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B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#26: Creating B2B content that engages and converts with Ryan Estes, Co-Founder of Wildcast
00:28:36
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- [00:01]
Greg Kilstrom
What's the state of your website?
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Ryan Estes
If you're looking for a new digital.
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Greg Kilstrom
Experience platform or DXP to run your.
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Ryan Estes
Digital experiences, I have the book for you.
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Greg Kilstrom
The Agile Brand Guide to Digital Experience Platforms is part of my best selling series of MarTech books. In this book I explore and demystify DXPs and look at the roles a digital experience platform should play, the different types on the market, as well as how to initially evaluate platforms, then how.
- [00:25]
Ryan Estes
To best implement a DXP once you've selected it.
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Greg Kilstrom
The book also features a forward from Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer at leading DXP provider Optimizely, as well as several other thought leaders in the industry.
- [00:38]
Ryan Estes
Learn more and get a copy in print or digital now by going to.
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Greg Kilstrom
The Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com. the Agile Brand.
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Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on MarTech marketing operations and CX best selling Author and speaker. Now let's get onto the show.
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Ryan Estes
In B2B marketing, creating content that not only engages but also converts is crucial. Today we're joined by Ryan Estes, co founder of wildcast, who has leveraged podcasting.
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Greg Kilstrom
As a powerful tool in this realm.
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Ryan Estes
He's going to share some insights into prioritizing ideas, maintaining consistency, and adapting to the latest marketing trends in creating content. Ryan, welcome to the show.
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Thanks Greg. I'm happy to be here.
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Yeah, looking forward to talking about all this with you. Why don't we get started though with you sharing, you know, a little bit about your background, how you came to found co found Wildcast, and you know what got you into podcasting and B2B marketing?
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Yeah, you bet. I'm happy to. So I've been a podcast fan since the inception and a longtime podcaster. I started way back in iPhone2 and started doing podcasts and have built a career around podcasting. My previous company, Kitcaster, also current, has worked in podcasts as far as like booking guests, particularly in funded startup founders on podcast. About five years ago and then probably about a year ago we really got full swing into Wildcast. One thing that we saw particularly for B2B is that podcast audiences are probably the most undervalued audiences in the market, full stop. What we found booking guests for podcasts is that they were just deriving just a ton of customers, they were using podcasts to raise rounds of financing, they were using podcasts to recruit talent. And what we, what we kind of learned is that, you know, people really give a high amount of their attention to long form podcasting, particularly in the B2B tech SaaS space, which is a little bit unique. I think if you're thinking about podcasts, usually the first thing that's going to come to mind is True Crime Rogan or Huberman. But a lot of us are using podcasts really to discover tools and find solutions for what's happening in our businesses. So those very small audiences we found very potent for founders in particular and for large enterprise brands as well. So we set out to make Wildcast, which is essentially like a podcast advertising marketplace that connects these brands to really hard to find customers. Sophisticated buyers, particularly in the C suite, particular, VP level, founder level. These people are very hard to sell to and very hard to find. But podcasters like you have done a great job of kind of bringing those together in one place to help them find solutions.
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Great, great. So, yeah, let's dive in here then and definitely going to touch on some of the things that you kind of intrude there. So with a lot of potential topics and strategies, sometimes part of the challenge with B2B content creation is just prioritizing the right ideas. So how do you look at this? You know, with so many potential ideas, you know, depending on the business, of course, but you know, with so many potential ideas, how do you look at, you know, what do we choose? What's going to make the biggest impact? You know, where do you start with that?
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As far as, like business ideas within.
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The business, as far as approaching B2B content around it?
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Yeah, B2B content is challenging in a couple of ways. One, there's fairly a high barrier of entry, which is to say that the deeper you get into B2B, the more technical the aspects of any particular subject matter is. So the thing I'm wrestling with on a frequent basis is really, how can I be as open and welcome to the layman, for lack of a better word, and also provide depth in content for people that are highly technical looking for answers. So it's kind of a strategy and oftentimes it means just kind of speaking as clearly and precisely as possible and maybe even kind of taking a stand. Yeah, this can be challenging also B2B, because in podcasting, you know, you have people that kind of represent larger organizations, so there could be compliance issues. There could be. There could be, you know, people listening in, listening over your shoulder, making sure you don't blow it. So oftentimes that can result in unclear speak or at least people not giving, like, an honest take. So, you know, oftentimes what I'm trying to do with B2B content is be as clear as I can and take as far of an extreme take as possible simply to get people's attention.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I haven't been doing this quite as long as you, but, you know, I've had my share of experiences there. One time, I won't name name names or anything, but I had a CEO, great interview, like, super engaging and great stories, and then come to find out as soon as we hit stop record that CEO was not given permission to mention the client that they mentioned this amazing story around and so had to edit it out. It was still a good, good show, but, you know, probably would have been great with that, that extra story intact. But, you know, to your point, there, yeah, there's people listening in. There's kind of the, you know, I mean, I go through a process with my own show of, you know, getting questions appropriate, approved and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, definitely, you know, it can kind of water down what can otherwise be an engaging message. Right.
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I think, I think it's changing too, I think, and maybe I'm just like calling on brands to kind of embolden their team to take a position, share stories. Obviously there's going to be a line, but really you don't know where the line is until you walk over the line a couple of times. And I think giving, especially the C suite, the agency to do that is going to only benefit them. I mean, one thing I believe firmly is that attention is actually upstream from value, which is to say you might have the most wonderful tool the world's ever seen, but if nobody knows about it, that's a problem. You know, and in this day and age, we're all kind of like bored to death from brand marketing. You know, we want to know the person. I think that especially as we're kind of becoming inundated with generative AI, like real people stumbling, making mistakes is going to have a little bit more charm to it and actually a little bit more attraction.
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Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, we both certainly have an affinity for podcasts, you know, again, doing it quite a bit. But, you know, how do you look at where content is shared, how it's delivered? You know, certainly, you know, there's. There's a lot of benefit to podcasts. But sometimes that may not even be the right channel or way of delivering the message, or sometimes it needs to be accompanied by something else. How do you look at content delivery to make that biggest impact?
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You bet. I think what we're seeing trending right now is combination of short form content dominating and long form content dominating. And so by long form I mean probably anything digitally derived that's not television, that's 20 minutes or longer. You know, LinkedIn is going to go to like short form content any day now, basically getting on board with what TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have been doing forever. And for B2B, this is going to be gigantic. You know, it'll be great for LinkedIn because it'll give you something to do on LinkedIn, I suppose, which is kind of like doom scroll LinkedIn.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Ryan Estes
So you're seeing this kind of marriage of long form where people are willing to like commit, like, you know, 20, 30, you know, if you, if you are talking about longer podcasts, three hours at a clip to podcasting because it kind of weaves into their day and it's more task derived whether they're working or they're driving, they're at the gym, whatever they're doing, doing the dishes. Whereas you have the short form content, which is essentially like, you know, the last 60 minutes of the day where you're just looking for like quick fix, you know, just this to this to this to this to this. And I think both have their place particularly right now, you know, so from a content standpoint, particularly B2B be, you know, you're not seeing this mid range thing, you know, where, whether it's. You could just think of it as like the sitcoms of content are kind of fallen out of favor in opposition to short form, long form. And where I think podcasting is, you know, uniquely positioned is it drives both, you know, like you have, obviously most podcasts are better than 15, 20 minutes, but also all of the little nuggets that you can pull out of podcasting, it lend itself really well to short form content. There was actually a TikTok I saw the other day is kind of like a kind of a younger guy, kind of an advanced TikTok advertiser. And you know, they advertise products and where what you, what he was saying is that like if they get on there and they're doing like a product demo or they're trying to sell a widget or something like that, the efficacy of delivering that product endorsement, making it look like a podcast was like 10x. So to make their ads, they do like a fake podcast where they're just talking about the ad. And somehow I think that there's credibility behind podcasting as a medium that's helping driving sales even for like, you know, B2C type customers.
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Yeah, I mean, that kind of answers the next question I was going to ask because, you know, I wonder, as someone who's been doing podcasting for a while, you know, certainly I think a lot of brands got on the bandwagon, you know, a few years ago and certainly there was a huge spike in the number of shows and I think as. As well as the number of listeners. So, you know, in a sense, podcasting was influenced by the marketing that preceded it. And now kind of what you just touched on is, you know, is podcasting being such a popular thing now influencing other types of mar. You know, almost kind of the inverse of being influenced by. Now it's actually influencing how marketing is being done, I think.
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So, at least for this guy who is finding success, you know, which is amazing, you know, because I think that's also there's a company called Sounds Profitable that's kind of like the industry research component for podcasting. And, you know, part of their research is like, how do they determine credibility or measure credibility in podcasting versus like nightly news or cable television or the radio, and particularly in that vector like podcasting scores really, really high that people actually trust podcasting more than they trust the news. So, you know, hopefully they're listening to the right podcast.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Ryan Estes
Yeah. Be careful what you listen to, I guess.
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But yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
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Ryan Estes
You know, there's certainly, I've always, you know, told and been told that, you know, you want to maximize the content for the channel that you're using. And so, you know, whether it's podcasting or, you know, social or whatever the case may be. But how do you recommend that brands balance that with, you know, just staying consistent across their channels? Because, you know, these B2B brands, they're obviously they're marketing on a number of different channels, if not all of the available ones to them. For, for a larger company, you know, how do you, how do you look at consistency and you know, how should a brand look at consistency when they're, you know, maybe a podcast is a big part of their mix, but not the only part, you bet.
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And this was kind of an eye opening thing about getting started with wildcast. I kind of figured that wildcast advertising in particular was ubiquitous enough that brands understood its value. But largely, I think even sophisticated and savvy marketing brands kind of entered podcasting to like, how can we contribute with a podcast with creative content? Which I think is amazing. But also, again, you're going to have to kind of like be able to take a stand and stand on this content you're providing, which is going to create QCs. So there can be kind of a large barrier of entry to create podcasts. Secondarily, you have, you see a lot of success with very large B2C brands in podcast advertising as well. Whereas B2B, you know, SaaS companies, tech companies, the kind of brands that we work with, they haven't really considered podcasting, largely because the biggest podcasts in the world that kind of consume the most advertising spend are entertainment type shows, whether that's comedy or true crime. So where we saw this opportunity is kind of just from our day to day experience of working with hundreds, if not thousands of very niche B2B tech SaaS, Ecom, kind of podcasts that will never have millions of monthly listeners just based on the content that they're providing. These have very engaged listening bases, possibly the most, the most valuable listening bases they could find. But every single podcast has their own particular terms for advertising. They have their particular add ons. And so there really was kind of a barrier of entry just of like, boy, how do I manage a dozen different podcasts? So that's kind of where Wildcast comes in, is that we're able to aggregate all of these extremely valuable audiences from these niche podcasts, which is just another way to say, like highly technical, but also very much smaller audiences. You know, a thousand to a hundred thousand monthly listens. We can aggregate all of those to get those million impressions, those 10 million impressions for a brand that's looking to kind of find their audience at scale. So, you know, when I came into it with the misconception of like, oh, you know, B2B brands already know all about this, actually there's a little bit of education component, I think, only because if they tried in the past, it might have been a little discouraging of how much effort it is. And I particularly am like very sensitive to the efforts of marketing directors at SaaS companies because they're often tasked with knowing everything about every marketing platform and have the passwords for everything. So that's kind of what we wanted to do, is like be able to like connect in an earnest and genuine way the audiences that are looking for solutions, the podcast hosts that are kind of this bridge, they're almost like steering the ship and then the brands who want to speak to them, you know, and again, this is, you know, for companies that are actually providing strong value, you know, not necessarily some of the maybe novelty items that have been popular on podcast advertising in the past.
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Yeah, yeah. And so then from that, from that B2B marketers perspective, because I mean, even, you know, B2B SaaS even alone, not to mention B2B broadly, but like B2B SaaS even, there's a lot of different variations in there. You know, there's different target audiences, all those kinds of things. So, you know, how do you help those marketers, you know, as you described, you know, find their niche? So, you know, let's say I'm a B2B SaaS company and my target audience is marketers. You know, that's probably the most of the audience for this show. You know, how do you help them find their audience?
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Basically what we do is we give them blue ocean. Niche podcasts is still wide Open for the taking, essentially. I mean, if you're a B2B SaaS company and you're looking for a marketing audience, good luck.
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Right, Right.
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Only because if you're going to Google Ads, your cost per click is going to be $25 a pop. And I know that firsthand, largely because at first glance, Wildcast is a podcast advertising marketplace, which means we're competing with Spotify. So Spotify is going to dump a billion dollars into Google Ad Network. And is there going to be any room for us? There really isn't. You know, and I think there's a lot of people bumping up against that, you know, whether it's venture backed or you're competing against publicly traded companies where it's like, oh my gosh, we have something that's so unique and so cool, and I know it solves our problems and it solves everybody else's problems, but, boy, we just can't get the word out. But this is where niche podcasts, I mean, the territory and the terrain is also available, you know, for large enterprise companies as well. But for, like, right now, you know, in 2024, there's this amazing opportunity to reach people that are really hard reach with new, new information, new products, new success stories, new solutions. So, you know, that. That I think is like kind of the benefit right now that, that we've seen for years now with, with niche podcast is that you actually have an opportunity to kind of. To kind of break through.
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Yeah, yeah. And so along those lines, then, you know, even within podcasting, there's certainly a lot of changes happening. And, you know, whether it's, you know, Apple makes an update here, you know, whatever. Whatever the case may be, how do you stay on top of this so that, you know, you can guide advertisers in the. In the right direction then, you know, with. With everything going on, you know, to your point, marketers are supposed to know everything about everything, but, you know, how do you kind of help them, help steer them in the area of podcasting?
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Yeah, we're getting a lot of new tools, you know, to your point, like every time Apple recalibrates, how they're quantifying a listener, that affects the entire industry because largely, you know, podcast advertising is still based on listeners, you know, so. So it's tough. One thing that we do to kind of overcome that, and largely because we want to come from the podcaster's perspective first, because that's really our bread and butter. You know, we're representing these brands and giving them the best possible we can, but we also want to make sure that our podcasters are taking care of. So really using the tools we have available now, which are amazing, you know, we have, you know, large language model tools, AI tools that we can do air checks on everything. So oftentimes, you know, for. For brands, having a host read ad on. On one of their favorite podcasts is amazing. And when you're able to deliver 120 episodes and you can hear it in real time just with a click of a button, you can hear every single one as they kind of appear is a huge value add for the industry in itself. You know, the other thing that we do that's maybe a little bit unique is we allow people to aggregate all of their listenership. You know, YouTube is great because everybody can just see it, but otherwise, you know, podcasting is kind of a black box, you know, and so if your hosting company is going to report a number and you get YouTube reporting a number, if that ad is being played on your TikTok, that blows up. We'll allow that number. And so we really have kind of a, in aggregate, a larger, more comprehensive listenership number for the ads that folks are paying for than almost anybody else. So what I'm excited for is all the new products that are coming down the pipe for podcasters. Podcasting in general, for better or for worse, is still kind of the wild west. Being based in RSS and being based in, like, something that was built to be free from the very beginning, you kind of have, like, a bunch of different tools vying for the same space, and there's no kind of, like, standardized place. So on one side, that's great because it allows for innovation to happen very quickly. On the other side, it's a little bit harder and a little bit more clunky to be able to report on some of these listenership numbers.
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Yeah, yeah. And so for those B2B marketers out there, how do you recommend that they. Obviously, if they're listening to the show, they have some kind of a soft spot for podcasts. But, you know, how do you recommend that they take a serious look at marketing on podcasts? And just kind of similar to what you were saying as far as how you keep up with things, knowing that B2B marketers have to know a little of everything, where should they turn to for trends on podcasting and if it's a good fit for them?
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Yeah, of course, I would love to shill for my own product, of course, but the kind of industry or research component is called sounds profitable. Definitely look at their materials because they make a very strong case for host Red in particular, which is kind of where we land for podcasting to be just like this amazing opportunity for brands, you know, So I think people, if they go check out. Sounds profitable. That's great. Of course, I would love to talk to anybody. Oftentimes, I like to start these conversations with, what's your favorite podcast? You want to find out how much it cost to advertise on that show.
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Right, right.
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So that's kind of a fun place to begin. And of course, we can. We can help people and walk them through, you know, what their ICP might look like and how, you know, niche podcasts in particular might be able to serve them.
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Great, great. Well, last question for you. You talked a little bit about this already, but, you know, any. Any future trends or things that B2B marketers and content creators should be keeping an eye on and, you know, over the. Over the next couple of years.
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Yeah, you know, I think we're all holding our breath to see what happens with Generative AI. Yeah, I think it's really cool. I can't help myself but, like, make weird songs and, you know, share with friends and stuff. I think that, like, we're probably six months to being able to say, like, hey, I'd like to hear a podcast with Abraham Lincoln and Bob Marley talking about the upcoming Nugget series. I think that's coming. But I'm fairly bullish on the future of just art in general because so far, I haven't seen anything super compelling out of AI that's not just a toy. I hear how it's going to shape the future of everything or how it's going to destroy everything, but I'm like, yeah, but I'm just making these dumb songs about my friend's kids and sending it to them. So I'm really excited to see what the tools will bring, but largely based around connection. And why I've always. Why I fell in love with podcasting in the beginning is because it has this almost salve for the modern human digital experience, which is, if they had their way, they'd wrap our eyeballs in screens and keep us isolated into little consuming buckets. Not to be cynical, but I think podcasting brings us together. Even listening to other people's conversation makes me feel a little less alone. And I think these tools, the ones that are going to rise to the surface, are going to enhance this kind of connection, particularly in podcasting and in audio in general. Appreciate you, Greg.
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Yeah, thanks so much. Well. Again, I'd like to thank Ryan Estes, co Founder at wildcast, for joining the show. You can learn more about Ryan and wildcast by following the links in the show notes.
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Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2bagility.com. That's B2B agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
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Ryan Estes
The Agile brand.