How to Build a B2B Podcast That Drives Pipeline with Tom Hunt (Growth Activated)

I think it's quite a good way to start a B2B company and then you just copy and paste it to other clients. Hey Tom, welcome to the Growth Activated podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today. My pleasure, Mandy. I'm excited. I'm excited for the discussion. Me too. I discovered you through one of our, our podcast guests a few weeks ago, Gabe Luloe. His team actually, I know, works with you and Fame and had reached out to coordinate him as a guest, and he spoke so highly of you. And ever since then, I've been following you on LinkedIn and, and really actually appreciate your entrepreneurial and founder wisdom as a solopreneur over here. It's been really fun to watch. Oh yeah, first shout out to Gabe. It's been a pleasure working with him. Expert podcast guest and host now. But yeah, thank you for the kind words as well. Yeah, absolutely. So Tom, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your background and from following your story on LinkedIn, I know you started a lot of different companies in your time and, and certainly landed on Fame, which is a B2B podcasting company. So would love to hear a little bit about that journey and how you ultimately made it stick with podcasting and why that was a space you were interested in. Yeah, I think my approach was just to like throw loads of rubbish at the wall and, and see what would stick. I'm not very good at being strategic, but I'm quite good at taking action and moving fast. So ever since I realized that I wanted to leave my job in 2014, I set myself the goal of replacing my salary in 12 months in the calendar year of 2014. And I did it. But ever since then, so that's now been 12 years, it's been like doing loads of stuff. Like even now at Fame, I just do loads of stuff, even if I should maybe sit back and be more strategic. Now the downside of that is sometimes it can get you in trouble, sometimes it confuses people, but the upside of that is that you learn. And so over the past 12 years, I have learned quite a lot, mainly just about selling stuff online, which is really what I am, is a marketer. So if we follow that story forward, The thing that basically made the most money early on was this podcast agency. I think that's because of two things. A, as I mentioned, like, I just got really good at online marketing because I did it so much for like 8 years before starting Fame. The other thing I did learn is I spent 4 years in management consulting, so I learned how to like run meetings, send emails, really management. If you're good at marketing, you're good at management, then starting a marketing agency is a logical step. So There's really 8 years of prepping for starting Fame, which started in 2019. And it started because I spent 6 years trying and failing so much so that I ran out of money. And so I had to get a job. So 2019 or '18, I was head of demand gen at a B2B SaaS company. We've started a podcast, it went really well. So I left, they became the first client and then were a client for 5 years, churned recently. And that's essentially Fame. We just, I think it's quite a good way to start a B2B company if anyone's listening. It's like, get really good at running a process inside your business, like being employed. You're basically getting paid to do R&D. And then if you can skillfully navigate out of the company and get them to be your first client, and then bonus points. And then you just copy and paste it to other clients. I love that. So I'm a fractional CMO. I was a VP of marketing and ran growth strategy at a few different companies and became a fractional CMO. And I totally view it as like my playground. It's really fun to test new strategies, learn. Sort of build a strong point of view across these different clients and then apply it to my own business, which is fun. So you followed a similar path to me then. An interesting question that I like to ask is that obviously you could have like stayed just being the VP of marketing or CMO for one brand for like decades or whatever, and they just kept doing that by jumping through different companies. What was it that made you want to be fractional and have multiple clients? The freedom. And I, I guess I, I say that with the caveat of there's some freedom that opens up with being fractional, and then there's some freedom that is almost taken away that people don't always think about. But we love to travel and work abroad. So being in control of my own schedule, like I don't work Fridays, I get to set my own schedule, I choose my own clients, and if they don't follow the same methodology of me or how they think about marketing, I get to leave. So, and then of course the ultimate idea of working from wherever I want is really nice. So I've thought about going back in-house because there would be loads of things that would be easier, But I think that for me, the opportunity and the freedom it opens up has just been a game changer. But then the, the added challenge you have there is like finding the clients, right? So that's not something you'd have to do if you're in-house. Totally. I actually took a different approach. I am on the bench of a marketing agency who finds and places fractional CMOs. So I have the benefit of not having to do my own business development. Now, I do work with clients outside of them, but those clients have come to me through my presence on LinkedIn, through my previous network and referrals. Yeah, and I, that's like a good safety net to have the, the marketing agency there placing you. Presumably you don't get paid as much when they place you 'cause they have to take a cut, but it's good for the safety net. Yep, absolutely. So Tom, I would love to hear your perspective. So you landed on podcasting, obviously there was a huge need in the market for it. Clients saw the value, you leaned into it. How has it evolved in the last 6 years? And is it still something you're going all in on? Or are you expanding based on how the industry is expanding and viewing podcasts? Would love your perspective on sort of what's happening in the podcasting space. And maybe more because of luck, I think we did nail the timing for B2B podcasts in 2019, especially as COVID happened, more marketing budget shifted to online stuff. So we nailed the timing. What's happening in the market? Like when we started, it would be rare for a company, a B2B company to have a podcast. And now it's rare almost for a B2B company not to have a podcast. So I would say there's more competition, which essentially means that your show has to be better for a more specific person in order to get their attention. So we've had to narrow, like when we do strategy for podcasts, we've had to try to force clients to narrow the niche, to get as narrow as possible early on, because that makes it easier to make it better for someone. To listen to your show than someone else's, and that's how you get the early audience. So slight change in strategy at the start. If we had a company in like the sales niche, we could probably start like a sales leadership podcast and get listeners, but now we might have to focus on something even, even more niche. In terms of what Fame does, 90% of our revenue is just through running podcasts for B2B clients. It was 100% at the start, now it's 90%, and that's always been our focus. It's the one thing that we try to tweak and improve almost every day. We do have some ancillary service lines that we've added on either through acquisition or through me developing new things. And that accounts for about 10% of revenue, but it's essentially a service where we just do the viral social clips, a service where we, it's much more stripped down and we just do the editing, unlimited, lower cost, and then a service where we book clients on other podcasts. So those are the three bits, only 10% of the revenue. And I'm curious, with it almost feeling like, to your point, that everyone has a B2B podcast these days, like, what in your mind are the prerequisites for having one? When will a podcast fail for one of your clients? Maybe they don't have a strong point of view, maybe they don't have executive buy-in. Like, where should marketing leaders stop and think, is this actually— if I don't have one, is this the right strategy for me? 3 things. First is not getting the positioning right. Podcast positioning is broken up into two areas. So the first we've already covered, which is the niche. So it needs to be as narrow as possible. The second is what we call the edge. So here's the thing a listener would tell their friends about. I'll give a quick example. My show used to be called Confessions of a B2B Entrepreneur. So B2B entrepreneurship, very clear on the niche, probably just about narrow enough. And then the edge was the confessions piece where I tried to get guests to say things they wouldn't normally share. So it's a niche and an edge. So a client may come to us and want to do a show. If they have sales software, they might want to just do a show about sales. We would advise them, heavily against that. Or an email marketing software company might want to do a podcast about email marketing. We'd be like, no, we would advise them to do a podcast about open rates, for example, especially to start with, just go narrow as possible. And then the edge, if you layer the edge over a nice narrow niche, then it's very easy to get the early listeners. So that's the first thing. Second thing is being strategic about guests. ROI from podcasts can come in the short term, typically through relationships with guests, and long term through building an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you. With most clients, the CFO wants to see some benefit in the first 6 months. And it's very hard to get listener ROI in the first 6 months. So what we like to do is work with our clients to just be strategic about guests. You bring on guests that are an existing customer, not to talk about the work you do, but to build a relationship to secure the renewal or potential customers or potential partners so that we can show the CFO in the first 6 months that the podcast has generated one partnership, which is driven 5 leads. And then that enables the business to double down to build the audience, which is where the long-term, more valuable ROI comes from. And the third then is being consistent. So if you start with a cadence, or you don't have the budget to get past 6 months, then it's almost wasted because you never get to the point where you can have this, when you can cultivate this group of ideal buyers that know, like, and trust you. So they come to you as they, or They come to you when they actually need to, need to buy the thing. Those are the 3 things that we see when clients fail. And do you typically see long-term success when I've, I actually have a few clients that have run podcasts for the sole purpose of lead generation with bringing on their guests. They actually don't care about the audience. They don't care if they're building anything beyond having a conversation with the guest and then being able to sell to them. That's actually happened to me too with a few podcasts I've been on where it was, that was very obvious to me that that was the ultimate goal. Do you see benefit and like long-term success from that strategy, or is that really short-sighted with the investment of a podcast? The Holy Grail is building the audience that knows, like, and trusts you. That's a much more scalable version of ROI, because if you're just trying to pitch guests, then you're obviously limited by the amount of guests you interview. And to be fair, you could just— if you could book them, you could interview a guest every day and then interview 20 a month. And then bring them into your pipeline, which I think is a valid strategy, but you just have to ensure, like, the guest has to have a good experience. If they don't and they think they're just on there to be pitched, then they're not going to convert and word of mouth is going to be bad about your business. So I think the best approach is to focus on the longer-term ROI, e.g., don't jeopardize the audience growth because you're just bringing on someone to sell to them. But if someone is genuinely going to be good for audience growth as a guest and they are an existing customer, potential customer, or partner, then that's just upside, right? Because you're going to build a relationship with them and then that could lead to something down the line. Yep, absolutely. Okay. So we talked about what people get wrong. What is on the flip side, sort of the top 1%, 5%, 10% of the clients that really get it right? What are they doing? What are they getting right? My view on Let's do a top 3 and we'll put skill of the host as second. So like success modes, or like basically the best clients end up building the audience that knows, likes, and trusts them, right? And the way you do that is by creating great episodes. So I'll explain how you make great episodes. First is guests. Here's the thing that has the biggest impact on the episode quality is choosing the guests that can add value to the audience, but within the framework of your podcast positioning. So you could bring on the best guest that exists, but then if they're not Talking, or if they're not creating content through the structure that you believe is going to be the most valuable for the listener, then it's almost a waste of time because your podcast positioning is basically a thesis that this content type with this type of guest is going to be valuable to our ideal listener. And so you just have to keep executing on that, reviewing the metrics, and then learning and improving. So first is getting the guest that can add value within the framework that, within the content structure that we think is going to be valuable for the customer. Second then is the skill of the host. So there are small things you can do, like we want to track the ratio of the host speaking versus a guest. We want it to be between 20 and 30% for the host. We want to track the host's filler words. Are they using so too much? Are they using like, etc.? Are they genuinely interested and engaged in the subject matter? So we get the right guest that's going to create content within that structure. We improve our host skill. And then if we do that, then we should start seeing the numbers go up. And then once we start seeing the numbers go up, then we want to just work out what's the next step in the funnel that's going to take a listener who likes the show and bring them that one step closer to becoming a customer of the business. It's typically some kind of piece of information or some kind of offer that doesn't cost any money, but often is in exchange for an email address that will then get them into the CRM. You basically can't get someone, you can't retarget someone or get someone into the CRM that listens to your show on Apple Podcasts. So we want to create those great episodes and then we want to have like a seamless next step down the funnel to bring them into the CRM. So those are the, if we see a client doing that, or if we're able to do that with a client, then typically it ends up being a success. I love that. Now you'll have to rate me at the end or something, or give me some feedback, but that's really helpful. And one of the things that stuck out to me is with the host being such a critical part of the podcast success. Success. Do you typically find that when people are starting, let's say I'm, I work for a B2B SaaS security company, if I'm a marketing leader or a CMO that's creating a podcast, should my host be my CISO, like my cybersecurity expert, or would you choose someone that could have those conversations but maybe isn't in that seat? I guess, how do you typically help organizations identify who the right host is? Yes, 3 things. So yeah, availability, do they have the time to record? Do they have the subject matter expertise and interest? So in that case, if you're a cybersecurity VP of marketing, you're starting a podcast, then yeah, your CISO or your chief evangelist or co-founder could be a good option. And then finally is, do they have the communication skills? So some chief evangelists, especially technical companies, this type of person may not have the communication skills we need. And so then it could fall onto someone in sales, CS, or even the CEO. So it's comms skills, subject matter expertise slash interest, and then availability. Now, let's say people are listening to this and a podcast— starting a podcast sounds overwhelming. At what point would you suggest or recommend that someone goes all in on being featured as a featured guest on other podcasts rather instead of building the infrastructure for their own podcast that they have to manage? Like, how do those two strategies play together or separate in your mind? Yeah, I think if the goal is to explore podcasting, the much easier route into this is to become a guest on shows, especially if that person could eventually become the host of a show, is because it's good to do that, because you practice your online communication skills. It's like very easy to set up, much lower cost, and you, I guess, will start to see whether you can potentially reach ideal buyer through going on other podcasts. If you do 10 guests on 10 shows and you don't have anybody coming inbound, saying they heard about you from a show could mean that maybe it isn't worth creating your own show. That said, one good promotional strategy for your own show is obviously to be a guest on other shows and then direct people back to your show, because those people listening by definition like podcasts and so should be listening to your one as well. And I guess on that note, if we talk about the investment, you did share early on you feel like CFOs, a lot of your clients want to see the return on an investment within 6 months. Obviously, audience and follower growth takes probably a lot longer than that, I would imagine. But what do you recommend to CMOs and VPs who are considering launching this? What type of investment, people, resourcing, spend, and what, what is sort of the return, the green flags along the way that they should be looking out for and communicating back to their team that this is working? Yeah, so let's talk about the green flags first. The first thing you want to see is people that are not your employees saying they like the podcast. It could be comments on a LinkedIn post, could be reviews on Apple Podcasts. That's the first signal that you're going in the right direction. The second signal, and so that ideally you get in the first month, the second signal which comes from month 2 to 6 is, is the metric total downloads. And so that includes like plays on Spotify, plays on Apple Podcasts, views on YouTube. Is that increasing by 5 to 10% a month, because then the theory is that people are coming back and more people are listening to the show. At the same time as tracking total downloads, the other metric that we like to look at is average consumption, which is Apple Podcasts, or on YouTube is average view duration. So is that metric longer ideally for episode 6 than it is for episode 2? It is the content getting better every episode. So that's the next thing we want to see. And then the kind of holy grail from the listener side is having somebody come to your website and then in the form where you ask them how they found out about us, they say podcast. That happens in the first 6 months, amazing. And then the other thing, if we are being strategic about guests, it would be some kind of pipeline built through either a guest becoming a customer or a partner. So those are the things in the first like 6 months that we would expect to see or would like to see. And then in terms of investment, There's typically 3 roles. First is the host. Their investment is anywhere between 1 and 2 hours per episode. Second is what we like to call, we call it the main contact, but he's typically like a marketing assistant, marketing manager, who's essentially responsible for the show. And they're probably finding guests, prepping the host, managing the third role that I'll talk about in a second, and then doing promotion. The third role, it could be one person or it could be multiple. This is essentially, we call it the creative role, which is the person that would be creating the written assets, creating the visual design, creating the audio, the video, and the video clips. Can be one person, but it also could be like parts of multiple people. So 1 to 2 hours of the host, which their time is typically quite expensive. Let's say 1 day a week from the marketing manager. And then let's say 6 to 8 hours per episode, maybe for the creative person. So you can assign costs to those. I don't know, maybe it would come out to $3,000 and $5,000 a month, depending on really the cost of the time of the host is probably the biggest variable there. 'Cause if it's like the, if it's a thousand perfect company and his CEO, that time might be worth like $1,000 an hour. Yeah, that really hits home 'cause I do this alone and when I started, I did, I had no idea how much time commitment it would be and it's a lot of work. But AI for me has made things a lot easier. I'm actually exploring with Claude Code right now how to automate a lot of the post-production workflow, which has been interesting. I haven't gotten it to work totally yet, so I can't speak to the quality of the output, but how is your team? Either leveraging or finding AI to make some of this easier or harder? Because I'm sure it's also creating more saturation and noise in a lot of ways. We built an application called Fame AI in 2022, I think, when ChatGPT came out to essentially, you upload the audio of the episode and then it produces the written assets and also hosts coaching. So, speed percentage, et cetera, filler words. Back then, the written assets weren't good enough, but now they're getting much closer. So we do, we have a lot of the written content automated, but obviously we have the writers first, producers review that, because you can't put anything out in a client's name if it hasn't been reviewed by a human. We haven't yet been able to bring AI into like the actual editing process in terms of like actually manipulating the audio and video files, but that's probably coming, I would have thought. But it is quite good, like you feed the episode and then it can tell you what clips could be good, for example. So it can help with the post-production. Um, in that way. I guess one of the things that came to mind is, because video, I think me personally, I'm moving towards video. I was an audio-only podcast, and seems like such a miss because of course I'm doing guest interviews like with yourself on video. But do you recommend that when clients are starting a podcast that they always are video first and they're maybe creating and optimizing for YouTube in, in these days? Or how do you sort of view, I guess, video versus audio? Yeah, absolutely. The discovery on YouTube is better than Apple Podcasts and Spotify, e.g., it's better to get, well, it's easier to get organic views for free with YouTube. So having long-form video, ideally in person as well, obviously it's a lot more expensive to hire a crew or to hire a studio, but we do see like live recordings perform better. And then we also will get better Shorts. And so YouTube Shorts, etc., TikTok Reels is the other best way to get free attention for a show. And typically, like, in-person recording typically performs better than remote recording, which performs better than just audio. So audio form videos. Interesting. Any other growth tips or growth hacks while we're thinking about it? So video is a must for sure, and it sounds like doing reels and things also helps grow visibility. But what else, I guess, is— what else would you suggest to people who want to grow their show? I would say that posting high volumes of snippets because you can always have your, your theory on what's going to perform, but it's quite unpredictable what will pop off organically. And so posting high volumes of snippets on all places that will allow you to post vertical video and then just waiting for something to pop. And then as it does, that's when you would add a bit of ad spend, just like $50, because if it's popping already, then you're going to get a lot more mileage from that $50. So this can be done on LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts. So that's probably the most effective way to use ad spend if you're looking to promote a show. Let's do an organic one. So there are, for every single niche, many blog articles that list the top X podcasts. I don't think these people know how valuable those rankings are. And so it's relatively easy to get featured. You either just pay them a bit, you either do some kind of deal, like you get, let's say it's a company, you bring on their CSOs a guest on your show if they put your show in that list, or you create your own, or you do some kind of backlink exchange from your domain. And so just running a campaign to get your show in those lists, it's like a lot of upfront work, but if you are successful, then that should be like this flow drip of, of new listeners to the show. And Organic One, there are essentially thousands of articles in various niches that list top podcasts in that space, and they're relatively easy to get into. You can do some kind of deal by bringing someone from their business on your show. You can exchange backlinks, you can pay them a little bit. And it's a lot of upfront work to find the 20 and then do outreach. But then if you get that right and you get placed ideally high up in those lists, ideally with a link to the show into Apple or Spotify or YouTube, then you will just get a stream of listeners into the show. And the final organic one that people are not sure understand, which is important when you are in the positioning process for the show, e.g., what's the name of the show, what's the description. Is just like really basic SEO stuff. And so if there's a core keyword for your niche, you just want it to be at the start of the name. Like the first word of the podcast is the highest SEO signal in Apple and Spotify and YouTube, et cetera. And so if your podcast is about SEO, just have the word SEO at the start and then have the word SEO in the description, et cetera. So like that's quite basic. That's a paid one and that's two organic strategies. Awesome. I've always thought about going after the best of lists, but I, I guess I didn't realize that it's as easy as, as maybe it actually is. So I'll, I'll definitely think about prioritizing that. And I, and certainly like I imagine, and in the research I've done, the LLMs are referencing a lot of those lists for credibility as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Especially if the list is like ranks well on Google, was published 5 years ago, um, the LLM is gonna look at that as trustworthy. And so getting your show in there will definitely help. Wow. And so even if it was published 5 years ago, a lot of people you find are open and willing to adding new shows. Like, you just have to hustle, you know? You just have to make the deal good enough. Like, some of them, you're like, you don't even have to do anything for them. You'd be like, hey, this is a podcast, got this many downloads, this many reviews. I feel like it deserves to be in the list. And like, that might work, I don't know, 1 in 20 times. But then if you offer to pay someone $500, that'll work like 1 in 2 times, you know? So you just have to hustle. Oh, fascinating. What is a good download rate for B2B podcasting? It seems like, I would imagine that the viewership isn't nearly as high as consumer podcasts, but I'd be curious to, like, what is a good benchmark? I think it depends what the company is trying to achieve. And then also on the niche of the show, like if we have a show that's in the governance space for cybersecurity, so they're interested in cybersecurity professionals that are responsible for governance.. And so I don't know, maybe there's like 1,000 people of those in the US, 1,000 people with that role in the US. And so if they get to like 100 downloads per episode, that's like pretty amazing, 10% of their audience. But then we have some clients where the show is like about just sales and there's probably, I don't know, 5 million salespeople in the US. So then if they only had 100 downloads per episode, then that might not be as good. So Instead of like the absolute number, what we like to look at is the growth rate. And so what is a good growth rate for the first 6 months? We typically like to see 10% a month, assuming that in month 1 with the launch, etc., there's 1,000 downloads. Then in month 2, month 3, 1,100, and then it compounds from there. I think if you launch with 2,000, if you grow at 10% a month for the first year, then you get to around 5,000 downloads a month.. And so if the niche is relatively broad, then that is what we'd expect. But if it was like the Cybersecurity Governance Professionals Show, then we, the launch might be 100, and then by, uh, 12 months it might be, I don't know what that compounds at, but it might be like 500. Interesting. This has been fascinating. I've, I've learned so much personally. I'm, I'm excited to, excited to try, and, uh, also for my clients too. But Tom, I'd love to hear like, what is one of your favorite case studies with your clients? Where has podcasting just really exploded or provided a lot of opportunity or sort of been best in class? Is there any examples you could point to that to maybe inspire us? Our biggest growth story in terms of downloads with, uh, actually a B2B2C show, so it was a little bit cheating, so I won't choose that one, but eventually over about 9 months we got to 140,000 downloads a month, largely because of a Facebook ad paid strategy. It was in the root cause medicine space. And so we are really just targeting people that are interested in different types of root cause medicine. And so what we're able to do for that is we bring on doctors that were experts in different types of root cause medicine. And then the promotion strategy was just focusing on that, like one or two quotes from that episode from that doctor that was like very uplifting and motivational, putting them as quote images on Instagram actually, and then just running meta ads to those images, and then the CTA was to listen to the episode. So I spent quite a lot on ads though, to get to that 140,000. In terms of B2B, what would I choose? I would probably say, if I had to choose one, the show called CFO Weekly that we've been running for about 4 years. And they, like, the download— CFO, like, relatively large niche. The downloads are decent, but probably the best outcome of that is the business impact that the show has had. The business is outsourced accounting functions. And so obviously CFOs are ideal customers. And once you get to like a critical mass of high-name guests in a niche, like in the CFO world, then it's just relatively easy to find other than actually they start coming inbound to you. And so had many big CFO names and it's just now a stream of CFOs that they get to build relationships with. Now they're not directly trying to close deals for Kest, but Every week they get to build a relationship with a new CFO, which is obviously great for their business. So that's a good B2B example. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Tom, for your time today. I guess to close us up, I know you've got so many great tips for entrepreneurs and founders and marketing leaders. What would be something you'd leave us with that you wish more CMOs either paid attention to or did in their daily work? I would say like if you're trying to grow a podcast, actually, that's the last thing you should grow. The first thing you should grow is an organic social audience. If you're the CMO, you either do it for yourself or you do it for someone in leadership, and you grow that without trying to send people off to your email list or to your podcast. And so do that for a year, maybe build the audience, and then only I would move down the funnel to email. And so I would, after that, spend a year or 6 months building an email list. Again, like a value only, just, just adding value on specific topics and you can drive people there from the social audience now that you've added enough value on that social platform. And then only then would I start the podcast and then it's going to be very easy to grow the podcast if you have an active social and email list. So the podcast is the hardest to grow but will have the biggest impact on that audience once you've created it. And so you've actually not started the podcast, start with organic social. Build an email list, and then start the podcast. I have not done it in that way, but I am gonna start thinking about how I can continue. That's awesome. Well, thank you, Tom. I so appreciate your time today. Obviously, if people want to get in contact with you, is LinkedIn the best way? Should they go to Fame? Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn, and then I can direct you to the best place. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate your time today. Amazing. Thank you, Mandy.