Episode Summary
New B2B podcasters often think podcast magic “just happens.” Podcasting is so much more than acquiring some good equipment and booking a guest’s interview. In order to run an effective podcast, you have to be organized and you must sustain a level of consistency to build your audience.
In this episode of Recorded Content, Justin Brown sits down with Sam Hembree, a Content Marketing Specialist at Outreach who manages the behind-the-scenes work for three different podcasts.
Sam and Justin discuss the balance of doing work internally and leveraging the help of an external agency. Sam stresses how being organized is a key driver to her success and pinpoints how a well-oiled machine opens up opportunities to keep the shows fresh and exciting.
Sam and Justin also discuss the importance of a narrow audience. They pinpoint how to determine when or if you should create a new show for a tailored audience.
Guest Profile
- Name: Sam Hembree
- What she does: Content Marketing Specialist at Outreach and producer for the Sales Hacker Podcast, Sales Engagement Podcast and Revenue Innovators.
- Company: Outreach
- Noteworthy: “If you have thoughtful, interesting hosts who know their stuff, everything else falls into place much, much more simply.”
Key Insights
- Podcasting is more work than people initially think, and having an agency support you can make a difference. Sam works at Outreach on three different podcasts as a content marketer, which means she does all the behind-the-scenes work. “Having an agency does definitely help coordinate with audio editors, writing your descriptions, uploading to streaming platforms. [...] Subject matter experts, leaders, they’re really busy, so we can take the scheduling, the prep work, all of those more mundane tasks off their plate,” she says.
- In order to make your podcast stand out, listen to what others are doing in the space. “As I got into podcasts, I just started listening to as many as I could, even if it was just one episode from a particular show because I wanted to see what they are doing. And so, as you start listening, you start seeing similarities. The point of the exercise [is to be] aware of what is going on to see where the opportunity is. How do you stand out? There’s tons of podcasts in every space. So how do you not just do what everybody else is doing?” she says.
- Great content speaks for itself, but it also needs a little help. Sam talks about the importance of repurposing podcast content to help people, even if they aren’t listeners because they could become listeners someday. “Great content speaks for itself, but you have to obviously push it out there. It’s most compelling when you aren’t just asking people to do something. Taking the time to pick out the best advice from the show and then giving it away freely… so even if they don’t go listen right now, they’ve benefited from the show,” she says.
“If you have a podcast on auto-pilot, you’re not going to get the results you want.”
Sam Hembree
Content Marketing Specialist
Outreach
Episode Highlights
Making a successful podcast involves a lot more than just finding a guest and hitting record
“A lot of people don’t realize what it takes with repurposing content, promotion, there’s a lot of enablement material to make for your hosts so that they’re successful and to make sure your guests have the best experience possible. […] You’ve got to have somebody making sure guests are fully prepped and following up with guests when it goes live, sending them swag, making them happy, rallying a huge promotion effort around each episode, and then making those specific asks for rating and reviews. […] You definitely have to have somebody with their eyes on the show who’s digging into analytics on a regular basis to know what’s working, what’s not, where to make improvements. Otherwise, I think your show is going to get stale,” Sam says.
Organization is a must for successful B2B podcasts
“It’s been really helpful to stay organized, having everything in one place in one folder–branding, materials, messaging, one-pagers, analytics tools, passwords. That way, anybody can step in at any point and know what’s happening and where to find it. Having that enablement material set up [with] all of your processes documented helps a ton. I have a spreadsheet that I use with our agency that tracks every single person we reach out to. I feel like that has helped a ton because I can say he’s all of my guests. I have the date when they’re scheduled to record and then the date when we have them going live so that I can always make sure our queue is full.”
Sharing content with anyone and everyone is essential
“I spend the morning the episode goes live just sharing it with everyone. Asking the host to share the guests. We reach out to influencers who are particularly interested in whatever topic we’re talking about and ask them to share it. We’ll share it on our own platforms, on Outreach’s platforms, and we share it in our newsletter. We just try to utilize every single channel that we have to push out the episodes, and we have more ideas for what we’d like [to do],” says Sam.
You may need to get creative when setting key performance indicators for a new podcast
“It’s super hard [to determine KPI for a new show]. If you haven’t launched a show before, how would you know what to expect? […] Before launching Revenue Innovators, we had two other podcasts, so I was able to dig and find a 30-day report from the Sales Engagement podcast. I treated that like a baseline for what to expect, and then once we crossed 30 days with Revenue Innovators, we set some ambitious goals for where we wanted to grow the rest of the year. […] Then I looked around at other podcasts in the space to see how many ratings and reviews they were getting. It’s hard to gauge that I feel like, but we really wanted to shoot for the stars,” Sam states.
Identify what’s most important to you to help you make difficult decisions
“Hard decisions come up, especially when you’re working with executives who have crazy schedules, both our hosts and our guests. We’ve had to decide at some points, somebody is away from their equipment; do we still have the episode regardless? And we’ve just said quality is the most important thing and establishing our reputation early on matters a lot to us. So we would rather have less episodes that are really high quality,” Sam stresses.
