Episode Summary
Many B2B marketers realize the benefits of a podcast. Your company gets a chance to hear from customers, connect with experts and influencers, and share perspectives on industry trends. But even when marketers know they need a podcast, most B2B marketers don’t know when to start. Is it better to get the company up and running first? Should you wait for product/market fit? Should a podcast be part of the initial launch of the company?
Brett McGrath VP of Marketing at The Juice, a company that just launched last year, started developing The 3C Podcast before he was even officially hired. In this episode, Brett talks with host Tristan Pelligrino about when to start a B2B podcast, the importance of getting content creators out of their siloes, and how podcasts can help new businesses share their work.
Guest Profile
Name: Brett McGrath
What he does: Brett is the VP of Marketing at The Juice, a curated discovery platform for marketing and sales.
Company: The Juice
Noteworthy: Brett pitched The 3C Podcast by writing a letter to the audience explaining why he wanted to do the show, why he thought it mattered, and the value he hoped it would bring customers.
Key Insights
- Starting a podcast allows your company to build relationships with other people in the industry and potential customers. Brett started The 3C Podcast to learn more about The Juice’s customer base quickly. Instead, he found himself curating relationships. “I get the opportunity to meet new people in our market that potentially someday down the road could be a paying customer of The Juice. Not only am I building relationships with them, but I’m building trust and laying that groundwork. Any modern-day marketer knows that it’s not transactional. It’s all about building relationships,” he says.
- Podcasts are about more than recording a conversation with a guest from the industry. They also update listeners on what’s happening at your company and hopefully spread the news in their circles. The 3C Podcast has two episodes a week: one traditional interview podcast and one about the more significant themes Brett picks up on in his interviews and how The Juice is handling those themes. “This is an opportunity on a weekly basis to not only do a show where we’re sharing ideas of other people but share what we’re working on. Share the good, bad, and the ugly,” he claims.
- There’s no specific right time to launch a podcast. Instead, a company needs to focus on getting the right people in place: a passionate host and an internal champion. Brett argues that starting a podcast isn’t about hitting a certain point in a timeline and checking the box that says “start podcast.” Instead, it’s more about people. “You have to have an individual who feels comfortable, who understands the power of the podcast, and can communicate that internally in a way that the stakeholders say, ‘You know what? This is something that I believe in for the long term, and let’s do it.’ And once you have that internal buy-in and a passionate host who gets it, that’s when you should start,” he says.
Episode Highlights
When you start a podcast early in a company’s life, it can be challenging to determine your ideal guest profile
“Being in startup land, it’s tough. It takes people sometimes several years to figure out exactly who their ideal customer profile is. But I used it as an opportunity to meet with marketers of different backgrounds, different years of experience, different roles with the one theme that they spend a large portion of their time in content. Then it was the process of bringing people in and getting them to understand why them and why I was reaching out to those people who I didn’t currently have a relationship with.”
Having a podcast helps new companies build awareness and connect with customers
“This is how people are being educated today. People are going to YouTube. People are hitting Spotify, listening to podcasts. I’m always going to be a writer. And I’m always going to tell everyone that they should write, and I’ll always be focused on writing. But marketers need to understand consumer expectations, what’s changed, and the rise of these new mediums. If you’re not publishing regularly through audio channels or video channels, you’re missing out big time because the younger demographic of buyers that you’re trying to reach will never know you exist if you’re not where they go to consume content regularly.”
Content creators, strategists, and marketers should view themselves as facilitators
“The bigger the organization, the more dispersed the roles and responsibilities are. So there are silos within these marketing teams around the content that they’re producing, which is a great thing for content and just content marketing in general. So teams are siloed around what they’re doing. I wanted to get our internal team involved in all of our content early, whether it was, ‘Hey, I don’t want to be the only one writing. I don’t want to be the only one on the podcast.’ So I view my role as not only a creator but a facilitator. The more content people, strategists, marketers, whatever your role is, think about what you do as a facilitator, the better quality content you’ll have and the more integrated your content will be across your entire marketing strategy.”
Internal buy-in and employee advocacy is so crucial to creating an exciting culture
“I look at my team and think, ‘Where’s my team every day? What are those meetings? What are those things that we’re doing? Where can I always share the work that I’m doing on the content front?’ Then they can understand the message, and then they can share it out across their channels. We have a channel in Slack that we call social promotion. So when I publish something, I spend time making sure that I package up the article, the episode, or whatever it is and share it in one message. Later, I’ll look down at my phone, and the engagement has already started from my team, whether it’s the likes, whether it’s the retweets, whether it’s the shares. People see that and they say, ‘You know what? I saw a job rec out at The Juice for a design role. Their team is super active on social media. It seems like they like what they’re doing. So I’m going to apply for that design role because I want to know what it’s all about.’ So it can help with culture building and recruitment.”
