B2B Marketing Podcast Playbook

Do Podcasts Work for B2B Marketing?

Yes — podcasts create new opportunities, increase brand visibility, and increase your visibility across platforms if you repurpose them.

• Look at Harry Stebbings and his podcast "The Twenty Minute VC". He started with £50 to his name and no contacts. He started slowly with lesser known guests and expanded. Stebbings is now one of Forbes' "30 Under 30."
• Dock founder Alex Kracov is in the process of growing his business. His podcast "Grow & Tell", along with the help of a steady SEO grind, has managed to gain 160+ paying customers in two years

Who Should Follow This Playbook?

If you have a vested interest in building pipeline for a B2B business, this playbook is for you.

You might be a:

• Founder
• Early stage Head of Marketing
• Content Marketer

Every B2B company would benefit from this guide, but it creates the largest delta in earlier stages (think Seed-Series B companies) that are still considered "the underdog."

Why Start a Podcast?

A Podcast is Easier than Prospecting

"Eight out of ten people say yes to joining a podcast. But if you just do cold outbound, you're lucky if you get just 5% conversion rate." — Mason Cosby, Founder of ScrappyABM

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People don't respond to cold outbound from your sales team because they know they're being sold to. Folks are far more responsive to earnest invitations asking them to share their expertise.

You can reach out to important decision makers at VP level or in the C-suite. They'll be flattered to be a guest on your podcast, and in the process, they learn about you and about your company.

You're top-of-mind when they or people they know come across a problem you can solve.

You Borrow Audience From Your Guests

When you share snippets and learnings from the podcast on your social accounts and tag your guest, it's extremely likely that they'll re-share it with their own network.

I know I do.

Here's why this matters:

• You get your brand in front of a wider audience
• If your guest is a potential buyer, the people in their network are also potential buyers
• If your guest is an influencer in your space, their followers are your potential buyers

Podcasts Give Unique Perspectives That Let You Stand Out

With so much AI drivel oversaturating the internet, it's becoming increasingly hard to stand out with words and text alone — especially if it's fluffy.

The people and the experiences behind the words are what matter most.

You need to source information from people who have "been there, done that", or else your buyers can't trust its credibility.

This is the only way to stand out in a sea of sameness, especially with the proliferation of generative AI. Podcasts give you these unique high-value perspectives that help you cut through the noise.

Podcasts are the Best Source Material for Content Repurposing

"You can actually do keyword research on the front-end and structure the questions that you ask to align with H2 or H3 headings, and this becomes the outline of your podcast. You copy over the transcript, use AI to reformat it, and you've got a blog post that 70% there.

If you create and use a podcast appropriately, it becomes video content, long-form and short-form video, social content, blog content, and you get a podcast. You can also turn it into a newsletter.

It becomes the "hub" of the hub and spoke model that fills in the rest of your content pieces." — Mason Cosby

Marketing teams are under pressure to do more with less, especially with increasingly expensive paid acquisition.

Efficiency in content marketing comes down to repurposing high-value assets across channels. Podcasts are great sources because:

• you get expertise from your guest
• you create networking opportunities that help you build your way to more experienced or more renowned guests
• you get a podcast for people with the time to listen all the way through, and material for a blog post for those who don't have time to listen
• you can turn it into a newsletter and re-engage buyers in cycle with something genuinely insightful
• you can use quotes and video snippets from the original episode in your existing articles to boost SEO performance
• you get a video recording to snip up for talking head videos on Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels

So, how do you create a B2B podcast?

1. Start with outreach
2. Prepare questions and your recording setup before recording the episode(s)
3. Edit the episode for clarity and flow
4. Distribute snippets across social and where your ICP is
5. Improve your setup and outreach to generate pipeline

How Do I Do Podcast Outreach?

‎Getting started with your podcast is the most difficult part.

Once you have a couple of episodes out there and can point people to your past guests, it's easier to get more experts on the show since you have social proof.

Who to Target in the Beginning

In the initial stages, you want to focus your outreach on:

• people who are already active in your online ICP community and are sharing information with their network. They'd be excited to have a platform to speak from
• people who already have podcasts. They get it

Once you have an initial set of episodes published and are more well-known, you can expand your outreach to other experts.

Podcast Outreach Template: What to Say to Potential Guests

You want to treat your podcast outreach as you would treat outbound in sales.

1. Figure out what people have expertise in and write a personalized message referencing something that they have shared recently
2. Tell them about your audience, why you reached out to them, and how creating content on a podcast would be beneficial to both of you
3. Send this message via email or via a social channel that you have a vested interest in. They might be more receptive to you if they can see who you are and that you're sharing related information
4. Put them in a sequence. Send another email after a few days, and a final "break-up" email suggesting that you could reconnect in the future when they are available

Here's an example of an outreach email that got me a podcast guest:

How Do I Run a Podcast?

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Step 1: Prepare Questions for Your Guest

First order of business is to do the necessary research on your guest and come prepared with thoughtful questions.

Before you get to the questions:

1. You want to set expectations and offer any instructions — for example, letting them know to keep their answers concise so they're easier to clip for content assets. This helps foster open communication and a more relaxed atmosphere
2. Ask them why they agreed to the podcast and what they're looking to get out of it, topic-wise, to guide the conversation

Your questions themselves should have two goals:

• To get the guest to share unique insights that aren't easily copied by competitors and are also of genuine value to your buyers
• To get the guest to share perspectives or advice that is aligned with your company narrative. This way, you can sell the problem or solution to the problem to your customers through an expert

You're not running the podcast for fun. Your CEO is going to ask for the ROI at some point.

You need to make sure you have a good product marketing foundation and understand your ICP, problems, status quo, and solutions to ground your questions. You're collecting marketing material that you can use later.

Share these questions ahead of time with your guest so that they can prepare. For example, Jordan sent me this script ahead of our podcast episode:

Step 2: Record the Episode

Set up and send a calendar invite with the recording link ahead of time. I use Calendly to send our invites.

You can start off basic with Zoom recordings, or use a more robust studio software like Riverside.

I usually structure my calls as follows: 10 minutes of introduction and prep and 30 minutes of recording, so total session time is about 40 minutes.

Step 3: Edit the Episode

Once you have your episode recorded, it's time to edit. We use Riverside for our podcasts, but if you don't have the budget or bandwidth for a dedicated video editor, you can use the native editing tools on your computer or Mac.

For editing, focus on:

• Cutting out unnecessary exposition
• Cutting out pauses
• Cutting out "ums" and other filler words
• Balancing sound levels

Get Your CEO to Guest on Other Podcasts

In addition to hosting a podcast, it's important to get your CEO on other podcasts as well.

The goal of a podcast circuit is to create a saturation effect. You want buyers to hear about you everywhere at once. This means you need to do at least about 20 talking appearances in a quarter. If you spread it out, it doesn't work.

Some best practices:

1. Pick a single theme for the podcast circuit you want to run. Do not dilute the message by talking about different topics. eg - one podcast is about founder story, one is about problem A you solve, other is about problem B you solve. This is bad. Every appearance should be more or less the same.
2. Ask yourself "What do you know that everyone else is missing?" and make that your topic
3. Use listennotes.com to find podcasts that would be amenable to your CEO talking about that topic
4. When you reach out to podcast hosts, suggest that your CEO wants to speak about that specific topic

How Do I Distribute My Podcast?

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1. First, you want to push your podcast to all major podcast platforms:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcast
• Amazon Music

2. Next, you want to create an RSS feed so that people get notified of a new episode automatically. There's a guide to creating RSS feeds for podcasts by RSS.com.
3. You then want to publish your video to YouTube with captions and a logo. Software like Riverside and Letterdrop can help you do this if you have the bandwidth.
4. You should repurpose the podcast into a blog and socials. Letterdrop can help you do this automatically with the URL link alone — check it out.

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5. Finally, you want to make sure that you include these blog posts in your newsletter as bite-sized insights.

How Do I Turn Podcasts Into Pipeline?

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Expand Your Outreach

As I touched on before, existing episodes serve as social proof and allow you to go after more ambitious guests.

Just think of Henry Stebbings and Alex Kracov.

Upgrade to a More Professional Setup

As time goes on and the podcast proves profitable, you should start investing in:

• a more professional mic and camera setup (Wirecutter has a list for the equipment you need for better video calls)
• upgrading your audio. Soundproof your recording room

Remember to Set Up Attribution Reporting

Make sure you have free form self-reported attribution form in your demo signup so you can see if buyers are coming inbound from podcast episodes.

Tap Into the Pipeline Goldmine that is Podcasting

Podcasts can help you cut through the noise from the start with exclusive, high-value insights that you can repurpose across channels.

We can help you put podcast repurposing on autopilot to maximize the reach of these insights. Reach out to us to start today.