Graham Brown: Welcome to The Age of Audio, my name’s Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co. The Age of Audio is a series of conversations with thought leaders and changemakers in the world of audio. Podcasts, Radio and Social Audio converging with big data to create engaging and authentic content for a new generation of listeners.
All right, David, let's dive straight in. Talk about, if we can, B2B podcasts. What do you define as B2B podcasts and how is it different from what most people understand of this podcast?
David Bain: My definition, hopefully I share it with a few other people, is that I imagine the B2B sales cycle to be a lot longer than B2C. And I think that gives podcasting a wonderful opportunity. Because I used to design digital marketing courses in the past. And as part of doing that, I liked to have a content marketing model at the center of a digital marketing model or a structure for a program. And I used to begin with Google's three H model as the central point of that content marketing strategy - a hero, heart and hub content. And to me, B2B is hub content. B2B podcasting is hub content. It's episoded content that gives the user an opportunity just to keep that brand top of mind and between finding eight about them to begin with, and being prepared or being ready to make that purchased decision. And B2C of course is very much about instantaneous, if possible purchased decisions. B2B is a much longer, sales cycles could be a year long. So it's a way of keeping that brand top of mind.
Graham Brown: How does that affect the content itself? Is it the same? Because when we talk about podcasts, consumers to consumers, the average listener, they'll tell you maybe Joe Rogan or Serial, or how I built this, how I made this, all those kinds of podcasts that they're familiar with. What are those? Those aren't B2B, right? So a little bit of a different style of content.
David Bain: They aren't B2C either and that I would define B2B business opportunity and podcasting to be a content marketing opportunity. So an opportunity just to keep that brand top of mind. Joe Rogan, Serial podcast like that, that you mentioned there. They're means to an end. Consumers listen to those podcasts and that those podcasts are the end product. By thinking about it from a business perspective, I'm imagining that a podcast is a content marketing opportunity. So if it's B2C, if it's a shorter buying cycle, perhaps it's more necessary to tell the listener about the product or about the service in every single episode, perhaps with B2B, it's not so necessary to do that.
Graham Brown: How does that then work with a B2B brand in the sense that when you're talking about content marketing, now we have options. We have video, we have blogs, we have white papers and every social media channel. How does a podcast fit into this? Is it part of that mix or is it separate to it? How does it all work?
David Bain: They don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. Podcasts can be recorded, of course, at the same time as video. And you can have top of mind, the idea to collate a few episodes together in the end to create some longer product. Perhaps even to create a virtual summit as a result of the relationships that you build with all the people that you interview as part of your podcast series, if that's what you do. I've only published a book as a result of doing a podcast and I call it six steps from podcasting to publishing a book. And just briefly, that's starting a basic audio podcast, moving on to a more comprehensive higher quality audio podcast that's recorded [inaudible] including intros and outros moving on to video, moving on to live stream, moving on to producing a virtual summit and then publishing a book from that. And it's a sequence. And then by the time you get to the end of the sequence, you can be recording a podcast at the same time as producing a virtual summit and perhaps producing video materials. So they can fit in together as part of your content production mix. So it's not necessarily something that needs to sit apart.
Graham Brown: Tell me a little bit about that process from podcast to book. Why are they well suited to each other? Why is a podcast a great way to start that journey?
David Bain: It's not necessarily something that I figured out from the beginning. It's something that I actually, the light came on in my head afterwards in terms of that's what the process was. The reason why it's obvious and natural for me to do the process that way is that to begin with, you want to be able to do things like use the microphone well, find your way of articulating into audio form only. I think that works better in audio only as opposed to trying to do everything to begin with. If you're trying to live stream, for instance, to begin with, and you have a bit of an audience there perhaps. You get some people asking you questions, I've seen you Graham do one of your live streams on LinkedIn, really great live streams, and you do a great job of interacting with your audience there as well, bringing in questions. But do you really want to be bringing in questions and looking into the camera, wondering how your video is performing, thinking about how you're articulating yourself. You're over the microphone, whether you're using the microphone correctly, whether your audio is as good as possible. No, you want to start off with finding your voice, to begin with an audio only form, and then moving on to the next stage after that.
Graham Brown: It's very agile in a way, isn't it? That you are almost jamming in the musical sense, learning the mechanics of it. And that is a great way because you have to do it Showtime don't you? You have to do, what I call the moment of truth? When you have to put your content out there and let people consume it, otherwise it'd always be inside you. There's a big sort of step between just having ideas and publishing a book, but what you've built in your six steps is this kind of step one, which means, okay, you don't have to worry about your visual appearance or even like doing it live. It's just okay, just get on the mic and jam. And it's step one, you can do that. And then maybe you don't have a book inside of you yet. Maybe it's just like all these kinds of disparate ideas coming together. And the jam is like joining the dots a little bit of all these different but unrelated, seemingly unrelated events and ideas and your life, isn't it. And you bring it together in this cohesive way.
David Bain: I think what you alluded to was perfectionist syndrome as well. And that's obviously an issue for many people. However, there's the other side of that issue where you end up looking like a real amateur, and if you're doing it for a brand, if you're doing it for a business, you have to have a certain level of ability of performance, of content quality, otherwise you, it could be detrimental for your brand.
Graham Brown: How do you then build an audience for that brand? Because I imagine that the sort of very narrative based formats, we've seen since Serial, for example, or even NPR, this American life we've already seen the bar raised of what audio could be and yet a vast majority of podcasts that I'm sure you've seen [inaudible] as I have. Man speaks to man about man's boring journey. It is really, I mean, it's not that he's boring, but it's just that the way he tells it, because it's how he's told at every conference presentation when he was asked, "Oh, so tell me about yourself." But we've gone beyond that and yet that seems to be in the business space still. What people are starting out with is okay. As a starting point, do you say to people - ‘fine, start with an interview’ or do you try and push people up that sort of narrative curve a little bit? What's sort of working at the moment? The reason I ask David is because I think a lot of people go into podcasts thinking that man speaks to man is enough. Like this is 20, 21 folks and listeners have graduated a little bit. What are you saying?
David Bain: Yeah, I think there's two stems up from there that you need to start, start up from. One is audio quality. A lot of people still record using zoom or using some other internet based platform that ends up being a bit glitchy that has both speakers on the same audio channel that can't be edited properly. And it's not a good experience. And that the average listener is much more comfortable knowing what good audio sounds like nowadays, and listens to professional quality shows on Spotify or wherever they listen. So they're going to be comparing your audio quality against that. So if you get a reasonable microphone like the Samsung PTU, dynamic microphone under a hundred pounds, under hundred dollars, use it three or four inches from your mouth, speak over it, instead of into it, use a boom arm. That's a better starting point than most, but you talked about the content style as well. And a lot of people start off in either one of two [inaudible]. Number one over scripting, and number two, not scripting at all. Over scripting, reading everything. That's a bad experience and most people can't read naturally, or as if it's saying as if you're not reading and secondly, not scripting at all. If you don't script at all, you end up waffling on and not getting to the point and just asking people to tell a little bit about yourself, as you mentioned as well, Graham, which is a boring introduction. And I think if you have a bit of a scripted introduction, if you tell the listener what they can expect by listening. And if you ask an interesting question initially, instead of asking someone to introduce themselves, that gives you the next level up and you can get straight into the conversation, which is a better starting point I think.
Graham Brown: [inaudible], completely caught me by surprise. I did, not so long ago, a podcast on Skype as a guest, somebody said, can we do this on Skype? I'm like what? Are people still using this? Like years ago I used Skype almost. I think a lot of people did with Skype recorders and all that. And that's completely caught me by surprise that people are still doing that. That was really old school. So props to them for hanging in there. Now, an interesting question, how do you make brands and I maybe should rephrase that. How do you make corporate people interesting? There is a resistance isn't there? Like being interesting is almost mutually exclusive to being truthful, like performing and storytelling versus telling facts, I'm going to talk about my products or I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about. How do you, you know, because you've invested interest in making your series of success, even though your client's paying for you right. You want to make it successful because it's your showcase. How do you work with clients to do that? What do you think are the sort of areas that need the most input?
David Bain: The starting point is to the question, how do you make your brand interesting by not talking about your brand? Certainly if you're doing a podcast, ideally as subject matter for a podcast, I advise that you're looking for the overarching category of content that your business sits under. So you're not talking about specifically what your products and services do, you're talking about certainly something that's of interest to the listener, but you're talking about the category of content that will end up being an interesting series of content.
Graham Brown: But how loose can you go with that? Because I think this is a concern, isn't it? That for a brand, a B2B brand, let's say for example, I'm accounting software. I have to sell accounting software. This is my shtick. That's my package. And how far can I go with this? You're talking about a category.
David Bain: It's all about the audience. So is the content likely to resonate with and be of interest to the audience. So there's lawyers or attorneys in the states and they were wondering what kind of podcast to start off with. And their services only tend to be used once. So obviously there's no point in talking about legal services. Their target market isn't interested in the law. So they decided to start a podcast about golf because they decided that their target market actually were really passionate about golf and there's golf podcasts that were brought to the listener by the law firm. And then that's our way to do that. In general, it's probably drifting too far away from the core content of the company. But if you do your content marketing audits, if you're looking at your different types of content that you deliver, you've got your hero content. Your big, old encompassing, incredible pieces of content that bring consumers , that bring attention to your website to begin with. You've got your help content, which answers common queries and can surface your content for Google suggest for different areas in search as well. You've got your hub content, which is your episoded content, and that's the purpose of that content is to keep your brand top of mind, by just reminding people that you're actually a thought leader. And that's the opportunity with this medium called podcasting. If you do manage to keep someone interested over the long-term, you're not going to be talking about your brand. They're going to be subscribing because they want to subscribe. So the question is, what kind of content do they want to subscribe to on a weekly basis for perhaps years before they're ready to make a purchase? And it's not exactly what your business does. It's that I want from that
Graham Brown: I like the definitions that you've written down, so hero, help, hub. How does the podcast as a hub interact with the other pieces of content? Do you have podcasts which also help content or is it driving the content or coming from those areas into the podcast? How does it normally work?
David Bain: Okay. Let's go into something that I haven't really talked about much. I talked about it once and I'm tending to talk about it again, in a few months time at future virtual summits that I'll be doing. And it's something that I call the Pump and Funnel B2B marketing model. And that's the way that the different types of content interlink with the different consumer touch points in your consumer buying cycle, if you're a B2B brand. The five step process that I tend to encourage B2B brands to go through is fairly common to other marketing models out there. It's attract, assure, connect, nurture and convince. Convince at the last stage, because I believe that consumers make the purchase decisions themselves, you can just convince them to do so. And then you have to differentiate each content that maps towards those different stages in your funnel. You've got your hero content that maps towards the attract stage, the help content that goes towards the assure, connect and nurture stages and a fourth stage that I haven't even mentioned yet, but I call heart's content. I brought that in myself as a fourth stage, that's actually content that describes product centric content, content that tries to get consumers to make an immediate call to action. And so that ties up to the convince stage and you've got different arrows that go in between the hero, help and heart content towards the hub content i.e. People drop out of your natural sales process to get to your hub content, and they may stay at your hub for a while. They may get attracted back by your help content on your website and then sucked further down your funnel. If you'd like to describe it like that, perhaps they're not quite ready to make that purchase yet. So they can go back to your hub content again. So your hub content sits outside your core proposition content, but drives people back when they're ready to go.
Graham Brown: I really like that. That's well thought out there, David. That's a nice visual as well explained in words. So, as I understand it, when you're talking to clients, podcasts are for these clients, a content marketing play in the sense that that's how they understand it, where they put it in their world. Okay. I do content marketing. This is a core part of it, or just because like people like to, especially when you deal with corporates, they like to put it in the right box. So they know what the right person's dealing with, be it comms, marketing, content, et cetera, social media even. Some people try to say that podcasts are social media. Do you just allow people to run with that conversation or do you try and make sure it goes in the right box early on? How important is that for you?
David Bain: It's helpful. And it depends on the size of the company. And if you're talking to a big company then it's necessary, but you also need to listen to whoever you're talking to. If you're talking to the marketing director of a company, you need to actually listen to how they perceive it and how they intend to use it and what their communication mix currently is in order to better position how your solution could actually fit in. In general, it's content. In general, it's the type of content that's more challenging to measure the impact of because people will listen to it and not necessarily be part of a sequence when they're listening to it. So in relation to that, I try to get some brands to ask their customers questions, which content did you engage with prior to actually coming to us today? Those kinds of questions to try and measure the volume of it.
Graham Brown: Yeah. I wonder about that B2B space as well, that it seems that when you're talking about B2B these days, mostly it's in the context of software SaaS platforms. There's a lot of professional services, obviously B2B, but even though these may be large organizations, they're thinking like startups in that way, there aren't really clearly defined channels. And people talk about content marketing, for example. Even though that's natural to somebody like you, that's like quite new for these organizations, but I know people have been talking about it for 10 years or more. But for them, oh, it's like, they only understand things like social media or not. It's either traditional or not. So it's hard to find. I'm just curious about your experience effectively selling podcasts, like what's worked for you in terms of how do you position this? Because one of the things I always find is that as soon as somebody starts putting it into the box of social media, then you know that you're facing an uphill battle. Is it proving the value of podcasts? And I try to take it out of that conversation and try and push it up the chain, which may not happen. Because it depends on what they think it's about. When we started out, we didn't have a clue. Everybody's put us in the social media box, right? So it was a podcast versus Facebook ads and you would never win that. Now we look at it as a comms play because of the kind of companies we deal with. They're very defined comms. What about for yourself? Do these sorts of conversations come up for you or not really?
David Bain: Yeah, they are, but you're making me think about it further and I don't think I've reached an ideal situation. I also think that different brands perceive it differently. So it's very difficult to have a one size fits all solution. I think the answer is just to listen. In general, there are many traditional B2B professional services companies that aren't comfortable with digital, or even a website at all at this stage. And perhaps it's an opportunity to publish relatively easy, easy content on their website. It's an opportunity to have a transcript and have perhaps SEO on their website as well as elsewhere in other platforms. Thanks to it for being a podcast. For startup technology firms the main issues tend to be the fact that they don't have much time. So how are they going to come up with the content themselves? And how much time is it going to take to get this done? And then you've got the more independent entrepreneur or personal service provider, personal brand type person who would like a podcast maybe is a little bit more budget conscious, maybe understands a few more areas about digital marketing, but needs to be listened to as well. So I think in summary, it's all about listening to people and ensuring that what you offer isn't predetermined and your solution is a solution as opposed to maybe a set of buckets that you've raised beforehand.
Graham Brown: A product. Yeah. All right. Switching gears, then rounding out. What is exciting for you in this space that you think is maybe something that you see others don't, but where we're heading in the next two to five years, but everybody's talking about the obvious things like, social audio, brand originals. These are obvious. What are you saying that's outside of all of this, that's interesting to you?
David Bain: I'm trying not to get too led by technology or where we might go in five years time, simply because that's not where my clients are. My clients are struggling with how to produce quality content on a consistent basis that's right for their audience and where I'm finding the struggle that brands are facing at the moment is with actually producing high quality content. As I mentioned earlier on, too many brands are starting podcasts now and using poor quality audio equipment and poor quality recording. And if I can get brands persuaded to use decent microphones, use them correctly, be a little bit premeditated with their intros and they're the outros and I can pitch a wonderful show together for them. That's great. The next stage after that, as I mentioned, is moving to video. I'd like to produce more exciting video shows that also publish podcasts for various clients. And then the next thoughts after that are how to promote on podcasts. Because as you mentioned, Graham, your podcasts are maturing. It's much more difficult now to get that organic reach. Three years ago, I got 20,000 downloads a month easily, within a couple of years for my podcast Digital Marketing Radio. That was relatively easy without any promotion at all. Starting from scratch now, I don't think I could do that quite so easily again. So then it's okay talking, how do you promote a podcast? It's taking video segments, adding captions to it, having a bit of paid social media budget and driving it towards podcasts subscriptions as well. But it's also accepting that podcasts are maturing, marketers accept that you can't publish a new website with a new domain name, publish content on that, and expect to start to rank for competitive keyword terms nowadays. You just can't do that. And people have to accept that with podcasts now. You need to go through that 6 to 12 months to consistently publish before you get any significant organic reach.
Graham Brown: You've been listening to The Age of Audio with me, Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co. To get access to all the audio conversations and book content for the age of audio, go to www.theageofaudio.com. One more time - theageofaudio.com