Justin (0:00:00) - Hey everybody, before we get started, I want to thank my friends at Hatch for producing this episode. You can get unlimited podcast editing and strategy for one flat rate by visiting Hatch FM. All right, let's get in the show. Welcome to Distribution First, the show where we flip content marketing on its head and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I share playbooks, motivations, stories, and strategies to help you repurpose and distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you created. Everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Distribution first. Very excited to have Jason from B2B Better on the show this week, and we're going to deep dive into all things podcasting. So, Jason, happy to have a show. Jason (0:01:00) - Justin, it's great to be here. There's nothing I love more than going inception on podcasting like talking podcasting on a podcast, like podcasting Squared. So, yeah, this is going to be a fun 30 minutes. Justin (0:01:11) - I think every time I have a show about podcasting, it's a little meta. I did one last year and I was like, just so you all know, this is going to be very strange. This is going to be a very odd show, but hopefully today's conversation will not be Od. I'm super curious, just kind of. You're much more like, obviously I have a podcast. I advise companies who are doing podcasts, and I've helped start up podcasts at Ed companies as well. But I'm curious kind of lay the land. We're in 2024. Podcasts sort of had their ridiculous heyday in 2020 when there was nothing else to do but listen to podcasts. With your working with companies on podcasting, what's the state of them? I feel like in some ways they're overhyped, but in other ways they're underhyped. Jason (0:01:57) - I think it really depends on the context, because you're absolutely right to say that. Rewind two years, it seemed like every brand and their mother were launching a podcast and doing so without really a clear idea on why are we doing this in the first place? And that is where I start. It's the why. Why are we deciding to leverage this piece of content, this channel, over anything else? Launching a newsletter, investing in our blog, doing more at events, why a podcast? And when you put that question to people directly, it starts getting them to think around, okay, how can we use this as a tool that's going to allow us to move the needle towards our marketing KPIs? And then the natural follow up to that question is, what does success look like if we were to launch a podcast, right? We know we want to do it because maybe we want to grow brand awareness, but then how are we going to measure that as an output of this effort that we're putting in there? And it's really getting clarity on those two questions like why are we doing this in the first place? And then how are we going to measure that in the short, medium and long term? That has to be the starting point before making an investment into podcast. If you can't answer those two questions, then you need to go back to the drawing board and really have a hard think about whether or not this is the channel for you. Justin (0:03:15) - So let's dive in there then. I think that's a really good point. As you're thinking about answering that question, what is the right answer? Maybe let's start with why, right? Why are we doing this podcast? How do you think about that with clients? Or what do you think as you're even maybe talking to people who want to do one? What answer are you looking for with why? Jason (0:03:36) - It changes depending on the context, right. And I think some clients of ours come into it with the why of we just don't have any brand visibility. We just don't have any awareness of our service offering, our solution offering. And so that's something that we need to and want to change. Another example could be we have all these amazing clients that we work with, these amazing case studies that we have that we could be activating, but for whatever reason, our customer doesn't want to do a press release or a case study. And so we need to find another way of trying to tell that story. As a marketing team, we do a lot of events. It comes out of our budget, but despite being a marketing activity, really, it's a sales one. Yes, we're doing the booth and all the logistics, but in terms of Roi off the back of that event, there's not really much to talk about when it comes to our function of marketing. And so kind of unpicking some of these reasons starts giving us some sense of direction around, okay, what does a podcast look like that's going to allow us to serve those objectives? So if it's about brand awareness, we need to be thinking really hard around distribution. So yeah, we're going to create a show that's worth listening to, but how are we going to get it in front of it? As many people as possible that we think would find it interesting. If it's about case studies and testimonials. Okay, we need to draw up a target list of our existing customers and then work with our success team to develop an outreach program that's going to help win them over to come onto our show, share their perspective on the industry, and then also get some of that kind of halo effect of brand association through that means if it's about events. Okay, well, now we need to be working with our sales team because there's an opportunity there for us to be running an account based marketing play where in their prospecting in advance of the show, we are reaching out to them, not just with an offer for coffee, but an offer for, hey, we're going to be recording a show on booth and we'd love to have you come and be part of it. And so these are all kind of some examples of the whys that we come across here at b to be better when engaging with clients for the first time. And they give us a very clear path forward in terms of what kind of show should we be creating, how should we be distributing it, and ultimately, what is the end product going to look like? Justin (0:05:43) - It's so smart. It really is, to think about it that way. It's easy to look at a podcast and think a podcast is this very particular format or it's this very particular thing. And therefore it always is about getting the biggest reach possible. But when you have mismatched goals, right, like where maybe you're in essence running it more as that ABM campaign in a lot of ways, where you're bringing on potential clients, you're talking to them, that's not going to get you as wide of a reach. Those people aren't. The value of the show isn't there. And so I think understanding all of those things at the beginning are so key and so crucial, because otherwise you end up creating a show that really ends up speaking to no one or it's speaking to the right person, but then you're delivering it in the wrong channels. Jason (0:06:32) - Yeah. Or you're also creating a false sense of success or failure. So, for example, if the purpose of this show, if the why is we need to get more customers talking about our brand and the podcast is a tool in which we can start doing that, so then looking at metrics like downloads may be a little bit of a red herring. Like, sure, everyone wants to see huge number of downloads, but if the why is we want to be getting more customers co creating content with us, then that in of itself is a success criteria and will dictate what kind of leading indicators that we're going to be tracking in a dashboard to tell us whether or not this show is worth its sold or not. If we're not able to convince customers to come onto the show and give us those testimonials, then by definition we're failing our why? It doesn't matter how many downloads we're getting at the end of it. And so these two things are so closely linked because I think when it comes to podcast measurement, people default to the obvious like impressions and downloads and volume based metrics, where if you don't understand your why, it could give a false sense of failure. Where in fact, your show maybe is successful if it's allowing you to kind of move the needle on those marketing KPIs we've set out in the front. Justin (0:07:46) - Yeah, it's super smart. And I think the measurement piece tying to what it is makes sense too, because I think one of the interesting things with podcasting marketing in general is we talk about TAm, like total, adjustable, available market or whatever there is. But what's the tam for your podcast? How many people can we even expect to want to listen to this? Right? Jason (0:08:09) - Absolutely. Justin (0:08:10) - Do you walk through that with clients? Do you try to figure out baselines of what to expect? Or again, just as you're talking about that, how to measure success? If we can see that 25 of our top potential clients are clicking through or whatever, or somehow listening to the show, that might be a success in some cases, depending on what the criteria is. Jason (0:08:31) - Yeah, absolutely. And that's definitely something that we cover. Right. And one example immediately springs to mind. One of our clients, they're a data services provider and they're targeting the biotech sector and. Right. So this show that we've created, aptly named data and biotech, has a relatively small, addressable audience because we're trying to target, let's say, heads of data in biotechnology, manufacturing, organizations of size. Right. And so the pool of potential listeners there is relatively small, like in comparison to a show that may be created by someone like a g two or a chili piper or a Monday. Right. So that is something that we 100% need to be aligned on when we're kicking off a project on. What is the expectation there in terms of volume? So in that situation, considering that we are going to have a relatively small audience, we can't really be judging success based on download size, on download numbers, because it's useful and interesting to see. But is it really giving us a clear indication of success? I would argue that no, something like average consumption time would be a far better indicator of success because it's telling me about resonance, right? If we are getting 100 listens per episode that are completing at an 80% to 85% rate. And remember, these are like deep dive technical interviews, around 45 minutes in length, that's telling me that we've got something interesting here, right? Because people are sticking with it for the majority. And I would much rather have a reach issue than a resonance issue, because a reach issue I can fix relatively easily, right? To put it bluntly, you could just throw money at it, just get a load of ads out there pumping the show to your target audience on somewhere like LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever. Resonance. Now, that's something that's much harder to crack, right? Because that tells me if the numbers are low, if I'm looking at my average consumption rate in this example, there's something wrong with the content and I need to go back to the drawing board and have a real think around. Am I creating something of value? So, you know, given a choice between the two, if anyone's listening to this and thinking, okay, what should my North Star metric be? First, get a clear understanding of your why, but then have a really deep think around, okay, if I have to pick one north Star metric, that's going to help me illustrate that we are achieving our why to our board. Realistically, what is that going to be like? What is the best measure of success? And I would say in most cases, erring towards more of those resonance based metrics versus those reach based metrics, particularly in niche or targeted industries, is going to be a better bang for your buck. Real quick. Justin (0:11:19) - My mind's going a million places. Best place to find resonance metrics like consumption time is. Where am I looking for that? Jason (0:11:32) - I mean, assuming that the majority of downloads are happening in one of two places, like Apple podcasts or Spotify, both of those platforms, when you claim your podcast in those platforms will give you that data, they're named slightly differently. I think Apple may be average listen time and Spotify's average consumption time, or maybe vice versa. They report in slightly different ways. Apple gives you, I think, just a pure percentage point. Spotify gives you that, but also, like quartile completion rates. So how many people get to the end of the first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, and fourth? And so trying to harmonize those two data points into a dashboard can be a little bit problematic, but you can average them out across the two. So podcast connect is what it's called for. Apple and Spotify for podcasts is your go to in the first instance. Yep. Justin (0:12:21) - Makes sense. I've drilled into the apple ones, but I haven't looked at Spotify, so I'm going to have to take a look over there and start pulling some averages. With resonance being so key, and I think it's true of literally everything in marketing. You can have as much reach or pay for reach or any of those things. Like you mentioned, it's not just with podcasting, but if you don't resonate, if you don't have something that's resonating with the audience, you're dead in the water. And so I'm curious, how do we build a show that resonates? What are those types of things that we need to be looking for or even planning ahead to think about? As I'm thinking about topics or ideas or like, my goodness, we talk about a million different things. We solve a ton of different problems. Which ones do I start with? How do you build a show that. Jason (0:13:13) - You know, it's something that I don't even think we could do a whole episode on, but probably write an entire book, or if not, a series of books on? I will give a quick shout out here to a friend of mine, a guy called Jay Akunzo, who I'm sure a lot of people listening to this will be aware of. He runs his own podcast called Unthinkable. He has a great community called Creator Kitchen, where if you're looking to learn these kind of core storytelling skills, I would highly recommend checking out. I take a lot of inspiration from him and his work over the years of creating high quality media work, media content. I had him on my show, b two b better once, and it was just a bit of an eye opener on moving away from commodity content and really creating something of resonance. And that is a word that he uses extensively. He talks about this idea of starting with these four or five questions that are going to allow you to kind of drill down into the kernel of a potential idea that your target audience may be interested in and that could be repurposed into a podcast. And those questions are things like, okay, what is the problem that my customer or my target listener is experiencing? How are they trying to fix that problem? Why does that not work? What is my suggested solution instead? And why is this better? And if you answer these five questions, you start getting a sense of an idea of what really matters to your customers. So if we use HubSpot as an example, HubSpot does a lot of different things for a lot of different people. So I'll try and keep it as simple as possible. But what is the problem that HubSpot customers may face? Well, they are trying to connect together a bunch of disparate marketing, sales and customer success tools into like one holistic platform. Why is this a problem? It will break down with a stiff gust of wind. What should they do instead? Use one centralized platform that sits across these go to market functions. Brings it all together into one centralized place and location where you can get a full snapshot of that customer experience. And then why is that better? It's better because it prevents data silos and it streamlines efficiency and it's more cost effective. And that gives us the kind of starting kernel of an idea. For example, from that we may extract this idea of customer experience. Like, what does the customer experience look like across marketing, sales and customer success? That could begin to be the premise of our show. Now we've got the what we need to think of the why. Like, why would someone be interested in listening to a show about the holistic, end to end customer experience? We need a hook. Jay talks about this. The hook could be something like a big idea that we have about customer success, that only we see things in this particular way. It could be a mechanic, the way that we format the show, it could be looking at it through a particular trend that's happening in the marketplace. So if our idea, the what is customer experience? Our why could be a big idea would be something like providing a high quality customer experience has never changed throughout history. It's always been based on these, like, three or four core principles. And we need to understand how do we extract those core principles from the past and apply them to the modern day customer. And so now we've got our what and we've got our why and when we smush them together, a show about customer experience, but exploring it through the lens of historical customer experiences and how they apply to the modern day. We've got the beginnings here of an interesting, original idea that could have some resonance with our audience now. Great. To have an idea, we need to go out there and validate it. And I would say that keeping things low cost, low effort, low lift, producing an initial, like four to six episode season where you can put it out into the world and track some of those early stage qualitative indicators of success, is where you want to go. I see too many brands failing in their podcast efforts because they go all in, they buy ten grand's worth of equipment, they're hiring all these huge big names to come and speak on their show, but they're just not able to keep up the momentum or see the metrics in the early days that are giving them the confidence to continue on. So summarize, really drill in on what the show is going to be about by asking those customer centric questions. Develop an interesting hook, a big idea, a mechanic, a trend. Once you've got your premise, launch an mvp, minimum viable podcast of four to six episodes with really clear qualitative metrics that you're going to be measuring that are going to help you build the business case for longer term investment. Justin (0:17:54) - All right, everybody, just follow that one and you'll be good to go. I think we're. No, this is amazing, Jason. So I'm curious on, I love the idea of pilots. I actually recommend that a lot with teams. I call them pilots. But it's the same heart behind it, which is don't go all in when you can't sustain it. It feels similar with the four to six episode sort of like season one. Is that something that you would communicate up front to the audience of like, hey, we're doing six episodes, we're doing four episodes. Or my hesitation with it always is like, if I don't communicate that, they're going to think I'm just done, or I'm just another in the podcast graveyard of shows that couldn't make it to eight episodes. Jason (0:18:35) - I mean, I think there are pros and cons to both, like communicating it and not communicating it. I guess instinctively I would say that there's no harm in saying there's going to be just six episodes of this podcast, and then coming back for a season two and saying, wow, it was so hugely popular and there was such a massive demand for this, we had no choice but to come back and keep creating content. I would probably advocate for that approach because it gives you an excuse to stop and not feel the shame of just being another one of those shows that end up in the podcast graveyard. Right. You start by saying, we're being very deliberate. There is this question we want to answer. There is this trend we want to explore. We're going to do six really high quality, focused episodes on it, and then we're done. And then, great, you get to the end of six episodes, mission accomplished. And then you can make a decision as a brand, do we want to continue on or do we want to stop? And if you want to continue on, as I say, you can make a bit of a song and dance about it and get that kind of, like, social proof credibility out there that this is something people are worth, that people are really wanting to listen to. I guess the risk of not announcing it up front is, yeah, you just kind of do six episodes and it stops, and then people are like, oh, that kind of been that interesting. Yeah. Justin (0:19:53) - For me, I also think you put yourself in a unique position with a podcast because what you can end up doing is depending on the goal, right? Like, if the goal isn't to become the next top ten Spotify ranking show, where you're amassing just gobs and gobs of downloads, if your goals are around some of those other metrics around audience engagement, retention, building something, getting our points of view out there, like some more less hard and fast, like impressions and downloads, you could have one episode a month or one every other week, and six episodes could get you a quarter or a half a year's worth of content and essentially being able to break that thing up. And now you have essentially almost either a full quarter or a half a year's worth of stuff that you can experiment on, pull the ideas out, test in different ways, repurpose in different formats, distribute across your channels, understand what's working, what's not. And I think that, to me, is a really unique reason why I love podcasting. You can do it with other mediums, you could do live events. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different ways you can do a similar playbook with it. But with podcasting, it's unique because as long as your audience is kind of aware of what you're doing, like, hey, we release every other week, once a month, we're dropping a brand new episode, and it's going to be really high quality and it's going to be really good. As long as you have those distribution plans in place to what's going to happen after you hit publish. You can go gangbusters with that. The problem that I see with folks, I'm sure you said the same thing with distribution, is they don't have any plan. They release the show and they publish their six episodes, and they get their 15 to 35 downloads, and that's it. There's really no forethought onto, okay, downloads weren't the goal, but attention was the goal, and we didn't get that either. We didn't do a good enough job of doing that either. So I'm curious, do you see the same thing with the companies that you're talking about, and how do you kind of talk through the distribution side of that? Jason (0:22:05) - Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to distribution of podcasts, I think there is no one size fits all strategy, because, again, it all boils back down to your why there's no point investing in a shit ton of LinkedIn ads if your objective is to run a podcast as an account based marketing play, like, for example. And so again, I come back to the why? Why are we doing this in the first place? And from that I can start to define what does distribution need to look like for us to kind of hit those milestones that we've set out for. Ultimately, I think your point around we do one episode, we publish it, and we never look at it again is like 100% accurate. It's a really ineffective way of maximizing the utility of an asset like a podcast, because a podcast in most cases, is an evergreen asset. And we work with a lot of companies that have very little internal marketing resource to create content. And so the reason why they are attracted to podcasts is because this gives us something that's going to allow us to fuel our content pipeline by the reformatting, the republishing, the atomization of this artifact over the next quarter, half year, what have you. And so, yeah, absolutely. It shouldn't just be like a hit publish, one and done type exercise. I would say that though, particularly in contexts where bandwidth and resources are limited, it makes sense to one focus on a channel. Podcast is the content, right? And yes, it is kind of a channel as well, in that you get some exposure in the podcast directories, but it needs that additional push across some other channel, be it a newsletter, social media, whatever, in order to really have an impact. Focus on one channel. In the short term, nail it. And once you've nailed that channel, you can kind of move on to the next thing. Often that channel is going to be something like LinkedIn. And so there's a whole bunch of opportunities that are open to you when you look at how podcast content can be repurposed on somewhere like LinkedIn, of course, there's taking the social clips from an episode and publishing it across your brand account. You can do audiograms, you can do still graphics, you could do LinkedIn newsletters. If you're taking the transcript from your show, and you are, with a bit of editing, publishing it out there as a newsletter. Key takeaways driving attention back to the podcast. But I think probably the most interesting opportunity in 2024 is like, how do we leverage our employees and our colleague network to distribute that show? Because research suggests that the total number of connections that your employee base will have versus your brand account in terms of followers will be tenfold. And that's like a sliding scale, right? So if you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, your total employee network will be connected to ten times that number, 10 million. If my math is correct, that could be potential recipients of your podcast. And so then the question becomes, all right, how do we internally build a machine that allows us to service our employee base in a way that will allow them to go out there and with as little friction as possible, publish and promote the podcast content that we're creating on our behalf? I'm reminded of an example when I was in house and I was running marketing for a global tech solutions provider, we built a podcast, explored the intersection of media, sport and technology, and we had a sizable following on LinkedIn as a brand. But it was really our salespeople that were like, banging LinkedIn hard as a means of opening up new opportunities and prospecting. And so sitting down with a core group of them, we were like, okay, we're creating this content where we're interviewing members of our ICP. How can we service you? How can we help you to repackage this content in a way that makes it as comfortable for you as possible to share this across your social profiles? And so for some people, that was simple as, just give me a clip, give me a clip. I'll get it out there. For others, it was, give me the clip. And I also need some copy that I can amend. For others, it was, sit down with me. I want to do some kind of one to one dms with people. I want to use this podcast content as the crux of those messages. What does that kind of look like? And so it's just about making yourself available, right? You've gone to the work of creating this great asset. Now you need to do the work of actually packaging it in a way that's going to allow you to hit those marketing objectives. Hit that. Why that we've outlined above. And so, yeah, starting with your employee base is a really good place to start. Love that. Justin (0:26:44) - And I love the sort of tactical actions on that. That's one thing a lot of folks have sort of reached out to me about as well in terms of like, all right, we know employee advocacy is going to be huge with distribution. How do we do it? And again, like all things distribution, the answer is, unfortunately, it depends. Your sales team in that case was like geared up. I've worked with other team where it's like sales wants nothing to do. Like, you want me to do what? That's a different problem to try and solve. That might be more upfront education on the platform, the content, why we're doing it this way, things like that. But I think leaning on your employees outside of just like, hey, we launched this new podcast episode this week. Please go share it with your audience. Here's a boilerplate. It's much more about finding, I think what you sort of hinted at is like finding those few core people who are going to do it correctly and want to do it and then figuring out based on the content, who best can talk about what or use which pieces or that might be dependent on the show, even depending on what that is. But understanding when you have a 40 minutes podcast, there's a lot of content there to pull from. And a lot of times what I'm realizing when I'm talking through with folks, a huge unlock is you're pulling the value out of the clip, you're pulling the information out of the show, sort of locked behind Apple's or Spotify's sort of play button, you're going to take it out, you're going to help your audience and say, all right, you don't even have to listen to the 40 minutes episode. I'm just going to provide you with some good, solid help right here. And I think that's the key with repurposing podcasts, in my mind, is eventually, over time, somebody's either going to want to listen to the full show or they're not. And you can't force them to do it one way or the other. But also, if they see your clips alone and get value, that's a win. In my mind. There's lots of clips from shows that I watch and I enjoy that pop up in any given social feed that I see, and I never listen to the full show. It's not because I don't like it. It's that I don't have time. And so it's like, but if they didn't do those clips and if they didn't properly distribute that content, I would never see it. It's weighing that balance. Jason (0:29:10) - Absolutely. And this is the one other thing I'll just add on top of what you just said, there is like involving people earlier in the process of distribution, like outside of your marketing bubble. I think ultimately the better the outcome is going to be if you can sit down with your sales, if you know you're going to use your podcast as like an account based marketing play involving the sales team right from day one at the conception stage, what are we trying to create here? What's the message we're trying to express? Who is our target audience? How are we going to package this in a way that is going to allow you to go out there and use this in your prospecting efforts. It's going to help you build a stronger business case. I can't tell you how many marketers I've spoken to who say to me like, I want to launch a podcast. I just don't think anyone's going to care. Right. And so internally, I mean, and so if you can go to your board or your decision maker, who's going to sign off the budget and say, look, I've sat down with sales and we have a really clear idea on how we're going to package this content up, where we're interviewing our ICP as a tool to go out there and aid our prospecting efforts. And they are 100% bought in on this. You are maximizing the chances that budget is going to get signed off. Where you're going to run into issues is like, we want to do a podcast and we're just going to start interviewing people and we'll let you know when it's done. And people struggle to get kind of motivated in that context. Right. They struggle to see how is this going to be of use to me. So when you're playing that internal political game, bringing in other stakeholders who can vouch for the quality of the idea is a really powerful tool in terms of getting it over the line. Yeah, I love that. Justin (0:30:48) - Bring in other people and have a plan for what's going to happen after you hit publish on this podcast. Having those two things in your arsenal to be able to pitch the reason why. Absolutely huge. And it's also going to be more helpful for you in the long run as the person, team, et cetera, managing the show, because now you can feel confident and comfortable. Oh, okay, we got a plan for how this stuff is going to actually be used and what I need to do every single month or every week or whatever the cadence is on that versus I'm burnt out because I'm trying to fit in a podcast amongst everything else I'm doing. And we're not doing it as much as I know we should, but it's just over here and it's not performing as well. And I pitched all this and it just becomes a giant, chaotic mess for a lot of teams. And so I think having that plan and being able to be upfront and kind of honestly doing the hard work up front to be able to lay the foundation to where it's going to be a solid and joyful experience for the most part, versus something that just becomes one more thing your marketing team is supposed to do. Jason (0:31:55) - Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Justin (0:31:57) - Well, awesome, man. We're at time and we're recording late in Jason's world, so I'm going to let Jason bounce and we're going to move on. But dude, super glad to have you on. I think there's a ton of really good takeaways here. Stuff I'm going to take away and talk with some of my clients about as well. So I'm like feverishly writing notes down here on things and I'm definitely going to start taking some of these. So, Jason, it was super fun to have you on, man. Thanks for coming. Jason (0:32:23) - Real pleasure. Thanks, Justin. Justin (0:32:30) - All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Distribution first, and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you so, so much and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in this episode one way or another, into your content strategy as well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that are going to help you build your brand, ten x your content and transform the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe to the show and sign up for my newsletter at Justinsimon Co. So you don't miss a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next episode as well. And until then, take care and I'll see you next time.