The 3 Things That Will Make or Break Your B2B Podcast | Content Wars - EP17

Nathan Yerian: So thanks everybody for joining us for the three things that will make or break your B2B podcast. We will be streaming this to LinkedIn Live as well as a webinar platform and we'll probably have a replay later on our podcast. So today we're going to cover a lot of aspects about podcasting specifically in the realm of B2B and we're going to share with you some things that I think trip up some companies when they try to start a podcast. Hopefully we're going to expose those things, give you some tools and some tricks to get over those hurdles and give you the clarity you might need to be successful in starting your own podcast. So without further ado we've got a lot of material to cover. 

We're going to get right into it. So B2B podcast it's starting to matter more and more. I know we obviously run a video production company. We deal with a lot of different types of companies creating a lot of different type of content. One of the content types that we produce is podcast content. Within the new year we've seen an increase in interest in the podcast format, specifically video podcast format. What are some of the things that you're hearing and seeing from our clients as to why they're now more interested in this particular format? 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah it's a good point. I think that a lot of what we're seeing kind of follows the same suit. Going over that and laying the foundation for why this matters is going to be key for helping you to decide if a podcast makes sense moving forward or not. One of the things that we've seen a lot is that trust has shifted. So buyers are trusting people over brands. We see this in the type of content people are consuming. 

We're seeing this in how they're consuming. We're seeing this in the conversations that happen offline. But there's been this shift towards people wanting to hear more from people and building trust through that versus previously what has historically been the case where brand content or the company putting out content has had an impact. But we've really seen a big shift towards this in probably the last 12 months. 

Nathan Yerian: So yeah that's 100% right. People are seeing that the experts they have are starting to get more traction or set a different way. When they create content with the experts they have they're getting more eyeballs more more reach in general. They're getting more interactions. They're getting more likes shares comments whatever it is when it comes from a human being versus from the company which also has another aspect to that. 

So obviously you have the human aspect of people want to interact with humans. But there's another piece to that which is because they're involving their team or their experts in that process they're unlocking information that wasn't available before. You're taking somebody that's been there done that probably for decades in their career and they're saying hey let me let me share some real knowledge with you. So the knowledge that they're getting and uncovering through formats like a podcast they're uncovering sources of information that hasn't been available before. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah and you're definitely getting a lot of that when you are talking to a subject matter expert. And one of the great things about that is that you're able to take one video asset and have many outputs. So we're seeing that through getting your best people on camera and being able to talk about a lot of things is great. But then there's also a lot of versatility in how video podcasts can help your content engine. And the reality is that if you do it right you can actually get over 10 different assets across any channel that you're working on from a single podcast episode. 

Nathan Yerian: Yeah absolutely you're not just creating a blog article and putting it on your website. There's there's a lot more versatility to starting at this particular format. So we've talked a lot about why companies are turning to the podcast format but there is a problem that we probably need to talk about when it comes to podcasting. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah the big elephant in the room is that over 80 percent of B2B podcasts actually end up failing. And usually it's not their fault. It's not like the idea was bad. It's that nobody built a system that could help it succeed. 

And we see this all the time. And so I think that as we get into the meat of this webinar we're going to really be able to see how these systems can contribute to the success so that if you choose to do a podcast you're not one of the 80 percent. 

Nathan Yerian: Yeah and that 80 percent is on the low end. I mean there's a number of metrics to this. So it's between 80 and 90 percent usually. But I mean when when they say fail what they're describing as failure is they stop recording they stop producing it. So the definition of failure is the podcast cease to exist right. And the crazy thing is like if you look at the metrics I think the number is it's 80 to 90 percent fail at around episode seven. So it isn't that they got in and they got this great success. It's they're barely off the ground and they're already failing. And I think that's what what we're trying to put together and say hey look let's look at the areas in which these podcasts are failing and let's let's try to create systems to get over these hurdles. And that's that's really what what we want to do today. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah and we've heard this from clients who have either launched some form of episodes or who have maybe never even got it off the ground. Sometimes people have you know a room full of equipment or we have this you know hodgepodge of episodes. 

Some of them have seen light of day or haven't. So really digging into this and seeing the three podcast killers are going to help understand those issues as well. What are the three podcast killers. So in our experience every B2B podcast that has failed can be traced back to one or multiple of these things that usually will kill your podcast. 

So the first one that we're going to look at and we'll go into each of these more in depth but the first one is no strategy. And we really see this as one of the most common scenarios where people will show up and they don't have a North Star or they don't know their audience or there's no real point of view and what happens is that there's no reason to exist. So like you said by episode seven they get hung up they get off track they get defeated or burned out and it can really kill the effort or the momentum that they had because there was no strategy going into it. 

Somebody said hey let's you know do a podcast and we just start up and we start recording and you end up with you know conversations that are off track or don't have a you know clear North Star and it's a really common problem. 

Nathan Yerian: So yeah no strategy is definitely something we see a lot. I mean people just get the idea by the equipment and try and go without a real plan and it ends up killing that podcast. 

The next one that we see all the time is no production system. So they they get in there and it's hard to shoot or they can't get the right people and it turns out if you can't shoot your podcast it ends up dying or you shot it and you can't get the assets that you were dreaming about when you started. So if you can't shoot it or you can't edit it or process it into something you got a big problem and you need a system to solve that and if you don't have it your podcast is going to die. 

Adam Marquardt: Yep and the third podcast killer is no distribution system. So if you don't have a way to distribute it consistently it will die. 

Nathan Yerian: All right so let's start talking about the first podcast killer no strategy and let's go a little bit deeper so the audience really understands what we're talking about when we say that. So you know if you were to start a podcast without a strategy these are some of the things that would plague that process. You would you would really have really a lack of purpose when you have no purpose when you get to that situation that you were describing where it's like oh well just start a podcast. Well that's cool but if you don't have a real reason why the podcast exists if you don't really understand where it's going people are going to lose interest in that. Podcast is a cool idea but if it doesn't have a direction you're not going to get longevity out of the team that you need to actually stay dedicated to that effort so that's going to be a huge one. 

You know you you end up with random topics you talk about this one day you talk about something else the next day you had no real direction so you're never actually going to be able to build that audience because the audience that cares about topic one is not necessarily going to be the audience that cares about topic two so you have no direction in your content you're not going to be able to build a real podcast and build an audience over time with randomly selected topics or you haven't defined that audience you know and and and you're talking about things that doesn't necessarily interest the audience that you think that you're creating the podcast for so if you don't know who that audience is you don't have a prayer of talking about the right things that are going to interest them and the last one and I think this is the biggest one everybody has big ambitions we're going to talk about all these things it's going to be great and then we get to episode six or seven or whatever it is and we say well shit we we've run out of podcast ideas we don't know what to talk about next we've talked about everything our ideas have dried up and that's nonsense we'll we'll get to you know how to get over really all of these things but these are the symptoms of you didn't have a strategy when you started you had an idea for a podcast but that's where it 

Adam Marquardt: stopped yeah there's definitely been podcast shows that I've listened to where I've listened to one episode and I was like oh that was really good I I really like the the format the content the whatever it is and I go to listen to another one and it's completely different and so without having that clear purpose and without having those topics that aren't all over the place and knowing the audience without having cohesiveness amongst those things your episodes will dry up it's just a result of it unfortunately so we're going to go through this today and really help you to understand what to do next and make sure that when you do strategy you're doing it the right way to reduce the chance of any hiccups like that which 

Nathan Yerian: brings us to how do we do strategy the right way and you know obviously we do this with with our clients we've got a formula to do this and that's really what we kind of want to walk through with you but the the core of it is if you are going to create a winning podcast strategy you really need six core elements 

Adam Marquardt: yeah and the first one that we're going to look at is audience so you mentioned it earlier but who's this for right what role are they in what's the mindset that they have going to this what challenges are they struggling with and being able to position your podcast to a certain audience allows everything you do to align with that audience if you have an audience of engineers and i'm talking about something you know unrelated that audience will not be engaged that audience will not tune back in so you have to make sure that when you define this that you have a clear picture of who you're talking to and what it looks like and it doesn't have to you don't have to go full buyer persona on this but it is important to clearly identify who this is for 

Nathan Yerian: yeah if we're talking to a certain person that has certain challenges it's going to help us identify what should we be talking about how should we be talking about it and have a litmus test for is this relevant to this audience if we don't know who that is you're not going to be able to do that so the next one is purpose what is the purpose of the podcast and that really goes to fault right first there's the audience side of it what information are you trying to transfer to the audience what are you trying to get them to believe what are you trying to show them through the information you're delivering and then secondarily what is the purpose for the company to do the podcast what are we up to are we trying to increase awareness are we trying to increase our status are we trying to become thought leaders in our particular industry what is the thing that we're doing this for and i think by defining the purpose for the audience and for the company we're going to be able to stay on the path a little bit better and make sure that when we take an action starting a podcast doing an episode inviting a guest we can align it back to that purpose and say does that get us closer or further away from 

Adam Marquardt: what our purpose is yeah you have to be able to align it to the purpose because there are so many decisions that you have to make when creating content that it gives you a good baseline of are we going the right direction are we you know bringing the right people are on are we saying the right things which leads us to the next one number three which is point of view and this is one that people skip all the time but we really encourage people when they're going through this process with us to slow down and think about what do you believe that your industry usually gets wrong this is a question that sales is actually usually pretty good at answering but a lot of people don't spend the time to think about this but having a point of view and defining that can actually be seen through your whole show as you proceed 

Nathan Yerian: so something to keep in mind when you're thinking about point of view the reality is your audience doesn't need more content what they need is a different way to think or more information or a better way to do things and where that information comes from is from your experts that have been there done that have that expertise that they built up over their career and they're sharing that information so it's the value of the information or the perspective that comes from the company not the fact that we have a podcast that's why it's critical to get that point of view really detailed what is the difference in our message that we're taking and why is that valuable to that audience crystallizing that on the front end is going to help save your podcast 

Adam Marquardt: yeah and the point of view will actually feed into the next one which is number four topic architecture so this is something that we're going to go through more in depth here in a little bit but this is something that people usually miss and this is earlier when we were talking about the thing that kills people is running out of episodes or running ideas of what to talk about or talking about things that are off topic all of this can be solved with the right topic architecture so we're going to go through this and we're going to help you to understand the themes the subtopics and then essentially the episodes that will give you a never-ending runway of content for your show 

Nathan Yerian: yeah topic architecture is huge i know when we go through the the exercise that we do with our clients and we actually get that nailed down the comments that we get from our clients is like oh oh my goodness that that is a lot of things that we could talk about and that fear of we're going to run out of something to say here just dissipates almost immediately so the next thing in the strategy is format so this doesn't have to be set in stone but you have to have some idea what kind of show are we creating is this a solo show someone just sitting down and and going through topics is it a discussion where you have two people from the company they're going to sit down and really hash out a particular topic is it going to be a guest show are you going to have you know a question and answer format where you have a guest coming in that that might have expertise on particular topics what is the length of this are you going for a 15 minute episode a 30 minute episode a two hour episode are you pulling a joe rogan and going for three hour marathons i mean what what is the the length that you are going to try to aim for um what's the structure how how is the show put together what how does that conversation break down and ultimately you know do you have recurring themes or segments that pop in there like a lightning round at the end or whatever it's going to be that that your audience can know and expect and and appreciate about your show particularly so really nailing down what that format looks like and this can change over time but what do you want it to be what what should it feel like when you sit down at that first episode what does that look like and that's really what 

Adam Marquardt: format is about and to bring this all together with number six we have success criteria so essentially how will you measure whether this is working or not that's a question that we get often sometimes people will jump to metrics or kpis that they've used in the past you know oh well we're going to get leads off of this and if that's where you're headed i'm not saying it can't happen but i am saying i i wouldn't recommend that as your success metric there's lots of things and it could be something internal for the company something more philosophical or could be something more concrete we see this divide pretty often between businesses depending on what they're trying to achieve with the content that they're creating 

Nathan Yerian: yeah many times you're looking at success criteria as you pointed out if the criteria is leads it's going to be very difficult to trace how a podcast produced that piece of business not that it can't happen because it totally can and has but tracing that or measuring that i think is going to be problematic for you i think you know the the types of things that we want to focus on when we're talking about success criteria would be we're going to elevate our presence in the market we're going to have our point of view known by our potential customer base we're going to start softening the ground for our sales operations because people are hearing from us and understanding what we think what we do how it works so there's an opportunity for you know growing in awareness or growing our reputation or increasing our authority or increasing our trust those are some success metrics that you really want to focus on and there's different ways that you can hone in and start to measure some of those things but generally speaking you need to know what is going to be our definition of it's working if you don't know that you'll never be able to actually gauge it worked or it didn't work so we've talked about audience purpose point of view topic architecture format success criteria all of that goes into a system that we call a podcast blueprint so you know for creating a podcast blueprint we go through a process there's there's a discovery questionnaire process there is a strategy session that we get into with with our client then ultimately what comes out of that is a finalized podcast blueprint or set a different way a podcast strategy right so we'll share all the components so that you can actually create that blueprint and once you have that document you're going to be in a much better place to start your podcast and that takes us to the next point which is within that blueprint one of the things you're going to do one of the things you're going to create is going to be your topic architecture you're going to go through and identify common themes or recurring themes that you're going to talk about within your podcast and for each theme you're also going to have subtopics that are associated to that theme so you're going to have an array of areas of discussion and what this is going to do it's going to be a really good starting point when it's time to sit down and say what are the episodes we're going to produce so you know we're calling it the secret weapon this topic architecture I can tell you this has literally been said by some of our our clients oh my goodness I feel like I like this is our secret weapon because we were so worried that we were going to run out of ideas and now we see that's not real when you get into the blueprint and you can see hey this is the themes this is how this works this is the subtopics I understand what we're doing here but also a little bit later we're going to get into how do we actually use that to create episode ideas and then how do we put that into play with our team to actually start producing those ideas so we're going to get into that in a little bit but that topic architecture that high level what are the themes we're going to cover what are the subtopics of those themes will be included in that blueprint process 

Adam Marquardt: yeah then that's a great point this is where people will usually get hung up or in some cases they try to skip it but this is going to be the thing that will allow an endless supply of episode ideas to flow from it just as one example we have a client that is in the staffing industry and one of the things that they did when they mapped them out is they mapped out probably a dozen different themes and you want to try to come up with say 10 now you may be able to make it work with five you may be able to make it work with 10 some people may need more but the reality is let's say that you look at one of their topics and they have one of their topics was food production that's the industry that they serve they have a lot to say about it but then within that they have subtopics so within food production they have food safety they have training they have quality control and when you stop and you ask them hey can you talk about this topic can you talk about food safety they're like yeah I could tell you about this and this and this and it's like cool each one of those has the opportunity to be an episode but by creating this topic architecture you really have a unique advantage to have an endless supply of ideas flowing to you 

Nathan Yerian: yeah absolutely and we'll get into more about what that is and kind of how how how that gets put into play here in a second okay so you have your topic architecture you have a system in which you could create ideas for episodes but how should that actually happen how do you apply your topic architecture to start creating those episodes 

Adam Marquardt: once you've mapped out and understand that topic architecture you're essentially going to have a list of ideas that you could have episodes around and what we like to do from here is build what we call an episode plan and essentially an episode plan is going to give you the ability to not only batch these topics together but then plan for the quarter 

Nathan Yerian: so the idea topic architecture is that you never run out of episode ideas which brings us to our next topic the episode plan 

Adam Marquardt: yeah so your episode plan is essentially going to allow you to take those episode ideas and turn them into an actual scheduled production event and that's going to be the most important part is it's cool to have ideas I love that we've brainstormed these different episodes we could create but now we have to go through a sequential process that's going to allow us to actually create that content so what we like to do is when we have clients go through and and brainstorm the first you know few episodes based on their topics and subtopics what they're going to do next is build an episode plan and essentially this is going to allow them to plan the next quarter if you build an episode plan and you have 26 episodes and you're posting once every two weeks or you're doing it weekly and you have 52 episode ideas this is going to take that next step of say what are we going to shoot this next quarter so step one is that we're going to ideate a batch of episode topics so you're going to be pulling episodes directly from your blueprint topic architecture that you figured out in the last step and you're going to start using those working titles and figure out the talking points and who's involved and what this is going to allow you to do is start to round out some of the details of what would go into that episode so if you have a working title and you know that you need Tim and John to sit in and have this episode well you can begin to map that out in this episode plan and it's really going to give you a better actionable next step for when you go to step two which is planning for the quarter 

Nathan Yerian: yeah absolutely so so as you pointed out if you're doing a bi-weekly podcast you're going to have about 26 episodes during the year right so if you can sit down and map out these are the topics that we want to cover in these 26 episodes these are generally the areas of discussion and this is probably who's going to be in those episodes it gives you a really good starting point of who might need to be where and when and how might that happen who's an expert in what so it's the starting of that planning process to actually be able to produce these episodes so if you planned year in this case 26 episodes you now just need to pick which ones do you want to produce this quarter which allows you to start creating a quarterly plan once you get that quarterly plan it allows you to move on to the next step which is actually scheduling the production start to get your team involved who's actually going to be in the episodes especially if you have guests involved or something like that so if you take it from we've thought of what the episodes are we've selected the ones that we're going to do this quarter now we can start tapping other people in and saying hey Tim or John you're going to be here on this day and Susan and Samantha are going to be here on this day it lets everybody know what are we doing and when is it actually going to be lights camera action time so that brings us to the end of the strategy session we will share a document package with you that'll give you a lot of information of how you can actually do this for yourself strategy is only part of the equation it'll get you a really cool document but if you want to actually create a podcast you got to execute on that plan which is what we'll get into next so 

Adam Marquardt: podcast killer number two done done done no 

Nathan Yerian: production system and when there's no production system there's a number of symptoms that you're also going to see that will ultimately kill a podcast the first one's going to be scheduling chaos you don't have a system so you're going to start getting pushback on actually producing your episodes you're going to have problems booking your executives it's going to be pushed off a month or a couple months and then before you know it your podcast is dead there's going to have you know just problems in setting up it's it's going to be sporadic of when we are or aren't doing it and and bringing out the equipment and setting it up and what's going to happen next and it's just it's problematic for the setup of even getting it done editing editing is a lot of work if you don't have a system of how that work is actually going to happen it's not going to happen or at least it's not going to happen to the extent that it should happen if you're investing the time and and money in starting a podcast and and fatigue sets in you know you you might get some assets some assets might go out but you're not going to get the the full set of content that you should be getting it because it's it's a lot of work and it's a process we have to figure it out every time but if you have the right system all of those can be eliminated 

Adam Marquardt: yeah and speaking of the right system if you are going to do a podcast we always recommend it's a non-negotiable first we always recommend leading with video because you can do an audio only podcast but the reality is it usually is only resulting in one asset which really hinders where use it how you use it how many people you get in front of how much awareness and trust you're actually creating from that content so it's really really limiting in the ability to help your audience begin to build trust in you and the content that you're creating unlike a video podcast where you actually can create a content system around a video podcast so like I said with an audio only episode that's it you know you you have limited distribution or future repurposing of that there are some different use cases you could argue but it is limiting versus when you have a video podcast you can use that full episode on youtube you can use it on spotify apple is actually working on releasing a video version of their podcasting option right now and then you can break that down into social clips and those social clips can live on linked in and shorts and instagram and they can direct people to the full episode or previous episodes and you can even take that video and you can take the transcript and you can break that down into things like blog posts newsletters webinar content linked in articles so when you create this content waterfall with a variety of different placements and usages from only one asset the value of it goes so much further 

Nathan Yerian: and that's super important there's you know a lot of companies that'll start a podcast and they're thinking audio and that's fine but the reality is two things one you are doing it to spread your message and you want to reach as many people as possible and an audio only podcast does not make that possible and I think secondarily and most importantly the people that you're involving in your podcast are probably some of the most valuable people in your organization so if you're using their time you need to use it wisely said differently you need their time to be used in a way that can reach the maximum audience and that's not going to happen with an audio only podcast okay so we've already covered the pieces about the strategy but just looking at where we are in the system overall we talked about a blueprint we talked about a episode plan now it's time to get into a repeatable production system so you can actually produce this content we're going to look at things like producing a discussion guide for your different episodes how we're going to record these episodes how it's actually going to happen what you're going to create so what you're going to get out of it or the assets you're going to create from your recordings and then also how are we going to get approval for these before they see the light of day that's going to be the system that you're going to need for your production to actually happen to actually be planned shot created and approved so that it could see the light 

Adam Marquardt: of day and like you said we talked about the blueprint and the episode plan in the strategy phase but what happens now that we're in the production phase to actually bring those ideas to life so what we do for our clients is every episode actually gets a discussion guide and so the reason that we do this is because one of the things that we talked about early on was staying on topic and I have seen people create the episode plan and then they wing it and then they sit down to record the episode and by the end of it they are so far in left field talking about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the initial concept that they sat down to talk about and you want to avoid this mistake and the way that we do that is through a discussion guide you don't have to follow it a hundred percent but it's essentially an outline or a set of guides that should keep you on topic 

Nathan Yerian: yeah absolutely I mean you know we're talking about a group of experts they know what they're talking about that's why you're handing them the microphone but without guardrails of some kind sometimes they end up deviating a little bit from what you expected to get out of them so your discussion guide is the opportunity to let your your host or maybe even your guests know this is what we're going to talk about this is how it's going to go this is what we're up to in general so a discussion guide it's going to include what the topic is it's also going to check in and make sure that it's aligned with that blueprint we don't want topics that aren't aligned with the blueprint so the discussion guide is going to make sure hey this is how this aligns right you're also going to look at what's the takeaway that the audience is going to get from this we're going to you know talk for 30 40 minutes whatever it is what are we trying to communicate to them let's get real clear on that before we invest that time and then how are we going to communicate that what are the three to five points that we need to make to them so that they're able to have that takeaway what does that look like many times you're also going to include either prompts or some kind of question that allows the host or whoever's having the discussion to easily flow through that conversation and that can and they can use those questions or prompts to move that conversation along while making sure that they hit those points and I would recommend having some kind of closing prompt as well what are we going to say at the end how are we going to drive this home so you know putting that all on paper is great it gives whoever's going to be on camera a starting point for what the hell are we talking about and how is this discussion going to go so we're not just free flowing and hoping that we get there but it's also good to point out this is not a script it is not going to be a script it's not going to say well you say this and then I'll say that you can't do that especially to experts it'll make them nervous it'll make it weird it'll lose authenticity immediately so we're not over here just in a free flowing conversation wherever it happens to go we're going to go but we're also not living in scriptville either we're saying here's a structure guys and girls here's what we're up to this is where we want to go you have the microphone you're free to take it where you want but this can guide you in where we would like the episode to go all right so we've got discussion guys we've got a plan we know what we're doing we're sitting down we we're going to start producing these things but we've got a little bit of a hurdle which is we need to be efficient with how we're producing this stuff. We're asking our experts for their time and their time is valuable. So how are we going to make the most of that time and still be productive in what we're up to which is creating content and hopefully a podcast. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah absolutely and this goes back to when we started talking about building your episode plan and planning for the quarter. One of the things that we talked about was mapping six to twelve episodes off the bat. The reason that that's important is because if you can batch record you're able to protect the time of the expert, you're able to consistently create episodes, you're able to create essentially this pipeline that is going to feed the show so that your show never gets stale or you know something comes up and you can't record a week, you're not just totally thrown off course you have a plan and so batch recording essentially will allow you to maximize their time while still recording what you need so you're not scrambling for content. We're talking about recording two or three episodes in one day and that has a lot of value. One of the things that we see is that it's actually easier on the executive so on the day of recording they can come in and create multiple episodes and it can result in weeks of content. It helps them prioritize their time, it helps them know what to expect when walking in. It doesn't you know it's not a big suck for them where like oh every week for the next four weeks I've got to go in and record this. No we're going to do it in a batch setting and what we found is that it's actually higher quality so if the host or the guest or whoever it is is doing multiple episodes they get in a rhythm. They find out that hey you know what this was actually better than episode one. 

I said this or I did this or I had this manorism or I messed up or I led with these sentences. You can correct all that because it's top of mind and you get in almost like a flow state where you're able to do more episodes and you see towards the end of the day they actually get higher quality. Now there is a bit of a diminishing return once they get tired but you can get usually two to three pretty strong episodes. 

Nathan Yerian: Yeah and it really depends on who you're putting on camera in general so I mean we've got clients that'll do two. We have one that does six. They come in and they do a quarter's worth of content and it's with the CEO and he says look I don't have the time to do this I want to do it four times a year and we're going to come in and we're going to crush it and he has the energy to get through six. I would not recommend six for most people. I would say probably three is probably the max for most people. 

If you're a very high energy individual you might shoot a little bit higher than that but it can be done in a very efficient manner. The CEO for example that says look guys I want to do this four times a year. Great let's make that happen and batch production allows that to actually be a possibility. One of the other pieces is the efficiency in the production is not just for the production itself but it's also allowing that pipeline to stay full. I mean you have the production aspect of it but then you also have the we have to have something to edit to work on to be able to consistently deliver the assets that we're going to be talking about which ultimately leads to publishing protection. We want to know if we start publishing this thing and we get in a cadence whatever it is every other week we're going to come out with an episode and we have this social channel going on and we have this other content stuff going on that we're trying to hit a cadence with we have to know are we going to be interrupted are we going to get two months into it and then hit a roadblock and not put out an episode for a month. We can alleviate the potential for that happening if we're doing batch production and we're scheduling properly. So batch production it's better for the executives many times because they can just get in do what they need to do and then be back to their quote-unquote real job and it's better for the marketing team because they're getting a lot of content at one time that they can start to put into play put some in their back pocket for a rainy day and continue doing the production side of things. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah and just one more thing on batch production when you're starting out a new show this is less valuable than when you're doing it for episodes five six seven eight nine ten and beyond in the beginning with a new show what we typically do with clients is we recommend batch recording but only doing maybe two episodes max three the first time the very first time we're talking about episode one episode two and maybe episode three now before we and we'll get to this in a little bit before we get into publishing we recommend recording three and four so that way when you publish episode one you already have episode two and three and four in the queue but it's important that when you're starting out if you just record episode one and episode two you can then have those edited and you can look back and say oh you know what for episode three and four I'd actually like to fix A, B or C or I'd like to say this differently or I'd like to sit differently or communicate differently and you'll see these little nuances of how you want to improve and you can make those adjustments for three and four and so then whenever you have now shot edited and approved one two three and four by the time that you publish episode one you now have a backlog of two three and four and we know three and four is likely better than one and two because you've seen it and made improvements and now your show is off to a really good start where you have a solid foundation and you have a backlog of episodes that will allow you to continue feeding your pipeline. 

Nathan Yerian: Yeah that's definitely something that we've seen where you know clients are able to make micro adjustments and sometimes they're not huge but just seeing the first episode you're on or the first couple and saying oh my goodness I want to want to hold my head differently or maybe I want to do my hair differently or maybe I shouldn't say that word. 

Man I said um a lot of times I need to work on that right so there are things that you can see if you're the one on camera that you're like I want to make these adjustments and yes episode three and four would be better from that but also as you do it more you're going to get better so episode three and four are going to be better than episode one really no matter what. Okay so we're shooting all this content what are we going to produce with it what are we going to get out of it? Obviously we're going to get a podcast episode but but what else we've kind of alluded to there's a lot of content that you can get from this what are those pieces and how does that happen? 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah I think this is probably the most overlooked aspect when starting a B2B podcast most people are thinking of the single video episode that they'll get okay we're going to get this and then we'll publish it on YouTube and Spotify and we'll call it a day but what most people don't really either understand or implement or both is that there's this whole waterfall of 10 or more assets that you could be creating from a single episode and now when you look at the ROI on your content it's not just oh well we created this one video podcast episode it's no this was fueling our whole content engine and you're really able to do it in a way that you can't do with any other format you cannot do this with an audio only podcast you cannot do this with a blog post but this video podcast does allow you to essentially feed other assets. 

Nathan Yerian: Yeah so when we go back to what the purpose is we're trying to get our message in front of the right people and the more at bats we have to do that the more likely that is that it's going to happen so you know we have our full podcast episode obviously we can put that on you know the likely suspects are going to be Spotify and Apple in an audio format but as you touched on Spotify now has video and Apple's working on getting video as well because it's video we can also put it on YouTube so YouTube is one of the fastest growing podcast platforms and they have their own podcast program as well so in addition to that you can create social video posts that can be used on LinkedIn or YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or whatever platform your company plays on you now have video content that can be can be used there you know this is often overlooked from companies that say oh you know what our content mix is a blog article or a newsletter podcast is just one more thing we're going to add to it no podcasts can become the driver for your newsletter or for your your your blog posts I mean when you have experts sitting down and having long form discussions about things you have a wealth of information that can go beyond a podcast you can easily take a transcript and use that transcript to create written content so whether that's blog articles whether that's newsletters whether it's website content you now have expert source material to create your written content you don't have to have your separate expert interviews or you don't have to make it up you don't have to go research what the competition's doing or look in industry sources you have the source you sat them down you put a microphone in front of them start using that to create your other forms of content including your written content at the end of the day if you're doing all of this you're not walking away with a podcast episode you're walking away with with podcast on multiple platforms you're walking away with social content for multiple platforms and you're walking away with written content for multiple platforms you can take it further than this you can do call-out graphics you can create a bunch of different social type content I think some of that is overplayed but you can take this really far we use 10 as the example of how many assets you might be able to get to put into play it can be far more than that obviously there's work associated but it can be far more than that but I think walking into it you say hey you know what let's try and get somewhere between five and ten assets out of every episode that we do that's easy 

Adam Marquardt: to accomplish so far in creating a repeatable production system we've talked about creating a discussion guide recording creating a variety of content and arguably the most important is the approval process so you want to make sure nothing goes live without having the right stakeholders have their buy-in and have their approval on it 

Nathan Yerian: the worst thing that happens is you publish something and the expert shows up in left field or or legal shows up in left feeling like oh my goodness you got to take that down right you you didn't accomplish very much if you got all the way to the end put it into play and uh they you know you get a red card it's got that's not going to help you so you really need to work in an approval process into your system and figure out who are the stakeholders that might need to review and approve this content before it sees the light of day and bake into that process that they actually see that and whether we're talking about you know controlling the message what we can and can't say or what's appropriate for our brand or just getting the the maybe even the people that were on camera aligned with okay I said that that's how I want to say that or that's how I want to position this because sometimes they'll say something like well that's not exactly right what we don't want to do is make the people who are trying to position as experts saying something that's wrong or that the you know the audience might disagree with because it didn't have all the facts in or whatever and it'll happen if you have long form content there's going to be incomplete components especially when you start cutting it up for social you're like oh that wasn't the whole idea or maybe I misstated that fact slightly let's not use that one right so you have to get that approval process as part of your overall system it's going to help make the content better but it's also going to eliminate fire drills it's going to eliminate that problem that occurs when you as the marketing team pump out a piece of content and someone maybe even the person that said it comes out of left field talking about we got to take that 

Adam Marquardt: down yeah the worst thing you could do is publish an episode to youtube and then they watch it live after maybe a couple days and it's got thousands of views or whatever and then they say oh you know what we actually can't say that thing you have to take that out of the video it's like okay but I can't just replace the video file so now you basically have to have it edited and re-upload it and start over you lose all the engagement you lose all the traction it looks weird so you're basically going to be in a really uncomfortable situation that could have been avoided if you went through a proper approval process 

Nathan Yerian: so that brings us to the end of the production system aspect of things so so we've talked about strategy we've talked about production you know if if you're like most of the the clients we work with they're like okay cool we have something let's let's go ahead and publish it um but there's more to a distribution system than simply publishing a podcast episode when that happens when the focus becomes on just publishing that episode you never get the real value you're not maximizing the opportunity to repurpose your content and really get that in front of your audience which causes you to get less attention and if you're not producing those those other components within your distribution plan if you're not taking all of the assets and really figuring out not just hey we're going to post it to the podcast platform but we have all of these social assets and we have all of these written content pieces we have all this stuff if we don't have a plan to put that in action you're going to be pretty inconsistent so from the very start if we know what we're going to be producing we also have to have a plan of how each and every one of those assets is going to reach our audience and that's where our distribution plan comes in 

Adam Marquardt: the third and most important system in this whole webinar is building a distribution system and like you said that distribution system is going to allow you to stay top of mind and be consistent to your audience which is going to help your show and your content grow and build trust so the first step in building a distribution system is the podcast distribution itself this is probably the most obvious and usually the easiest one but it doesn't stop there so with podcast distribution this is where you can take the full video and in some cases audio and you can publish it across youtube and spotify and apple and this is where people will find and listen to your full episode but that's where most people stop and they don't understand the value of being able to deliver social content or article and written content and so when we look at number two we look at social distribution because this is a really really easy one to do because all you're doing is taking four to six little clips out of the full episode and you're essentially putting them into places like linkedin or youtube shorts or instagram reels or tiktok and i hear all the time from people like oh well my audience is and on tiktok or my audience is yes they are yes they are they might not be there expecting or looking for the type of content that you're producing but that doesn't mean they're on there and that doesn't mean that if they don't discover it or you don't share it in a certain way that they won't be able to find and follow you on that platform but social distribution the way that I look at it is it's almost a feeder to the full episode so if you see this social clip and the host or the guest or whoever's on camera says something that really resonates with you what are you going to do you're going to want to learn more you're going to want to go create a way to digest that whole episode so that you can learn whatever it is that they're trying to have you understand 

Nathan Yerian: yeah if you're interested in the topic you very well may go look for the full episode um you know if you're on youtube shorts you can link it i mean there's a direct link to go to the full episodes i mean that's the entire purpose of that link but even if they don't even if they never go and listen to the full episode even if no one ever listens to the full episode that actually just increases the value of the social distribution you want your message to be heard if no one's listening to the full episode you need that social component to be able to deliver the key points of the conversation to a wider audience not just the people that listen to the full conversation so social distribution is valuable make sure you have that as part of your distribution plan but you also have to have the written forms right your article publishing if you're going to take the time to take your transcript and really create blog articles or linkedin articles or whatever it's going to be that has to be part of that distribution plan so you're sure it actually happens is it posting to your website is it going out into the linkedin article system is that coming from the person is it coming from the company what what's the distribution plan to put that content into play the same with with your newsletter if you're pulling out content for the newsletter okay how is that happening when is that happening and hey are we still sending that newsletter is that still you know something we're doing monthly or quarterly or what does that look like so if you're going to invest in the content make sure that you're getting the assets as we already talked about but if you have the assets you have to have a plan to put them into play 

Adam Marquardt: i agree and putting it all into play is what this webinar is all about so when we stop and we look at all three things and how they work together we have a strategy system we have a production system and we have a distribution system this allows you to think about it create it and then get it out there 

Nathan Yerian: absolutely you have three systems they all work together and you know if you nail the strategy if you nail the production if you nail the distribution and if you understand how each one of those components contributes to the overall success of your podcast you're going to be a lot better often you're going to be able to accomplish what 80 to 90 percent of the podcast that start never accomplished which is actually have your message heard actually increase the awareness of you your brand and ultimately build trust in your professionals in your company in your solution so that's what we're up to if we're doing a podcast as a company and if you follow these systems and really plan them effectively you're going to be successful in doing that so the big question is should you start a b2b podcast and i think there's you know if you've made it this far probably the answer is yes because you haven't discounted that you're going to do it but likely suspects are you have real subject matter expertise you have people that can deliver value on a microphone you think that your audience would benefit from hearing these insights from those experts there's a long-term commitment you you're not going to get in and do an episode or two and be like oh well we're done with that you need buy-in for a long term it takes a while for a podcast to get traction you need to have everybody on the same page of we're going to do this and we're going to do it for a while right willingness to commit to video is a big one right so hey guys we're going to put you not just on a microphone we're going to put you on camera as well so are we all good with that because it's going to be part of it that's how we're going to get the value everybody's got to be comfortable with video here and i can tell you some won't be comfortable on day one but you do get comfortable and it'll be fine and then ultimately your goal is you want to have an active voice in the market if that's what your goal is hey creating a podcast is a really good way to make that happen on the other hand if you look at it go you know what we're we're a humdrum company we're you know commodity whatever we're no different than the guy down the street we don't have a unique point of view you know what maybe a podcast isn't your friend here what are you going to say we we have better service over and over again we're cheaper that doesn't make a good podcast so if that's what you're dealing with podcast may not be for you if you don't have internal champions if you don't have somebody that's like you know what that sounds fun let's do this let's sit down i i can talk i'll be a host i want to participate if you don't have that it might be a red flag for maybe this isn't the best the best way forward for you if you're trying to achieve results quickly too right so hey we we need to hurry up and and do this thing because of x y or z this is not going to be a immediate win for you so podcast is not going to be you know the thing that's going to turn your company around or fix your sales problem or whatever it's going to be so if that's what you're trying to do and you're trying to do it quickly don't look to a podcast because that's not what it's going to be about um you know some of this says hey look we we just want to audio only we just want to be there i i personally think that's a waste of time at this point um so i would say that's probably a red flag and then here a lot of people that are like oh you know we're the best kept secret they're bragging about it if that's what you want to brag about if that's your goal guess what a podcast is not for you because it will spread awareness so if you want to stay the best kept secret don't start a podcast the reality is when you're starting a podcast you're not just creating a show you're creating a system that allows your show to be successful ultimately what you want to create is a content engine for you to be able to deliver your message to your audience if you nail your strategy your production and your distribution you have the opportunity to create the most valuable content asset that your company has and it'll be your podcast 

Adam Marquardt: which brings us to a good point of what's next what do you do next in order to actually get the ball moving if you said hey you know what i think this is uh really good idea for me or my organization i think that we've got the right people i think we've got the right mindset i think that we agree with kind of all the points that you've listed before where do we 

Nathan Yerian: go from here yeah so you're gonna start with step one you're gonna start with creating that podcast blueprint and we've prepared a package for everybody to get started on this easily we're going to give you our questionnaire we're going to give you kind of that that framework and really give you an example of what this blueprint looks like so you can start your team in that discovery process you can have your strategy session and ultimately you can come out the other side with a podcast blueprint and that is your ultimate goal you're going to want to do that before you start worrying about how are we going to produce this thing or you know how are we going to distribute it none of that matters unless you have a direction that you're rowing in the first step for everybody is going to be get that podcast blueprint if you're listening to this and you're on the webinar we'll drop it a link to it in the chat there's there's no form to fill out we don't need your information we don't need anything from you just directly download it if you are on linkedin currently we'll include a link to it here as well if you don't see that feel free to connect with with me on linkedin shoot me a dm and i can and i can send it over to you so we want people to have these assets it is going to be valuable for you if you're thinking podcast it'll give you a really good idea of where should we start and if you start how to make the rest of the journey a lot easier because you have that plan there there will be companies that are perfectly capable of doing this themselves i will tell you we can help you do this as well so if you get into it you're like you know what i really want help with somebody who's been there done this before we need somebody to facilitate this for us we can help you with that you know reach out to us we can help you with that process as well so um you know there's a lot of people i think they're going to get value from starting this correctly and that podcast blueprint is the correct place to start 

Adam Marquardt: all right so with that i know that we've covered a lot today i know that there's probably going to be some questions that you may have so we're going to use this time to field some q and a we will take questions from both the webinar platform as well as from linkedin so if you have a question drop it in there if we don't have time to get to them all today we will follow up with you or we'll be creating additional content around those questions because i know that if you have that question there are probably dozens of other people who also share in that same question.

(Q&A Session)

Nathan Yerian:  I think that's all the time that we have for today you know thank you everybody for joining us for this presentation hopefully you got something out of it again if you have questions find Adam or myself on on LinkedIn reach out DMS we're happy to answer any question that you have again we will be putting the link out for the downloadable component so hopefully that gets you started if you get in there and you have questions feel free to message us or if you just find out hey we don't want to do this by ourselves let us know we have programs that can help facilitate that for you so again thank you everybody for your time and we look forward to seeing you on the next one