James Carbary is the Founder of Sweet Fish Media and co-host of the B2B Growth Show podcast. This is an excerpt of an interview with him that appears in my forthcoming Bullseye Marketing book.
Louis: James, do you know how many people are listening to your B2B Growth Show podcast?
James: We are getting anywhere from 40,000 to 45,000 downloads a month. So each episode is getting downloaded anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 times over an 8-week period and then the downloads tend to trickle in after that 8-week mark.
Louis: That’s great. I am surprised it lasts even eight weeks; that’s a terrific length of time.
What do you see as the opportunity with podcasts? And is it different or greater than what companies can do with blogging or YouTube videos or other content?
James: I think that the unique thing about podcasting, which has been my thesis from the time we started the agency, is that a podcast is just one way for you to become the media company. And when you are the media company — be that through your blog, be that through your podcast, be that through publication that you write for — when you are the media company you can create very strategic relationships with a wide range of people. So if you are looking for referral partners, instead of saying, “You want to refer a business my way?” You can say, “I’d love to feature you on my podcast.” Instead of saying, “You want to buy my product?” You can say, “I’d love to have you on my podcast.” Instead of saying, “Can you feature me on your podcast?” You can say, “I’d love to feature you on my podcast.” And so a podcast to me is just a very tangible way to add value first to the people that you are ultimately trying to work with in some way, shape or form.
Podcasting is not the only way that you can do that. There are several ways that you can do that.
So for the example of B2B Growth, Jonathan, my co-host and myself, we didn’t know anything about B2B marketing when we started the show. But we knew that our buyers were B2B marketers and so we started reaching out to them asking to feature them on our podcast by having conversations with them about topics of their choosing. A couple of things happened. One, we built really strategic relationships with those potential buyers and several of those people have now purchased our service from us. So that’s I think a massive benefit. But then also we learned B2B marketing from experts by having these conversations. And so it positioned us as thought leaders in the space by creating the platform that distributed that type of content from these experts.
Louis: One of the big issues for any B2B marketing is getting in front of the right audience. If you are having 1200, 1800 or more downloads of your podcast, how do you know it’s the right audience? Not just you but for someone who is creating a podcast: how are they going to get the right audience to listen to them?
James: That’s a great question. I think that the way that we’ve done it is we’ve just been very, very targeted and specific in the type of content that we create. So in order to attract our audience essentially we feature their peers on our show. And so if we are featuring a lot of VPs of marketing at companies with more than 50 employees that are B2B companies, we know that the content that they are talking about isn’t going to be relevant to everybody. So not everybody is going to want to listen to it, but it is going to be hyper relevant to the exact type of people that we want to reach.
Louis: What do you think are effective promotional or amplification strategies that you’ve seen companies use, perhaps with podcasts that you produced for them, to get their content in front of the right audience?
James: One thing that I have recently started doing is, setting up co-promotions with other podcasts in my space. So The Marketing Book Podcast, I went to Douglas Burdett and I said, Hey, I will talk about your show for 20 to 30 seconds at the beginning of our show for a few episodes, would you be willing to do the same for me and in that way, we will expose both of our audiences to each other’s podcasts? He said yes and so we are doing a co-promotion together. And I’ve structured similar deals with 5 or 6 other shows that are reaching B2B marketers.
