Launching a B2B podcast is an exciting way to diversify your marketing channels and enter the rapidly growing world of audio. However, B2B podcasts can be challenging to measure, especially when you’re trying to target specific industries, company sizes, and titles or positions.
As a B2B marketer, you know the importance of being able to track lead generation and justify ROI, something that’s commonly known to be difficult to do in podcasts. Compared to other digital marketing mediums that lack video or social media, podcasts don’t give marketers as much insight into who your listener is, how they engage with your content, and overall performance metrics to measure success.
It was these challenges within the podcast industry that led our own team to create B2B Analytics, empowering brands to discover which companies are listening to their shows along with key company data.
Throughout this article, we break down how to use data from B2B Analytics as well as other more general analytics to measure the success of your B2B podcast and make informed decisions based on those insights.
Using B2B Analytics to your advantage
One of the most pivotal benefits of B2B Analytics is that it allows you to see exactly which companies are listening to your podcast.
But just seeing this list of companies isn’t beneficial. It’s about what you do with this data. Let’s dive in.
Hitting your target audience
Knowing what companies your content is attracting shows you whether or not you're hitting your target audience whether that’s defined in your ICP or ideal listener profile as we like to call it in the audio world.
With B2B Analytics, you can discover details about your listeners including:
- Company name
- Company size
- Company industry
- Company revenue
Let’s say you've identified your primary listener persona as C-suite executives at investment firms specializing in AI. You check your company breakdown and notice that most of your audience are listeners in tech companies, not investment firms.
With this information, you’re able to identify that your content isn’t reaching your desired audience, whether it’s because it’s too technical or maybe the style of the show doesn’t resonate with investment leaders, whatever it may be, you know something needs to change within your content. -
We’ve also seen an interesting use case where a brand made each episode target a different industry. With B2B Analytics, they were able to benchmark whether or not this episode strategy was effective.
Lead Generation
Previously, attributing leads to your podcast is nearly impossible unless you have a “how did you hear about us” in your sign-up process or they click on your website from a UTM link in your shownotes.
B2B brands can now leverage B2B analytics to boost lead generation efforts since you now know what companies are sitting at the top of your sales funnel. Brands can export the data from their B2B Analytics dashboard such as company, size, industry, and revenue, and pass that along to their sales team for prospecting.
Or alternatively, you can start tracking these prospects through your sales funnel. First, you see them become listeners of the podcast, and then you offer a gated piece of content in your show notes and see them download it, after this, they sign up for your newsletter.
Here’s an example: You notice that the companies listening to your show are primarily in one of the industries your brand targets. Create a downloadable template that you know would solve a pain point for those listeners, and mention it in the podcast. You’re now nurturing leads and providing value beyond your podcast without blatantly making a sales pitch.
Justify podcast ROI
Because of its lead generation benefits, B2B Analytics opens the door for brands to more easily measure and track ROI. Whether you’re an internal B2B marketer or an agency, decision-makers want to know if their money is well spent especially during times of economic uncertainty. With access to audience breakdowns, you can accurately report on if targets are being met.
Another way to capitalize on this information is when designing external marketing campaigns for the podcast. Now that you know exactly who is listening you can create targeted campaigns.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you’re a software company that has created a podcast to target mid-sized companies that specialize in operations and distribution.
When you look at your listener breakdown, you notice that while for the most part, you’re reaching your target audience, there is a small sub-section of companies that aren’t listening. Now you know that you need to focus your marketing efforts on reaching the leaders at these companies. Is there a specific newsletter they subscribe to that you could sponsor? Or a conference they will attend? Now that you know who is and isn’t listening, you can make more informed marketing choices.
Other ways B2B brands can leverage analytics
Other than using CoHost’s B2B features, there are lots of ways for brands to use analytics to their advantage. By tracking your best-performing episodes by consumption rate, downloads, and tracking links, you can transform that content into other marketing assets and support your show across channels.
1) Scaleable content
A great advantage of long-form content like a podcast is that you can track what content is performing well and then scale and reuse that content.
Have a wildly popular episode? Turn it into a newsletter segment. Did an episode get a shoutout in the press? Reach out to that publication with more PR opportunities or find similar ones.
Another great way to scale well-performing content is through blogs. Turning popular episodes or subjects into blogs is a great chance to harness the full potential of SEO. Unfortunately, podcasts are not quite optimized for SEO at this point (although there are lots you can do to boost discoverability) so blogs are still your best bet for great SEO performance. You already have content written and know there is an interest based on the episode's performance, so you know you’ll have a winning blog on your hands.
2) Cross-promotion
Hopefully, your podcast is already an integrated element of your brand’s overall marketing strategy, and if it’s not, it should be! Discovering what channels are driving traffic toward your podcast, and how the links you list in your show notes are performing are great analytics to leverage when creating marketing content.
While a podcast is not a sales tactic, it is fine to link your service offerings in your shownotes, and track their performance with tracking links. You should also be supporting your podcast on your other channels, like Instagram and LinkedIn.
3) Tracking links
Measure what is driving listeners towards your podcast using tracking links. Every social channel should have its own tracking link and whenever you have a guest come on, make sure to provide a custom tracking link so that you can attribute traffic correctly.
This will also allow you to focus your attention on areas that are underperforming, or help you decide if a certain platform is simply not worth the effort. For example, if Instagram is only responsible for 1% of your listener traffic, it might be worth putting those resources elsewhere.
How B2B brands can measure podcast performance
B2B brands can use podcasts as a powerful tool to not only reach and engage with their target audience but drive leads and generate revenue.
To maximize impact, it's key that B2B marketers understand how to effectively use podcast analytics to measure impact and performance. With tools and metrics like B2B Analytics, Tracking Links, and episode comparison graphs, brands can gain insights into the performance of their podcasts and make data-driven decisions to optimize their content strategy.
With the right approach to measurement and tracking, B2B brands can harness the full potential of podcasts to deepen engagement with their target audience and drive business outcomes.
Interested in CoHost’s B2B Analytics? Reach out for a free demo.
