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B2B Podcasting Insights - business strategy podcast for founders and brands
Following 'Best Practice' is KILLING Your B2B Podcast!
00:18:27
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Transcript7 lines
- [00:13]
A
Navigate me to podcasting success, please.
- [00:21]
B
In 100 yards, publish weekly. In 400 yards, book a bigger guest. Their audience will share it. In two miles, repurpose this into 15 clips, carry on straight for one mile to reach podcasting success.
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A
Are you sure?
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B
Keep going.
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A
That's a bloody lake.
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B
You have arrived at podcasting success. White British podcaster, male, followed all the accepted rules of podcasting, but ended up in the drink anyway.
- [01:13]
A
You followed every instruction precisely, huh? Fat lot of good that did you. He did everything right there, didn't he? He followed every instruction to the letter and he still came a cropper. See, the thing is, he relied on direction from something that has no ability to think beyond best practices. And it sent him straight away, like, see, the horror isn't that a driver made a mistake in following best practices? He didn't. He did what he thought he was supposed to do. I mean, that's literally what we're taught, isn't it? Follow the best practices and you will get success. But the problem with following best practice is that best practice, this isn't always accounting for changes in terrain and developments around your journey, whatever journey that is. And if you don't factor those in, you too can end up face down in a lake. If you think of that metaphorical sat nav as advice on the Internet, then think about it this way. The voices on the Internet are not proactively trying to get you a client. What it's doing. The voice on the Internet is the thing it knows best, confidently sharing with you its own experience. Best practice is the satnav voice of our entire industry. And it really comes down to this. It's the average of what worked on the average podcast and nothing more. And it's read aloud with total certainty. And you don't want an average podcast. You want a podcast that does the job that you want it to do. Best practice is going to make you brilliant at being an average podcast. Unfortunately, that also means it's going to make your podcast the worst of being a sales asset. And a brilliantly average podcast is not going to pay your mortgage. So let me talk you through what you can do instead of of blindly following best practice. Bring an open mind for this one. You might need it. Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights. I'm Neil Velio, the founder of Podnos Podcasting, a UK based full service podcast marketing and consultancy agency specializing in helping people like you. Whether you are a founder, a CMO, or anybody else that's in charge of making sure that your company's Podcast gets results is successful. Now, we've all seen it, haven't we? That confident voice that permeates through the Internet explaining how they can help you get results using best practices. I built my podcast to 2.5 million downloads in a year. And I will show you how you can also do it. We've all seen those. The ads on Instagram, the posts on LinkedIn, the YouTube clips. They're everywhere. But here's the problem with these people that are peddling best practice as a solution. They're optimizing for the wrong thing. Best practice is literally tuned towards download numbers and the growth of but you might not be needing download numbers, and the growth of your podcast's job is is to move the downloaders that you already have closer to making a decision to buy from you. A number going up in your dashboard is not the same as someone getting closer to clicking your payment link. Another problem with following best practice advice from podcast gurus all over LinkedIn is they literally just want to homogenize you and your podcast. If everybody with a podcast like yours optimizes from the same playbook, it just means there's going to be hundreds of podcasts that all sound the same. And a positioning asset that looks and sounds like everyone else's positioning asset is no longer a positioning asset. It's literal noise. So you see, best practice is usually a recipe for being absolutely technically excellent, but ultimately forgettable. And best practice, it kind of creates the illusion of strategy. It's like another aspect of this content marketing piece we've talked about before in this podcast. Content pillars, they're an illusion of strategy. They feel like there's something that is wise and sensible and produces results. But while it feels like strategy, it's actually just production. And production in itself does not get you results. It's a piece of the puzzle. And the thing is, all this best practice advice, it's slightly lethal because it sounds like it's wisdom, but it's wisdom that's being peddled by people that don't actually know the nuance of the results they're trying to get for you. They themselves have followed best practice, and it might have worked on one or two aspects of their production. But having best practice get you some results is not a recipe for universal results. So let's look at some of these best practice framework items then, that we're constantly having repeated to us day after day after day in social media content publish weekly. Cadence is a production metric. It's not a results metric. You fill a calendar consistently and you get consistently good at doing the wrong thing. Grow your audience to increase your conversion rates. Great. So you're telling me that 12,000 wrong listeners is better than 12 absolutely ideal buyers. Are you chasing reach drags you closer towards tyre kickers that are looking for your freebies and have no intention of ever paying you any money for your insight. Keep it short. Respect their time. B2B buying is high consideration. The right buyer will happily give you as much as two hours of their attention and time, providing you give them the answers that they want to inform their buying decision. Now of course you don't want to waffle on for about an hour on something that could very easily be mapped out for them in about 20 minutes. Of course not. What would be the point of that? But the problem is arbitrary durations absolutely amputate the results that you're looking to get. Hook them in the first 15 seconds. Look, I'm guilty of this one myself. It is a decent best practice. I mean the chances are you're reducing drag from listeners to not listeners. Someone hears you setting up within seven to 15 seconds, they're much more likely to stick with your episode than someone that say, talks about walking their dog this morning for about five minutes before they get to the actual point. That's just logical. But that hook them right at the beginning. Best practice advice is literally important from the entertainment and retention farming industries. If you chase the hook too much, you start to sound like one of those creators, you know, the ones you see on YouTube which destroys your authority signal and it actually erodes trust. So it's working opposite to actually converting a buyer book big name guests so they cross promote their audience isn't your buyer. I mean I alluded to this last week when I talked about the well known events marketing company that I had the argument with on LinkedIn where they were trying to tell me that being a guest on a podcast is just as beneficial when you don't have a podcast as being a guest on a podcast when you do is bobbins absolute nonsense. And these people, they're getting paid to give advice on content marketing for Christ's sake. How? It's simple. Being a guest is literally helping someone else to grow their own brand at your expense. And sure, they might give you some assets that you can use on your social media. The problem is you're not the brand being promoted there. You just happen to be connected to the assets. Repurpose everything, be everywhere. Slicing each episode into 15 clips per week just spreads a thinner effort across all your channels, and the chances are your buyer isn't on any one of those channels. It means that your messaging is just becoming decontextualized noise. If I had a pound for every single time I've been asked do clips on social media help grow your podcast? I'd probably have enough money to buy out all these ridiculous AI clip creation companies and get rid of them once and for all. Nobody needs them. So let me talk you through best practice and how it should be approached. Because the thing is, best practice isn't wrong. It's just premature. It's a set of answers to a question that you've probably not yet properly asked. And that question is once again, what is this podcast's job? Once you define the job, best practice becomes an optional tactic that you can accept or reject depending on the job in hand. Skip the job and best practice just literally becomes yet another task you add onto a pile of stuff that's not moving your business forward. If you understand that your podcast's job is to move a buyer's decision from not sure to sign me up and take all my money, then your best practice might well then become have you checked out this episode of the podcast where we talked about the very thing that we discussed on your discovery call? Your best practice becomes the communication. If your podcast's job is to do outreach, then the best practice becomes gather all the relevant bits of contextual data which has emerged from your podcast's history and get that in the eyes and ears of your ideal buyers. If your podcast's job is a credibility, thought leadership play, then the best practice will be get as much content as you can across all your social media channels and make sure that your ideal buyer, as in the events organizers, are seeing it, are hearing it at that point when you've made that decision and figured that out. Best practice goes way beyond whether or not you should talk for seven seconds at the beginning of your episode, or whether you should be releasing weekly instead of monthly. Or what was one of the other ones? Oh, booking big name guests. They cross promote doesn't even come into it. Why would you need to book big name guests if your entire purpose, the total job that your podcast has, is to literally move a buyer from thinking, considering working with you to here's my money. Let me click the link. Guests are irrelevant. In fact, they're a distraction. And of course we cover all this with one of my podnos diagnostics. It's literally how we help you set the destination before you even start the journey so you won't need any best practice advice? Because you know exactly what your podcast job is and you know exactly how to get it to do it, go to podnows.co.uk diagnostic. That's P O-KN O-W-S.co.uk diagnostic It's time for the part of the show where we take questions from the general public, whether they've come through via voicemail or podnos.co.uk voicemail or via email. Neil nealodnows.co.uk and we try and bring some clarity to these relative strangers. This one is from Gareth, who runs a B2B marketing company up in Liverpool. He says, I keep getting told that if I'm not on YouTube or not doing video, my podcast doesn't count. I am a one person marketing team here. Is this true or is this just more nonsense being peddled by LinkedIn gurus? Ah, so you've answered my first question. Where did you hear this rubbish? Obviously it was on LinkedIn. Video is one channel that works for one modality. It's also absolutely fundamentally true. Whatever the mob nests, the younger generations are trying to convince you otherwise. YouTube's own propaganda. Having a video on YouTube does not make it a podcast. It's a video. A podcast, technically, by the letter of the podcasting law, does not exist unless there's an RSS feed pumping that content into podcast apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And it's not a podcast if it can't exist without those platforms having your content fed to them. So, for example, if your show is only on Spotify, technically it's not a podcast, it's just a show on Spotify. If your podcast is only on Apple Podcasts and it's hosted by Apple Podcasts directly, which you can now do, technically it's not a podcast, it's an Apple podcast show. Same is true of YouTube. If I can only find your content on that proprietary platform, it's not a podcast. That bit aside for a lot of B2B video is effort that's being spent in the place where your ideal buyer isn't. So do it. If your job needs it, don't do it. Because a carousel on LinkedIn said if you don't have video, you're not a podcast, they're talking crap. The only scorecard to hold here is wherever they consume that content. Did it move them closer to making a decision to buy from you? YouTube does not change that answer one little bit. It just changes how much work you did to get them there. Hope that helps. If you have a question for me? For founder FAQs again, the voicemail address is podnos.co.uk, voicemail or email me Neil podnos.co.uk. here's this week's quick tip. Make sure you're regularly checking the podcast indexes of Apple Podcasts and Spotify to make sure there are no duplicates of your show. Sometimes this can happen if you change host. Occasionally, RSS feeds get a little bit jumbled up and shows get duplicated within Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Now the problem with this is that you could be stealing your own audience if someone finds your show in Apple Podcasts under OneID. And then there's another show that's getting lots of reviews and ratings. They're technically rating and reviewing a duplicate version of your show that is not getting the care and attention that you're giving to the main show, or at least as it is to you. So just go through Apple Podcasts, do a search for your show, and make sure that only one thumbnail shows up. Do the same in Spotify, and if that's not the case, reach out to the support teams of each of those platforms and kindly ask them to remove the duplicate. Make sure you remove the right one, though. Make sure the one that you get removed is the one that doesn't have all the reviews and ratings on it, because there's nothing worse than than losing all of those reviews and ratings. So I hope this episode was useful. Stop following best practice guidance from some random on LinkedIn who doesn't know you, doesn't know anything about your business, and frankly, probably hasn't even worked on any other podcast but their own. There's always a grift. Make sure you're not caught up in it. If you did find this useful, make sure you share it with another B2B founder or person in charge of a B2B podcast. I'm sure they'll appreciate the insight as well. Until the next episode, good luck with continuing to get better results from your B2B podcast.