B2B Podcasting: Does It Deserve Marketing Budget?

It's Dec 5th 2020...

And your boss, the CEO of your 30 person SaaS business wants to know:

Should we invest in a B2B podcast?

It's a tricky one...

• Downloads are hard to track
• It seems like everyone and their dog is releasing one
• You're not sure if you have the "talent" in house

Fortunately, you have read this blog post the week before the meeting and can give him an accurate estimation of the likelihood you will generate an ROI from said podcast.

Let's get to it...

I've led a marketing team before...

I know the challenge of being given a lump of cash at the start of the year and having to leverage that to create more value for the business.

You need to choose between:

• SEO
• Paid
• Content
• Influencers
• Partnerships
• Conferences
• Virtual events
• Print
• Hiring SDR's

All valid strategies... but not isolated.

Each of those approaches to growing a B2B business intimately connect and interact with each other.

For example:

• PPC spend can inform written content topics
• Partnerships can be formed at conferences
• SDR's can be used to promote content

In fact, I used to find that the best ROI channels were always those that did influence a number of channels.
If you're struggling to determine which strategies will work best for your business, consider reaching out to an experienced B2B SEO Agency for guidance.

Introducing: the B2B podcast

Now obviously I'm kind of biased, because whilst I was in my last role as Head Of Marketing at a 30 person B2B SaaS business, we started an immensely successful podcast, I then left and now run Fame (a B2B podcasting agency!).

Regardless...

A B2B podcast straddles a number of the channels outlined above:

• SEO - each episode is loaded onto your domain and optimised for a relevant long tail keyword
• SDR/Sales - deals can be originated through relationships formed with podcast guests
• Partnerships - partnerships can be originated through relationships formed with podcast guests

However this post is not supposed to blindly preach the benefits of B2B podcasting, this post is to inform you as to whether budget should be assigned.

Regardless of how long term your business thinks, you will still need to be able to ascertain some kind of ROI from any channel during its first year, without this, it will be hard to justify that the spend should continue.

And thing is... with B2B podcasting is that there is actually two different classes of ROI:

• Short term relationship driven ROI - customers/partnerships generated through guest relationships
• Long term audience driven ROI - leads/customers generated through the audience

And just to make this clear, here is an example of a guest of one of our client podcasts reaching out post interview to enquire about their service:

Podcasting is a long game

It's very hard to build an audience in the short term with a podcast.

This is why the first year ROI generated from a B2B podcast is unlikely to come from the audience. It must come through the guests.

Let's say you invest a total of $20k into the podcast during year one.

This gets you:

• 24 episodes
• 10k downloads per month
• 1k extra website sessions per month
• Some other fluffy social engagement metrics

But most importantly you have build relationships with 10 potential customers and 5 potential partners.

If you have the right process in place, you are likely to have closed a customers and possibly also a partnership deal here.

Let's just say a customer is worth $15k in revenue to your in the first year, and a partnership is worth $10k in revenue in the first year.

You now have a cash positive ROI

And all the fluffy audience building metrics essentially come for free.

This then allows you to re-invest in the podcast in year two, where you can start to realise benefits from the audience side. In an alternate reality where you were not strategic about the guests brought onto the show, the podcast would be cancelled after year one and these benefits would have never been realised.

The crucial part here though is the ability to liquidate a large portion of the amount invested in the podcast with 1-2 deals with customers or partners. This process works best when the average amount that a customer will pay you in year one is greater than $5k, the same with a partnership deal.

The more effective you are at closing deals with guests, the more investment you will be able to make back into the audio content... which in turn will grow your audience which will then in turn increase your ability to get better guests... which will then grow the audience further.

And the cycle continues until you have the #1 podcast in your niche, and you look like a marketing legend ;)

OK back to the meeting, the CEO is looking at you in the eyes...

He wants to know if you should invest and chunk of the 2021 marketing budget in a podcast.

You look straight back at him and say:

It depends...

It depends... on whether we think we can generate an ROI on the relationships developed within year one... if we can do that, and keep investing... then we will reap the benefits from the audience in years two, three, four and five.

We hope this post has been of value to you... and of course, if you would like a little help with starting and growing your podcast... click the button below to claim a free proposal and let's get started on the path to an ROI positive podcast.