Should we invest in a B2B podcast?

It’s a tricky one…

• Downloads are hard to track
• It seems like everyone and their dog is releasing one
• You’re not sure if you have the “talent” in house

You are fortunate in that you read this blog post a week before the meeting and are able to provide him with an accurate evaluation of the chance that you will create a ROI from the podcast in question.

Let’s get to it…

I’ve Been In Charge Of A Marketing Team.

I am familiar with the difficulty of being handed a large sum of money at the beginning of the year and being tasked with generating more value for the company while doing so.

You have to choose one of the following:

• SEO
• Paid
• Content
• Influencers
• Partnerships
• Conferences
• Virtual events
• Print
• Hiring SDR’s

All sound tactics… provided they are not used in isolation.

There is a close connection and mutual influence between each of these strategies for expanding a firm that caters to other businesses.

Take, for instance:

• PPC spend can inform written content topics
• Partnerships can be formed at conferences
• SDR’s can be used to promote content

In point of fact, I used to discover that the channels that influenced the most other channels always had the highest return on investment (ROI).

Introducing: the B2B podcast

Regardless… A business-to-business podcast bridges many of the channels described before, including the following:

• SEO – After being uploaded to your website, each episode is then optimized for a specific long-tail keyword.
• SDR/Sales – Through the development of connections with podcast guests, business opportunities may be discovered.
• Partnerships – Relationships developed with podcast guests may pave the way for the establishment of business ties.

However, the purpose of this piece is not to preach to you about the virtues of B2B podcasting; rather, the purpose of this post is to enlighten you on whether or not a budget should be allocated.

It does not matter how far into the future your company is thinking; you will still need to be able to determine some kind of return on investment (ROI) from any channel within its first year of operation. If you are unable to do so, it will be difficult to argue that the spending should continue.

And the thing is… with business-to-business podcasting, there are really two distinct categories of return on investment:

• Short term relationship driven ROI – consumers and partnerships attracted as a result of positive interactions with guests
• Long term audience driven ROI – leads and consumers derived from the participation of the audience

Podcasting Is A Long Game

Building an audience for a podcast in a short amount of time is a challenging endeavor.

As a result of this, the return on investment (ROI) earned in the first year by a B2B podcast is not likely to come from the audience. It has to go via the customers first.

Let’s imagine that throughout the course of the first year, you put a total of $20,000 into the podcast.

This is what you get:

• 24 episodes
• 10k downloads per month
• 1k extra website sessions per month
• Some other fluffy social engagement metrics

You have to create connections with 10 possible clients and 5 potential partners, but the most essential thing is that you have to do this.

If you have the appropriate procedure in place, there is a good chance that you have successfully concluded a contract with a client and potentially even with a business partner here.

Let’s simply suppose that a single client brings in $15,000 in revenue for the first year for your company, and that a single partnership brings in $10,000 in revenue for the first year.

You Now Have A Positive Cash Flow From Operations.

And all the fancy metrics for establishing an audience are basically provided at no extra cost.

This gives you the opportunity to reinvest in the podcast in the following year, which is the point at which you may begin to see advantages from the perspective of your audience. The podcast would have been terminated after the first year if you had not been strategic about the guests that you invited onto the program, and these advantages would not have been realized at any point in time. In an alternative scenario…

The opportunity to liquidate a significant chunk of the capital invested in the podcast via the completion of one to two agreements with consumers or partners is, however, the most important aspect of this situation. This method yields the greatest results when the typical amount that a client will pay you in the first year is larger than $5,000; a partnership arrangement gets the same results.

Your ability to close agreements with guests effectively will allow you to make a greater investment back into the audio material, which will in turn build your audience, which will in turn boost your capacity to obtain better guests, which will in turn grow the audience even more.

And this cycle will continue until you have the most popular podcast in your particular field and have established a reputation as a marketing guru.