← B2B Podcasting Insights - business strategy podcast for founders and brands
B2B Podcasting Insights - business strategy podcast for founders and brands
Your Episode Nobody Shared Was the One That Actually Worked!
00:25:04
Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:01]
A
I want to tell you about a LinkedIn post that I saw just a few days ago. I'm not going to name the person partly out of professionalism. I know, me weird, right? But it's mostly because I don't want to spend any more time with this living rent free. In my head, I will say this. It was about how B2B brands are damaging their credibility by doing the whole cinematic podcast thing. You know, with the swelling music, the dramatic pauses, the. The moody lighting, all the psychological little tricks, and yet they're about supply chain logistics. It was a really well argued post, actually. Very articulate, clear thesis had been thought about and there were specific examples provided and there was good structure to it. I mean, I was engaged. It was the kind of thing that makes you think, yeah, this person really understands the problem that they're presenting to their audience. And I sat there watching it and I listened to it as well, because I wanted to sort of understand whether or not I had the same jarring experience from it in both formats. Spoiler alert. I did. But I was just really blown away thinking, wow, I know this argument really well because I made it myself a few weeks ago on this very podcast with specific analogies that were, let's be real about this, not at all dissimilar from the ones I was now witnessing. Again, now I want to be clear. I didn't feel like this content was stolen from me, at least not in a way that I would want to take it to a tribunal. It was more of a, well, wow, that's a remarkable coincidence of intellectual direction to take with the podcast when an idea wanders off on its own and forgets to tell you where it's going. Now, this new podcast on YouTube alone got 40 likes and several hundred comments. People saying things like, wow, nobody's talking about this. This needs to be said way more. Well, the thing is, I said it on this show weeks before and mostly to a much smaller audience than those that were generating 40 likes and several hundred comments. Not a small audience. Smaller because the original podcast episode, the one that this new episode owed a debt of gratitude for, the inspiration for, was barely shared. This new podcast episode, I tracked it down on LinkedIn. Hundreds of re shares, thousands of comments, something like 40,000 LinkedIn connections. Mine, the original, the OG Nah, 6,000 followers. I don't remember how many likes, but there certainly weren't many shares. Here's the thing though, I'm not angry. I certainly wasn't angry when watching it, and I've not changed my opinion Now I was, and this genuinely surprised even me. Actually, I was quite pleased because if someone thought that my argument was well worth repurposing and plagiarizing, it means the argument's valid. And it means my argument worked. The idea did land. It just landed not in my own content system, but in someone else's. And that is what this episode is going to be all about. Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights. I'm Neil Valio, founder of Podnos Podcasting. We're a podcast agency helping B2B businesses and founders like you to get considerably better results from your B2B podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about why your best episode probably got almost zero shares, what that does and doesn't mean for you, and why publishing is not, and I repeat, not the finishing line in your content story. Let me describe an experience that you may be familiar with. You record an episode, you know while you're recording it that it's gonna be a good one. Your argument's sharp, your examples are specific. You haven't opened it with 45 seconds of welcoming people to the show that have probably experienced being welcomed 40 times beforehand, as if they're brand new to it and haven't been loyal listeners for probably a year now. You listen back and you think, yeah, that's it. Nailed it. This is the one that's going to make a real difference to not only the podcast itself, but my brand in general. So you publish it, you post the links in all the places you go away, you take a breather, you make a cup of tea, and then when you come back to refresh your stats in Captivate Dashboard or wherever you host your podcast, you're expecting it to look a little bit different. Maybe not too dramatically, but subtle at least. You're expecting a graph where everything's pointing up to the top right? But when you hit a five, it doesn't look any different. It looks exactly the same as it did before you went off to make that cup of tea. You have four downloads, at least three of those are from people that are on auto downloads. They probably followed your show six months ago and haven't listened to a single episode yet. Your LinkedIn post announcing the new episode has had two likes, but you're suspicious they might even be bots or maybe even a colleague that's just trying to be supportive. So your brain does what our brains naturally do. It connects the dots in the most self defeating way and concludes, yeah, bruh, your episode failed. Nobody cares. Podcast isn't working. Give up. And none of that's supported by the actual real evidence, because the evidence you have is not. Oh, this episode failed. The evidence you have is this episode just wasn't shared. And I need you to understand those are two completely different things, and confusing them might well be costing you. Here's what actually gets shared in B2B. Podcasting through things like YouTube and also on LinkedIn. Hot takes contrarian headlines, clips of people saying things that makes the audience feel clever just for agreeing with it. The phrase nobody is talking about this, referring to something that literally everyone's talking about. Lists. Bloody hell, the lists. Basically anything that performs insight within the first four seconds, because that's what algorithms love. And it will always generously promote that content before it shows you a video of a dog doing something cute and funny. None of that algorithm stuff is in any way related to the content that genuinely changes how your ideal buyer thinks about their problem. The episode that gets shared is probably the one that confirms what people already believe. It's comfortable, it's affirming. It gives the viewer, the listener the opportunity to go to their major stakeholders and say, I've been saying this for ages. Look what these people are saying. It travels far and wide because it literally requires nothing additional from the listener or the viewer. They just nod along, they feel validated, they click the share button and they feel good about what they've contributed to the world in that given moment. And that's lovely for them, but it's absolutely useless for your pipeline. The episode that actually changes a buyer's decision is usually the one that feels a little bit less comfortable. The one that names a problem that your listener or your viewer specifically has but hasn't been able to articulate to anyone. The one that makes them feel, in, let's be honest about it, a slightly alarming way. Like you've been inside their private board meetings and general office meetings without having been invited. Yeah, in a slightly creepy way. Now, that episode does not get shared. It gets saved. It gets passed around internal offices, but it doesn't do anything publicly. It gets replayed in the car, over, over again. It gets whatsapped to somebody else within the team, usually accompanied by a message saying, have you listened to this? That's not a share, that's a referral. And that's something very different and way more valuable. A referral from the right person at the right time is worth way more than 47 likes and shares on a LinkedIn post. It's worth way more than somebody commenting on YouTube saying, yeah, great insights. Thanks for sharing. Because none of these people were ever going to buy from you. They already know the problem you're solving. What you want is reaction from the people who didn't know the solution to the problem that you're solving. The ones that are going to have those conversations with senior stakeholders and say, we need to hire this person, because they clearly know their stuff. Now back to my Die of a CEO episode. It was specific. It named the person at the center of it, Stephen Bartlett. It took a position that I knew would irritate certain people within that content ecosystem who had spent actual money on their dramatic lighting and all the cinematic intros that they'd invested in. They'd spent money on editors that were literally primed to make this content almost in their sleep. And I made it for these people that were probably feeling a bit triggered that this effort was actually undermining their credibility and it might not be getting them the results that they were hoping it would do. The shares were fine. They were mostly from peers, people like me in the podcasting industry, who are trying to get the best results for their clients. They enjoyed the validation. Then, really slowly, over the next few weeks until now, I started seeing my same thesis appearing in other people's content, including a clip from the long form video. One of my direct competitors, LinkedIn. I'm not going to name this person, but it's almost like they stuck the transcript of my episode into ChatGPT and said, can you make this more Chris? Oops. I just named the person. My bad. Now, I want to be clear. It wasn't word for word the same, just the framing and the conclusion that I presented. Which means the episode worked. The idea was good enough to spread, just not within the same infrastructure in which I was putting it out there. So, to use an analogy, it was like I was presenting some magic beans on my kitchen windowsill. I left the window open and allowed anybody to grab at those beans and do with them what they will. So that's not a content failure. That's a distribution gap. And the difference between those matters enormously, because if you diagnose it as content failure, you're gonna be tempted to go and change the wrong things. Here's the deal. Most B2B podcasters, they treat publishing as almost like the end of their job. They've recorded it, they've edited it, they've published it, they've written the description in their hosting dashboard and on YouTube. They've posted links to that content, and then they're wiping their hands. Yeah, Job done. Brilliant. Go me, pat on the back. And then they wait for the world to notice what they've done. That's usually what doing a podcast looks like. And that process is almost like baking a cake, leaving on your kitchen counter, not on the windowsill, and keeping the window closed, not telling anyone that the cake exists. And then you're wondering why nobody comes along and eats it. The cake does exist. The cake is probably delicious, but nobody knows the cake is there to experience it. So distribution is the part where you get the right content in front of the right people that would definitely engage with it and enjoy it at that given moment. It's a completely separate discipline from making the content. It requires different thinking, different approaches, and, I won't lie to you, a whole different effort. It's why my team at Podnos Podcasting have had to take a couple of years to really get this working and finesse it for our clients. It's why most people trying to do it by themselves give up so quickly. They just skip it because the reward doesn't seem to match the effort. So the specific question is not why didn't more people share this? Because, let's be real, nobody owes you a share. The specific question that you should be asking is, does the person who needs to consume this episode even know that it exists? Because if they find it and they're the right buyer, you know, the one already circling the problem that you're presenting your solution to it. If they've been secretly googling answers to that question, and yet you've just spent 20 minutes explaining it in a better way than Google ever could with its AI results, if that person then finds your episode, they're not going to share it publicly. They're going to book a call. In fact, they're going to protect the information because they know your solution will give them the edge over their competition. So really, the gap between published and consumed by the right person at the right time is really where most B2B podcasting ROI goes to die and without fanfare. And it didn't die because the content was bad. It died because the content didn't know what job it had to do. We're back to that point again, understanding buying triggers, buying decisions, and how to activate them. With your podcast, your content has been pushed into a distribution vacuum, being brilliant at no one in particular. Now, if I'd had the distribution infrastructure in place and the intent when my Diary of a CEO episode went out, the people who found it useful would have found it from me first, before it got repurposed, the referrals would have become shares and I would have had social media validation with an empty bank account. The 47 likes and shares would have come to my post, not somebody else's. And that, friends, is the lesson here. Not make better content. The content was fine. I'm still quite proud of it. But the frame you're looking for is make sure the right people actually feel something and find the content in the first place, knowing full well that taking action on it will give them the competitive advantage. And that might not look like 100 likes on LinkedIn. Time for this week's Founder FAQs and this week's question comes from Denzel and Cardiff, who runs a leadership development consultancy and is in the planning stages of launching his podcast. Here's his voice Note hi Neil, Love the show.
- [17:24]
B
Quick one I can't decide whether to do Seasons or just publish continuously. My gut says seasons feel more structured and easier to promote as a thing. But then I read somewhere that gaps between seasons kill momentum. I've been going back and forth on this for about three weeks now, and my wife says I need to just make a decision and get on with it. She's probably right. Would love your take. Cheers.
- [17:51]
A
Denzel, your wife is absolutely right, and she normally is, isn't she? But that's not really my advice, though, so let me give you something slightly more actionable. Here's the core issue with seasons for B2B podcasts. A season implies a gap, and a gap implies that at some point it's not going to get filled with new content. In other words, your podcast RSS feed is going dark, and a dark feed is. This is very unsaid within the industry, to be honest, but it's kind of a credibility suck. When people go to your podcast and notice no recently updated episodes, they're just going to assume that you gave up. And people that give up don't give off a positive, successful vibe. Now it might be that you've just decided to change direction and you've waited for the next season to bring your podcast back maybe six months down the line. But to the person looking at the feed and seeing no new episodes since October last year, that person's going to oh, they gave up, right? Won't bother following that show then. They're certainly not going to engage with any of the content you've previously published, because it's like deciding whether you want to watch a show that you know was canceled three years ago. On a subconscious level, that person is probably looking at Your podcast that's gone dark six months ago and going, oh well, this seems like a company that doesn't follow through on things. Let's see if there's anyone else out there that is continuing to make content about what they do. So when we're saying about keeping momentum with your podcast, we're not doing it just because, oh well, if you're publishing more frequently, I get paid. There is an element of that with some podcast agencies, but it's more about the fact that we know the only way we can get you results is if you keep publishing content that keeps your feed looking active. And when podcasts take a gap between seasons, the temptation is only too great never to resume. Something always comes along, a new project, a new exciting development within the company. And when that happens, decision makers tend to be could we use that half an hour a week for something more productive? And of course the dopamine's a factor. Once you stop getting those dopamine hits, you become used to that lack of dopamine from the thing. Here's how seasons can work well when your content has a genuinely serialized arc, when episode six directly harks back to episode two and would benefit from being listened to sequentially in a run quite quickly. I don't know, maybe you're covering your business's journey from year one through to year ten. It's a long term plan and you want your quarterly periods within those years to become their own seasons. In which case, yeah, that could work really well. Or even the year as a whole as a season. Again, recipe for success potentially. But if your B2B podcast is like most of them, a run of self contained episodes that happen to share a common theme, there's no good reason to take any kind of break. You're just taking a break because you've seen other people doing it and you feel like that's an okay thing to do. So publish continuously at a pace that you can sustain and that you know you'll enjoy. A fortnightly show that never, ever goes dark will always outperform a show that is seasonal, because let's face it, a show that's seasonal disappears for a couple of months at a time every six months. So go make that decision and your wife will be absolutely relieved that you listen to her once again. You're welcome. All right, the quick tip for this episode. This one is about episodic length and it's going to feel almost offensively simple. Stop padding your episodes out to reach an arbitrary duration. I know you're doing it. I've done it. We've all done it. You said the thing you came to say. Your argument's done. The listener or viewer has everything they need from you. And then you keep talking for another four minutes about stuff because you want to hit that 20 minute marker and somehow 17 minutes feels a little bit short and unfinished. It's almost like you feel like that extra three minutes needs to go out there to justify your followers following you. Don't. Your episode's done. It's ended. You just didn't click stop at the right time. Now your completion rate, which is the number of your listeners that listened all the way through your episode to the end, is one of the most commercially useful signals of what you're putting out there. It tells you whether your ideal audience is engaged with you, or whether they're just really passive. The fastest and easiest way to bring that completion rate up is to know where the episodes naturally have done their job and end it there. Let's be honest about it. More people reaching the end of your episode means more people taking action on your call to action, which is what hopefully brings bread into your bank. All right, so if this episode has left you wondering whether your content is actually reaching the right people, and when it does, doing the right job, or whether it's all just slowly being pushed into a content vacuum, that's exactly what the POD knows podcast Growth Diagnostic is there to achieve for you. It's a single paid session. By the end of it, you'll know what your show's doing, where the gaps are, and how to fill them. The link is in the episode description below, whatever platform you're listening or watching this on. Or you can head directly to podnos.co.uk diagnostic. That's Pod K N O W S. If, on the other hand, you suspect the content itself definitely needs some attention before you even think about what job it's got to do. That's what the audits are for. Again, podnos.co.uk, this time forward slash audits. Until next time. Good luck with your B2B podcast, and if you've recently published something you've heard nothing more about, just sit back with it a little while. It's probably working. It's just it's working offline and isn't represented by social media shares. Thanks so much for checking out this episode, and I look forward to speaking to you again on the next one.