podcast and do a terrible job of promoting it on their own sites. Make sure you create an episode directory on your site with episode pages, show notes, embedded audio, graphics, etc. And be sure to add your podcast to the main navigation menu or mark it clearly under your resources/education section. Don’t just bury it in your blog.
Hey there. Welcome to brands that podcast each week we talk with the people running podcast strategies at successful brands. So you can learn how to grow your company through podcasting.
And this Q&A episode, we're going to answer some questions related to B2B podcasting. So as you know, if you listen to the show, a lot of the interviews, you can hear brands who use podcasts to help them grow. And a lot of the lessons or specific topical episodes we do would be applicable to B2B B2C, direct to consumer or whatever.
In this episode, I specifically want to cover ways that you can use podcasting in a B2B setting to help your company grow. So we're going to start with some specific practical ways that a podcast will help a B2B company grow. We'll then move on to how to market and grow your B2B podcast. Just a brief overview of some ways to think about that and some tactics you can try to grow listenership of it over time. And then we also want to cover examples of great B2B podcasts that we've seen, that you can go check out and sort of emulate what they do or take notes from. And then end with a couple agencies or tools we'd recommend to help you get the job done.
So let's start with a few ways that we think having a podcast will really help your B2B brand grow and stand out. The first is having a podcast will help you empower your sales team with content they need to address concerns and to build trust with prospective clients. So this is something we use at Lemonpie all the time.
This is one of the best things about having a library where we're just putting out the best information we can. We're trying to be as helpful as possible. We're doing it in a long form setting. In the sales process, if prospective clients have any questions, we're just able to say, oh, you know, you have these questions about ROI or attribution, we've done one or two episodes on that.
We're able to share with them, essentially, a couple episodes that are 45 minutes in length, where we share the most in-depth thing we could, like we get more in depth than we could on a sales call, and we're letting the prospective customers listen without pressure from sales.
So they just get to consume it. They get to hear our thoughts on it. They get to chew on it and meditate on it. They share it with their team a lot of times. The other thing is it lets them really share with the rest of their team to help the rest of their team get on board. So what we found a lot of times is the person who comes to you, the point of contact on the deal, for example, might be really, really bought in to working with you. And they might be really, really sold on your point of view on solving the problem or that you're definitely the one they want to work with, but they've got to like catch the rest of the team up. They've got to educate them.
And so having a podcast lets you, if you can point them to a couple of episodes that they can share with the rest of their team to answer some core questions or really provides some core education, it lets the rest of their team listen again to your point of view and your thoughts on solving the problem or addressing concerns, asynchronously without any pressure.
And just anecdotally, this is something we've seen happen a lot. We'll often recommend episodes and hear later from customers that go on to close with us, they say, "This was really helpful. Actually went on to listen to two or three other episodes that were in the feed. I shared them with the rest of the team. We're ready to go."
It really is powerful to empower your sales team and shorten the sales life cycle.
The next thing having a podcast can do in a B2B space is help you build relationships. So we talk about this a lot in earlier episodes is the power of serendipitous relationships. And this is something that in a lot of the companies we've interviewed, they have articulated this value as well.
For a lot of people, the people that they interview end up becoming industry partners. We had one specific case study I'm thinking of where they actually went on to do a collaboration and put on co-sponsor a digital event together because they met each other on a podcast. You know, one company interviewed another and they ended up partnering together and putting on this amazing event.
It also could be that you're talking to future customers. So we don't necessarily buy into the practice of literally starting a podcast, just with the intent of, you know, not really caring about the quality of the content or adding value to listeners, but instead just targeting your target clients and having them on just as a like Trojan horse way of like getting them in your sales funnel.
But we do often find that this happens just sort of, again, serendipitously. You'll have a guest who maybe is a good fit. They kind of fit your target ICP, and they're a good fit for your product, but it's a sincere interview. You are having them on because they're great thought leaders. They can add a lot of value to their listeners.
And at the end, we've heard this happen a lot among brands where the guest says, tell me more about your product. Tell me more about your service and, and ends up going on to become a customer because there's that trust that's being built. There's sort of a relationship being built throughout the interview process.
So a lot of times part of building relationships is actually relationships with future customers. And then just mutually beneficial relationships. An example here is how Eric, our founder, met Dave Gerhardt. So Dave was one of the early yeses to come on the show. He was gracious enough to come on and give us an interview.
It was an amazing conversation and him and Eric just really hit it off. They kept in touch, they would go back and forth, giving each other advice or picking each other's brains. And that went on to form a really cool relationship that Lemonpie was able to have with him. And now Hatch. And so again, relationships is just a really powerful thing that will come about from your B2B podcast.
The third thing is building an audience. So if you think about it, this is sort of like an audio version of your newsletter. And I say newsletter as opposed to social, because with a newsletter, you have a little bit more ownership and control of that audience. If the tech platforms decide to take down your organic reach or something on social, you don't really have as much connection to your audience as you would maybe with a newsletter, something like that.
So this is a channel to build an audience that really is connected with you. It's building a community that really wants to hear what you have to say often every week for 20 to 40 minutes, it's kind of a unique audience. We have found where followers on social are looking for quick insights and helpful tidbits and things like that, podcasts listeners are really signing up to say, I'm going to let you in my head space, and I want to hear what you have to say for a long period of time on a regular basis. And these people are usually fully bought into your methodology or your point of view. An example here is Refine Labs, a marketing agency for B2B firms with the State of Demand Gen podcast.
So they're basically, week-in, week-out building an audience and a live community that they are sharing their point of view on the industry with, and the listeners there, if you ever tune into that show, they believe in the methodology. They believe in the point of view that refined lab shares or that Chris Walker shares and they're there for it.
They want to keep consuming it. And so building an audience or turning it into a live community is a really powerful example of something you can do with a podcast in a B2B space.
The next example is it'll help you stand out from competition. So there's a few things here. Probably your competition is on social. Probably they have a newsletter, probably they have a blog, but depending on your niche, they may not have a podcast. So you could be the first podcast in your niche, which would give you an amazing first move or opportunity. You'll probably benefit from more organic searches like within Spotify or with an Apple, if you're the first.
So you have a potential to be the first in your niche and really like take the lead on that and have first move advantage, or you can be the best. Even if there's 3, 4, 5, 10 other shows you really can work hard to be the best podcast, the most valuable podcast, or most unique podcast in your niche and stand out from your competition.
So again, a lot of B2B is copycat stuff. The stereotype among B2B marketing is it's fairly boring. The adage usually is go look at what B2C is doing, if you want to see innovation. And some innovative B2B brands try and copy what they see there and direct to consumer, but having a podcast will really help you stand out and leverage it to have a lot of creative content.
Like I said, even going back to the idea of building a live community or things that you don't see your competitors. So it's going to let you put out more valuable content on a more consistent basis. If you're deriving your content from your podcast, you'll probably have a leg up on the quantity and value of content that you can put out that your competitors can't just because you've got a more consistent well to draw from.
And it also lets you give your brand a voice. Podcasting as a unique way of like one of the things you hear a lot. If you talk to listeners is they'll all say, I feel like I know the host. I feel like I know this company. I feel like I know this person in a way that they don't, if they just watch YouTube.
And I think some of that is we're used to watching celebrities on TV. We don't feel like we know them. Right. But there's something where we follow people on social. We're just following. We don't know them, but there's something about listening to someone's voice in your head space, over a long period of time that really helps you feel like you know them and you're connected with them.
So again, having a podcast for your B2B company will help you stand out from the competition by having more content, better content, being first to market with a podcast and giving your brand a voice.
The next value is it provides you with an amazing content marketing engine.
I know some companies we've talked to some brands that start a podcast purely for this. Basically for them, it drives their entire content strategy. So it can either drive your content strategy or it can supplement your content strategy. The difference here is maybe for more established teams that have been running content for longer, they kind of have enough content for the quarter booked out, and a podcast is simply going to supplement that. They already have decided certain themes they want to cover or certain topics or questions they want to address. And if the podcast happens to cover that, they're going to be able to supplement and drive a little bit more content to their existing content calendar. They're going to draw a little bit more from their podcast and put it into the feed.
But if your team is new or starting up, like if you're a B2B startup, if you're like seed round or Series A, you don't have a really strong content team yet, you can start with a podcast and it can literally drive the rest of your content strategy, meaning, and this is what we do at Lemonpie really is we basically take one episode and then we turn it into lots of pieces of content. So rather than starting with sort of a blank content calendar every quarter or every month or something like that and wondering what we should post about, we basically just start with the podcast and pull 10, 20, 30 amazing insights out of every episode.
And those takeaways, those insights are what later become articles or social posts or something like that. And so they really fuel our content strategy. We don't have an existing strategy to the podcast fits into. We base ours around the podcast, and this is something a lot of younger companies or startup companies are able to do. And it helps your content team really never stare at a blank content calendar again.
The next valuable thing that's going to give you is developing ongoing market research and customer insights from your target ICP. So chances are, if you have a podcast, you probably made it, you know, you're probably aiming to talk to your target audience or your target ICP on the podcast.
That's who you want your listeners to be, probably. Then chances are, if it's an interview podcast, you're having the best thought leaders in this space from among that ICP on your show so that they can share valuable tips and insights and things like that. You get to interview top thinkers in your ICP.
And what we have found is, this lets you learn more about your customers as a result. So similar to listening, to like Gong calls, your marketing team could go through and listen to Gong calls in order to understand customer pain, struggles, influction points of why they came to buy. Problems that they're trying to solve in their organization.
The podcast is going to let you do that in an even wider way than sales calls, because sales is focused on solving one problem and it will definitely help your marketing team learn your audience better, but running the podcast really lets you know, like the things that they're thinking about on a day-to-day basis, besides just solving the pain that your product solves, what do they consider valuable content?
What are the things they want to learn to grow their career? What are the things they need to do to grow their company? What are common pain points they all run into? Your marketing team and your content team is going to get to learn all these things by interviewing top thinkers in your ICP, reading reviews, getting feedback from listeners, when you turn your episodes into social posts and you can read the comments and the responses there.
So this is sort of the last really valuable thing is it's going to let you develop ongoing market research and continually understand your target ICP.
So, those are just some of the values of running a podcast in a B2B space. And some of the benefits you're going to get from starting one. Now let's talk about marketing and growing your B2B podcast.
So this is the next big thing on everyone's mind. And the reason is once you start, a lot of companies develop what we call pod fade, which is they maybe get 10 episodes in, or they come out guns blazing. And then all of a sudden it's pretty difficult to continue to book guests, or they weren't really in it for the long haul, maybe philosophically, or they were expecting it to drive a certain amount of leads or revenue within like a few months and because it didn't do that, they're having a trouble getting buy-in to commit to doing it.
So when it comes to marketing and growing your podcasts, one thing is to set your expectations, right? Starting with what you should expect. The average podcast gets about 175 downloads per episode. And so if you are launching a podcast for probably a more niche audience than the average podcast, let's say you're talking, it's a show for your target ICP in a niche B2B space.
If over the course of the first year, you're able to get to 500 downloads per episode, then you're doing very well. And so the first thing is setting expectations the right way. This is not going to jump within a few months to 1,000 necessarily or 10,000 downloads. Obviously the overall listenership size audience size of podcasts is growing year over year.
And as podcasting continues to get more popular, you probably will gain more listeners over time, but it's important to set those expectations up front. And then if, as you continue to grow the show, if you can get between 500 and 5,000 downloads per episode, you're going to be actually doing better than 90% of shows that exist.
90% of podcasts can't make it to that scope or size and you'll experience a huge impact on your business as a result. So those are expectations when you push launch, just because you build it doesn't mean they're going to come. And so what can you do proactively? This is a question we get a lot. What can you do proactively to market or grow the audience size or listenership of your B2B podcast?
One way is by repurposing content. We talk about this in a lot of episodes, actually. And the idea here is take the best moments of your podcast, whether it's five, 10, 30, and share them with your audience, wherever that audience is paying attention. Another way of saying it is don't be so presumptive that you think that your whole audience, all of your audience needs to come over.
Don't make them listen to the full episode, to get the value of the episode. They may not be podcast listeners. Not all of your audience is going to want to consume long form content or has the time in their week, or wants to fit you into the slot of their current rotation of shows. So the idea here to grow it is let's say for example, you take the best, most valuable insights from each episode.
And then you're going to write a newsletter, summarizing them. If you have a big newsletter audience, maybe you're going to write an article that gets published on your blog. You're going to do a thread on Twitter, highlighting the best moments of that. All the takeaways. From that episode, you're going to do a lengthy LinkedIn posts where you're sharing all the tips.
You're going to turn it into five video clips and put them on Instagram or put them on Twitter or LinkedIn. You're going to upload a full length video to YouTube. And so that's repurposing. That's this idea of taking one episode and making 20, 30, 40 pieces of content with it and sharing it natively and contextually, wherever your audience is hanging out.
And rather than doing a post where you say, come listen to the episode to get the insights you just say, here are the insights. And what that's going to do is over time at the least. Worst case scenario, you're going to be a better follow on social, or you're going to be a better read in your newsletter because you're giving more valuable insights on a more regular basis.
And at best what's going to happen, inevitably is the followers that are really getting a lot of value from that or who want to learn more or dig deeper are gonna come over to the podcast. So you will slowly gain subscribers over time, this way, as well as making the most of your show by delivering it to people wherever they're hanging out.
So a little behind the scenes advice on how we do it, just to get really uber practical. We listened to the full episode, and then we note the best takeaways. We actually used Descript, which is a great tool. If you're not using it, you can use a tool like Descript. We highlight the best takeaways in there.
And then we basically run a database to categorize those takeaways. So you could use Notion or you could use Airtable. We use Airtable. You could use really anything. I mean, it could even be like a Google sheet or something, but basically we pull out the best takeaways from every episode. And then we put them in this ever-growing catalog of takeaways, this repository, and we give each takeaway a category or a tag or a subject line or we tie in media files with it and things like that. And so what we're building over time is this really, really big ever-growing repository of really valuable insights that are coming out of our podcasts. Usually we aim for 10 minimum out of each episode. Often it's pretty easy to get 20 or 30, if your guests are good and they're just dropping all kinds of great knowledge or insights.
And then when it comes time to create social posts for the week or the month of the quarter, we have that library to go through. So we go through there and we usually put our own spin on things. We say it in our own way. If we agree with what the guests said, we'll kind of like meditate on it and say it in a way we would say it, or we'll attribute the guest and say like, this was a great insight in this.
So basically that serves as inspiration for almost all of our content. That's repurposing content. Another way you can grow your B2B podcast and market it is guesting on other podcasts. So the idea here is you can get booked as a guest on related podcasts that your target audience is listening to. Let's say, for example, you want to talk to salespeople like B2B sales.
Let's say there's 15 or 20 really good B2B sales podcasts. You could get booked as a guest if you're a subject matter expert and you really, really can be one of the best interviews that show has ever had. And you're ready to deliver a bunch of education and insight to the audience. You can get booked as a guest on those 15, 20, 30 shows, however many it is.
And then after you deliver the interview, most times hosts are going to say, "Where can people find you?" And rather than just giving your company webiste, you'd be able to say, "Well, actually we run our own podcast for B2B sales folks. It's specifically about," and then throw in your hook, you know, your unique take on it, your unique niche that you're built your podcasts.
And there you're actually promoting your podcast to your target audience. And those are people that already proved that they like consuming podcasts content. And they're your target ICP. So to do this, you can DIY it internally. Like you could have your team identify these shows using a software tool or just going out and finding it and finding the shows you want to be on.
And then your internal team members can work on pitching the hosts. You can hire a podcast pitching or booking agency. There's some cheaper like pitching and booking agencies that really will just cold email and cold outreach to a lot of these and try and get you pitched on. Or you can hire a full service podcast PR agency.
That's what we are at Lemonpie. That's what we do all day, every day is get founders and their teams booked on shows that their audience is already listening to and really go above and beyond in a PR sense to help you be the best interview that that show has ever seen. So, those are a few ways you can tackle the problem.
But the premise is that you're reaching an audience that is your target ICP that already listens to podcasts like yours. And you're getting to promote yours as. If you want to learn more about that, we actually put out a really, really in-depth guide on podcast guesting. You can check it out at lemonpie.fm, go find the articles there.
Or we actually have a brands that podcast episode you can find in the feed on doing podcasts tours as we call it. So go check out that episode if you want our most up-to-date ideas and experience, and like we share the best insights on how to do that, if that's something you're interested in.
The next thing you can do to grow listenership of your B2B podcast is testing, paid sponsorships or ads.
This would be something that basically where you've heard, like a lot of times, for example, Manscaped is a company or Athletic Greens you might've heard on some of your favorite shows. You can purchase ad spots in podcasts that your audience is already listening to, to get your message out there. Some companies you're buying it'll be called, add some you're sponsoring the show.
But the idea here would be that you would identify the shows that you think your target ICP is probably listening to. And again, kind of flipping it on its head rather than driving them to your core business or product. You're saying, "Hey, if you're enjoying this show, come check out," and then name your podcast, give them a little taste about what it's like.
There's all kinds of ways you can get creative with this. You could either have the host of the show give it a listen. And if they really like it, have them do a really authentic host-read ad, promoting your podcast as a harty recommendation to their listeners. You could use the ad spot to play a clip of your episode.
You know, you could intro it and say, if you love this show, you might like ours as well. Here's a clip from it and play some really compelling clip that you have. But basically the idea here is using paid sponsorships or ads to find other shows that your audience is probably listening to and then getting in front of them saying, "Hey, consider our show as well."
Sort of unique take on this would be the idea of going one step further, and this is something we really haven't seen anybody do but that you might try, is testing paid episode drops on similar podcasts. Whereas doing podcast sponsorships and ads is pretty common, right? You would go to the host and ask if you can sponsor the podcast, or if you can pay for an ad spot and work out the creative there, this would actually be paying the host to put a full episode of yours in their feed.
Now some cons here is they may not be willing to, they may feel if it too directly competes with them. I mean, especially if it's another B2B podcast, the company running it, if they're your direct competitor, obviously very low chance of likelihood that they're going to do this.
But if they're a thought leader and they're running it as like a creator, this is something that they might be keen to do. Basically the idea here is you would offer to pay them that instead of for an ad spot or a sponsorship spot for 30 seconds, you're paying to have an entire episode of yours dropped in their feed of that show with an intro that's read by the host.
So it looks like another episode coming through and the host would essentially say, "Hey, I'm dropping a bonus episode here. These are from my friends at, you know, dah, dah, dah. This is from their podcast that dah, dah, dah." And then they intro it and then it would go ahead and play it. And at the end you can have a unique call to action for people to come find you.
So this would be a really interesting thing that you could test. If you're looking to grow listenership.
Another idea that we heard on our interview with Jonathan Barshop who's running podcast growth at HubSpot, you can check out that episode for more ideas of growth, is giveaways for listeners who review or share your episodes.
So there's all kinds of ways to solve this problem. You can use review software, but the idea here would be that essentially you ask your listeners to either leave a review or you ask them to share your episode with like-minded listeners on social or something. And then you have a way of tracking that and then you reward choose a handful of winners who do that.
So for example, maybe you say everyone in the next month, if this is your first time listening, go share our episode, share your favorite episode on social on LinkedIn or Twitter using the hashtag brands that podcast. And we're going to pick five winners every month who are going to get a $500 Amazon gift card or something like that.
So that's another way to incentivize listeners to actually review your podcast or maybe better yet share your podcast and heartily promote it in their social.
Another way to grow your listenership is just to have a great web presence for your podcast. We did a full episode you should go check out on how to have a website for your podcasts, that you can apply to a B2B setting.
So this is where so many B2B brands go wrong. They launch a podcast and then they do a terrible job of promoting it on their website. I'm not going to rehash everything here. We go into depth. You can check that out if you want to know more about what makes a great website for a B2B podcast. Actually have a web presence for your podcast.
Have an episode directory, have episode pages, show notes, embed the episodes there, make it clearly promoted in your nav bar, make it clearly under the resources section or education section. So many brands go wrong here when they launch it, and then they bury the episodes under their blog or something like that, and they don't do a good enough job promoting.
Another way to grow your podcast is just to improve it over time. And this is one, no one likes to hear, right? Because this is the consistent advice you hear that foundationally be consistent and improve it over time, but it really is true. I mean, I can't tell you how many people we have talked to on this show that at the end, like they'll give a lot of ideas on growing the show, but at the end they will all say foundationally, it really does boil down to being consistent, persevering, but not just that, improving the show over time, using reviews and listener feedback.
So this is two part. Be consistent means don't give up after three months, don't give up after six months, if you're just seeing 150 downloads. But it also means when people review are you reading their feedback? You may not be covering things that your audience wants to hear.
You may not be covering topics that they're interested in, or maybe they think it's too long and you need to make it more abbreviated or really just serving your audience and figuring out how to make it better on an ongoing basis.
So those are some ways once you've got your B2B podcast up and running, you can market it and grow listenership and grow, download numbers.
Now let's talk about examples of great B2B podcasts you can go emulate. There's a lot here. So I'm just going to highlight a few and some reasons why I liked them.
First would be Drift Insider. You can go find these at Drift.com. I think it's drift.com forward slash insider. This is a podcast network I like because they've tailored it to their diverse and growing number of ICP is.
So if you are a B2B product that serves a handful of PS, maybe you serve sales and marketing and communications. Maybe there's three really big use cases for you. Drift is a great example of a B2B podcast network where every time they have an ICP, they basically spin out a podcast for them and try and deliver really good viable content targeted to that ICP.
The next example would be Design Better by InVision. I listed this here because there are podcasts designed essentially to reach every level of management as their tool expanded. So this is a SaaS product that basically started as a way for designers in companies to collaborate together.
But as they've grown over the years and added features and expanded, really now, and as design has to become like everyone, every level needs some hand in designer and thinking about that, they've expanded their ICP to essentially, like now they're a whiteboard tool. Now their collaboration among all kinds of departments. They are a good example if you feel that your B2B product or service is expanded to the point of it used to be for this one target ICP, but now it's expanded.
You can track the growth of their podcasts, how they started doing it, just for designers in season one. And then they just really widened the ICP and in, so doing the content that they would talk about in every episode.
The third one I would point to is Metrics & Chill by Databox. You can listen to that interview here in this feed, where I talked to John Bonini, the marketing director at Databox.
This is a great example of a niche specific show that's custom tailored to attract their target audience. They took a really unique hook with the show. I think a mistake, a lot of B2B brands make is they'll just do the, like the insert ICP here. The rev ops podcast, the demand gen podcast, something like that.
Metrics and Chill, they were able to take a really unique hook with it. So it's for a target ICP, but they did a really unique play where they're talking about one metric and how you can measure it well, and see it grow. And they pick one guest every episode who's done that. So this is a good example of if you have a narrow ICP and you want to think of a unique way to stand out when there's some other shows, go check them out.
Breaking Brand by Buffer is a great example of an innovative storytelling and narrative show. This is just a great podcast that you can do in your B2B space that's outside the typical interview format. There are not many B2B brands that do storytelling and that do like a narrative style show. Like the famous podcast, Serial.
Buffer did this. It's called Breaking Brand. Go check it out. It's really cool. And that would be a fun example for you to look at if you really want to think about getting creative and unique.
All right. Let's wrap up with a few types of agencies that you can hire to get this done. So if you're a B2B product or a B2B service, and you're looking to start a podcast for your audience, there's really three ways you can go.
You can do a higher cost, high production agency. You can work with a middle cost, B2B focused agency. Or you can work with a lower cost tool or provider to really just take care of your needs. And this is of course, outside of DIYing it. You may have the bandwidth to DIY it really, you could get away with just a good USB microphone, if your content marketing manager, or if you have an internal resident expert in the space they could serve as the host.
But if you want some support doing this, I know we get recommendations on agencies. We've talked to a lot of agencies when we went to recommend clients to them. So it really like, I just wanted to give an example of these three tiers. So with higher cost, higher production, they're typically great for storytelling and for narrative and really deep expertise.
So if you have the budget and you want the best, these are who I would point. A higher cost, higher production agency is going to probably give the best product and usually I would point people to them for really well done storytelling shows, storytelling shows the narrative shows in particular are so much more work.
There's so much more labor intensive and time intensive, and they require so much more creative sound design and crafting. The most innovative ones are using like sound effects and all this stuff. So if that was the direction you wanted to head, you'd probably have to find an agency that did that. So for example, Pacific Content, they've done work for Slack, Facebook, Adobe Ford, Shopify. They would be good for this.
Pineapple Street studios would be good for this. They've done works for Netflix, MailChimp, Amazon, Gimlet, HBO. Obviously these are going to come at a much higher price point, but if you're a well-funded B2B company and you really want to do something highly stylized and highly creative, this is good for you.
If you're looking to do a more traditional show, like either self hosted or having guests interviews and things like that, but you still want to outsource the full production of it to one agency, you could look at the more middle cost B2B focused agencies. So there's a number of B2B agencies. And one that we've recommended people to is Caspian Studios.
They pretty much focus solely on B2B SaaS. But they're a good example of this, where they have a lot of experience in helping you book the right guests within your niche and between. And then producing your show, adding in some stylization, adding some narrative or voiceover. That's what I would recommend a middle cost agency for would really be if you're going to do an interview style show, but you want to outsource. Your team does not have the bandwidth to edit the episode, do guest prospecting and try and get guests booked for the show month over month. If you want to make it sound a little bit more high quality and high production value, that might be a good option for you.
And then if you're looking to just outsource part of it, this is where increasingly a lot of B2B brands are ending up, especially ones that are like seed round or series A maybe series B, like you're looking for a solution to really take out the hardest parts of it.
But your content team kind of believes in podcasting, you have the ability to repurpose your content. You have the ability to maybe go prospect, the guests that you want. Maybe you have a lot of industry connections. So like guest prospecting is not hard for. But you really, really want to take care of some of the hardest parts.
This is where you might want to bring in a lower cost service tool or agency to sort of supplement the efforts of your in-house content team. So for example, Hatch, which is a company that we are essentially like a sister company to us, we took our production wing and spun it out into Hatch, which is unlimited podcast editing an on-demand strategy for one flat monthly rate for businesses.
So this is the best solution for example, if you want help with the technical components of podcast editing and you want it to just sound as amazing as it can and outsource that most technical piece. So you can get back to focusing on creating the best content and marketing. And if you want a team to really help make sure that you're creating the best thing that you can and having ongoing strategy.
So this is something that you could do to outsource the production side. There's services like Content Machine or profit. Let's say you're going to do the whole podcast yourself. There's teams like that, that you can use that are going to help you specifically with repurpose in the content. So if you handle producing the show internally, they will take each episode and turn it into a bunch of pieces of content that you can share on social.
These are examples of lower costs, where your team is DIY more, you want to handle more of the creative vision of it. You want to maybe be more involved in the content edits of it and all the things like that, but you just need to outsource sort of the most time intensive, difficult parts of it. So that's how I would think about it when we get asked about, so we work with an agency and what's the difference between them higher cost higher production is going to be especially good for like a really creative mindblowing storytelling narrative show.
The middle cost agencies are like, if you really are set on having one line item in your budget, like you want one agency, that's going to do it all. And they do it all from soup to nuts, specifically focused on a B2B space. That's usually like a middle cost agency. And then if you want to run with as much of it as you can, cause you're sort of a lean scrappy team, but you just need to sort of outsource the more difficult time intensive parts.
That's where a lower cost service like Hatch for podcast production or profit or content machine for podcast marketing and repurposing might be a really good asset to you. So if you are a B2B brand thinking about getting into podcasting, I hope this helps you think through all the ways that your podcast will be able to benefit you and bring value to your brand, the ways that you can market and grow it.
Once you have it launched examples, you can go emulating to continue to improve your show over time. And then agencies and services we'd recommend. And we've bumped into that. We like if you need some help pulling it off.
Thanks so much for checking out this episode. If there's a company you'd like us to interview or a question you want us to answer on the show, just let us know. You can ask us at brandsthatpodcast.com or DM or tag Lemonpie on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And if you want to reach your audience on podcasts, that they're already listening to be sure to check out lemonpie.fm.