Last year Front Lines produced more than 1000 podcast episodes. About half of these were part of our own owned-media strategy and the other half were produced for our B2B tech clients who pay for our podcast-as-a-servicesolution. In total these episodes generated over 2 million downloads.
Here are the top lessons learned from producing 1000+ episodes in 2023. Keep in mind, these lessons are written through the lens of niche B2B podcasting for early-stage technology companies.
Lesson #1: Diversify episode formats:The interview format is great. Getting the chance to interview your ideal target customers leads to quality content and most importantly, it’s the starting point of a commercial relationship. But there’s one downside to this format: the host (normally the founder or CEO) rarely has a chance to showcase their own expertise, perspectives, and thought leadership.
Mid-last year we started experimenting with alternative episode formats. One of the formats we’re seeing work is what we call the Executive Monologues. Instead of the standard interview format, with this format, the host dives deep into a specific topic during a 3-5 minute long talking-head style video. This is then turned into a podcast episode and repurposed for social media. These episodes combined with the standard interview are the perfect combination.
Lesson #2: Become the voice of a profession/discipline: There are a lot of podcasts out there and many more will be launched in the coming years. If you want to stand out, you must niche down. Starting a podcast that aims to attract an audience of Chief People Officers is not a novel idea in 2024. There are many podcasts targeting them. But there are much fewer podcasts that are serving, for example, the highly specific niche of HR and recruiting leaders in healthcare.
This is the type of niche you should serve. It should feel so small and targeted it should make you a little uncomfortable. Your job is to service this niche in a way that no one else can — neither a traditional media company nor a competitor.
One good place to look when targeting your niche is for emerging job titles. Gainsight is a great example of this. They witnessed the Customer Success Manager title emerging and doubled down on serving the Customer Success discipline before anyone else was dedicating serious resources to it.
This is the big opportunity: become the voice of a highly specific profession. Celebrate the profession, give people in the community a platform, and help evangelize the profession forward.
The shows we’ve launched over the years that have been the most successful have all aligned with this concept.
Lesson #3: Prioritize audience quality over quantity: We constantly monitor and optimize for audience growth but we’ve found there’s a downside to chasing growth. It’s very easy to make strategic decisions to drive growth but potentially attract the wrong audience.
For example, for a cybersecurity podcast, our client’s Board was obsessed with growth so we expanded the topics of the podcast and brought on cybersecurity influencers/thought leaders. The audience numbers skyrocketed but there was one problem — their product is actually used by a very specific member of the security team. Previously we had focused on interviewing just people from that area of the security team and that’s why the audience growth was somewhat small: the show was hyperspecific.
After some negative feedback from the audience who felt like the podcast was no longer speaking to them, we retreated and went back to the core focus.
This may seem obvious but it’s an incredibly important lesson. As you launch a podcast the inevitable question comes up: how many people are listening? It’s a well-intentioned question but it’s the wrong question. The far more important question is: who is listening?
You are not building a true crime podcast with an audience TAM in the tens of millions. You are building a niche B2B podcast (especially if you follow the advice in lesson 2). Getting 250 people to listen to your podcast, week after week, can transform your entire GTM. Don’t let internal pressures to show audience growth come at the cost of serving a niche audience of the exact buyers you want to build a relationship with and eventually sell your technology to.
Lesson #4: Be inspired by Mr. Beast, not B2B competitors: For a long time, people seemed to be okay with B2B content being boring and dry because, well, it’s B2B. But the lines between B2B and B2C are blurring. Brands are realizing that the B2B buyer they are targeting also happens to be a human outside of work hours and in that time, they are engaging with content on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. To actually capture the attention of B2B buyers today, content must look much more like the types of content they engage with in their daily lives.
As you look for inspiration, look to content creators like Mr. Beast and the content you see on Instagram or TikTok. This content is captivating, easy to consume, and highly engaging. In other words, everything most B2B content is not.
Most importantly, get inspired by their business model, especially the new model many creators are pursuing. They are monetizing their audience by building and selling their own products. Logan Paul’s Gatorade competitor will do over $1.2 billion in revenue last year and Mr. Beasts chocolate bars will do $500 millionin revenue.
The playbook these creators are running is similar to the traditional media playbook: create content to attract an audience, then monetize that audience. Traditional media companies monetize by selling ads and subscriptions while creators are monetizing by building and selling their own products. The goal of your podcast is the same: you are building an audience with the long-term objective of selling your technology to your audience.
Lesson #5: Build a media brand, not just a podcast: Your podcast should not just be mixed in with all your other blog content. Your podcast should be its own brand and that brand should have a different objective and purpose than your primary brand.
This lessons comes from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s 95-5 rule: Only 5% of your target market is in market to buy at any given time. 95% are not. This means they will be largely immune to your traditional sales and marketing efforts. This is where your media brand comes in. Your media brand creates content to serve the 95%. The content builds and nurtures a relationship with that audience so when the time is right, your primary company brand is the top-of-mind and obvious choice.
Lesson #6: Prioritize capturing emails: Getting subscribers on Apple and Spotify is nice but the downside is you have no clue who they are and you don’t actually own the relationship with them. You are one algorithm update away from losing access to your subscribers.
Your primary objective should be to capture emails from your audience. The easiest way to do this is to create a newsletter for your podcast. To incentivize your audience to let you into their crowded inbox, you must find a way to make the newsletter worthwhile for them to subscribe to. This can be exclusive content, original research, etc.
Lesson #7: Invest in character development: The Sultan of Science. The Dictator. The Rainmaker. Most people in tech are familiar with these names from tech’s largest podcast, All In. But did you realize they were characters intentionally developed for the show?
In an episode of Acquired, Jason Calacanis reflects on the success of the podcast and shares how he put effort into developing each of the co-hosts into their own character. This doesn’t mean he invented anything. He simply found aspects of their personalities, intentionally brought them front and center, and packaged it up in a way that would attract the attention of the audience.
This is what you must do too as the host of your podcast. You need to develop a persona and character that your audience connects with.
Lesson #8: In-person > online: Recording an interview virtually on Zoom is certainly easier than recording in person but we’ve really found that recording together, in person, is impossible to replicate online. It makes the relationship feel much more real.
To record in person, we set up several clients with podcast studios at their conference booths. We then invited attendees to be part of the show, recorded episodes on-site, and then produced and distributed the content as podcast episodes. These episodes always preform much better than virtual episodes and most importantly, the conversion rate of guests turning into paying customers is much higher when the relationship begins in-person.
Lesson #9: Invest in a proper studio: For the last few years, we just shipped clients a microphone and some best practices on how to get the best quality when they record at home. This may have worked fine before but as mentioned in a previous point, quality is the way to stand out in a world of commoditized content. Want to stand out? Don’t look exactly like everyone else!
Now we are investing in studios in client’s homes/offices. These cost anywhere from $5k-$10K but once set up, they elevate the production to the next level.
Lessons #10: Podcasts for press releases: Does anyone actually read press releases? The real answer: no. Yet brands publish them over and over again. We’re anti-traditional newswire press release but that doesn’t mean we’re against having important announcements that you want to get out into the world.
We’ve found that podcasts can be a great way to distribute news. We did this a lot in 2023. Instead of just writing up a standard blah blah blah corporate press release, we recorded dedicated podcast episodes to have a conversation about the news. Releasing a new product? Have the CEO interview the product leader behind it. Funding announcement? Have the CEO interview the investors to discuss why. New hire? Have the CEO interview them to learn about their background.
Maybe press releases work for big brands like Microsoft but are rarely effective for startups.
Lesson #11: Advertising is in fact cool. “What if we put audio ads in the podcasts?”When this idea was first discussed internally, I hated it. It made me think back to that scene in The Social Network where they are talking about having ads on “The FaceBook” as it was called then. They said no, because, well, they weren’t cool. I thought ads aren’t cool. But this changed in 2023. We started experimenting with playing ads in-audio during the podcast. These short 15-30 second clips that raise product awareness or drive traffic to a content asset are highly effective.
Hubspot does this strategy with their network of shows. If you watch MyFirstMillion on YouTube, for example, throughout the episode you will see ads for Hubspot. These aren’t being delivered like traditional Youtube ads. They are embedded directly into the episode. Hubspot is building an audience then monetizing that audience by selling their technology.
Lesson #12: Guarantee you get in front of who matters: Don’t have the mentality that if you build it they will come. It’s too risky and as a startup, you just don’t have that much time to wait it out. Instead, ensure your podcast gets in front of exactly who matters. The easiest way to do this is with targeted LinkedIn ads and retargeting ads based on specific buyer behavior.
For example, if you have a pipeline of 500 leads, run contact-based ads to them on LinkedIn to make sure they see every episode that comes out. To help make your sales team’s lives easier, run ads to their prospective guest list for podcast episodes. This helps the prospects at least know your name before they receive cold outreach from your team.
Lesson #13: Get other departments engaged: We’ve found that often times, other departments have no idea there’s a podcast and even if they do know there is one, they don’t know how to use it.
For your sales team, make it easy for them to recommend guests. If they have specific prospects that have gone cold and need a push, they can invite them to be a guest on the podcast (just ensure they actually fit the shows theme). This can be a great way to get prospects reengaged.
Same goes for your Customer Success team. Make sure they know they can use the podcast to deepen the relationship with any existing customers and to do conversational customer success stories — instead of a boring PDF, bring the customer on to the podcast and have a discussion.
This year our aim is to double our production capacity to 2,000 episodes per year — we’ll continue to share lessons as we scale these efforts!
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