Podcasting in Digital Marketing: A Guide for B2B Marketers
In a recent discussion with digital marketing and podcasting experts, including Sarah Hulyer, we gained valuable insights into how "Let's Grow Girls" came to be one of the most successful leisure podcasts in the UK, with more than 1.2 million downloads. This podcast, which started during the lockdown out of Sarah's newfound love for gardening, targeted a specific group interested in cut-flowers, a niche not yet explored in podcasting. Sarah and her co-host used simple tools at first, focusing on engaging their audience on social media and trying out different types of episodes to see what their listeners enjoyed the most.
Guests
Sarah Hulyer, Digital Communications Manager at Ashurst
Charlotte Maddison, Senior Marketing Manager at JLL
Conrad Ford, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Allica Bank
Mark Chappel, Global Head of Creative Marketing at Man Group
Sharon McClintic, Senior Content Marketing Lead at Lumar
Sarah is lovely to have you here. Thank you so much for for arranging and organizing this with us. We're all really, really keen to meet you. Sarah is the global social media executive at Ashurst, which is a British multinational law firm headquartered in London but has offices all over the world and has been one of the first practices to operate in, south Korea, for example. And previously she was in a social
media leadership role at Allen and Overy. And I won't steal your thunder, Sarah, by telling you the, you know, by kind of, eating into any description of the origins of a podcast, other than to say, she's the founder and presenter of Let's Grow Girls, The Cut Flower podcast, which I believe was started, during lockdown. With
an abandoned stretch of land, which she will, tell us about, and a focus on improving mental health for the people around her. Had people stationed overseas with your friend, Nicole Laird, who got into this whole world from, similarly, not necessarily horticultural background. By seeing a cafe au lait. Dahlia, I believe, which I realized I have one of in my garden. It is very lovely. Anyway, so now with, you know, millions of listeners and really impressive guests and very professional
editing, I've met your editor of the podcast, highly professional editing, distribution and management of the podcast. We're really, really, really keen to learn from you. But this is an open forum, so we should be able to have open questions around what's worked for us when starting other podcast or content initiatives. What hasn't
worked, things that have been, on your mind for a long time that you would just love to discuss with a group of peers that have similar, challenges and opportunities. With that said, and with your permission, Joaquin, perhaps I should ask Sarah to tell us a
bit about the story of your, origins of your podcast, because, this was not something that you had done professionally. This is something that you had discovered, and grown yourself. So we'd really love to learn about that. Tell us the origins of the podcast.
First, I'll make
a quick disclaimer to say I'm just recovering from Covid. I don't normally sound quite so hoarse and Darth Vader esque. At the end of that statement is to say that I have had a fair bit of cold and flu, so if anything doesn't quite add up, that's my excuse. But as Thomas very kindly mentioned. So my day to day, I'm a B2B marketer. I do
digital communications for a big global law firm that covers social media, CEO comms, everything digital, including our podcast strategy and on the side during lockdown in 2020. What a time. Also, how joyful did we talking about this with Covid? I got locked into
my home that was on an army base at the time and I was working as a freelance digital communicator. So I was working with small to medium sized clients, typically B2C, doing things like Christmas tree selling workshops, brownie bakers like those kind of businesses. And, I picked up
gardening. So essentially on the army base that I lived on, there was an empty plot of land, as Thomas mentioned, that we turned into a community garden. So this is separate to the marketing. I basically picked up an entirely new hobby and we grew cut flowers and vegetables. So the labour was provided by the serving men and women who were at the time confined to their
barracks and unable to leave. And the produce was supplied to the local families. And in starting that, and, going on my own horticultural journey, I did what all marketers do. And I'm sure you can all relate. I spotted a gap in the market. I wanted to listen to podcasts specifically about growing cut flowers and
none were there for me to consume, so I did the relevant market research. At the time, there was one huge creator who was making content about cut flowers, and sort of no one else other than that. So someone with a monopoly on the market, her name is Erin. She runs a is now a TV show, blog and social media channel called
Fleurette. And I sought out Nicole, who's my co-host. So she is a gardener with at the time, I think she had a few thousand social media followers specifically related to gardening. That was what her content was about. I think she had about 2 or 3000 followers. I had none
and we put our heads together to create the podcast. I've kind of given myself a few main points that I wanted to bring to you in terms of what I learned from the experience is B to B marketer. But essentially what we did was we bought two Gamer Boy microphones and I mean Gamer Boy, they were blue and they came with these cute little desk
clips. And we pretty much started the entire thing from scratch. So I edited the first three seasons, and in the first season we threw ourselves predominantly into a testing phase. So we tested different lengths. We tested different, like episode styles
So we did some that were just the two of us, some that were interviews and then those interviews. We tested different types of interview styles. So I'd say point one was testing. We kind of threw everything we had at the initial phase to figure out what landed, and we also tested our different social media platforms. So initially we marketed the podcast only
on Instagram, but we pivoted later when we realized the audience was older to Facebook and we started generating audiences across Facebook, a Facebook page and a Facebook group that now has 20,000 members. And the page is at about 5000 followers. That was kind of how the podcast started. But essentially
it all came from my initial, new discovery of the joy of horticulture. I don't know if anyone else had gardens. Do we have any gardeners here? A lot of indoor plants.
But nothing outside. I think
indoor plants is an interesting one because there's been a real, increase in the amount of people talking about those online.
I think that was a big lockdown thing as well. All of a sudden everyone was a houseplant. Mum.
Yes. Yeah. It started with like two aloe plants and they just like kept propagating and then kept adding to it. So now there's like 20 definitely, spend
too much on our garden as well.
You can see it now just out there is now that's a garden. That is a garden. And it's also a lot of credit card debt. It was good. Yeah, we did it mostly over lockdown as well. Yeah.
It's definitely I think that was another element. I saw that the market was really booming over lockdown. Everyone's garden centres were out of out of stock. It was a it was a hobby along with sourdough making that lots of people picked up. So that's the kind of story, I guess, of where
the show started. And we're now on
season 8 or 9. I want to say that's in the makings. We have graduated from being edited ourselves. We now have an editor. We have a group of Patreon supporters who fund the running of the show. We have several sponsors lined up for our next season. In terms of my sort of key takeaways, the first is not to focus on the
vanity metrics in those initial seasons, especially for B2B. Obviously, this show doesn't immediately relate to the work that you all do in your businesses because obviously we weren't trying to sell anything. It was a show all about passion and our interest. But when I compare it to the work I've done now in our firm, our law firm podcast series
and the learnings I've tried to bring over were that actually, initially we didn't really care how many people listened. I remember telling thomas this story that I remember when ten people tuned in to episode one. I think we, like, popped a bottle of champagne because we thought that was the best thing that had ever happened. And at no point did we ever think about like, at no point was
the goal for us to have this huge audience. We focus on trying to serve that smaller audience as well as we could. And actually through that small audience, we got a lot of the big breaks that, sort of made the show into what it was. So one of our ten listeners knew Charles Dowding, who's a really well known gardener, relayed back
to Charles the show that we were doing. And that's how we ended up with him on our show. And he's, reasonably social media savvy. He's got sort of, I think I want to say 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. And he's created his own style of gardening. That's called No Dig, which is essentially based on the idea that if you think about the garden or
the the most beautiful places on earth, like woodlands and forests, no one is tilling the earth. No one is turning it over. Green matter is falling from the trees and from dead plants, and amazing plants grow from there. So he runs this whole, method of gardening where there's no digging, no tilling. You just plant into the ground that's already there
So we interviewed him and our first season, and that was our first big sort of break. So that's my first main, sort of key takeaway is to prioritize the small audience that you have. What can you deliver them and making sure you have, sort of hosts that have a suitable amount of enthusiasm. The two of us, essentially, we both
love what we talk about, and we bring guests on who love to talk about gardening. That was a lot of rambling, Thomas. Is that what you wanted?
Yes, absolutely. That is exactly what we wanted to hear. Of course. One of the criticisms or the problems that people have with podcasts is that you can't know who's listening, and it's really hard to get a good sense for the profile of your audience. But clearly, the people that are in that ten for the first episode did really matter to you. So you must have done something to engage
that audience, even if it was just put an email address on. How did that person, put you in touch with that guy how did you do? How did you manage that kind of community engagement? To try and get more depth, to understand who your audience were and how you might use them in the way that you clearly did
it was the creation of our Facebook group. So the audience that we were communicating to were typically like older women, and we found that they engage best on Facebook as a platform, more so than some of the other, more, as my mom would call them, newfangled, platforms
so essentially, we had a Facebook group that had those initial ten, 100, 200 listeners, and we were able to engage in ongoing conversation with them. And it was through that platform that they put us in touch with Charles.
Has that been important, going forward? Is it like the combination of the community on Facebook with the podcast?
Absolutely. And then also I think since then we, our audience has branched out. We have a younger demographic, a younger American demographic that are very Instagram heavy. And so now we
consider those our two main audiences in two different places and we communicate to them respectively. But keeping that audience going on Facebook has been a huge part of the podcast. We advertise each week's episode in there. But we also encourage other conversation related to the topic, and we
typically invite each guest. So as the podcast has gone bigger, we've been really lucky to have some amazing horticulturalists from across the world. We invite them into the Facebook group, which is amazing because you often see them pitching in on random conversations about like, weeds or whatever. But then they also typically do a Q&A, which people find really exciting
So we get the chance to offer, day to day people access to sort of some of the most incredible gardeners in the world. And that has been really effective as well.
Did you set up a different group for the different, geographies? So like one for UK and one for the US?
No, we just have
one huge global, group, which I think is one thing we could potentially have done better we have recently expanded a lot in our sort of New Zealand Australia audience, it's a very uniquely horticultural problem. And so I guess reasonably irrelevant to this group. But obviously they have a completely different season
in Australia. So summer in Australia is winter here in the UK. So in when we're talking about like summer flowers, everyone in Australia is like in their, well, not thermals, but they're in their non-growing season and they're thinking about what seeds to buy. So that's a very interestingly unique challenge. But yeah, that has been
one of the elements. But we have we moved into a platform that allows us to, break up our advertising based on location. So we're able to have sponsors for our UK audience. We've had some discussions with B and Q or some other big UK suppliers, and then we're able to divide out our Australian and American audience to their
relevant sponsors, which is a little harder because we're not in Australia or America, but we'll get there eventually.
I have operational kind of process question, because I know you mentioned that you when you started, you guys were doing the editing yourselves. I have an editor. I guess I'm just kind of wondering
if you have, like, any sort of indispensable tools that you recommend, like right now, like we're looking at, like, Podbean for hosting. Because they also allow video. I had descript recommended to me for editing. So we do have a freelance
editor that we're going to work with, but I would like to be able to do some editing in house so that we're not always, you know, reliant on somebody external in case their availability changes. So, I don't know, just any tool recommendations. Also for analytics or, you know, tracking metrics.
So we started out with spotify's own podcast
tool. I think it's changed its name now, but it was called anchor, and I think it's just called Spotify Podcasts now. And we found that that tool was really useful in terms of its integration with Spotify in the initial phase. But I would say the tools that were indispensable to us were squadcast, which is what we used to record with people remotely. So
it essentially allows you to create a recording studio that's virtual, so you can send people a squadcast link at the appropriate time the recording starts, they join a green room. They get a chance to see the camera test their audio, test their, headphones, etc. and then choose to join you on the stage when it's time
And we found that that platform was amazing in that there are like several, emergency backups. So you get your top level recording and the quality is always immaculate with different tracks so that you can edit out ums and ahs. That was a big learning. I didn't realize if you invite people on who aren't used to content
creation, they often do join you from a kitchen where there's like screaming children. There's like pots clattering. So having those separate audio tracks is absolutely indispensable. I think our first episode, you can hear children screaming in the background because we had assumed the guest would know to go in a quiet room, never assume. Yeah, they always need to be told. The other thing we did as a group that I found useful when we edited ourselves was one of us would keep a word document going normally. Me, as I was editing sort of marketing brains, and I would write down timestamps of key sections for me to go back to. I found that sped up editing by about
100%. Otherwise you have to listen to the whole audio approximately five times. Similarly, with figuring out what you're going to promote on social, I would use those timestamps. So every time they said something that I thought was really impactful, I had a list of notes to go back to. And then also I would say the other thing that we found really useful was, sending off the
audio files to become transcripts. It's unedited state. So we would get a transcript of the whole recording which enabled other people. So, my co-host, who's essentially works in compliance and is not a marketer, and other people, when we started bringing in sponsors or big guests, they could read the whole transcript and
mark out things that they didn't want included or things that they did want included.
Did you use like Otter AI or a program like that for the automated transcripts?
Embarrassingly, when we started, I think we used a real person via Fiverr, which is sad now that we have ChatGPT. Obviously I would never now our the guy who does our editing
produces them, so I'd have to ask him.
And then with the anchor slash like Spotify podcast platform. Do they like, can you export the audio files from that, or do they limit you to, like, only hosting and editing and only like pushing it to Spotify specifically?
The one we recorded is Squadcast.
And you can export all of those files. And then we take them out, edit them and upload them onto Spotify. Yeah, I think you can then re-export them from Spotify.
Okay. When you were editing yourself, what program were you or platform were you using for that?
I was using audition
the Adobe, the Adobe tool, because I've always been an Adobe girly. And a lot of the shortcuts are the same for Premiere Pro and some of their other tools. But I think now there's quite a lot of really good online tools that you can use.
I put in the chat the transcript tool that
we use, which is podcast editor, streamlabs basically. And it works really, really well, in terms of the quality of the transcript. And also you can edit words, you can delete filler words, pauses, etc..
Awesome. Thank you.
And you can create also video
or audio snippets from from the transcript.
Oh that's perfect.
Question for you, Sara. Have you experienced at any point sort of a plateau in your listener base, and if so, how have you got over sort of that hurdle? So I'm a marketer, a life sciences podcast for JLL, and we have a very dedicated listener base. But that
has, I guess, reached a certain level. So how do you then increase that, that demographic again?
So we tested out our strategy with our guests. So we had a guest strategy in terms of we would go for a mix of larger growers who often had the least
interesting content from honest. I wouldn't tell them that to their face, but they had the biggest audience to offer us. So that was the trade off. And then we had, groups of small growers who didn't have online followings but had the most interesting topics to offer us for our guests. Initially, we used to launch each season with the most the biggest audience guest, and then follow that up with all of the smaller audience but more interesting episodes. And then in the end, we actually flipped it around and we thought we worked out. That worked better. So we moved to a mid-season peak in terms of, those like key audience growth guests. And we found that it
it kept our own audience that continued to plod along like yours. It kept them interested. But it also meant we got that injection of new interest in the middle of the season, and then it benefited the rest of the guests who didn't have that following because they were the listeners sort of kept on. And the other lesson we learned was about listener trust. We found that
at one point, my co-host and I essentially, I wouldn't say fell out, but, we both had a lot on at work. We both had busy corporate jobs, like she works in corporate compliance for a big insurance supplier, and we both sort of disagreed on where the podcast was going. We both took a few months off and our listener base took a huge dive
because essentially, I think we lost their trust. They were used to logging in every week to an episode, and once we broke that, a huge chunk of them never came back again.
If you were to start again, whole new podcast, especially in your role within law, what would be the
three things you'd absolutely do versus the three things you would never do again from the lessons you've learned? I think the three things I would do again would be a focus on social media. Obviously
I mean, I'm biased. There is a lot of my role is social, but I do think it's probably the easiest place to gain attention and find audiences. If I was to do something I didn't do before, it would be paid social. I would focus on, finding those audiences where they exist. It doesn't have to be big budget. We run
some really niche legal podcasts, and when I say niche, I mean, like really niche. And we've had some success finding other smaller podcasts and paying them to advertise our show in terms of we're not gaining access to audiences of millions, it's shows that have probably
a similar amount of listeners to yours, Charlotte, like a few hundred or a few thousand. And actually, I think I would prioritize finding the right people as opposed to trying to find everyone, which is what we did with the gardening podcast. We once we started to grow and we got a taste for it, we just wanted it to be as big as possible, and we ended up gaining
a lot of audience members who aren't relevant to us and what we're trying to do. So I think I would focus on paid social, but paid social? Where where is the most impactful for especially B2B audiences? I would do video because we didn't. We were audio only. And I think with the way the world is heading, I think video is is really key
the third thing that I would do, is have a better plan straight from the off, which isn't useful, actually, if you've already launched your podcast. But we kind of went out of the gate running and then tried to herd the cats in afterwards, which was reasonably stressful
so if you haven't started a podcast yet and you are on the precipice of it, I'd say it's worth considering both your launch strategy, your mid sort of range mid growth strategy. What will you do when you have those followers or when you face those plateaus? And also, kind of like a further afield plan because
we basically went out of the gate running.
It sounds like that community, you know, what we're really talking about here is less, perhaps, the way I envisaged it as a podcast, but a combination of a community and a podcast
and of course, communities have their own challenges. But I'd be really interested to know what works for you. I mean, obviously you are. I mean, traditionally people think of a community. Everyone in B2B would love to create an online community of people that are fans of what they talk about and their product
but we think of this as taking a huge amount of time. What are the tricks or just the techniques that have worked for you in maintaining an enthusiastic, engaged community? On Facebook in this case, that we wouldn't necessarily think of I think the challenge that I see with podcasts and sort of b2B marketing and growing those audiences, it's about connection with other people.
And I think our types of businesses, that's the hardest, kind of content to create, because in the podcast
my co-host and I, we share a lot about our lives and people who listen feel like they know us. We make reasonably like personal jokes. If you look at the website, we give quite a bit of information about our jobs and our lives in our sort of like bios. So a huge part of the show is like hinged on our identity
and our interactions. And she's very serious. And I can be the more lighthearted one. And people often say, in our reviews, they sort of talk about how much they love us too as people and how hard that is to recreate from a B2B setting. And often I look at steven Bartlett and what he's done with the diary of the CEO and
if you I do think he has really hinged that on himself as a character, but he's managed to land it in a place where he gives a lot of himself, but not as much as you would professionally. So I think for me, the interesting element is that stepping that line between having a host or a person who runs
a podcast who is relatable and interesting, but keeping it professional and not stepping into something that we would deem as too personal. So we're testing it at the moment with one of our lawyers. His name is Lee Doyle and he runs our banking practice he's been a banking lawyer for, I don't want to say longer than I've been alive, but it is reasonably possible
And, the amount of interesting information he's got about the banking world is, unending. So at the moment it's about how can we translate that into a new, platform? And that's going to be audio podcasts. How can we, I guess, enable him to give
enough of his personality to draw following, but make him still feel like he's not sharing his whole life? He's not in fashion.
I guess it might be possible that he's comfortable being interviewed by you or other people on a podcast, but finds it harder to perhaps engage with a community online. Maybe. I certainly do like with our with our community
hasn't been very successful. We haven't really put enough time into it. The podcast has been far easier somehow for us than the community. Maybe that's just my character, but I guess you're saying kind of that character would be the important thing, not the medium. So carrying
that over into the community on Facebook, that and the podcast itself, they're both looking for the same, things, perhaps the audience.
In those interactions, even on Facebook, it would we didn't use the, podcast page
We used our own pages. So if you posted in the group asking a question, it would be me personally who responded. And then, I mean, it did get vaguely creepy at one point because obviously we would talk about like, our plans and stuff and you'd get random people being like, how was your holiday? And you're like, great, thanks. Thanks for asking. But
it was that element of making them feel like they had a real connection to the, the person. So you're right. It's I think it's about finding how you can break that barrier in a professional manner or a sort of B2B content.
Conrad or Mark, where have you got to and where have you found
the blockers or not so far.
I mean, we haven't attempted anything yet, and one of the reasons for that and sorry, in the podcast space, because one of the reasons for that is the failure rate is just so high. And that frankly, that's the main reason I'm here. Right? Because clearly you're
one of the few success stories, and it feels like one of those things where you need to give it time and you need to invest. I mean, the happy challenge we have is there's always much more easy to activate channels to get customers. I mean, we remain very fast growing. But I would love for us over time to build
community. And I think a podcast is a useful way of doing that. But our biggest constraint is always just resource commitment. So the opportunity cost if somebody is focusing on that this, then they're not focusing on something else. And the constant challenge you have is basically we're building new channels, all of them, largely speaking
of delivering. But the reality is the really valuable stuff is community. It's brand. It's those franchise things that are, you know, highly defensible and highly valuable over time and making sure that we carve out time to invest in that. So the straight answer is we haven't got far at all. I think community is a big theme for us. Our segment of SMEs, they are
at a local level. They are communities, right? SME owners talk to each other. They refer, they recommend to each other, albeit typically at a local level. And we absolutely want to leverage that. We just kind of haven't found the secret sauce. And I would love for a podcast to be part of that. I have one specific question. So we've talked about your guests
Sarah, why do your guests come on the podcast? I presume you're not paying them. So is it for the exposure, building their own networks and communities, or is it because they love the sound of their own voice? What do you think drives them to want to be on your podcast?
That's a great question. And I would say
a very varied mix. I think for some of the smaller growers, it's a mix of passion. They are really passionate about what they do a lot. A lot of them are essentially people who run small scale flower farms. So they have an acre, maybe two acres, and their whole bread and butter every day is growing flowers and essentially
it's a chance for them. Each episode we take a specific angle on a different type of growing. So it's not just an interview about them on what they do. It'll be like, how to improve specifically your bulb growing practices like how to get more bulbs to germinate, etc.. So we basically find someone with a very niche bit of information
then drill them for it and then distribute it to our audience. Some people come for the exposure because they are hoping to be exposed to one now reasonably large audience. Some are, and I say this with love and respect. Those old men with an allotment types who just love to talk about
tomatoes very in depth for 4.5 hours. And then, other people are, kind of in for a mutually beneficial agreement. We scratch their back, they scratch ours, they give us content, they get access to our platform. I find the people who want exposure are the easiest to deal with
They are the most pliable. They give us what we want from the perspective of a marketer. Because what we do, and I guess an interesting part that I haven't mentioned, is that our Instagram strategy was very much based on harvesting other people's most successful content. So at the point at which we release the week's episode
for that week, we would post three posts that were all content we'd harvested from their social media. So we would go through their Instagram, pick their top three best performing pieces of content and repost those. So our Instagram has, I want to say I think about 20,000 followers at this stage, but it's nothing bigger or better than
basically a meme account that steals other people's content. Except we had very explicit permission to do so. And I find that those people are the best to work with because they are the most upfront with that stuff that we need. And they understand that we're out here trying to build a business just like they are.
And in terms of the guests, obviously you
need someone who's got something important to say but or interesting to say, but also they need to be able to say it in an interesting way. I mean, do you sometimes talk to somebody and actually kind of think, nah, this person's not going to be able to cut it on a podcast how do you create from your side?
This is ongoing discussions for us as a team. So we have never done a
pre call. We the first time we speak to them is often when we get on for a recording, that means that we place a lot of trust into our editor who is really good at his job. But we also essentially, my co-host allows me often to lead the conversation so we don't
script each episode. I go in with a list of things from, I guess from a producer standpoint of the conversation and the outcomes that I want. And I often have to put the words in their mouth and lead them there. And we essentially edit out the parts that are less glorious.
What's your target length? Is it half an hour or what's the typical, in theory it's half an hour.
But we have found that our episodes do well up to an hour and 20. If we haven't been able to cut the content out. Sometimes we've not been able to get people to stop talking. We've tried to edit it. It hasn't quite worked. So we've reluctantly
put longer episodes out and they've still performed just as well. But our target is about 45 minutes.
How much do you typically trim to get down to your, end product?
Average recording is an hour and ten, okay, so even if someone's not particularly good at explaining or compelling, then
you can still get a good content out. You just have to, cut a bit harder.
Yeah.
Interesting point you've raised there about episode length.
Like as a person listening to podcasts. I love a long episode, but I feel like in the B2B world, maybe you wouldn't want a longer episode
what do you people think about that?
I feel like 45 minutes to an hour, but I also it's like it depends on what's happening with the guest, right? So if they're going really in depth and it's an interesting conversation, then I'm happy to listen for an hour and a half. But you know, some things, if it's a kind of a lighter conversation, then I'm fine with 20 minutes to half an hour, but generally
I feel like 45 minutes to an hour is my sweet spot.
Even on B2B podcasts, I think the rules are on length, are probably a bit more relaxed on podcast than any other format.
At least I have to say from, I mean, very niche life sciences podcasts, but our best performing have always been half an hour. If
we sort of tip up to the 45 minute mark to an hour, then listeners tend to drop off at that 30 minute mark.
That's really interesting. We typically always based it on rapport. So if there was a good rapport between us and the guest, we would allow it. If it was one of those where it's slightly tense
you know, we don't really relate to each other. They're giving us good information. But you get that gut feeling that it's just not, you know, it's not entertaining. And there's not, a match made in heaven. Then we would try and get those down to be shorter, so we would allow ourselves to go over the limit if we had, lack of a better word, good banter
Conrad. You were you were mentioning. How do you get guests? Why do they do it? There are various services that like matchmaker, for example, that is like a search engine for guests, for podcasts, literally for podcast guests. But we haven't found that the people that put themselves
forward there are particularly interesting or good guests. On the other hand, we have definitely found that approaching people, is remarkably successful that you wouldn't think would come on a podcast. There's some glamour around. I used to work at the BBC World Service briefly as a producer, booking people
on a show called world. Have Your Say, and I would I mean, obviously it had the BBC, so we'd call up and say calling from the BBC, would you come on a program? But people would come on the program who it definitely was not in their best interest to come on a program and talk about whatever kind of horrendous situation they were in. And I think something of the the glamour of being on a podcast rubs off because we
often contact people that we think, no way are they are going to say yes to this. And they do. One of the nice things, you can go on Amazon and do a search for upcoming books. You can search by publication date in the future and look for books related to your subject, because people with books coming out in July will definitely know will tend to
be really keen to come on anything they possibly can to promote their book, and it looks really good to advertise. We've got, you know, an episode coming up where we're going to introduce, you know, the author of XYZ, where it's really specifically related to your audience, seems to work quite well.
Yeah. Because my I'm kind of I'm torn and
maybe there's a middle ground actually. But so if my target community is business owners, small business owners, and they, you know, they typically been running the same business for a decade plus or it's a family business that they inherited. You know, these are traditional, small businesses around the country. And I on the one hand, I'm thinking
you try and get guests who are names in that segment, and we'll pull in the punters. But the other potential one is you try and get actual small business owners who are quite, charismatic and good talkers and actually, you know, you have an episode, for example, on how I sold my business. So
the vast majority of small business owners, right. They think they're going to sell their business, retire. But it's much harder than they realize. And most of them aren't. Actually, the businesses can't be sold. Real business owners talking about, you know, particular situations and challenges. I actually wonder and then I guess one one option you can have is you once a month or once in a blue moon
you have a famous guest just to give yourself a spike, but then you sort of keep it on informative peer to peer content. Yeah, I think that's probably where my thinking is.
Well, what about you, Mark? What stages have you got to.
Sure. I mean, that's the fascinating conversation on kind of how best guests are. I've been running shows
here as an exec producer and a host since 2018, so we've got three, four shows, four from May, under our network. So I think my issues are kind of managing podcasts at scale, you know, making sure we're using tools and editors who don't get overwhelmed. And we've got good team, good agency support. And then coming back to
paid promotion and finding the niche for each show, let alone each episode within our content calendars. All that kind of work. I will say, coming back to, guest management is a fascinating one. So the for one of our shows, which is dedicated to sustainable finance, etc., we found incredible success doing exactly
what you suggested, Conrad of actually, I would trawl what conferences or industry events were going on and look for people who are on panels because they are already good speakers, they are already keen and will have guaranteed to have signed up for something like this. So you already know your opening pushing on an open door there. Once you have that, I
have a standard diary management kind of outreach program for people that then for each person we're inviting on, I create a shortlist of previous guests who are like them or I know have interacted with them in the past. And that way there is a familiarity that if they don't know your podcast, which, let's face it, B2B, who knows our podcasts, they
at least know that guest and they know they've heard of that person and go, oh well, if so-and-so's been on there, clearly this has kudos and therefore you kind of build on that. And it's a thing that takes time. Obviously, like, you know, we've been doing 2018 six years for two of our shows and the other one's been going three years, and it's one where you have a lot of people getting very
interested in internally shows. Although again, coming back to this B2B issue that we have, people leave the company. And I like to joke that one of our shows is cursed because every time I pick a new host for a new season, they then either resign or retire one person was made CEO, which I was like, okay,
there's one out of six, which is good. I think with B2B, creating host led parasocial relationships is really tricky. And unfortunately it's caused people internally here to become very nervous in about who is the host, who is the guest? Why are we doing this? What
is this person that we're building up? Because it's cursed ones. Cursed. The others are fine, but one is cursed. And, that is the problem that I face of that.
How do you feel about having, like, two hosts? That way, if one leaves, the other one remains.
That is indeed the problem we're trying
to solve with our one, the one that we're launching in May, which is consistent co-hosts chat show format, rotating third guests using external client usually or potentially external experts. And that way it's more I've been calling it it's a banter led show versus our other shows. But it is that of like it's
two people having a nice chat about whatever's in the news, which we try to stay away from along our other shows. And I think that helps create a little bit of a thing, but that's creating a still a host relationship that we're very wary of. And so our approach to keeping things manageable is
on our interview. Podcast is thematic seasons, right? Like I used to do a weekly show, at my previous job, and it killed me like trying to do a week on a few if it's not your main job. If I was also social media manager as well as multimedia manager, managing video, trying to think up content for a week to week show and then get that edited, get that published
do all the social content around it. We found that actually doing a tight six episodes on a core theme, you know, life sciences legal. There's always like here is the marketing focus that you have for the next three weeks, next three months, do six episodes on that, record them at your own leisure, and then batch
them, like, go out with an intense one every two weeks, one every three weeks, and then say, oh, and introducing teaser for season four. That's that's now two three. You do two three seasons a year rather than because some weeks you just can't find the guest, or you can't find the content or the energy to do good content. And but
it's just to do six good episodes. Also, Conrad, this comes back to a problem that you mentioned where quality guests we have had to like jettison people who we've recorded and gone, this is the worst monotone I've ever heard, and no editing or modulation will fix this. And unfortunately, either you are polite and
say that it was lost in the editing room or something corrupted, or you just say, look, unfortunately, this didn't meet our editorial standards, and as we have grown the show to have that ability to go, sorry, it didn't meet what a good enough standard for us to be published. And we don't think that you would be proud to have this published either. So we very much had that
conversation, upfront conversation with the guest to say, look, I don't think this shows you or us in the best light and like, you can have a listen to it. If you disagree, let us know. But I think, honestly, you can either try again and we've done that before or it just didn't work out and that's fine.
Kind of in terms of, managing podcasts
at scale. One just a plus one. So like we have a really robust existing webinar program and we do find a lot of those speakers for our webinars from industry, events. And, you know, people who, as you said, are already used to talking in front of crowds, are already good at speaking. So we find a lot of people for
the for the webinar program through through those industry events. But I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with, repurposing. So one idea that I had to kind of like manage the workload because the, person who would be our host also has a day job. I have other like just tons of other stuff on my plate
is that we, you know, we were thinking of doing sort of half, original podcast episodes, interviews, that kind of style and then half repurposing the existing webinars that we already produce and that we already have the videos and the audios for, you know, maybe just adding an intro track like, here's what this session is about. Obviously
there's a video, but I'm wondering if anyone else here has repurposed kind of existing video content or existing other content as podcasts.
I have yeah, it's done well, like, we did that all the time in Covid when we were doing weekly
market calls for people going like, what the hell is happening in markets we just did here is a thing we did for clients. You can catch it.
Yeah. That's what I'm hoping because I'm just like, I can't ask the person hosting to do, you know, to do a weekly. But I'm like, okay we could do by monthly, like or, you know, two a month if we repurpose the because we have a huge backlog
of webinars from years. If we repurpose the webinars and then just do one original episode a month.
So, okay, I think some of the best performing stats that I've seen were from, it was from adzact. And we did like a very lighthearted set of Halloween episodes. And when I've seen the stats come through from LinkedIn, they just keep being rewatched, I think because they are funny and
and they're a bit different, and they just keep doing well.
There are definitely themes that just seem to be incredibly popular, and sometimes it's a bit difficult to work out in advance. And sometimes, you know, when you've got it that this theme, like we did one on luxury marketing and how B2B marketing
is just like luxury marketing, I think we just had so many people really excited about that, because they sort of really wanted to think that B2B marketing was exactly like luxury marketing, I think. And we had, you know, luxury marketers, come on, who were just, you know, just average people from the luxury industry who were their peers of the B2B marketers, but they were almost like celebrities
and treated them as peers. And people just seemed to really like that. So, yeah, like Flora says, sometimes a theme just seems to really be. And so if you've got one of those from the from the webinar. Absolutely. We use it.
There is something we do before every episode is running survey. We ask our community what are the themes
that they would like to see in the podcast. And if they want to be in that episode, we ask them to type their name next to the theme. So it's a great way to be connected with our audience and seeing what are the the themes that they will love to hear. We also ask for their influencers in, in B2B marketing
So we've invited influencers that our audience recommend so we know that they are relevant to our audience. And we started also an awards, an ad awards program. We ask them to submit what is the best, marketing
campaign they've seen in the last year. Flora, you can tell better. How is that program? But we started an entire program from that specific question.
Yeah. So I look after the awards and again, it's I think because it's it's a very light hearted
and, fun half an hour to an hour where we look at really good B2B ads, we send them out beforehand, we send out the judging criteria beforehand. We have briefing calls with the guests, so we kind of know what, how they're going to judge. So some people judge it on gut feel. Some people want to look at metrics
Everyone's very different. It's very subjective. But it's it's a really interesting good conversation and everyone takes away some sort of learning from these other amazing B2B campaigns. So some of them have got massive budgets, some of them have got much smaller budgets, and we all learned so much which can go. I take it to my clients, they take it to their businesses. It's
but you don't. You're not putting yourself on the line. It's you're judging other people. You're judging, just a video generally. So it's it's a different way of engaging, I think, with your community.
Do you ever get pushback if people are negatively judging a video?
I leave that up to, my
editor, we tend to edit out all the negative stuff.
Sharon, and just. Just talk about we'd say who won. We don't necessarily like dig into who lost and why.
I was listening to I can't remember what it was. There is like a sales podcast where they were doing teardowns of like schools, like cold email outreach, and they were a bit
mean, but I liked it. To go back to the idea of using, like, content you already have, that is something that we have done quite a lot in terms of our best performing titles or questions or queries, like how to get your best germination of this rare type
of flower. We then go back and recycle clips from different guests and compile them together and make, like a compilation episode. That's what we've done with a quiet period as well. So a chance to reuse the other audio content you've got, essentially rehash some of your audio recordings can be really useful. And to go back to Conrad's questions about sourcing
your guests, the key thing I learned, and I'd be interested to see if Mark agrees, is about getting the pitch email completely on point. So, as you said, referencing back to guests you've had, they give you kudos. But also, if they're not a typical podcaster, if it's not something they do regularly. We found it was
really important to get upfront that it's easy. It'll take them 60 minutes. It's not an interrogation, it's a conversation with friends. They have full editorial rights to remove whatever they like, and all they need to bring is a pair of headphones and sit in a quiet room with a good internet connection for an hour long conversation about something they enjoy doing. And once we nailed
that kind of email, pitch basically said, come on our show. You like gardening? We like gardening. It'll take you 60 minutes. This is what's involved. We found we got a lot more, exceptions from the kind of people who do mostly garden and not do content online
but just back that up that that was exactly basically word for word, what we have there of not a gotcha interview. Full editorial control. It's a chat. You can do as many texts as you like. It's not live. That always makes people feel better. It's not a webcast because some people hate webcasts. So
something that came after a few episodes of learning and me doing the editing was, at the start of the episode, we would always say to them, if you fluff up your sentence, if you say something wrong, or if you say something that you immediately regret saying, stop talking and say to us, I'm going to start that
again.
Or please take that out and then take a big deep breath and start talking again. And that made recording so much easier, because you can see quite clearly in the audio clips. Take that out. And instead of trying to deal with like jumbled sentences where they've like fluffed up a sentence and then not started from scratch, you get sort of clear audio, which is a tiny minor point for something that as
someone who was doing the editing, did reasonably change my life.
I think it's also worth saying on the getting clients on board point, especially when you're starting the podcast. Don't underestimate your network. I mean, we're, I think three years into the life sciences podcast and we've not gone out
cold to a single guest yet. They've all been people that have either been known to the company or the host itself and actually use use that network from initial initial standpoint. It doesn't always have to be a cold out blue guest.
I
noticed we are just coming to the end of our time. That has absolutely flown by and I've really enjoyed it and really enjoyed hearing from all of you. Thank you so much to Sarah, for being the lynchpin and inspiration for this podcast episode. Deeply appreciate you giving us your experience and learnings from your highly successful
podcast. And thank you, everyone, for, being so open with your challenges and opportunities and thoughts. We're going to send out a dried flower wreath to everyone from flowers from the cut flower garden of Babington House in Somerset. So if everyone would mind just emailing Joaquin with their address, just their preferred address, that they would like to receive this
to, we're going to send it to you anyway. Even if you don't email us, we'll just send it to your company. So send us the preferred address. If anyone has any final thoughts, please share them.
Thank you so much.
A small final thought from me to say my main takeaway is
as marketers, to keep doing things outside of the job. Like this was something that really opened my eyes. It was a really interesting challenge that I would never have done otherwise. And before then, I'd gotten out of the habit of finding new challenges outside of the day to day B2B stuff. So my key takeaway would be keep looking for things to do outside of work and see how they inspire the stuff you do day to day
and thank you for having me.
Thank you everyone. Thanks a lot. It's been very useful.
Yeah, thanks so much.
Thanks everyone. Take care. Thank you very much.
Thank you everyone. Bye bye.
