How B2B Podcasts Improve SEO, Sales Enablement, and AI Search Visibility

Speaker A: Welcome to B2B marketing methods. I'm your host, Terri Hoffman, and I'm the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let's face it, embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join me as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys.

Speaker B: Welcome to Today's episode of B2B Marketing Methods. We have a very special episode thanks to my guest and I want to take a second to just quickly introduce her and go over some of the points that we're going to talk about today. So this is Sarah Smith. Welcome, Sarah.

Speaker C: Thank you, Terri. Uh, Terri and I, this isn't our first time sitting down, talking. You shouldn't know that, but you'll hear more about that. Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: I'm so happy I get to interview you this time.

Speaker C: This is fun because you came on my show. We were in a much smaller office at the time.

Speaker B: It's been really, really fun to watch you guys grow. Sarah is the co founder and CEO of a company called Speaker Box Media and I'm going to have her explain who Speaker Box Media. I'm, um, going to ask you to go over that in just a minute, but I want to touch on some of the high points of our conversation today. So we're going to be talking about who Speaker Box Media is. We're going to be talking about how you can use a, ah, podcast to answer some of the questions that your B2B marketing audience has. We're going to be talking about some of the reasons why you hear people don't want to do a podcast and what their concerns or pushback is about podcasting in general. And then we're going to talk about how you can use podcasting to build brand awareness and the fun conversation about attribution. You know, how do you measure whether or not a, uh, podcast is working? Which, you know, we could have a whole entire episode about that. We kind of had a pre episode about it before we started recording. And then we're going to talk about how to tailor your content for different pieces. So just wanted to give a little bit of preview. But first off, welcome Sarah. Thanks for joining me on my podcast at your studio.

Speaker C: Yeah, how about that? How about that? For collaboration and partnership. Again, thanks for having me. I could talk about this topic all day. So I'm really excited we get to sit down and do this in person.

Speaker B: So let's start off with the basics. You're the co founder and CEO of SpeakerBox Media. Explain to me, tell me a little bit about your story. Who is Speaker Box Media? How did you get started? Give me the backstory.

Speaker C: Speaker Box Media is a, uh, B2B podcast agency and studio. We are full service, specifically focused in creating multimedia content for executives and B2B brands and helping them become the authority in their industry. And so we started in 2018. I started it, the company with my co founder and husband, Ray. Um, and the way that the company came about was really in an organic way. He was into audio engineering and marketing back in the day, creating music. And that's what you did in Houston. So we're headquartered in Houston, but, you know, record nationally. And my background is in photography. I've been shooting and selling photography since I was 18. He was on an engineering track and I was on a pharmacy track, like most people in Houston are. And we both, at some point were just like, we don't want to do this with our lives. That's not what we want to do, not what we're passionate about. And so we were dabbling, creating things on the weekend. And I was in my final year of business school, and you have to do a fictitious business as part of your final capstone project in business school. And so we had been dabbling with the idea of starting a business. And so I said, well, let's like, let's kind of make it official, unofficial. Let's, uh, see what this could look like if we're going to spend a year, if I'm going to spend a year researching this project. Speaker Box was actually like my fictitious business. And it was the first version of a business plan. And when we did the research, I felt like, uh, as I progressed through that, it became very apparent to me there was an actual opportunity here. There was. And that at that time, which was 2017, 2018, there was nothing podcasting in Houston. Very little, if anything, in Texas. Most things were film specific or focused. We are like, holy moly, did we just find something that doesn't exist here? Wow. And I think both of us. There was no convincing at that point. Both of us were just like, I think we found it. We found this overlap in our unique skill sets, and we felt like we could bring something new to the market into Houston, which is a fun. I mean, does global things the coolest stuff in the world that I think a lot of people don't even realize happen here? So we started it in our spare bedroom of our house with 500 bucks and said, great, let's go get our first clients. And, uh, you know, I won't lie. That really was largely Ray's job the first two years he ran the company mostly by himself. I was part time, would come home and do the books after my full time. And once we grew it to six figures, then that's when I came on full time.

Speaker B: So, yeah, that's. It's. It's been a fun adventure to. And I'm sure we get to see the fun and exciting parts of it. Uh, and you two are, you know, really rolling up your sleeves and putting in the hard work to build it to what it is. And so I've known you guys, I want to say, for about four or five years. It may be longer, and I'm getting old, so I don't always remember all those details. But I think what's been interesting, too, is to watch you guys test different business models. And, you know, we're going to talk about podcasting and marketing, but ultimately, I have a lot of business owner listeners and business people who are listeners. And I'm not going to ask you to walk through the different business models, but maybe you could just talk a little bit about how you. The journey, you know, that you've gone on because you've. You've tried some different things. And I think I really respect that you guys have been willing to try some different approaches until you found, you know, your niche in the market and what would actually work as a business model in Houston.

Speaker C: Yeah, you know, uh, honestly, when we came out, I felt we both have a high sense of urgency, and so we both felt behind. We were like, oh, my gosh, someone's going to do this tomorrow. And honestly, we didn't realize how early to the market we were. Uh, marketing in Houston is still largely developing and has been. I don't have to tell that to you, who's been at this three times as long as we have. Right. And so multimedia content and even businesses having social media, uh, platforms and media platforms, that's like, unheard of right. At the time, but we didn't know that. So, you know, naively came in thinking we're behind and we're gonna. We're gonna push this forward. One of the early decisions we made, one thing about us, I'll say, is we've never been scared to zig when everybody else is zagging. You know, we've always been okay to go against the grain, but you do have to, from a cash flow and revenue perspective, be able to. We've always reserved at least 20%. We've always put back into the company as founders and we've always reserved budget for innovation. We have always kept that running since the inception. Even if it was just Ray thinking about ideas on the weekend, pushing thinking of creative ways to apply what we were doing different. But we did make an early decision to have an office in a time where people were really backing out of that and going remote. But I really believed opening a studio, even at the time though it was a hundred square feet in a co working space was an effort to be able to show what we can do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So one thing that's always been ingrained that I think has helped us is showing our work. We've always been big on that. Listening to the market. Every single thing, every product that we've built at speaker box has come from listening to the market and post, uh, Covid. So we opened our office in 2019 and then Covid hits and it's like, did we just make the worst decision and get into an office lease when everything went remote? But to our benefit, our office was so small, we called it the Houston pod to like make light of the fact that it really was like a pod. You could fit maybe two or three people in there and we're like, forget it. We're just going to dive into the creativity of it. We're space city. This is a space pod, Whatever. But funny enough, people needed to social distance at that time. So that little pod, there were a lot of great convos had in there. It came in at a time where people could utilize it and we just kept listening. We've always been ear to the ground listening to our customers, consistently connecting feedback and applying that. Not being scared to pre launch product lines and see how they perform, get feedback on what people liked about them, what they didn't. If I were to give this away for free, would you take it? Those type of things and just never really attaching ourselves too much to our feelings about what we thought the company should be, but really built in a way that we wanted to focus on serving them well regardless of where they were in their marketing journey. Sometimes that was heavier on the education side than I would have liked. Sometimes it was pushing us on the creativity side. But we've never, never shied away from m taking up the challenge to help them become the expert and to start producing multimedia content for their companies.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's very clear that you guys believe in your product. You know, you believe in this channel of marketing, but it's really a way to connect. And I love that you Guys are very committed to it and really believe in it. Explain where your business model has shifted to now because we're sitting in your studio. It's so well done. It's in downtown Houston in one of the well known historical buildings, known for its architecture. And it's a really cool vibe in the office. But I would really love it if you'd explain your offering now and where you've found your sweet spot in the market.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think one is we believe in story, uh, and we will die on that hill, that it is creatively an important part of any brand. And we show that. We show that in not just the quality and output of our work for ourselves and our customers, but even in the office that we selected. The story here is a beautiful story and we just embed that story is ingrained in everything we do. And so business model wise, we, uh, have always had a studio since inception. We just kept it private. We only used it for our clients. And after we developed that process and stealth in a lot of ways and only used it for our clients and then we kept getting requests, kept getting requests, hey, could we book out your studio? Could we do this? It was kind of an underground thing and we went back and forth on whether we wanted to have like a publicly facing studio and finally decided after we had built the team and built the process enough that we were ready to do that. So this is actually the first year that we opened the studio publicly. Part of that was all about space and getting the right space for us, checking the P's and Q's of logistics and what the experience we wanted to create was in studio. And so we pulled the trigger on that this year and it's been extremely foundational for us in the sense that one, as a business owner, you want to develop different profit centers. So that's obviously one strategic move. But the other is that all of our products, what we're really creating here is an ecosystem of things that fit into the content creation suite of what our clients need. And so it's just back to taking that feedback. So, but we have an agency model that is retainer based or project driven, if you will. And then we have a studio that you can book that is more specific, like instantaneous purchase. But it really was about diversification and the scale of pushing the quality of what we wanted to do for ourselves and allowing others to take part in that too, whether they used us as an agency or not.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think what's really interesting to, as a marketer, I would call it part of your values is you guys really focus on quality and the experience. Just for the listeners to know, I walked in today and you guys were thoughtful enough to find a playlist that I don't even remember how you knew that I liked that playlist, but that was on right to get me in the right frame of mind, in the right comfort level. And I mean, we're going to talk about this, but one of the things that's hard about podcasting is you could be on camera, but at a minimum, you're going to hear your own voice. And a lot of people just don't like that. And so the more comfortable you can make everybody feel and to create that better experience. And that goes down all the way to like, the microphone can be tilted at the easy angle to adjust. Don't worry, I won't move it too much. But, you know, things, little details like that and, you know, having me with a black shirt sit on the side that has the green plants behind me, those little details really add up to the quality that I think you guys deliver and you focus on and you don't miss any. Any little detail. And those are, those are things that, if you're building a really high quality B2B brand, they matter, right? My podcast typically is at the other end of the spectrum. It's more of a DIY approach. And I think, you know, I've seen a lot of value out of that. But I think for larger organizations that have a large sales organization and they have a, uh, brand that's in multiple millions of dollars in value and they're trying to grow it, that quality really makes a big difference, 100%.

Speaker C: It's a reflection of their company. And thank you for saying that. I don't take it lightly. We don't let up on anything when it comes to details. I think anybody who works on our team would vouch for that. We stress about the small things. We really, when we came out, there was a lot of studios and even agencies focused on business, consumer, and for us, honestly, Ray and I just love business to heck. And so we decided to focus only on B2B. We felt like we could bring the cool factor, the wow factor, the, you know, to B2B specifically. And so we pride ourselves on being the studio for executives. Uh, everything from the fact that there is valet parking, that there is a Uber drop off, there is fresh coffee, tea, water, there's somebody to greet you when you get here. Every single detail about that experience and what that team expects is something that was very thought out. And it's because it is a reflection of our brand. It is a reflection of quality, and it's also a reflection of experience for them and their guests. For us, the brands that are coming, they're bringing their best people in their network and we really view ourselves as an extension of their brand and we want to represent them well. So we stress on the small stuff because we want to add to their brand equity both in terms of the, you know, the value that we provide on the back end with content, but also the experience. It sets the precedent for everything about how that company operates. And that's what I hear most often when it comes to this conversation of quality or not. Quality is you can put things out and you can do things in a way where it negatively affects your brand equity and the in the marketplace and how people view you. And so I 100% agree, obviously I'm a stickler for quality, that that's why people find this important at the level that they choose to do it with us.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. I'm sure it's been hard to stick to that standard at times because it's not like when there are other options out there. There's a spectrum of prices. Right. And so you guys know exactly who your audience is, you know where you're positioned. And it's important to hold that standard of quality, I think, for the companies and brands that you work with. So I want to dive into some of the things we previewed.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: When I opened, what are some of. I touched on one or two of them. But like, what are the things you hear as far as. I don't really think I want a podcast. I get why a podcast could help my brand, but let me tell you all the reasons why or what they're thinking are the reasons why a podcast may not work for their brand or fit for us. Like one, for example would be do I have to be on camera and do all of my guests have to be on camera and what are the angles and what do I wear? And I mean we run into difficulties with that just for a headshot. Right. A lot of people don't like the way that they look and they don't like the way that they present themselves. It makes you self conscious. But what are some of, uh, if that's one example, maybe you can elaborate on that and just talk about some of the things you comment here.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So one is that what people believe a, ah, podcast is. So when we started, initially a podcast is largely audio only, but podcasting has changed and accelerated into full scale video as well. And so I think that shift sometimes when people think about applying a strategy, they're still thinking through it through the lens of like we're going to sit down on a mic and just have an audio only podcast. And they're really not thinking about the opportunity that having a audio video podcast creates for them. So I think that's one is just, oh, well, we don't need an audio strategy because they're still thinking about a podcast as audio only. So that's one, two, I think is they don't understand how this works within their sales cycle or for their marketing. Uh, largely people still attribute it to just brand awareness. Oh, this is just great. Top of funnel brand awareness. And the best brands that I know are using it for sales enablement. They're using it for business development. As far as the networking and guesting perspective of it, there's a lot of different ways strategically you embed this that I feel like people overlook. They deduce it to. This is for brand awareness.

Speaker B: Okay, so talk about that a little bit more. Give me an example of how that would work.

Speaker C: So for example, on the guesting strategy, when we think about networking and business development and B2B, we do that already do that at conferences. Yeah, we sit down and have one to one conversations all the time. And I can't tell you how many execs leave these combos. Like, darn, we should have recorded this. Or we should have because this was a really thoughtful conversation. And how we challenged each other or how we brought a different perspective would have been great to share. We're already doing this in how we operate in business. All that we've done is created kind of a reoccurring way to engineer business development within your flywheel. So the idea is like your flywheel should accelerate as you go. So where we sit as a multimedia brand is we are the accelerator or the fuel that keeps driving that flywheel. Flywheel forward. Yeah, because you're already doing these activities. So we strategically attach video podcasting or multimedia content, if you will. If you have to get that word out of your head to that, you're whether you're doing webinars, whether you're going to conferences. So that's one way, I think, thinking about it in your strategy. The other thing is in B2B, our sales cycles are so much longer than we're not selling $5 hairbrushes. You know, we're selling oftentimes six figure products or tools or contracts. And so the Number of touch points that we have to have in our sales cycle and the number of ICPs that we sometimes have in our, in our marketing is more vast.

Speaker B: Explain what an ICP is.

Speaker C: So your ideal customer pro Persona. And so you are oftentimes having to talk to maybe four or five people within that company to actually get that deal done. And so this works as a sales enablement tool because it kind of equips you with different pieces of content, different thought leading content that your salespeople can then send and connect and network online with. Right.

Speaker B: Well, just even in this conversation that you and I are having about podcasting, I may want to connect with a VP of marketing. That VP of marketing may need to convince the CEO.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: That a, ah, podcast or investing in marketing would be important. There may be a marketing manager or somebody in the field who has all the subject matter expertise for that brand who's like, wait a minute, why do you need some of my time? The podcast like every discussion can be broken down and little pieces of that entire conversation may appeal to different people or those ICPs, those Personas that you need to build a relationship with.

Speaker C: And it shows people a lot about how you do business, who you are. Right. Uh, we do business with, you said it. People we know like and trust. And that's 100% true. And so by conversationally someone being able to watch something engaging help, you know, me talking about the product, talking about how to apply it, a perspective is shaped on the back end what a lot of people. There's already data that shows before anyone ever engages in your sales process, they do their own online research and it's

Speaker B: like 90 something percent.

Speaker C: It's insane.

Speaker B: It's a huge number.

Speaker C: It's a huge number. If you don't have any type of content online, like sometimes base layer, website, base layer, social, um, if you have no thought leading content online, then the likelihood that you're going to convert basically is way less than your competitors. Right. So just you getting out there and creating this multimedia content is going to help in that regard. People, when they do their online research, they're going to see you. And that kind of brings us into the next conversation, which I know you're super passionate about, which is search.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Your content then shows up in Google, YouTube, LLMs, all of that because people are searching online for the solution. And so there's a massive opportunity with multimedia that doing a podcast kind of just, it takes, it hits all areas in one swoop, meaning you sit down, you do a long form conversation that breaks down into audio, video, written content that then hits all these touch points. So, and on top of that, if you do in B2B, a guest driven podcast or interview based podcast like we're doing, you've also hit your networking and your business development at scale. So it really is an engine that helps drive business development as a long term strategy.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so you're making me wonder if another, I guess, concern that you hear pretty common is. I don't, I don't really think our brand is that interesting. I'm, I'm not even really sure what we would talk about.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: What, what could we say that would last 30 minutes or 40 minutes and multiple episodes of 30 or 40 minutes that anyone would possibly be interested in?

Speaker C: Yeah, good point. Yes. I don't think anyone would want to listen to it. And so, you know, that is a common objection. And the reality is most of the time I'll, I'll ask who are they benchmarking against? Right. And it's like you're looking at Joe Rogan or you're looking at the top podcasters and you're saying they have millions of views. We won't have that. That.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so I go back and you know, in B2B, the reality is you don't need millions of views, you need a hundred to a thousand of the right people on your content. Yeah, that's the reality. So restructuring the idea of what success looks like in this arena when you're applying it in a B2B way is super critical. And that's kind of how we walk them through that. So we kind of go through the guesting strategy of IT partners, referral partners, your customers, all the areas in which you are able to get a hundred to a thousand of the right people consistently tuning in and seeing you as the authority and the number of opportunities that open up from that.

Speaker B: Right. It's, and it, I think, you know, even to get into the weeds a little bit, it's what are the common things you get asked over and over so that if you had them answered in a recorded episode that can be shared at scale by your salespeople? What are the things that you wish people knew about your brand or, uh, the way that you do business or the way that your customer service team works? You know, these are differentiators for your brand that can often be really challenging to show or prove before somebody is doing business with you. And I think a podcast gives brands a great platform to show off some of those more soft or touchy feely elements. Of a brand that are harder to just list on a website. Yeah.

Speaker C: It's also nuances. Like a lot of our customers come in with really like technical products. And it's like, no. When you go to these industry specific conferences, you see the hundred to 1,000 people who are very deep in your industry. The way that you talk about something, the way you show up, the little affinity pieces you have on your shelf, the things that we really relate to other people with and we don't realize we do. All of those things show up in multimedia and help people along. That buying decision of you're for me. Because you like this too, you know, and it's important. I mean, you can't negate it in sales. That is part of why people choose you. You either get rungs forward into the yes or wrong source of no. And it certainly helps when people feel like you align on what you sell, how you sell it, uh, your goals. And then the plus is, hey, I like to work with you too. Because we like similar things or we talk about similar things.

Speaker B: Exactly. It's a different way to get to know someone. In addition to understanding if they have that technical expertise or industry expertise, it's like, well, now I see what it would be like to sit in a meeting with them and get to know them and communicate with them and understand them. And I mean, communication is so important. The B2B space, knowing that you're working with a vendor or a partner or someone that you're going into business with that you feel comfortable with. I mean, uh, that is a differentiator for a lot of B2B brands, whether they want to believe it or not, it is. Are you easy to do business with? Do you seem like you would be easy to work with? Do you seem like you would be easy for me to talk to? Does it seem like I would have an easy time picking up the phone if I had something to complain about or talk through with you? It just helps your approachability. And so I might have invented a new word there. But you know, I think those are again, like softer things that are very hard to measure. And so on the topic of measurement,

Speaker C: that's what I was gonna say.

Speaker B: Let's talk about that one.

Speaker C: That's the biggest one.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker C: What's the ROI of this?

Speaker B: Huh?

Speaker C: So the first thing out the gate on this is this is a long term strategy. This is not. You come and you apply this and you just do this for three to six months. And now you're closing deals up the wazoo. That's not how this works. Much like, you know, SEO strategy, they are long term plays. You're looking at at least 12 to 24 months of doing this consistently before you start feeling like you're getting some of those big business development results that you want to see. So some of the I like to tell people, when it comes down to the first kind of inklings of roi, you start to see. So our tagline is become the authority, which is you're already the best at what you do in your industry. You're just too quiet about it. Right. You're not out here talking about what you do, how you do it, the results that your customers are getting. And everyone in their industry should be doing that. What happens is three to six months always happens. Someone's been running a podcast consistently and all of a sudden everyone in their ecosystem knows and they're like, how do they know? What did I change? What am I doing differently? Because my podcast guess is only showing 25 listens. But somehow everybody knows that I'm doing this. And it's because passively people are watching. And that's very hard to attribute sometimes. Chris Walker called it dark social. And I still largely agree with that, is that you're putting these things out and people notice. So three to six months, people, people start saying, hey, I saw your content, I saw your podcast. And you're like, well, that's funny because you didn't like or comment or do anything.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: And the reality is people are passively watching what you're doing. And it matters, it matters in your sales process. So that's like initially on the roi, you're getting some of those soft kind of.

Speaker B: Hm.

Speaker C: Then it's, hey, you're a great speaker. I saw you on your podcast. Would you come present? Would you come present to this room M or that room? Or people start to get speaking opportunities and all of a sudden they're pushed to the front runner of their industry specific conference and they're like, how did I get here? It's because you show that you could do that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So that in. What is the value in getting in front of a room of 100 to 300 very concentrated people in your industry? I mean, it takes time to see that all the way through. And then obviously, like there are metrics and on the data sides of socials and things like that that you track, should those things be trending up? All of them? Absolutely. That's building your brand equity and yes, that brand awareness. We're really big believers in data. Data tells us what we're doing well and what we're not doing well or what we can improve. And so on the content side, where it's not just about putting out this many clips, it's what's your engagement percentage, what's your average viewer duration? Those data points tell us when we're gathering, share a voice and therefore, hopefully share of market. So those things should correlate over time, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And the last thing is that it sometimes goes unnoticed. I do think it is also an internal culture builder and attraction mechanism for your brand. People would be very surprised how many people that they're trying to hire as they're recruiting and talent that also go do their research on the brand and figure out, is this a company I want to spend time with. There's been so many customers of ours that people have come to their company either by way of their podcast or through hearing or seeing something and they mention it.

Speaker B: That's really funny. I was thinking about that when you were talking about the ways that you can impact and how you can measure if it's successful or not. I was thinking, and it's just a great way to show if you are planning on joining a leadership team or you're planning on looking for a job out in the facility, any role, you get to learn more about that company's culture, how leadership operates, how the people in their whole business network. Yeah. Think and operate. That should show some quality. I think companies who invest in a podcast, and I'm going to use the word invest because I think it's people who are trying to invest in their brand and something bigger, people who view it as a transaction or whether they're looking at the investment in a podcast as a transaction or looking to get transactions out of it. I don't know that that really makes for the best client for us. When it comes to marketing, you have to look at it as, yes. You might initially just be getting awareness out of it and building your brand, but until you've done that, you don't have enough visibility when people are out looking and doing their research to then have it turn into a sales conversation or give your salespeople a chance to get through the door. I think one of the most interesting stories that one of our clients has told us about starting a podcast is I was going to the same conferences and trade shows for years. People would walk up to the booth, they would look up at our sign and say, oh, XYZ company, tell me what you do. One year after the podcast launched, they would walk up and look oh, I've been looking for you. I know who you are, I've been seeking you out. Right. How do you measure that? Yeah, how do you measure that type of recognition?

Speaker C: It's really difficult. And I'm not going to lie. Any marketing company who says they have attribution figured all the way out, red, red flag. It's so hard. And just as you know, more platforms creates more surface area to try to do so within the process. It's like, you know, asking salespeople, how did they hear about us? Asking your customers, how did they hear about you embedding all those places where people could say, yes, I found you on chat GPT or I found you on LinkedIn or, you know, I've seen those already from my own show. It happened to me. I was in a room and someone walked up and they said, my CMO sent me over here and said, I have to meet you, I need to talk. Their CMO was like, hey, you got one mission today, go find this person. And how did they know about us? Content on LinkedIn? It's the only way. It's the only thing that this person interacted with. And then when I had a chance to meet the cmo, I asked and she verified that for me. But it's verifying it and actually documenting that as a sales and marketing team, like, what's working? Right. But I've gotten a lot of pushback even on the conference side of it. It's like, uh, oh, we invest heavily into conferences and I'm like, yeah, conferences are where people gather and I think you should do both. So for us, we've gone on site, filmed conferences on site and like, what people don't realize is the best of the best are already there at the conference. So running an outbound booking strategy against the speakers and the thought leaders that are there, man, you can get some really great people just because they're already in conference mode. They're there to do business, they're there to network. And so attaching this strategy to what's already working well for you, it just 10x's it just amplifies it. But to your point, it's the age old question in B2B, where did the sale come from and how can we perfectly measure it to that? And I really just try to ask people to step back and like run experiments and let's just use our problem solving and say, what three things did we change this year? Was a podcast one of those? And is your revenue up then it probably has a lot to do with that.

Speaker B: The other thing I think is your salespeople will tell you, uh, your salespeople will tell you did. Are you hearing people commenting on it? Are you finding that to be a tool that helps open the doors? Your HR department will tell you, you know, we're, we're, we're getting great people in the market to coming to us looking for something. Instead of me having to go out and actively try to find the next pool of candidates, those candidates are, are approaching us. And I think it can be somewhat anecdotal, but I would really encourage leaders of those brands to be okay with that. It's okay if the feedback is anecdotal and that you're seeing the trends in the data going the right way. But in reality, most B2B companies don't need numbers. And you were, you were talking about that earlier. It's like if, if it just resulted in five new sales this year or made 10 deals you were working on, take a shorter period of time or it got you that one great hire that you had just really struggled to find the right fit for. Like, aren't those little anecdotal examples enough to help you invest in your brand change?

Speaker C: Yeah, the lifetime value of that.

Speaker B: Right, Exactly.

Speaker C: And we try as best we can. We obviously collect data and we try as best we can to map that back to certain specifics when we're talking about what result was generated from it. One of the ones that was super interesting, I think, uh, internal podcasts are really slept on. It's like an undercover kind of ROI that I feel like a lot of people don't understand. So we have quite a few customers who do internal. They're private, they're not syndicated across platforms. Podcasts for their company, because you're talking, I've got 5,000 employees, I've got a global company. And how do I connect with these employees, you know, at scale in a way that's meaningful for them and that helps drive, that's their target audience, that drives the mission and vision of this company forward in a way that's really tangible. And so we had a client recently who they actually we measured like the engagement numbers on how many people because they have technicians in the field, so they're not able to watch. We did audio and video. They embedded it into like their, uh, I'm going to miss the word here. But they're, they're Microsoft based. So what is the, their workspace?

Speaker B: SharePoint.

Speaker C: Their SharePoint. Okay, their SharePoint. And so the employees are able to access it that way. And they came back in the engagement numbers of the number of people who listened to. They did. The executive leadership team. So it was a CEO, all of the executive leadership team episodes. Right. It was the highest engagement on anything they had ever sent out to their employees to watch or attend. And so it's like, how do you measure that for a global company? And like, the impact that's going to have from your salespeople, your field people, hearing the mission, vision, what's progressing, getting those micro changes in the company that you want people to latch onto and message well in the market.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: How do you measure that, the success of that? Right.

Speaker B: I mean, it feels so much more personal than the kind of traditional, oh, uh, we're doing the all hands on deck, all company broadcast, which a lot of big I've worked for companies that have done that before. And you're, like stuck way in the back of the room and you can't see the screen and you can barely hear it. And when you are able to just listen to it in a podcast format on your own time and in your own environment, then it makes it feel like it was more personally sent to you as a message. The way it lands. Yeah.

Speaker C: And it's more accessible. You have visual learners, you have auditory learners, you have people who love to read. And this is a way to hit all of those learning styles, both internally, but also externally. You have people find you through video, you have people who find you on your blog, people who find you on YouTube or Reddit. Right. There's all different types of places that people discover and learn. And so this mechanism works for the accessibility of that, too. In this case, specifically, where you have field workers who are on the. They're on the rig or they're in the manufacturing warehouse all day. Right. They're able to listen rather than, you know, watch. So that retention and that engagement is higher because of that. By way of design.

Speaker B: Yeah. Do you know another thing that I'm thinking about as we're talking here is, guess what? Podcasts are edited. Podcasts can be edited. Right. And so. But, uh, that's a positive the way that I'm at least trying to communicate it, because I've done episodes and I'm communicating. And if you aren't pleased with the way a message came out or you want to take a step back and restate what you said, we haven't had to do that so far, knock on wood. In this episode. But that happens, right? Yeah. And so I think you have an open conversation and you have a Flow. But you also are controlling mhm. The message that goes out so that you can manage it and you can edit it. You can edit it into shorter segments and shorter clips. I think the editing part is something that um, gets lost. Right. Sometimes it probably sounds kind of obvious, but. But I don't think a lot of people like really think of the reality.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think that's a good point. And to your, you know earlier when you said a lot of people don't like to come on, on video and audio, we definitely experience that. And so engineering the process and in a way that helps relieve that pressure, editing is one not going live and being able to edit the other things is a lot of the companies we work with, you have full communications and legal that have to actually review this content before it goes out. And so we've just embedded that as part of the process that it's like, hey, we already know there's going to be red lines in this and that's okay. But that's part of you being able. If you don't tell your story a certain way, somebody's going to. So why don't you just get out there and uh, put the message to your point earlier of like, what do you want people to know about your company? How do I control at scale, how everyone across the organization and the industry are talking about us? Well, you've got to be the first person to put that out there. So.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Those pieces in the process I think are super important and it uh, sets a lot of people at ease rebuttal wise as well on that end. You know, we pre interview, we talked about it, we had a pre conversation before this and I, I love pre interviewing. One, you get to know the person off the, you know, off the camera.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And that helps set uh, them at ease too about what you're going to talk about and nail in those things. So you're not, not misrepresenting them, they're not misrepresenting you. And everyone's in alignment about what we're here to talk about.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And not in a really sleazy or engineered way, but just in a. Let's prepare because we all want to, we all want to do our best. Right. We all want to look our best, we all want to sound our best.

Speaker B: And so I think that that is the key to successful podcast conversation is the preparation and making sure that both parties are getting out of it. What would be important to them, whatever, whatever those outcomes are, you've got to be on the same page of It. I've noticed that there are sometimes people that I'll interview and as I'm feeling like, oh, this is easy. We both do this all day, every day. Right? This is easy to sit down and have this conversation. But I think there are a lot of different personality types and one personality type likes to be able to go back and reflect and pull research data or have whatever information they want to have at their fingertips and have, have it top of mind. So they're not trying to kind of struggle during the conversation to come up with a piece of information that is really important. So I think that prep is, is incredibly important. That's, you know, and sometimes people are like, oh, your conversations sound so easy. And I'm like, they're not though, because, I mean, I'm glad it, I'm glad that's what it looks like. It's, uh, because we prepared. We already knew what we were going to cover and we talked about it. And every now and then the conversation goes in a different direction. But that preparation is key. And it's especially key in organization that have a message that they need to be in compliance or there are regulations, uh, in their industry that dictate things that they can and cannot say. They can plan for it and be prepared for sure.

Speaker C: For sure. Yeah. Dealing in medical, manufacturing, m finance, a lot of the areas that some of our companies come from. That's big, right? So.

Speaker B: So yeah, we can talk about anything in marketing. It doesn't matter.

Speaker C: Yeah, nobody cares. Except the people are going to call you out about your acronyms and not

Speaker B: knowing them correctly, if you don't say SEO or GEO or whatever the latest term is, uh, then you and I will get emails later for that. But that's okay. Yeah. Actually, we talked about this slightly earlier, but I think it's really important. So something I have been getting asked much more in the last six months in particular is how do we show up in LLMs? And I'm going to be even more specific there because I don't want to assume that our audience knows all the acronyms and terminology. But if someone is searching for me on Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude or any one of the other ten that there are. I can't even remember. Perplexity. You know, there's a million of them out there now. If somebody's searching for me, how do I show up? There has been this whole mass chaos in the marketing industry about what do we call it now? Do we call it SEO? Do we call it geo? Who cares? People search on different things. Uh, and you want your brand to be found. That's what it comes down to. So, so if I have a podcast, is that another way for me to show up in the LLMs like ChatGPT and all of the others?

Speaker C: 100% because they're all pulling from what the base layer first is copy. So they're all crawling copy. So let's just use YouTube as an example. Massive opportunity on YouTube. And why, who owns it? Parent company is Google. So when people go search, whether it's on YouTube, but let's use Google as an example. Currently if I go search something on Google, if I search a question or a topic and there's a video on that topic, it is going to pop up on the top right or right immediately underneath that search bar in chat, GPT or Gemini that's actually pulling those results in.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And so let's really think about, if we go back on marketing, we pay for advertisement spots at the top and those are super expensive sometimes depending on your keyword strategy. So when you have multimedia content that is serving the audience and answering the questions that, that these search engines are trying to serve up good results for your media skips the line all the way to the top with the viewership improving that yes, you answered this successfully and well and it's great. It's being consumed a lot. You really get to skip the line. It's a massive opportunity. And like you said, all of these platforms are search based. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and the base layer of LLMs, that's it's all search or problem solving based. And so it all just functions kind of, it's just an extension of. I hate all the different acronyms as well. I'm just like, listen, at the end of the day like you, there are people searching. Multimedia content is being scraped just like copy was being scraped 20 years ago. And it's going to be served up in results if you have a authoritative piece of content that helps that person on the other end solve that problem.

Speaker B: Yeah, see, I mean there's just so many, so many reasons a podcast can be, can be valuable. I think being found online, building your brand, helping people understand what's special and unique about your business. I mean we've talked about a lot of them already, but I um, think right now, because it's so timely, the ability to use a podcast as a tool to expand the topics you're known for and showing up in LLMs is just adding another reason to go in that direction. And I think that was, I'M glad you kind of broke that down and explained it because I think there's like a lot of X's and O's to it too. Right? There's you record the podcast, you can break it into clips, you've got videos, you can put those videos on YouTube, you can put them on all the podcast platforms. You can create a transcript though, uh, that's all the words that can have all the keywords in it and the way you name the podcast, everybody listening, that's what speaker box, uh, you guys are your experts in breaking down all the X's and O's, but I think the reach and the ability to have all of those different things like spider web out correct and, and hit so many different marketing channels is just incredible. It's one activity that has so much reach. Yeah, more, more than, more than just about any other marketing tool that I can think of.

Speaker C: And organically, even when you don't have a marketing budget to attribute to paid yet.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: It lets you do it organically. It already does that. Here's the secondary layer and I'll just use us as an example. So you do that across your platform and you have all those, those that spider web effect, those tentacles out, right? Well we co collaborate on this and we do this together. And now not only is my brand and my content because we're going to share it together on our platforms exposed to the web that I have, the network that I have, but it's also yours. So there's this cross collaboration that happens when you do co collabor multimedia content like this that it's just like, I don't know, another organic way you can get that same level of reach at the cost that you did it. So you, you know, so I think that's also another piece that it's like the massive opportunity. And when you don't have multimedia content to serve these platforms, you're just not going to be indexed. That's the reality. Like you don't have video content, you're not going to be indexed. So that's where you're missing out with adding that additional layer of, of the video or why video or audio specifically. I mean.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Multimedia is the strategy that we're focused on but because of everything we just said. Because strategically it makes the most sense when you're trying to organically do something. And one of the things that I love about that as well is you can organically test at scale. Like say this podcast, we break it up, we put out 10 clips and one or two of them pops and we say, ooh, people really liked that. It's immediate. Immediately we have data that says this message that we said or this thing hit a nerve with people. Let's double down on that. Yeah. Now let's apply our page strategy or now let's amplify that and reslate that content, you know, two weeks from now or put it in our newsletter, uh, at a conference or whatever the case is. So that real time data and feedback from the market and audience, second to none. I mean it's just, it's, it's really cool.

Speaker B: Ah, yeah, no, I, that's a really good point. I, I completely agree with that. Well, let's see. I'm, I'm looking over my list that I initially made. I think we hit all of the points. Are there things here?

Speaker C: Are there other things? Yeah, this is the other thing.

Speaker B: Let's take a glance at it to make sure we haven't missed anything that we promised we would talk about. I think we hit it all.

Speaker C: We did. There's maybe one additional thing that I would say when it comes to content. It's this idea for at speaker box. We're really focused on building ownership media platforms and why I'm gonna bring this.

Speaker B: I would have been really upset if we missed this topic.

Speaker C: So ah, here's where this all fits in. Right. If you're in marketing, you're familiar with the peso model, right. Pained or paid earned, shared owned. So with what's happened in media is media has become decentralized before. You would have to go to Tier 1 media to get placements and you would have to do tons of PR and it could be very expensive sometimes to garner that type of visibility.

Speaker B: And there was, was X amount of

Speaker C: inventory available and there's relationships on the back end of that that sometimes could be pay to play. There's different things that happen there which would make it very hard for a smaller company or startup to get that same level of visibility. What happened with the ipod and social and is all that became decentralized. So once anyone could start a podcast or essentially start their own media brand, the game changed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And it's taken the market a little bit of a, uh, time to catch up to what's happening here. But that's what's happening happening. So you create content on earned platforms or shared platforms. Like social media. Right, like social media other. Yeah, but you don't own that audience, you don't own that data. You have no way to attribute it back to your company. And so the better play that I believe for the future of people looking at this is that you should always be looking at converting organic, social or non owned media to an owned media channel. And so like let's dial down into like a really common one, a newsletter. You should be collecting your own customer data, whether that's an SMS list, text list, email list, website conversions. You should be driving people back to an owned source of yours. And so when we focus on building a media brand alongside a company or content, that's what we're driving back. That's a big ROI piece that we focus on. Because when you have that relationship and you own that individual customer interaction, you're able to leverage that not just for today, but also in the future as your business grows.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And that really is the biggest opportunity that we're very focused on. And strategically what we're helping brands do is not just putting out content and getting those impressions and likes and engagement, but converting that to, to owned audience members and community that you can then leverage and I believe is gonna become extremely valuable in the future. Even when you talk about acquisitions and things like that, it's going to be a conversation of how much share of voice, share of market. Do you actually have data that consumers that we could reach out to in the future?

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to B2B marketing methods. Please be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast channel and leave us a review. You we'd love to hear from you and connect. You can find me on LinkedIn or visit our company website at uh, marketingrefresh.com.