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B2B Podcasting Insights - business strategy podcast for founders and brands
Does Your B2B Podcast Actually Need Video? (Probably Not Yet)
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Partners Picture the scene with me. It's a home office. The desk has been shifted somehow the beloved plant has been relocated out of shot. Someone's watched three YouTube tutorials about camera angles. They've bookmarked a gimbal they like the look of, maybe even a ring light. They've ordered a color calibration card and is on its way in the post. They're about to spend their entire Saturday night reconfiguring everything about their life for the sake of a 10 minute video. Their podcast has 24 episodes and not one of those 24 episodes has ever come up during a sales conversation. The color calibration card is probably not going to fix anything. Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights with me, Neil Velio. I am the founder and director of Podnos Podcasting, a podcast agency that helps brands and founders like yourself to get better results from podcasting. I want to start this episode with a question. Where are your buyers when they're consuming your content? Not where you hope they are, where they likely are. So not the version in your imagination where they're seated at a desk, coffee in hand, notepad and pen, listening to your content intently, like that's all they've got to do for the next hour. Not that, but the reality. Where are they really? What are they doing? I know where mine are because I've asked them. One came through in a sales call and told me that she'd been listening while on the treadmill. Another was watching a kid do lengths at a local swimming pool. And while she was watching a little and splashing away, she had her phone and her notepad and pen by her side, taking notes as she did two jobs at once. Being a parent, being a thoughtful business owner. I want you to sit with that for a second. Imagine it. A chlorine scented room full of shouty kids and the occasional whistle blast from a bored, overzealous lifeguard who's really questioning their career choices at that moment. Despite all that, she was vigorously taking notes in a less than ideal environment because what she was hearing was compelling her enough to take notes and keep that in memory forever. You can't replicate that with video. I don't care who you are, I don't care what your expertise in video is. You have to agree. You cannot replicate that environment, that situation, those results with video. Nobody can watch a screen and give it their full attention and their kid and do the same at the same time. And what we got here is not a production insight. It's not a comparison between different kinds of content. It's a comparison between different kinds of commercial result and intent. The intimacy of audio, which has always been its strongest point, the fact that it can live with your buyer in their everyday lives and doesn't demand that they stop what they're doing to consume the thing as video does. That's an advantage, and it's part of the mechanism of the funnel of the content deliverable system. It's how the podcast gets to work for you before you've ever even spoken with them. Video disrupts that mechanism, not because it's more expensive or because you have to put your face on screen, which is obviously the common obstacle that people always talk about when they're resistant to doing video. That's just a surface level thing. The real fundamental obstacle with doing video over audio only is that it requires the recipient to be sat stationary, visually available as a human being and present as well as in the mood to buy and open to what you're suggesting to them. And your prospect who's on the treadmill just listening to you. They don't need any of that stuff. You're there. You're already in the brain. You've done 90% of the work. The fact of the matter is in making yourself watchable, you are risking making yourself missable. Now, you know what I hear Every time a B2B founder or director tells me that they're considering adding video, and I ask them why? Their response is usually something along the lines of, well, our audience prefer video. And I come back at them with, based on what? I ask it every single time. And what I get back is some variation of something that somebody in the office once said, which itself was based on something somebody saw on LinkedIn, which was probably based on a stat that they'd seen on a website whose sole job is to get clicks and worry about the facts later. It was probably also sponsored by a platform that sells video ads. Or maybe Dave in marketing brought it up in the most recent general meeting. The thing is, Dave has his own YouTube channel about pots, and he loves doing that. That's his hobby. But Dave is not one of your buyers. Your buyers are probably on treadmills, honestly, your buyers are probably at swimming pools. Because your buyers have lives. Contrary to popular belief. Your buyers are not sitting around all day just watching television or scouring through YouTube or scrolling on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Your buyers are probably in cars on their way to meetings, or they're in the gym getting ready to jump in the car on their way to meetings. And so they're listening. Now, I want to be clear here, because this episode is not an argument against using video in principle. It's an argument against adding video without a good reason. And there are some genuine good reasons to add video to a podcast. Here's the test to figure out whether or not it's right for you. If you stripped every visual element from your podcast episodes, meaning have no charts, have no graphs, have nothing to point to, would a listener still receive 100% of the insight that your podcast is sharing? I mean, for this show, yeah. The argument is in the content. There's nothing to see, per se. If you've watched this on YouTube or in Apple podcast video, you will see that there is nothing particularly compelling. We don't really focus on stats and graphs in the visuals unless they come up and we might as well show them. But you're hearing me speaking about the stats anyway, so nothing is lost in the audio mix. If you strip the visual version of this podcast away from the content, you lose nothing. But say you're doing an episode on AI workflow setup, well, that's different. You're navigating an interface, a system, a ui. You might be pointing at a specific setting in a specific menu, and the meaning of that content slightly degrades without the visual. You gotta do more work to bring what you're describing into their visual cortex. That's very difficult to do without something to show them. In that event, you're not enhancing your podcast with video, you're actually completing it. You're bringing the full picture, if you'll excuse the pun. Audio alone in that situation would probably not be complete. If you're making any data LED argument, then charts are probably going to be really useful, and you probably don't want to skip out on those. That doesn't necessarily mean you've got to shoot full motion video. You could create those charts graphically using AI and put that in as B roll. But you probably are going to have to give some thought to the visual component of your podcast. If you're using a lot of stats, charts and data, and it's not even a stylistic choice at that point, it's structural. The honest nuance here is that in those cases, you've probably got a real fork in the road that you're facing. You can add video, or you can change the content. You can move away from teaching by numbers. You could lean more into storytelling. You can make the arguments in a way that audio can carry all this on its own. All of these are valid decisions to make. None of it is a compromise as such. They're just different shows presented in different ways. Which is why I always laugh when anybody says, oh, there are too many podcasts and there's no room for my new take on this thing. Of course there is, because most people are doing the other takes and they're all doing them. The thing that isn't valid is just adding a camera setup to a podcast because someone told you you should. Which brings me to the question that usually gets skipped entirely. Here's what almost never gets said in any of these video conversations. The reason most B2B podcasters can't tell whether their video podcasts are working is because the metrics are really hard to track. And on top of that, they have never really decided what successful looks like. There's no hard, fast definition for success that's been put in place. Your inbound sales team are not really asking, how did you find out about us? And if they are asking it, they're usually saying, oh, was it on our podcast? And if they are asking that, they're almost certainly not, then differentiating it by saying, oh, did you listen or did you watch? The attribution is pretty much invisible. Not because it's impossible to add, but because nobody gave thought to how to add it. And the reason nobody thought to add it is probably the same reason that the video decision is being made reactively in the first place. The podcast doesn't have a clearly defined job. If you can't answer in one sentence what your podcast is commercially meant to do. And we did an episode all about this a few months back. If you can't answer that sentence, then you can't evaluate whether any medium is working. Audio, video, billboards on a bus stop. You can only look at the numbers you're seeing which feel like they should mean something, and then hope for the best. Adding video to a podcast without a commercial job for that podcast to do doesn't give you a video podcast. It gives you a more expensive podcast that still doesn't have a job. The color calibration card is still not the answer. Okay, so if you've listened to this and you're still not sure whether to add video to your podcast or whether that question even matters for your show. Good news. I've built a one page decision tree for you to follow through and hopefully get clarity on that. It'll take you about 90 seconds. It's called should your B2B podcast add video? Very simple, does what it says in the tin. Very Ronziel and it routes you to one of three outcomes not yet, probably no, or yes, but on your terms. And each one comes with a specific reason at a specific next step for you to take. Nice no offense. Sitting. You'll find it at podnos.co.uk decision that's podnos.co.uk video-decision and the link's in the episode description wherever you're consuming this. And if you work through this decision tree and you get stuck on the very first question, which from memory is what is your podcast commercial job? Well, then that's a different conversation that we probably need to have together, and it's the one that the POD knows diagnostic is built for. That link is in the description as well, but for the sake of ears jotting down with notepads podnos.co.uk diagnostic that's P O D K N O W s.co.uk forward slash diagnostic. If the honest answer to the question what is my podcast commercially meant to do? Results in you answering with we're still kind of figuring that out, followed by a long pause. I'd point you back to that episode. Is your podcast doing its job? Your video decision sits entirely at the end to of that question. Get the question answered first and then come back to this video question. Okay, founder FAQs every episode I respond to questions from people who have been in touch through the website podknows.co.uk contact this one's from Paula, who runs a B2B HR consultancy in Leicester, and Paula's been asked by her web designer to provide a podcast bio for the show page, and she's not sure whether it should describe the show or describe her. Well, Paula, it should actually be both, but in the right order. A biography that starts with hi, I'm Paula and I've spent 15 years in HR is a CV, which is fine for LinkedIn. You your podcast page is not LinkedIn. Your podcast page is for the person who consumed your content and then visited the page because something in your show felt relevant to them and they're wondering whether or not to invest the next 30 minutes of their life in communicating more deeply with you. Lead with the show's commercial job. We're back to it. Figure out what that is. Not the topics, the job. Something along lines of I don't know. This podcast exists to help HR directors build the case for headcount decisions in rooms where finance always wins. There, you've talked to a person and you've solved a problem. That's a reason to listen then follow it up with why you specifically are the person that can help them take action on that problem. You can start talking on this show page about the restructures you've been involved with, the rooms that you've sat in, the leaders you've made decisions with. That's your credibility and that earns your place with the listener or viewer once you've established that. So a bio that leads with you is a cv, a bio that leads with the job that you do. That's a sales tool. Same podcast, completely different outcomes from it. All right, this episode's quick tip. When you write your episode description, write it like your ideal buyer has just said. I'm not sure that this is for me on a sales call. The description is not necessarily just a summary of what you covered in the episode, which is the trap that most people, including me, sometimes often fall into. It's not a track listing in a cd. It's the reason that this specific person who's stumbled across your content should click Play right now with no delay. An example for you in this episode, Neil Velio discusses video podcasting and whether B2B brands need to do it. That's a summary. Very few people are going to press play on that. Something better might be and I need to make a note of this because I need to use this. If someone in your business has just told you that you need to do a video podcast and you're not sure whether to believe them, this episode is for you. That's a reason to listen. That's a reason to watch. The episode's exactly the same. I haven't changed the content, but the description is making the difference on whether or not the semi interested person is going to commit to clicking Play. Until next time, good luck in your continuing production of your B2B podcast.