Building a B2B Podcast and Making it Work

Podcasts are becoming more popular each day (there are more than a million podcasts and more than 30 million episodes available). So it's not surprising that marketers are deciding to create a B2B podcast as a strategy to reach their buyers.

But how do you start a B2B podcast and how do you make it work?

That is the topic on this episode of the Modern Marketing Engine podcast with my guest Rachel Clapp Miller, Vice President of Marketing and Digital Engagement at Force Management. 

Force Management is a B2B sales effectiveness consulting firm that helps its clients define sales solutions and create management tools that produce measurable results. In her role, Rachel manages communication and content generation that drive leads and client engagement. 

She is also the host of The Audible Ready Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and revenue-driving executives, who share their best insights on how a focus on sales effectiveness can help companies increase revenue, improve sales margins and gain market share.

 

Listen to this episode as Rachel tells us how she started the podcast and those factors that have made it successful.

The Evolution of a B2B Podcast

The Audible Ready Podcast was born organically, almost by accident. 

Rachel was in charge of content marketing, blogging regularly, posting on social media and running demand generation activities.

"I needed to get into the heads of the subject matter experts," Rachel says. "So I started scheduling regular content chats with co-founder John Kaplan. We had conversations every other week about sales planning, pipeline, whatever it was we were producing content on." 

Rachel decided to record these conversations so she could listen to them later, but soon realized that she had a B2B podcast on her hands. So she kept recording the interviews as a podcast without telling John that she planned to publish them… A risk that paid off!

After producing and editing some of the interviews, however, Rachel asked for the official green light to make the interviews an actual podcast. Fortunately, she got the approval and the podcast launched in 2015 as The Force Management Podcast. 

Although people liked it, originally it was just a hobby and not a regular production of content. 

However, as the company was growing, the podcast evolved. Rachel evaluated the marketing tactics and realized the podcast was a low hanging fruit, an effective B2B marketing tool they could leverage. So she hired a writer for the marketing team to maximize resources and also contracted an outside company to edit and publish the podcast.

Rachel realized that since 2015, B2B podcasts had grown exponentially and to compete, Force Management had to take their podcast to the next level. That's why in 2020 they did a complete rebranding, changing the name to The Audible Ready Podcast.

The Goals of a B2B Podcast

As a B2B marketer, how do you measure the impact your podcast has on your business? 

The first thing is to set some goals, whether it is lead generation, sales enablement or branding.

For Rachel and her team, the goal is to increase visibility and brand awareness.

"There are many sales consulting firms, so we need to differentiate ourselves, and the podcast helps us do that," Rachel says. "We sell to the C-suite and high-level sales leaders on the go. We want to give them different avenues to find us, other than the newsletter." 

The podcast also serves to remain top of mind with their target audience, in this case, sales reps, who are the users of their training programs.

Furthermore, they have integrated the podcasts as added content to their training program, which not only increases the audience but serves as a tool to reinforc