S5E10 – How to Start and Grow a B2B Podcast: Expert Tips with Tom Hunt

are you wondering on How to Start and Grow a B2B Podcast? In today’s episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, host Joran hofman dives into the world of B2B podcasting with Tom Hunt, an entrepreneur who has seen the highs and lows of building businesses. With 17 business attempts and 11 investments, Tom found success with Fame, a company dedicated to launching and growing podcasts for B2B businesses. Today, Tom shares his extensive experience in creating successful B2B podcasts, generating valuable content, and using podcasts as powerful marketing tools.

Guest Introduction

Tom Hunt is a seasoned entrepreneur who has navigated the challenging world of business with innovation and resilience. He is currently leading Fame, a podcast creation company that has reached an impressive 3.8 million ARR. Tom also hosts his own podcast, Confessions of a B2B Entrepreneur. In this episode, he shares his insights into B2B podcasting, offering valuable advice for companies looking to grow their brands through this powerful medium.

The Power of B2B Podcasting

Tom explains how the shift in content discovery to platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts has made podcasting even more essential for B2B companies. Podcasts not only serve as in-depth content but can also be repurposed into short-form videos that capture attention in today’s fast-paced digital world.

How to Start a B2B Podcast

Tom outlines the key steps for launching a successful B2B podcast, including selecting the right host, defining your podcast’s niche, and choosing the right tools. He emphasizes the importance of a host who is available, has strong communication skills, and understands the industry. Additionally, defining your podcast’s edge is crucial in standing out in a crowded space.

Tools and Strategies for B2B Podcast

To help grow a B2B podcast, Tom recommends tools like Calendly for booking, Riverside or Zoom for recording, and podcast hosting platforms for distribution. He also discusses strategies such as repurposing content into engaging short-form videos, creating LinkedIn posts, and using guest appearances for cross-promotion to grow your audience.

Key Strategies for Engaging and Growing Your Audience

Tom emphasizes the need to provide content that engages your listeners. He shares tips for increasing audience engagement, like reading listener reviews on air, using AI-generated clips thoughtfully, and ensuring guests actively promote the episodes they’re featured in.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Tom highlights common mistakes B2B podcasters make, including misalignment between content and audience, and the lack of a consistent release schedule. He also stresses the importance of selecting the right guests for your podcast and maintaining strategic focus.

The Role of AI in Podcasting

Tom discusses how AI can improve podcasting efficiency, from planning episodes to repurposing content. However, he cautions against relying too much on AI, as the personal touch remains key to producing high-quality, engaging content.

How to Measure the True Metrics for Success

To measure podcast success, Tom recommends tracking key metrics such as total monthly downloads, followers, and episode consumption time. He explains why content consumption is the most important indicator for evaluating a podcast’s impact.

Tom’s Advice for SaaS Founders

For new founders, Tom suggests leveraging personal outreach to better understand customer needs. For those scaling their business, he advises focusing on employer branding and building a strong team to support growth.

Conclusion

Tom Hunt’s insights offer a detailed roadmap for B2B companies looking to leverage podcasts. From laying the right foundation to using AI and employing strategic growth techniques, this episode is packed with actionable advice for entrepreneurs at every stage of their podcasting journey.

Key Timecodes

• (00:46) – Introduction of Guest: Tom Hunt
• (01:21) – Why Podcasting is Powerful for B2B
• (2:04) – Content Overload
• (2:17) – Key to B2B Marketing
• (3:01) – Podcasting vs Other Content Strategies
• (4:06) – Essential Steps to Start a B2B Podcast
• (4:29) – Host Selection and Positioning
• (5:34) – Importance of Niche and Edge
• (6:41) – Defining the Right Podcast Niche
• (7:39) – Tools for Starting a Podcast
• (8:45) – Leveraging AI in Podcasting
• (9:17) – Creating Short Form Content
• (10:42) – Engaging Guests and Audience
• (11:45) – Leveraging Guest Networks
• (12:06) – Current Trends in Podcast Promotion
• (13:14) – Paid Strategies for Podcast Growth
• (14:20) – Aligning Podcast with Brand Exposure
• (15:30) – Guest Engagement Strategies
• (16:17) – Engaging Listeners
• (17:19) – Quality of Content
• (18:21) – Common Podcasting Mistakes
• (20:10) – Strategic Guest Selection
• (21:15) – Importance of Social Proof
• (22:01) – Consistency in Podcast Schedule
• (23:20) – Proprietary Database and Feedback
• (24:53) – Training Hosts and Feedback
• (26:10) – Metrics and KPIs for Podcast Success
• (28:13) – Role of AI in Podcast Production
• (30:12) – Starting and Growing a B2B Podcast
• (31:24) – Advice for 10K MRR Growth
• (32:06) – Importance of Customer Interaction
• (32:24) – Advice for Scaling to 10M ARR
• (33:23) – Summary and Key Takeaways
• (35:29) – Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcription

[00:00:00.360] – Tom

Discovery is shifting to mobile phones, it’s shifting to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts. And the key to getting attention there is having great video content with unique insights. And the easiest way to collect that, in my opinion, is through a podcast. The real key to getting that attention on Shortform is to hook the watchers attention in the first two seconds, but also deliver on that. So some kind of insight that is going to help them in their job and ideally is somehow connected to the product or service, especially if we’re engaging in paid or anything promotional strategy. I think we do need to make it clear that the podcast, although we’re not talking about the product or service with the client, that or the host of the show, we just want to make sure that the listener is exposed to the brand.

[00:00:46.440] – Joran

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to start and grow a B2B podcast. My guest today is Tom Hunt. Tom has tried and filled 17 businesses, invested in 11. And during this journey, he found the one which is working for him, which is called Fame. With Fame, he starts and grows podcasts for B2B businesses. They’re currently a team of 71 people, have 3.8 million ARR, and if you still have to believe his LinkedIn headline, he still has no idea what he’s doing. He runs his own podcast as well, which is called confessions of a B2B entrepreneur. Really happy to have him on the show. Welcome, Tim.

[00:01:21.110] – Tom

Thanks so much. I’m excited for this discussion.

[00:01:24.140] – Joran

Nice. We’re just going to dive right in. Why is podcasting a powerful tool for B2B companies?

[00:01:30.640] – Tom

My opinion on this has evolved over the past five years where we’ve been doing this. I actually started my first B2B podcast five years ago. Now I think the biggest upside or the biggest reason why any B2B SaaS company should have one is the downstream repurposed content you can generate from a show. Like Discovery is shifting to mobile phones, it’s shifting to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts. And the key to getting attention there is having great video content with unique insights. And the easiest way to collect that, in my opinion, is through a podcast.

[00:02:04.320] – Joran

Yeah, yeah. And I can fully resonate with that. Sometimes I just have so much content I don’t know what to do with it. As in I don’t have the time to actually publish it anymore, which is the complete opposite sometimes when I hear SaaS companies who don’t have one.

[00:02:17.830] – Tom

Actually, a guest on my show summarized B2B marketing really well and we put it In a short on YouTube shorts, obviously. But what he essentially saying, guy called Max from Holland, he was saying that really all B2B marketing is really understanding what questions your ideal prospects need or what they need to understand before they’re going to buy your thing. And then all you need to do is just produce that content and then put it in front of them at the right time. And so the podcast can also really help with that. And what I’m saying now is that the way to really capture that attention first is on short form video, short form vertical video, to be specific. And then you drag them back to the main podcast, you drag them back to the site and the bottom of the funnel content you have on the site. But this is the key, I think.

[00:03:01.270] – Joran

Yeah, yeah. And it goes really well into the next question. So how does podcasting in your opinion, compares to all the other content marketing strategies like block blogs or creating webinars, et cetera?

[00:03:11.860] – Tom

I think the effort you need to create this avalanche, as you said, the this almost too much content for the podcast, is maybe 10% of what you need to create a blog post or webinar series. I’ve done a share load of webinars and you’re like, oh yeah, let’s do a webinar. You organize, you get the speakers and everything’s good. And then you realize, okay, you actually have to get people to attend. And you get handed signups, 20 of them, confirm, and then you only see five of them online at a time. And it’s just really demoralizing. You spend all this time trying to do it. So actually getting a show set up, I think we’ll talk about that a bit later. And booking your first guest and producing this, the core asset, which is the long form video, could just be 30 minutes, can take like a couple of hours of your time, the host, but then also a couple of hours of somebody else on your team who can be very junior. And so the time and cost to create that first initial asset is minimal. And then you can cascade that down to produce everything else.

[00:04:06.850] – Tom

So in summary, it’s the time and effort needed to create the content.

[00:04:11.370] – Joran

Yeah, yeah, it’s going to be a lot less than prepping a webinar, prepping the slides and doing that, basically, let’s just start at the complete beginning. So if people are now listening and they think, oh, this is great, I want to start a podcast, what are the essential steps for starting a successful B2B podcast?

[00:04:29.660] – Tom

Step one we’ll start is host selection. Now, the second most important factor in a successful B2B show is your host. Now, we need two things from the host, actually, three. First one is availability. So you might want the CEO, but if the CEO doesn’t value this and doesn’t and it’s very busy, maybe it’s somebody else. Second is communication skills. Do they have the ability to listen and ask good questions? And then third is industry expertise. They’re only going to be to ask a question if they really understand the topic, ideally as well, if not more than the guests. So host selection is first. And then I would say second is what we call the positioning of the show. And the positioning of the show is split into two parts. The first is the niche of the show, eg, the category that it sits in. And the second part is the. Or we call it the edge of the show, e. G. The thing that makes this different to other shows in the space. It’s the thing that a listener would tell their friends about your show. So just give a quick, clean example. My show, confessions of a B2B entrepreneur, the niche is very clear.

[00:05:34.790] – Tom

B2B entrepreneurship. The edge is also quite clear just from the title. It is the confessions piece. Like I try to get the guest to confess or share things maybe they wouldn’t in other places. So we have the niche and we have the edge. And so getting that right is crucial. So if we nail the host selection and we nail the provisioning, then we’re basically gonna. We’re probably gonna beat like 50% of the podcasts out there already.

[00:05:57.000] – Joran

Yeah, yeah. Just I guess, like a selfish question. Grow your B2B SaaS podcast. Is it fitting these two for you? It.

[00:06:06.410] – Tom

It’s solid. Like, the niche is specific enough where we always advise to be as specific as possible, eg, slightly uncomfortable. And so here we have growth and marketing and we have B2B SaaS. So this is good. We also, like, we’ve optimized for keywords here as well, which is another consideration for sure. So we have a very tight niche. What I would maybe explore or maybe we can do this now is what is the edge? Because there presumably are. I think there probably is other shows that focus on marketing or growth for B2B SaaS. What is the edge of the show? And could we weed that in maybe into the title or if not, definitely into the description of the show as well.

[00:06:41.450] – Joran

Yeah. And I guess we dive deeper into the niche. Like, how can companies define the right podcast niche and of course, attract the right audience, Their ideal audience.

[00:06:53.100] – Tom

Yeah. So we have this sometime with clients. So maybe the four different industries that they could serve, they always error to be like, we want to cover all of these. And we’re like, no, please don’t. Let’s choose the best one and then let’s produce the show. Let’s get this working. Because the reason why we want it more niche is it’s so much easier to pick up those early listeners if when they see it on LinkedIn or they see it on YouTube, they’re like, wow, that’s perfect. For me, the conversion rate is just going to be much higher. So always like just choose the one that is specific enough so it’s just uncomfortable. And in terms of what niche or industry to choose, we just want the niche or industry that has the highest proportion of the people that are going to buy your stuff. So typically when clients come to us, most of them have their customer Persona defined. So it’s really just translating that into a niche or category.

[00:07:39.430] – Joran

Yeah, yeah, that would definitely be my recommendation. Who are you selling towards? Try to get them to listen to your podcast because then it’s like a free marketing channel only time invested. If people want to get started, you have to use some kind of tools to host a podcast, to record it and to distribute. What are some of the tools you would recommend for people starting out?

[00:07:58.020] – Tom

Yeah, I would start with three. So we need a booking tool and we need some way to book guests into the calendar we use calendly. There are many other options. We need a recording tour. Now the two setups here, if either Riverside, we’re recording on this right now, or you can use a combination of Zoom and audafdi, which is a local recording software, that setup can actually be free if you only record for less than 40 minutes. Reside 20, $30 a month. That’s recording software. And then finally we need a hosting tool. And so here’s the tool where you upload the audio and it distributes it to all platforms. Audio and also YouTube as well. And there are many versions of those. So I think those are the three things you need to get started. Maybe as you progress, maybe you need an editing tool or maybe you need some content repurposing tool, but I think those are the bare minimum you need.

[00:08:45.980] – Joran

Yeah. And for the recording tool, as you mentioned, where you’re now using Riverside, like they already have the AI generated clips in there. So I guess if you are going to use a recording tool, you might get a lot more benefits out of it by choosing the tool which helps you to distribute the content or at least create the short form Content, as you mentioned at the beginning.

[00:09:04.720] – Tom

Yeah, that was a wise choice by Riverside in my opinion. So they’re basically just using AI to take the long form, break that out into shorts and then they even now have the kind of editing interface to allow you to add subtitles and animations, et cetera. So yeah, that was a good move.

[00:09:17.820] – Joran

Yeah. What I personally like is that you can actually edit it based on the text so you can just see the transcript and then you can just cut things out. It saves so much.

[00:09:25.730] – Tom

The Descript feature. Here’s the thing that descript brought onto the market like four years ago, it was very groundbreaking at the time, but now it seems like other platforms are able to build it as well. So it’s great to see.

[00:09:35.370] – Joran

Nice. Let’s assume then we have our edge, we have the industry, we chose, the niche, we set up, I guess the tools, et cetera. What are some of the strategies I guess to really start growing the podcast?

[00:09:47.430] – Tom

Got it. So we’ve already covered the main one which is repurposing. So let’s dig into that a little bit. I do agree we can use AI to pick the clips, but we really need somebody who has a good understanding of the customer Persona to select the clips. And so maybe we start off with AI and maybe hopefully that picks the right one off. Not we do it manually because the real key to getting that attention on short form is to hook the watchers attention in the first two seconds, but also deliver on that. So some kind of insight that is going to help them in their job and ideally is somehow connected to the product or service. So we want to pull that out, we want to tweak and optimize to maximize the amount that someone’s going to review that. Maybe we need B roll, maybe we need some kind of music or sound effects and then obviously has to be brand aligned. And then we want to CTA back to the main podcast. We’re actually finding the YouTube shorts. We’re getting the most organic traction for these at the moment. And so in the description we link back to the main video on YouTube.

[00:10:42.160] – Tom

That’s one repurposing strategy. We obviously want a written like take the written content, whether that you can use a repurposing tool or just a transcript and have that on a blog post on your site. So that’s the repurposing to written. And then over time we’re just going to have a big like database of these posts that ideally is going to generate inbound organic traffic. And then I like really combining those two things into a LinkedIn post. Like writing LinkedIn posts that get attention is like a whole other episode. Right. But we want to basically get a good copywriter to write out a post that hooks the reader, drags people through and then either put an image or one of those short form videos in that post as well and then we’re linking back to the main episode from the comments. That’s my hot summary of three ways to repurpose show to get attention for it. The other obvious one is whenever you co create content with anyone, there’s an incentive for that person to share it or to link back to it. So there’s two things there. Ideally we get the guest to take the episode and maybe they have a press page on their site where they can link back to it.

[00:11:45.270] – Tom

Or maybe they’ll take the written content you produce and produce a blog post on their site and link back to you. And then also we want to try and maximize the amount of shares that the guest will do of the episode. So we’re going to tag them in the LinkedIn post so they like and comment and maybe repost. We’re going to send them the snippets because maybe they want to upload that or they want to tweet those shorts themselves. So I would say those are the two obvious ones.

[00:12:06.570] – Joran

Yeah, yeah. I love, I guess to see what you mentioned, like what is working right now, as in the more unobvious ones, like, curious to hear more about that.

[00:12:16.450] – Tom

Yeah. I think the biggest arbitrage now is if you were to Google Best Niche X or whatever niche is podcasts, you have a lot of blog posts ranking for those tools where the owners of those blog posts don’t realize the value of those. So the classic one we managed to Dominate was best IoT podcast. We also dominated Best Crypto Podcast for a while. And so a, you want to ensure that you have written a post and depending on your domain authority you might be to rank straight away. We had a podcast hosting tool that had a high domain authority, so we could basically rank straight away for these things. But that’s fine. Like you do that anyway. Even if you’re not going to rank, do it because over time you’ll ideally start to rank for your niche. So for you it’d be best. You’ve probably already done this best VC SaaS podcast, best SaaS marketing podcast. Even if you can’t rank yourself, you basically go to each of these and you do deals to get featured. So one we did is we reached out to whoever the company that created the product blog post in the IoT space.

[00:13:14.240] – Tom

And we said, we’ll bring your CEO as a guest onto our show if you put our show of number one on your list. And we did that. Or we just pay them a little bit to get included, or we do a backlink exchange to get included. Because if we get that right, then that’s a stream of essentially free listeners coming to the show. That’s something that I like to do. The other thing I’ve been experimenting with recently is paid strategy, where I post most episodes on my LinkedIn profile, typically the copywriting we just described and then the short form video. And then what I’m doing is I’m waiting for one to pop off and then I’m using thought leadership ads through the LinkedIn page, company page that we’ve created for the podcast. So that means we get the podcast showing up at the top of the ad and it’s my face from a person which typically performs better. And we use that. We only boost posts that are already shown proven to get engagement and so we get more from that ad spend. The kind of holy grail happened recently where we posted that for a guest and then the guest business asked to be able to promote my personal post from their company page because we made the guest look so good in the video.

[00:14:20.010] – Tom

So that’s that 30 happened once after about 120 episodes. So that’s the real holy grail and actually combines the paid and the guest strategy we mentioned earlier. So that’s what I’m seeing right now regarding podcast promotion.

[00:14:33.100] – Joran

Yeah, and it’s interesting because like the, the paid ads, it’s a bit of a long way to get paid clients in, but it’s really focused on Thought leader, getting yourself out there, getting people to get to know you via the podcast and then identify which brand you’re connected to and then go from there. Because it’s really top of Funnel. Or am I missing something?

[00:14:52.350] – Tom

Agreed. I would say it’s very top of Funnel. But what I would say in the intro and outro of my podcast, I Fame. Our podcast company basically sponsors our show. So anybody that listens to the podcast is going to understand what Fame does. And so all really care about is getting people from the social platform to listen to one episode. So then they’re like, okay, fame. Hopefully they then subscribe and then they get reminded about Fame every week or every two weeks. So yeah, I would urge if we are, especially if we’re engaging in paid or any promotional strategy. I think we do need to make it clear that the podcast, although we’re not talking about the product or service of the client or the host of the show, we just want to make sure that the listener is exposed to the brand.

[00:15:30.960] – Joran

Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. Personally, I don’t. I think we only have one ad in the middle of the podcast show right now, so we should do probably more ourselves as well, which is.

[00:15:39.370] – Tom

But he’s mentioned. I think it’s on the image and should also be in the show notes. Yeah, cool.

[00:15:44.610] – Joran

Yeah, yeah. I always wear a religious blue hoodie. Everybody sees me in that. So even though I don’t mention reds anywhere, you will see me in the blue hoodie. So people start to recognize me now at events because of the blue hoodie.

[00:15:56.500] – Tom

There we go. Exactly. This is perfect.

[00:15:59.400] – Reditus Ad

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[00:16:17.480] – Joran

so now we get like people to listen to this show. Do you have any advice strategies on how to engage listeners?

[00:16:25.160] – Tom

I think the number one thing is to just try and make the content as valuable to them as possible. Whenever I’m trying to get anybody to do anything, there’s this behavioral model by a guy called BJ Fogg and it’s on one side, it’s the trigger. No, sorry. The trigger is the thing you do and then there’s friction and then there’s incentive. And so the quality of the content is really the incentive thing. Like how much do they want to engage because of how much value we’ve added to them. And so what does this mean? Actually it means not accepting. Guess that you don’t think you’re good enough. It means taking the extra 30 minutes to prepare for the episode. It means doing content editing, which means like taking bits out or moving bits around to make it more engaging. And I think that’s much more important than the friction piece, which is little tactics or strategies you can do to get more engagement. The one that I’ve done forever, which I think has increased the number of ratings and reviews we get, is in the outro. So on my show, the intro and outro are custom that I record for every episode on the outro.

[00:17:19.860] – Tom

I’ll read out a review for Apple podcasts and then I’ll say if you leave us a rating or a review, I’LL read the thou and I give a shout out to you and your business. And so that’s like a way of getting listeners to actually contact me, get feedback, and then that helps with ranking. On Apple, we even built in a feature to our hosting software, like for audio messages. So a link on the player that would allow people to send a question via audio. But we had thousands of podcasts on the hosting tool and the uptake on that feature was not significant. So that one didn’t work that well. I also like shows where the host will read out their email address, for example, and say, drop me, give me feedback or ask me any questions. I think that’s a good sign or good thing to look out for.

[00:18:00.550] – Joran

Okay, I might just do this at the end of the show right now already. I can’t pick up a review that quickly, but people can email me at the end of the show. So I will give my email right there. Love it. These are all best practices. Let’s turn it around a little bit. Let’s make it more, make it a bit fun. What are the common mistakes companies make while trying to do podcasting?

[00:18:21.190] – Tom

The absolute, like stone cold killer of a podcast, in my opinion, is where they don’t understand where in the funnel the content sits. So they’re like, we’re going to release podcasts and because we are us and we’re amazing, we’re going to get thousands of downloads a month. But then they also, in terms of the content, just want to interview their customers about how their product is working for them. You know, it’s just a complete mismatch. They basically think they’re going to get top of the funnel awareness content, but in reality that it’s really bottom of the funnel content so that like we do have people come to us with that kind of misalignment or misunderstanding of marketing. So that’s the most obvious one and the most annoying one. For me, probably the three things is not getting the positioning right so the niche is too broad, or they’re not being an edge to the show, not being consistent with the release schedule. So maybe they choose a schedule that is too ambitious and then release weekly for three months and then don’t release for six months. That is really tragic because they’re probably going to lose that momentum and the listeners.

[00:19:16.920] – Tom

And the third thing that we haven’t spoken about yet and this, it used to be much more of a thing, I think five years ago, but less now. But I think it still is important, is not being strategic about guests, especially with B2B companies. Let’s say we have a marketing manager here, 50 person B, 2B SaaS company. I guarantee that they probably don’t have a CMO, but the CEO is like, how are we going to make money from this? And so what we want to do is just ensure that on the road to building that audience of people that are going to eventually buy our software, we’re increasing the chances we get an roi. And we do that by just choosing the right guests. We’re not going to pitch anyone, but we just want to build relationships with people that could be partners or that could be customers. And so that maybe we bring in a new partner in the first. You about partners with the affiliate business, right. And how powerful they can be. And so maybe we bring in it. The 15th guest becomes a partner and drives X amount of revenue. If that pays for the show, the CEO, he’s off your back, he’s going to reinvest and you can keep the show going for another year or so.

[00:20:10.770] – Tom

So just to summarize on the mistakes, it’s the not understanding where in the where in the funnel. It is not being specific enough with the niche or not getting the positioning, not being consistent and then not being strategic about guests.

[00:20:22.480] – Joran

Yeah. And I love the guest selection because I do have a couple of clients who I got on the podcast, but which weren’t a client when I got them onto the podcast. But we started building relationship and then of course we connected. They saw my content a lot and then they asked, what does yarn actually do? And then in the end they started using us. And like one trick I use because people always ask me, like, hey, how do you get so much? I guess like industry experts on your podcast, because we’re just doing it a little bit over a year. You have to find one crazy person who’s well known enough to get onto your podcast. In my case, it was Patrick Campbell. I think he’s episode three of season one or something like that. But I organized sasdok Local. He was speaking there. He said, kj, hey, can you make a quick video of me on stage? I said, yeah, sure, fine, but can you come on my podcast? We got a deal. After that, when I invited other guests and I say, I already have Patrick Campbell. It was an easy yes.

[00:21:15.530] – Tom

You’re tapping on the biggest lever for guest outreach, social proof. And you’re totally right. You just have to grind until you find the relatively big name and you got a massive one in this industry for number three. And then you just leverage that and you leverage that and with every other guest, you maybe notch up slightly. And then after 50 guests, it’s going to be relatively easy to get anyone on. But getting that first one, typically you have to go through network, but in this case, a bet that you made organizing that conference, presumably you weren’t getting paid for that. Paid off big time through the landing him as a podcast guest.

[00:21:48.820] – Joran

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I can’t remember which message I sent you to get you on my podcast, but it is somewhere in the lines like, hey, I already had Patrick Campbell, Wes Boo, Sean Ellis, Nathan Latka, would you be up and joining the podcast takes you max an hour.

[00:22:01.770] – Tom

Yeah, that’s it. And so for me, when I’m deciding what podcast to go on that I’m looking at who else has been on it and how many episodes.

[00:22:07.910] – Joran

Yeah.

[00:22:08.380] – Tom

And so the both of those basically come with time. So good outreach.

[00:22:13.590] – Joran

Nice. And you mentioned one other thing. Not being consistent in doing the episodes. How important is it to maintain a consistent podcast schedule? And what works best? Is it weekly, daily, monthly?

[00:22:25.170] – Tom

Yeah, it’s like fund absolutely fundamental in my opinion. And we’re trying to build a relationship with the listeners and if we break that trust, like we’ve done all the work to get them to actually want to listen to the show and then we don’t do the simple thing of just releasing consistently to enable them to build that habit. So very important and actually happened to me last weekend. So probably the only show that I get annoyed about when they don’t release on time is the all in podcasts. If you heard that one with Silicon Valley billionaires talking about tech and business and stuff. And it typically releases like early morning on a Saturday. And last weekend, for whatever reason, it was released like early morning the next day. And literally my Saturday morning routine, which I want to get a walk the dog and listen to, that show, was ruined. And obviously because I have so much goodwill with our podcast over the past two years, I’m not going to stop listening to it. But it was really annoying anyways, in terms of the frequency, you just choose the maximum frequency that you’re confident you can do for six months.

[00:23:20.770] – Tom

So it could be weekly mode. For most B2B companies, it’s typically bi weekly. But some go for weekly, some go for more, and some go for monthly is fine. It’s just quite hard to grow a show when you’re only releasing monthly.

[00:23:32.420] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense because it. You won’t have a lot of new fresh content, so you won’t have a lot of things to push out to actually get the growth going. So we go back to like, good things you can do. Do you have any best practices regarding B2B podcasts? What are they doing? How have they done it? What can we learn from those?

[00:23:50.340] – Tom

Yeah, the thing that you mentioned, which I think is not necessarily from the podcast itself, but is a. Is an upside that I see very few B2B companies leveraging is the proprietary database. So collecting data in a standard form and then building a proprietary database. You mentioned Nathan Latker. He was the first to do this in 2016 where he had the. He called it. He’s had various names but the top or the SaaS podcast. And what was great about his show is he asked the same seven questions and he actually built a B2B data business off the back of it. It’s called getlatker.com and it just has all this data that he was able to extract from SaaS company founders. And so he took it to the extreme. But for any other show, you can simply just take, just ask two questions or even just one question at the end of every episode and start building this proprietary database. The easiest way to utilize that for the benefit of the, of your business, in my opinion, is just to create a Google sheet or make it a little database if you have more budget. And then that can be the lead magnet in online marketing terms for the people listening to the podcast.

[00:24:53.820] – Tom

And so I think in this case you’re collecting pieces of advice for getting to 10k. Mrr. Perfect for a lead magnet for the show or just on the site because you’re going to have, let’s say 100 of these and it’s going to be like probably the most valuable or one of the most valuable resources for somebody trying to get to 10 KR. So I think that’s probably underutilized. The other thing obviously on the production side is we’ve spoken about the importance of the host. Second most important factor in a podcast, first is guest quality. But what I don’t see happening very much is feedback and training for hosts. So one thing that I like to do is you can upload a transcript of an episode and you can count filler words and so very easy to do. And you can go back to the host and be like used 17 times in this episode. Next episode is try and get that down to 10. It’s like a very marginal improvement. But if we stack these over time, we’re going to improve the quality of the episode. So those are a couple more things. Building the proprietary database, training the host that I think could help B2B company with a podcast.

[00:25:58.950] – Joran

I think that’s a really good one. If I look at myself, I don’t even listen to my own podcast. Would be able to improve based on the things I know from the recording right now, but not from the learning on actually listening to it.

[00:26:10.810] – Tom

Yeah, if. I think if you want to get very serious about it, you could do that. But you will be pleasantly surprised about how fast you can improve your communication skills if you, if you do review your own recordings.

[00:26:20.940] – Joran

Nice. It’s a good tip for me. I might do it on Saturday morning as well. So once we grow the podcast, what kind of metrics or KPIs should businesses track to evaluate the success of their podcast?

[00:26:33.060] – Tom

Yeah, so if we back up, the biggest upside for B2B company running podcasts is getting the 97% of people who are not ready to buy a podcast to know and trust you, so that when they need your cybersecurity compliance software, they come to you. And so if that’s the goal, really what we want to achieve here is content consumption. Because if people are listening to it and we’re adding value to their lives, they’re going to start to learn and trust us. So that means the primary metric we want to optimize for, in our opinion, is total monthly downloads content consumption. This month than we did last month, we like to shoot for 10% growth. Now, when you get really big monthly growth, when you get really big, that’s quite hard. But when you’re starting out and you’re the 500 to 5,000 to 10,000 downloads a month, that’s a good goal. So that’s the first one we like. Second one we like is total followers over subscribers on YouTube, but followers on Spotify and Apple. So from those three platforms, again, this shows that we’re building like a deeper relationship with these people and they want to be reminded of future episodes.

[00:27:36.410] – Tom

That’s a secondary metric. Maybe you want to see that go up 5% a month. And then the third one, which really helps us with health coaching and with content quality, is episode consumption time. Apple, from my understanding, I’m not right up to date. Spotify doesn’t allow this. But you do obviously do get this on YouTube and you can get it from Apple. So what percentage of the episode was consumed? Again, this is telling us that people actually liking this episode more than the previous one. So we want to tweak and improve that. So those are the top three metrics we’d like to look at. To guide us as to whether we’re hitting that goal.

[00:28:13.290] – Joran

Nice. Yeah. And I know Spotify has it, but we use Anchor, or it used to call anchor. Now it’s podcasters for Spotify or something like that. So we use their tool. So maybe it’s only possible when you actually publish it via them.

[00:28:26.650] – Tom

Yeah, when you host. Host with anchor, the free tool.

[00:28:29.860] – Joran

Yeah. We started with low budget. This is how we got started.

[00:28:34.380] – Tom

Very nice. Yeah, that’s the best way to start, to be honest.

[00:28:36.580] – Joran

So I guess we touched upon it a little bit already. AI, like, how do you see AI in podcast production, maybe distribution? How do you see it? Like being leveraged within a podcasting?

[00:28:49.220] – Tom

Yeah, I think it can streamline any process, though. We’ll just take a couple of examples. Let’s say we’re booking a guest through Calendly and we’re just collecting some basic information about what they want to talk about. We’re also going to get their LinkedIn profile. We can then use AI to combine what they want to talk about, what we know about our show, and their LinkedIn profile to produce at least the first draft of Episode Questions. As we mentioned, we can use it to. For Jeff snippets. We can use it to convert the transcript into timestamps, social posts, content. So I would recommend doing all of this. The only thing I would warn about is that again, the goal of, if we take out the guessing, the goal of all that, the content we’re producing from the show is to add value to the ideal customer. Now, the AI can produce great stuff, but often it’s like missing that edge, that thing that makes it actually valuable. And so we do like to have somebody that has an understanding of the customer Persona and of the industry to review all of that, because otherwise it’s just a complete waste of time for that guessing.

[00:29:49.120] – Tom

Again, we still want a human to go through and review the proposed questions from the AI, because again, you’re going to look like a bit of an idiot if you send questions to the guests that are just completely obvious or just not relevant anymore. So essentially, we can use it to drastically reduce costs, but we still need the human final touch, in my opinion.

[00:30:12.210] – Joran

I guess when we try to summarize growing and starting a B2B podcast, what would be your number one advice? If somebody’s now listening and then they’re like, yeah, I definitely want to get this started.

[00:30:24.500] – Tom

So for growing, I. I do one for starting, one for growing for starting. I think it’s now the positioning. So make sure the niche is Specific enough, make sure the edge is valuable enough for growing. This is the same ethos we have for growing our company and for growing anything is retention is the foundation of growth. So before you go and test all those promotion strategies we discussed earlier, we want to ideally have relatively high consumption. We want to have some good reviews, we want to have some good feedback. It’s the same with growing a business like before. You really spend those on Google Ads to buy more customers. You want to get testimonials, get good feedback from the clients. We don’t want to just throw water into a leaky bucket. So we’re growing a share. It’s retention of the foundation of growth. Cool.

[00:31:04.020] – Joran

We are going to go to the two final questions which are indeed building up our database. This is more towards like building a B2B SaaS company. So when we are talking about growing V2B SaaS, like what kind of advice? And you can make it towards podcasting or go beyond that. What kind of advice would you give somebody who’s just starting out and growing to 10k monthly recurring revenue?

[00:31:24.630] – Tom

Yeah, this one is not really marketing advice, but I think it’s super important. It’s basically to have a auto email from the founder for every user that signs up free or paid with a link to a 15 minute call booking. Now I think this helps in two ways. A, it enables the founder to actually do the selling and probably increase the conversion rate of them from free to paid off and paid to more. But perhaps more important is the founder is forced to learn about the people that are signing up to the tool and then you obviously feed that into the product roadmap. So it takes five minutes to set up and obviously you can have all the 15 minute calls and maybe after year one or maybe when you get to 10 kmir, this can be delegated to somebody else. But I think it’s super important in the early days.

[00:32:06.100] – Joran

Yeah, yeah. And this comes down to talk to your customers to actually figure out why did they sign up? What do you want to get out of your platform?

[00:32:13.900] – Tom

Yeah, exactly.

[00:32:15.820] – Joran

So let’s assume we reached 10k mor. We’re now making a huge step towards 10 million ARR. What kind of advice would you give a SaaS founder here?

[00:32:24.780] – Tom

Yeah, so our company is around 4 and we’re like tech enabled service and not even SaaS. But so this is not like that’s my caveat. I think with this it actually comes down to employer branding. What I’m realizing at the moment is that you’re likely not going to be the person directly doing the thing that’s going to grow revenue, whether that’s selling, building the product, doing customer service. And so then you’re what you as the founder trying to optimize for is the deal you’re making with the people doing those things, how much you’re paying that person and how good they are. And so that difference is proportional to how good your employer brand is. So if you have a really good employee brand, you’re probably going to be able to pay someone less. That’s actually really good. And so then that helps you with profitability as you grow. So that is my trick in terms of obviously the next question is how do you do that? The way that we’ve been able to do that to some extent is through LinkedIn, organic me posting and other people posting on the team. That’s my advice. But the caveat is we’re at 4 not 10 million, so it probably changed when we get there.

[00:33:23.430] – Joran

Yeah, but it’s nice to also get the advice from somebody who’s going on the same journey right now. That’s really nice.

[00:33:31.600] – Tom

Cool.

[00:33:32.000] – Joran

What I will do no AI is being used for this. I will summarize the episode in let’s say 40 seconds. Here we go. So why podcasting for B2B SaaS company it’s a great and easy way to receive a lot of content and distribute short form videos out of it. If you are going to start out, make sure you focus on these three things. Host selection so availability, communication skills, industry expertise, position of the show, pick an edge, pick an industry so choose one niche. If you focus on multiple three the tools make sure you have a good booking tool, recording tool and hosting tool. If you’re going to grow the podcast, make sure you’re going to repurpose the content in short form and long form. Like blogs for example, combine them into a LinkedIn post where the hook is super important. Also ask the guests to co share things, link it on their site, tag them into a post, get them to share things and even maybe run thought leadership ads on LinkedIn posts which are working really well. Leverages LinkedIn leverage list taking articles get yourself featured in them. So the best x podcasting the best x podcasting blogs for why engagement comes from the quality of the content.

[00:34:37.970] – Joran

So always focus on that. You can read out reviews at the end of the show, give your email to get feedback to get more engagement. Common mistakes, wrong positioning, non consistent publishing too much focus on bottom of funnel content and the guest selection. If you are going to start a Podcast make sure that you choose the frequency which is working for you. And if you want to take it one step further, start building a database from your show. So by asking the same questions to every guest then I guess for KPI’s focus on total month consumption so downloads try to get to 10% growth total followers episode consensium time so you actually see if people are listening. Use AI but be careful, don’t lose qualities. Make sure you have somebody actually taking a look at all the content which it produces and then retention is the foundation of growth.

[00:35:29.060] – Tom

Good summary. Very good summary. It’s great to know someone’s listening.

[00:35:33.030] – Joran

Exactly. These are all your words. Thank you for that. If people want to get in contact with you Tom, how can they do LinkedIn?

[00:35:38.780] – Tom

Tom Hunt is good email address Tom so is also good. And then yeah, Confessions of a B2B Entrepreneur is podcast perfect.

[00:35:47.200] – Joran

We’re going to link to everything so to your LinkedIn profile, to your podcast. We’re going to add the email in there. If people want to get give feedback to this podcast episode, email [email protected] so I’m already going to leverage your feedback in here. Thank you for that. And if you are listening to this show, please leave us a review either on Spotify or Apple podcast so we can beat the algorithms and maybe even rank higher than Tom’s podcast.

[00:36:11.060] – Tom

Yeah, I think you might be awesome. Great summary and yeah, I’m glad to see the feedback being being taken on straight away.

[00:36:17.380] – Joran

Nice. Love it. Thank you for coming on Tom. Yes, thank you for watching this show of the Grow your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you like this content. Feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover or reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Veritas, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.