Jason (00:00)
Think hard about the because the first 48 hours of a podcast life are incredibly important to
know, determine how much it's going to stick and how much momentum it has early on. you want to be like ramping up to the day of launch where, on all channels, email, web ads, whatever to say that this thing is coming.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:19)
Welcome to a new episode of the Science Marketer Podcast. Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Jason Bradwell on the show. Jason is a founder of B2B Better, a video podcast agency for B2B service providers. Today, we are diving into podcasting and specifically how we can use it as a marketing tool to promote your science company. Hi, Jason. Nice to have you on the show.
Jason (00:44)
It's a real pleasure and thank you so much for inviting me. I love talking about this kind of stuff and I love chatting with you, so this is going to be really fun conversation.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:53)
So can you start by telling us a bit about your background and your experience producing podcasts in B2B?
Jason (01:00)
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I consider myself an audiophile today, but I haven't always been. For 10 years, I worked in B2B marketing across a variety of industries, but predominantly in the enterprise media sector. So helping kind of leagues, teams, federations, broadcasters, telecommunications companies build the next generation of fan engagement products, you know, and
these businesses I work for ran a predominantly sales led go to market. And so as a marketer within those businesses, my job really entailed, you know, helping define a better positioning and messaging strategy, because often we're doing a lot of things for a lot of different people. So where do we focus? And two, you know, equipping ourselves and executive team to go out there and sell better. And that was predominantly done through thought leadership. And so whilst working for these companies, I launched a number of
podcast, video podcast, webinar, newsletter, of media programs that we were able to demonstrate, you know, kind of tangible ROI off the back of through a strategic approach to the content itself and its distribution. You know, one example, you know, we were interview members of our ICP on our podcast. And then yes, use that as an opportunity to build a relationship with those target customers.
but then also be really strategic in terms of packaging that content and distributing it on a kind of one-to-one, one-to-few ABM strategy to all the other members of our target audience. And after doing that for five years, I decided to set up my own shop. And now that's what we do full-time. We work with B2B service and solution providers across a variety of sectors, including life sciences, and we help them build podcasts, the drive pipeline.
Joachim Eeckhout (02:43)
So on your website, your company basically explains that you're focusing on helping B2B brands turn podcasts into pipeline. So can you explain what this means to you and why podcasts in B2B are so different than in B2C, let's say?
Jason (02:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's become a little bit cliche in marketing circles to say, Hey, you know what we should do launch a podcast. It's almost as cliche as like I joined a new role as a VP of marketing. I'm going to rebrand the website. And what we see happening a lot is B2B brands will launch a podcast or a video show or something like that. And they'll do it for a couple of episodes, see the download numbers are fairly small and give up.
And ultimately it's a failed vanity project. And I believe for B2B Better is not that this happens because the medium itself is flawed, but rather the kind of strategic approach that the brand is applying to the medium doesn't cut the mustard, right? It's not given enough deep thought around both the content itself and its distribution. And so what we do with many of our clients,
is we will sit down with them. We will get a deep understanding of, who is your target audience? What are your primary messages? Where are you currently seeing success and failure in marketing? What is it we're trying to achieve as an overarching marketing objective? And use all of that information to develop a content marketing, you know, a content and distribution podcast strategy that's going to get them to where they want to go. And sometimes that can manifest itself in literally pulling up
the funnel, you know, the customer journey for that brand and walking through how at each stage of the funnel in creating this one piece of podcast content, we can, you know, engineer, extract moments from that content that can sit at every stage across the funnel, right? In turn, playing a more significant role in driving pipeline. Cause when people think about podcasts, they think it's like brand awareness, know, it's all top of funnel.
We'll get loads of downloads, loads of people who will know who we are. And then they'll go to our website and kind of fall into one of our into one of our regular kind of funnel strip campaigns, whatever it is. Actually, we believe that from this one asset, you can create something that sits across the entire customer journey. But you have to be strategic in terms of how you approach it. Because, you know, it influences how do you brand the podcast at large? What kind of guests are you interviewing? What questions are you asking them?
What does the production look like in terms of the format and the segments that you're deploying? How do we distribute this content? Not just across social media, but also across email, websites, sales teams, at events through partnerships, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's what we're talking about when we're talking about podcasts driving pipeline, it's taking that strategic view. How are B2B podcasts different to B2C? I think B2B podcasts...
tend to skew more towards the educational side of things rather than the entertainment side of things. That being said, there's huge opportunity for brands out there, particularly brands that are in, dare I say, boring industries or misunderstood industries, to break from the status quo of what is considered boring B2B marketing and take on more of a edutainment kind of role. But yeah, that's a little bit about how we think about that.
Joachim Eeckhout (06:05)
And a quick additional question on this. When you work with a client on a new podcast, if I understand you also create a totally new branding, not necessarily with their own brand in front, so you can kind of put it in the background. Correct?
Jason (06:22)
Absolutely. Every show that we work on needs its own identity, both visual and audio. Now, it's really important that we work with the client to understand what does the brand identity look like at a top level? What does your style guide say? How does your tone of voice sound, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And then we will use that information to distill it into a bespoke identity for the podcast, the video podcast that we're developing. It should feel coherent.
You know, it should feel like if I'm listening to the podcast from B2B Better, it doesn't look wildly or sound wildly different to what I'd expect to see on the website or across other content formats. But yes, a big part of our work is creating that identity for the show.
Joachim Eeckhout (07:07)
Yeah. And I guess it's helping to attract also a broader audience. Like if you would call it the Mercedes podcast instead of a fan of cars podcast. mean, you can basically get more attention because it's a broader title or broader branding, right? Yeah. Great. So let's talk about life sciences because you've been also working with a podcast in life sciences
Jason (07:25)
Absolutely right, yep, you got it.
Joachim Eeckhout (07:33)
So since 2023, you're producing a podcast called Data in Biotech for the company CorrDyn Can you tell me more about this podcast and what you learned from it?
Jason (07:45)
Absolutely. I mean, when I think about the portfolio of shows that we that we work on, and we work across, you know, a variety of different B2B industries, data and biotech from from CorrDyn kind of, you know, stands out as one of the shows that I'm most proud of working on. And the reason for that is because, you know, it was very clear right from the get go that, you know, the host Ross, James, the CEO and myself had like a shared vision on
What is it we're trying to achieve here, which is, you know, positioning, CorrDyn and the company, in the biotech industry, more effectively. And, you know, really wanting to create something that was going to serve the community, you know? cause I think that's sometimes where brands get a bit mixed up. They launch a podcast for themselves, you know, they launch a podcast that the executive team and the board are going to enjoy listening to.
you know, that's not really going to be interesting to anyone else outside of your kind of immediate bubble. You know, with CorrDyn it's, we wanted to create something that was going to service the biotech industry and specifically data professionals working in that biotech industry. And so with this kind of shared vision, we were able to go out and, you know, take a really targeted approach to, you know, who are the guests that we're interviewing? What are the kind of strategic and technical questions that we're asking them? And,
you know, being really thoughtful in terms of how we get that content in front of the community that beforehand, you know, we had, you know, some foothold in, you know, still, still there was a, there was a journey to take. and, you know, now I'm really pleased that, you know, the, the show performs incredibly well. It's found a really kind of defined, you know, audience that tune in, you know, week in week out. we've had moments where
You know, we've seen the podcast being shared in online communities, completely independent of us, promoting it in those communities. You know, we've had moments where people have come up to us at events when they've heard, this is CorrDyn and, I listened to data and biotech. And, you know, of course you look at the numbers and you look at the pipeline, all that stuff, but, you know, that kind of community engagement that we're seeing being built around data and biotech. It's really, you know,
a prime example of what great B2B podcasting looks like.
Joachim Eeckhout (09:55)
Well, that's actually a question I wanted to ask you later about metrics. But I think that's a good time now. How do you measure, the success? So you started mentioning metrics, but how do you really, in this case, with CorrDyn, what's the factor to say, OK, this is a success?
Jason (10:13)
Yeah, absolutely. And metrics are a really important part of all of this because, you know, podcasts are notoriously hard to measure return on investment. A couple of observations, you know, from, from, from, but all the clients that we service, you know, downloads and views are typically looked at as like the gold standard metric, you know, if, downloads are high and, you know, increasing, then we're winning. This is often a bit of a red herring, you know, it's a bit of a
it can kind of lead you down a path that ends up with you believing the show isn't necessarily performing when the reality is, that, you know, the show's success is dependent on the context in which it operates. So, you know, if you're trying to sell deep sea drilling equipment and you launch a podcast to service that market, your total addressable audience is going to be relatively small. So looking at downloads actually doesn't really tell you anything. Actually, what's more important to look at
If you're looking for just like one number, it's consumption rate. How much on average is the podcast being consumed by the people that are listening to it? Because I'd rather have 100 CTOs listening to my data podcast that are consuming 80 % of it on average than have 10,000 people that are listening to it and they're churning out after five minutes. So consumption rate, which you can find in Apple podcasts and Spotify, the kind of analytics platforms there.
and on YouTube as well. That I think is a better kind of quantitative marker to measure early success. Other metrics can be a little bit more qualitative. For instance, if you were launching a podcast with the goal of using it as part of an account-based marketing strategy, because you're trying to move into more enterprise accounts. If you could run an eight-episode season and say that at the end of it, you now have
you know, four to six new enterprise relationships due to the people that you've interviewed on the show. And you have developed a sequence of events after you've finished the interview that's going to, you know, continue to build on that relationship, nurture that relationship and ultimately move them to the point of conversion. Well, there are four enterprise relationships that you didn't have before. So that is a success. you know, maybe it's marketing and sales alignment, you know, marketing over here doing one thing, sales are over here doing another thing. They're not talking.
The podcast can be a unifier, you know, because if we're collaborating on the guests that we are interviewing and we're collaborating on the questions that we want to be asking that are ultimately going to fuel the content that sales are sending out both via email and on their social media and they're going to events and they can say, hey, check out this conversation I had with VP of digital over there. You know, this brings teams together, right? And there are metrics that you can kind of attach to that relationship that can prove success.
So all I'd say is like, there is not a silver bullet. There's not a golden rule that this one metric stands alone as the thing that you should be looking for. It depends on what are you trying to build? Who are you trying to target? And how are you deploying all of this? And over what timeframe? Like all of that is gonna determine how you should be measuring success.
Joachim Eeckhout (13:23)
I never thought about it this way, especially like with actually finding clients through the podcast. think that's very smart for B2B companies. So yeah, that's a really good insight. If we look more like at the context of podcasts in a scientific audience, like life sciences, what are the key strategies to keep in mind for someone who's creating a podcast
in this type of environment where science and maybe technology is very important?
Jason (13:51)
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things that come to mind. Having spent obviously time trying to create content for the scientific community with, you know, myself personally not being part of the scientific community. I guess the things that I've learned are one, you know, the scientific community can see through BS pretty quickly, right? And, you know, coming from a sales and marketing background and like operating in the sales tech, martech spaces.
There's a lot of, you know, kind of, there's a lot of fluff and not a whole lot of like substance in a lot of the content that I'm seeing in B2B marketing and sales circles. but you can kind of get away with it because everyone's like slapping each other on the back and you know, this is gray and go, go you and you know, we're all, we're all happy and excited all the time. in the scientific community, like if you put out a podcast, which is like a thinly veiled like sales pitch.
people are gonna see through that immediately and they're gonna never tune back in, right? So you have to be very deliberate around like, what is the message you're trying to tell and how do you articulate that in a way that's servicing the community? Cause you only get one shot and then people wouldn't, there's enough content out there for people to be consuming. They will give you a shot, but if you let them down, they ain't coming back. And why I bring this up is because, know, I'm sure marketers are listening. I mean, I know marketers are listening to this podcast.
And, you know, maybe going back to their executive teams or their sales teams and saying, Hey, maybe this is something we should think about. And what you may be facing is, you know, then the executive team sales team come back to you and saying, Oh yeah, like, you know, we can, we can like, you know, really push our products, push our products and our services on the podcast and people are going to love it. They're just not, you know, like lead with value first. Um, I found that the kind of deeper you can go, depending on your audience, right? Like the deeper you can go kind of.
technically and find guests that can talk to the technical nature of their work, but frame that in a strategic context. I found those episodes tend to perform very well. And finally, the community is so strong, the scientific community is so strong. If you are using guests, if you're creating a show where you're interviewing guests, equipping those guests with the tools.
to promote the podcast on your behalf into their community, or their sliver of the community is incredibly important. And again, this is across all the shows we work on, but where we see that step change growth is where we find a great guest, it's got a great story, that's influential in the community, and it's incredibly easy for them to then go out once the episode is live and say, here are some clips and here's some copy and here's a blog post that they've written. It's really easy for me, I don't have to create anything.
I can just go, go, go, go, go. So yeah, a couple of observations on success in scientific communities or podcasting.
Joachim Eeckhout (16:43)
Yeah. I've seen several examples of podcasts produced by pharma companies most of the time, who are focusing on patient advocacy. So you have a few examples. have Argenx for example, doing one called Untold Stories, which is focusing on autoimmune diseases. You have the Japanese pharma company, Eisai which has actually a lot of podcasts in different areas. And the last one is on Alzheimer's disease.
It's a bit different from what you're doing, this kind of positioning. So what do you think of this strategy of using a podcast to help patients understand their condition better?
Jason (17:23)
Yeah, so I'll be honest, you know, I hadn't I hadn't heard of those those those podcasts before, before you shared them with me before this call. And as you say, it's, it's a bit different to what we do at B2B better. And that, you know, we work with B2B B2B firms, you know, who are trying to attract a B2B audience. I guess my takeaway from it, you know, was what these pharma companies are doing is they're like, they're investing in servicing the
the, again, using that word, like the community, you know, they're creating resources and materials that help people understand that conditions better and feel part of something bigger, you know, I, my grandmother had Alzheimer's towards the end of her life. And, you know, obviously, it's a state like it was a stage, you know, there were stages to it, right? There was the early stages where
things weren't quite right. still understood what was happening, but she was still generally, you know, coherent and then towards the end, you know, you know, was not. And I know in the early stages, she suffered from feeling loneliness, you know, and like, not really understanding what was happening to her or why this was happening to her. You know, I imagine this kind of patient advocacy approach for these pharma companies as a way of
you know, servicing that community and helping them feel like they're part of something bigger, that kind of like support, that support network. So yeah, I mean, I'm all for it, you know, is the bottom line.
Joachim Eeckhout (18:49)
There is maybe also a level of education on the therapies as well, the treatments available, these kind of things. So I think it's definitely in this direction of educating the community.
Jason (18:56)
Yeah.
Absolutely. Because you know, we've all been to the the the the doctors in the hospital, hopefully not often, but you know, we've all been there. And sometimes you can go in and you know, you're sat across the room from from a health professional. And you know, you're just hoping that you're able to articulate what's wrong to them, and they understand and they can give you the right advice. And, you know, my wife is great for this, like, if there's anything wrong with me or my daughter or her, she'll do a ton of research, not medical
which will do a ton of research ourselves, so she can go and equipped and understanding, least like with questions, you know, like I heard about this, I read about this, is this something that would be relevant to me? And she can have more of a thoughtful conversation about it all. And I think these podcasts that you've highlighted, you know, play a role in that as well, as you say.
Joachim Eeckhout (19:47)
Yeah, definitely.
So going back to the B2B side now, what are the most common challenges that life science companies face when they launch a podcast?
Jason (19:57)
Yeah, I mean, I think...
Not knowing where to start is a typical problem. know, like I think there's a lot of appetite for the medium, particularly with marketers who understand that this can play a more significant role across the entire kind of marketing strategy. But, you know, not really understanding, you know, how do I go from step zero to step one, you know, and then that not understanding kind of leads to inertia and not doing anything.
And so what I'll say is like, you don't need to work with an agency like B2B Better in order to get started. know, equipment wise, you don't have to spend a huge amount of money to produce a podcast that sounds great. You know, spend like 10 % of your time thinking about the production and 90 % of your time thinking about the content and the distribution strategy. You know, like, what's the premise? How's it going to differentiate from anything else that's currently out there in the market? Cause we just don't want to be contributing to the same noise. You know,
How do we bring on the right guests that are going to get us awareness for the show right from the get go? What kind of questions that we want to be asking that are thoughtful and differentiated from other questions that are being asked? Another thing that people don't spend a lot of time thinking about is podcasts by brands often exist to showcase the point of view in the people within the brand itself.
But if you're doing an interview based podcast, you'll spend like 95 % of the time talking to the guest and not have any of the spotlight yourself. And so thinking about, you know, how do we incorporate some sort of segment or engineer some sort of moment where we can showcase our expertise because that's important. You know, all of these are like kind of barriers to entry for a lot of brands who believe in the medium, but aren't just quite sure where to get started.
it's not as hard as you think. you know, offer I give to everyone is, know, we do these kind of like lunch and learns completely free where we'll sit down with you and we'll walk through, you know, what are the five steps in terms of launching a podcast that's gonna stand out. And so if there's anyone listening to this that, you know, would benefit from that, you know, I'm sure you'll put my details in the show notes. They can certainly reach out and be happy to.
Joachim Eeckhout (22:10)
Yeah.
Great. And is there any type of format or structure? you mentioned, for instance, know, interview based podcast. Do you think there is any format that works better in the context of science focused podcast?
Jason (22:29)
I mean, it's, I think the format that you adopt is going to be determined by the, by the goals that you're trying to achieve. Right. So like if brand awareness is the ultimate goal, then adopting a format, which is more of an interview based and like targeting guests that have influence in your industry, that's going to be the most important thing because then you want them to go out there and share it. And that's going to get you that kind of like early brand awareness traction.
if it's more about like, you know, establishing your credibility as a brand, then it's just kind of like lower down the funnel, right? It's more of that kind of like, you know, consideration phase to conversion. Then maybe you want to adopt a format that takes more of a narrative approach where, maybe there's a, maybe there's a, maybe there's a, there's an interview with someone in the podcast, but it's
you know, cut in with a with a commentary or a narrative from the brand itself. A couple of examples of what I mean by that for anyone who's interested. My podcast B2B Better, we do something similar to that. Like I'll interview a guest for half an hour, only really 10 minutes of the interview makes into the podcast and the remaining 20 minutes is just me talking about some of the stuff that they've said and things that I'm observing in the industry and what have you.
Another great one is the Noiser podcast, a short history of, very different to science, but like they'll do a, you know, an hour long episode on something from history and it will all be narrative driven, but interjected with short five minutes of segments from, from some academic that they've interviewed on the topic. some shows, you know, are good just with the host, the brand themselves, you know, we're about to launch a show, not in the scientific sector.
where there are four hosts from the brand, you know, having a water cooler chat about various topics in their industry. And the objective there is to show the brand's personality by putting the people within that brand at the front and center. And so yeah, format wise, I would just say like, take it back to the goals. What are you trying to achieve and allow that to determine what the show ultimately looks like.
Joachim Eeckhout (24:42)
And let's talk about the promotion. So how do you promote and grow a podcast in the small B2B niche?
Jason (24:49)
Yeah, I actually think that this is a concern that a lot of brands have that is somewhat unnecessary because, you know, there's always a fear we're to launch it and it's just going to fall a bit flat. In my experience, the further down you can niche, actually the higher the potential, you will have a show that sticks. It's really hard to launch a marketing show, for example, because there are just so many of them out there.
But when you look at biotech or life sciences or energy and utilities or whatever, like niche industry, the competition is far fewer, right? So you've got a far better opportunity to stand out. But to answer your question directly, which is like, how do you distribute a show? Think hard about the launch, because the first 48 hours of a podcast life are incredibly important to
know, determine how much it's going to stick and how much momentum it has early on. You want to be, you know, you want to be like ramping up to the day of launch where, you know, three or four days before the episodes drop, you've got teasers going out, you're tagging guests, you're firing on all channels, email, web ads, whatever to say that this thing is coming. Launch with three episodes minimum, because when guests
Listen to the first podcast. Obviously, the goal is that they love it, which I'm sure they will. And then they want to consume more. They don't want to be waiting for like another week, two weeks, three weeks to get it. So launch with three episodes. Think hard about the category that you're listing your podcast as in the directories. Business and marketing are really hard to jump out in. But maybe if you position it as a news podcast, there's less competition there.
you know, that gets you in the rankings higher, which then gives you a soundbite or something to shout about, on the days after the launch. so, so that's launch and then, know, beyond launch, guess the key to successful distribution is cadence, you know, set, set one and stick to it. audiences will expect you to do what you say you're going to do. so publishing an episode every week and then.
not doing it for a month and then coming back for a couple of weeks, it just is disjointed and horrible and it's going to lose your audience. I would say that sales teams are often under tapped in B2B in distributing podcasts. you know, bringing sales in early on in the process and making sure they understand what you're trying to achieve and how you're to go about doing it and making them feel part of the journey so that they can be forwarding sharing.
throwing this content out at their networks is an under tap channel. Ads is another thing we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about, and specifically thought leadership ads, particularly on LinkedIn. You don't need to spend a huge amount of money in order to get traction. But if you are going to spend money on LinkedIn when it comes to podcasts, promote the posts of the people that are sharing the content, right? So like if you have a host that's posting the content on their LinkedIn channel,
throw the money behind that, not against, if you have to make a choice, not against the post that the brand itself is putting out. But yeah, I can keep kind of like reeling off tactics in terms of distribution and launch. But again, I'll tie it back to, it all depends on the goal that you're trying to achieve, right? And who you're trying to reach and what stage of the funnel or what stages of the funnel you're trying to service. Like that's gonna determine where you put your distribution dollars.
Joachim Eeckhout (28:08)
So I have two quick follow up questions on what you said. So the launch period, as you said, like you have to go big basically when you launch, like what type of downloads, like number of downloads you should expect like realistically. Cause I know it's very hard. So what's your expectation?
Jason (28:26)
Yeah, I mean, like, it comes back to my point around, like downloads being a bit of a red herring, you know, like, and but I understand it because when you know, market is reporting into an executive and executive wants to see a dashboard with numbers and like that number is green and the graph is like going up and to the right and like, yeah, okay. So I wouldn't say there's like, you know, there's not like a benchmark, like if you get above this number, things are great. And if you get below this number, things are terrible, because it would be determined by, know, what size of audience do you currently already have?
like that you can be servicing this content to, you know, who is the target audience and like how many of them are there out there. But there are some numbers from Buzzsprout that can be used as a bit of a guide. I think at the last time I checked, anything more than 120 downloads in the first seven days puts you in the top 50 % of podcasts globally.
anything more than 240 and the numbers may they move around a bit but it's around these kind of like lines puts you in the top 25 % and anything above 480 puts you in the top 10%. So you know, use that if you will as a guide like when you're reporting after the first couple of days to a week of your podcast launch, you know, when you you know, to say to to say to the exec team or the other stakeholders, hey, we're in the top 50 25 10%. But but couple that with
other metrics of no like consumption rate. You know, like I'd say if your consumption rate is 85%, but you only get like 100 downloads, I'd be saying to my executives, we should be really happy with this because like, this is a res we've got resonance, you know, we've got stickiness, like people care about this. I can fix reach, give me ad budget, I'll get you as much reach as you possibly want. Ask me to fix resonance, like people are churning out after 20%. I might have go back to the drawing board.
So, you know, like, just keep it contextual and keep it tied to the overarching objectives that you're trying to achieve.
Joachim Eeckhout (30:23)
Yeah, this was actually my second question about paid acquisition. And I think you answered it basically. This is a way to solve your reach issues. If you don't have enough reach you can always put more money and get the downloads. But you answered it really well. think you have to think about stickiness as well. So yeah.
Jason (30:43)
Yeah, and to be honest, like, you in order to solve reach ads is the easiest way. Because you know, the more money you put in, the more people that are going to see it. But for those brands that don't have budget, you know, for ads, the other things I'd be thinking about in the context of reach are, you know, the guests making sure they know when it's going out, and they have assets available to them that they're going to be able to promote it and you're really on them like
Joachim Eeckhout (30:48)
Yeah.
Jason (31:10)
share, share, share, share, share, like this is really important. And most of them are always willing to do that. Your colleagues within the business, you know, making sure that they're all aware that this thing is happening and that they commit to sharing it across their channels. If you have brand partnerships with events or trade media, you know, if you spend, I remember, you know, a company I used to work at, we used to spend like 10 grand or something for
some sort of like, you know, like email banner. And we never changed it. It was just like we kept signing the check and they kept publishing the banner. You know, think about maybe picking up the phone to your trade partner and saying like, Hey, we're launching this podcast and we'd really like to align the launch with the next email blast that you're to put out on our behalf. Here's the link. Here's the QR code, whatever. So, launch is incredibly important. And on the day of in the days and on the day of launch, you want to be just
focusing all the marketing channels that you have at your disposal on that launch. Paid is great if you've got it, but if you don't, there are other ways to get
Joachim Eeckhout (32:12)
Great. Are there any emerging trends in podcasting that you think are important for companies to know?
Jason (32:19)
Yeah, there's a couple. mean, YouTube is becoming incredibly important. It's the second largest search engine in the world, obviously, and they're really going hard on the podcasting front. I believe actually it may have overtaken Apple and Spotify as the number one podcasting platform of choice. So, you know, if you're distributing a podcast, YouTube absolutely needs to be one of the channels. And ideally, it's video.
You know, we're seeing this trend in podcasting where, you know, more and more brands are when talking about launching a podcast, really what they have in their mind is a video show, you know, because the video that they capture from it can be just sweat, sweated harder than an audio only program. You can make YouTube shorts. You can publish the full length interview on your website. Yeah, you you can, you can turn it into ads. Like you can do a lot more, a lot more with
So if you are launching a podcast video first for sure Other trends I think a lot of people get hung up on production value and absolutely, you know, like there is something to be said about really high quality like polished Material by video material and there's place for that But I don't think it should come at the expense of like spending six months sitting on something until it goes out, you know people have a
higher than you would expect tolerance for content that maybe doesn't look as polished as you would like it to be. But the story, the message, the insight, whatever it is, is really top class. So, you know, I think that's another trend that we're seeing. You we want video, we want the production to be as high as possible, but we want it also out there in the world. And yeah, so those are a couple of the trends that we're seeing.
Joachim Eeckhout (34:07)
Okay, then last question. What resources do you recommend for people who want to explore the topic of podcasts further?
Jason (34:14)
I will use this as a plug. So, thank you. So we have the B2B Better podcast, which I'd highly recommend checking out to learn more about podcasting, but also just B2B marketing at large and doing so at kind of like enterprise service led businesses. I've run a weekly office hours on LinkedIn, which is usually on a Tuesday at 4pm UK time. And that's really an opportunity for anyone thinking about podcasting to kind of come and ask me questions.
Joachim Eeckhout (34:16)
You can.
Jason (34:40)
Of course, can also reach out to me on LinkedIn and I will certainly get back to you. Other resources. There's a book I've got here, which I don't know if people are going to be watching this or they're listening to it, but I'm going to pull it up. It's called Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel. And so this is a really great book for anyone who's interested in storytelling. basically goes behind, it was written, I think in the early 2000s. It's all comic book style.
And it goes behind the scenes at This American Life from NPR and other kind of like famous radio shows of the time. And it's just like a really fantastic read, entertaining, engaging read in like what goes into like audio storytelling. So I highly recommend checking that out. And just listen to podcasts, know, like consume as much content as you can. I never advocate for people to develop an even
unhealthier relationship with social media. like, you know, like, I've created accounts, I've gotten rid of all my personal accounts on social media, other than LinkedIn. And I've got now just accounts, which are just, you know, shows that I follow that I'm just, you know, I want to see what they're doing. I want to get ideas. I want to feel that creativity. The more you listen to the more you read, the more you watch, you know, the more ideas you're going to have. And like, those ideas, I don't believe there's original ideas anymore. There's only like,
you know, evolutions of existing ideas that are transferred from one place to another, right? And so, you know, what can you listen to in life sciences that's going to influence your podcast in, you know, supply chain or vice versa? You know, how does a host in on a podcast that's talking about fashion, engage their audience that we can adopt in our podcast about, you know, the pharmaceutical industry. So the more you can consume,
the better you will be able to output is my belief.
Joachim Eeckhout (36:32)
Thanks for the recommendations. So that brings us to the end of today's episode. Thanks a lot, Jason, for joining us today and sharing your insights.
Jason (36:42)
I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on.
Joachim Eeckhout (36:45)
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