Podcasting to grow your thought leadership | James Carbary

---

Using a podcast to market your thought leadership and do original research.

An interview with James Carbary about using a podcast to do content-based networking and original research.

Today’s guest is James Carbary, founder of Sweet Fish Media, the executive producer of the B2B Growth podcast, and the author of Content-Based Networking.

James chats with us about how he is using podcasting in a much more thoughtful and strategic way to create a flywheel of content that can be used outside of the podcast itself. James talks about the questions he asks before an interview to prompt passionate replies that you can build an incredible episode around.

We discuss using your podcast guests to do original research to gain powerful insights into the wants and needs of the very people you are looking to help. Furthermore, we explain how you can use that research to fuel your content strategy for months to come.

Finally, James shares how he is going beyond the podcast to create communities and achieve content-based networking to create meaningful relationships.

If you have a podcast or are thinking of starting one, this is the episode for you!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• Thought leaders can use a podcast to forge new relationships with guests that can lead to the guest becoming a client.
• During your podcast, don’t be afraid to ask the guest to do a short survey. You can use it to fuel your thought leadership.
•  A podcast about your thought leadership should be named around being a useful resource to the client and not around yourself.

---

Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

---

Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello and welcome. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my personal passions, organizational thought leadership. That is the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Today we take a look at B2B, podcasting. How do you launch and run a podcast so that you can help the organization meet its thought leadership and overall organizational goals? And to help me explore this topic, I’ve invited James Carberry to the discussion. James is the founder of Sweet Fish Media, and he’s also the executive producer of the B2B Growth Podcast. In my opinion, James is one of the smartest voices out there now on how B2B podcasting fits strategically into customer acquisition, relationship building and market intelligence. I’m eager to talk with him about the intersection of thought leadership and B2B podcasting. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, James.

James Carberry I am super pumped to be here, Bill. This is going to be a blast.

Bill Sherman Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I love about what you’ve been doing with Sweet Fish as well as sort of you’ve been an advocate for using podcasts in a much more thoughtful and strategic way. And I think that’s been something that’s been missing from a lot of conversations. It’s either check the box to have a podcast or there’s a lot of confusion in organizations. What are we doing with the podcast? So let me throw that to you. Do you see that as well? And if so, how does that manifest?

James Carberry I do see it, Bill. The biggest problem that I see is that people are looking at podcasting only as a means to grow a podcast audience. And I think the two massive opportunities that they’re not seeing are, one, the amount of ancillary content that a podcast creates. So a podcast creates a flywheel of content, especially if you’re doing what we’re doing right now. We’re recording a Zoom call, so we’re both going to have micro videos from this episode. We can both create slide decks on LinkedIn that are really working well right now from this, from the content we share on this episode. It can be fodder for our email newsletters. We can use the podcast content as a flywheel for lots of other content, so it’s well beyond just the channel of your podcast. I don’t think a lot of marketers are thinking about it that way. And then the other thing that I think they’re missing, so they’re not seeing a podcast as a content flywheel, but then they’re also not seeing the relationship opportunities that you can build with your guests. They’re only thinking about trying to interview influencers and trying to interview people that have written books instead of using it as a platform to interview the practitioners that you’re actually trying to serve. So whether you sell a SAS product or technology services or I.t, regardless of whatever you sell, if you go and actually interview your ideal buyer on your show, they’re going to bring you incredible content because they are there on the front lines, are making decisions and you should be trying to serve that persona with your content. So who better to interview than them? But while you’re interviewing them, what you’re doing is you’re building a relationship with them. We actually just hired someone to join our sales team. And the whole reason I know this person, this is a very strategic hire for us. We’re a small 20 person shop. And so making this decision was not made lightly as a big decision, as a big financial investment. And I’m convinced that this person is going to take our business to a completely different level. But I met this person because a thousand episodes ago on B2B growth on our podcast, I interviewed him as a guest. It doesn’t just work with salespeople talking to prospects. It can work with hiring managers, interviewing people that you know they want in their talent pool. You can do it with strategic partners. So vendors that could be great referral partners for you. There are so many different ways that you can get value from the relationships that you create through the guest that you have in your show. I wrote an entire book about it. We call it content-based networking. And the idea with content-based networking is you first. You’ve got to set your goal. What do I want to accomplish? And then you’ve got to figure out, okay, what relationships do I need to accomplish that goal? And then you say, okay, what content do I create in order to build those relationships? So with me, I was an early stage entrepreneur for four and a half, five years ago when I was building sweet fish and I thought, I want I want to build a business that’s on the Inc five 500 fastest growing list. And I was that that was my aspiration. That was what I wanted. So I thought, how do I get to that goal? Well, there are relationships that can help me get there. The relationships that I needed as an early stage entrepreneur, I need. Relationships of people that could buy our podcasting service. And so the content that I created was then became B2B growth. It was a show for B2B marketing leaders where I interviewed B2B marketing leaders to be a guest on the show, created content, the content flywheel thing that I was talking about, But then simultaneously I created massive amount of relationships with people that could actually buy our service so people would become a guest and then they would become a customer or they would become a referral partner for us.

Bill Sherman So let me jump in there for a second. So I think one of the things that the intersection between the content and the idea as well as the relationship, you’ve collapsed these two almost as two sides of the same coin. And I think in many places people are looking from an account perspective and saying, okay, what relationships do we need and not saying what stories are we telling, how are we communicating and how we’re using insights and ideas to build relationships? And whether you’re trying to monetize directly through a sales channel or you’re trying to deepen a relationship at a time when they’re not in a buying cycle. That becomes an essential point, is the idea fuels the relationship in a way that you come closer together.

James Carberry You’re exactly right. No, I think I mean, we’ve got we’ve got someone on our team that literally uses our show with existing customers. So, you know, long before it’s time for them to renew their service with us because we want to build relational equity with multiple people at the companies that are paying us money. And we use the show to deepen those relationships. We’ve got other co-hosts of our show that that are building relationships with people that aren’t customers that could become customers. And so there are so many angles that you can take with content based networking. Like I said, we’ve recruited people into our business because of it. So you’re spot on build. It’s relationships and content. It’s not one or the other. Now, that account based marketing, ABM is kind of having a moment right now and all these marketers are talking about ABM. This works for ABM. I mean, it’s ABM and content. I sometimes go away from using the term relationships because I think a lot of folks in business, even though I think and I think you believe there’s two relationships, are the oxygen of everything. It’s nothing happens outside of relationship and nothing significant or substantive anyway happens outside of relationship. So relationships are so powerful. But I have to stop using that term because it can it can come across as fluffy and flowery and too high level. So now we talk about, okay, are you doing account based marketing? You are you trying to target your target accounts and, and figure out how you can connect and engage with them? Well, if you have a podcast, you’re creating content and you’re going and asking those decision makers at your target accounts to be a guest on the show, engaging them in a way that they actually want to engage with you, as opposed to reaching out and saying, Hey, can I show you a demo of my product? Or Hey, can I pick your brain for 15 minutes?

Bill Sherman Well, and one of the things that I often see on that, too, is you have some of the shows which are incredibly well-produced. They’re almost magazine quality and audio magazine quality, and they’re beautiful, but they only come out, you know, a limited number of times a year because it takes production cost and effort and it just loses that relevancy and recency. And I think one of the things that you evangelize very strongly, strongly and I want to explore is when you’re doing the podcast and you’re using as a channel, it’s not something that you do once a corner, but you’ve got to be in the trenches every day. So let’s talk about that a little bit.

James Carberry Yeah. So our most successful customers, Bill, are doing a daily show and I know and a lot of people listening to this, they’re like, my gosh, we could never do a daily show. But when you start to think about the fact that the show should be hosted by multiple people on your team, your CEO could do an episode a month. Your VP of Sales could do a handful of episodes every month. Your SDR manager could take over a couple episodes a month. A couple of people from your marketing team could own 1 or 2 episodes a month. And when you start to widen your view of what a podcast can be and all of the different types of relationships that you could be building, it starts to the picture starts to get painted in a lot more clear way that like, we actually could pull this off. And when when you are producing the only resource for your buyer persona that is actually helpful for them, it’s not all about you. It’s not it’s not the your company show. It is in service of your ideal buyer and they can come back to you every single day to learn from you even. And not every company is going to do a daily show. But the more you can do, the better for the exact reasons you just spelled out. If you can be that consistent provider of helpful information while simultaneously building relationships with the exact people that your organization wants to build relationships with, that it’s a no brainer.

Bill Sherman Well, and one of the. The things that I look at from the organizational perspective is when you get into a large organization, whether you have 10,000 employees, 100,000 employees, you’ve got a wealth of knowledge inside the organization that is rarely being leveraged to its full extent. And you’ve got relationships that those people know that could be strengthened. And it’s always a little bit flattering of saying, Hey, I’m doing a podcast next month. Would you like to be a guest? Right. I love what you say. And so because many organizations are saying how do we take bold leadership from being something that’s done only at the top of the House and extend it down throughout the organization? What if you pull a couple people from sales? What if you pull some people from research or from the client side and start saying, okay, you’re doing two episodes a month and you pick and you choose. But with that, you get so many more touchpoints that are not, Hey, let me tell you about our latest offering or latest features and you have a conversation.

James Carberry It’s exactly and it’s about exactly about uncovering their insights, their point of view. You know, some I know you have a similar approach. I think you call it something different, Bill, But we in the last year have developed something we call P.O.V. Discovery, and POV stands for Point of View. And we were trying to figure out how do we help our customers develop better content with the guests that they’re featuring? Because a lot of times when you’re interviewing a practitioner, you’re interviewing somebody that is that is in the trenches. They’ve got an enormous amount of wisdom in their head, but they’re not often tapped to be content creators. And so they often don’t even know what you know. They don’t know the insights that are in between their ears already. And so we run our customers. We advocate for this system now called P.O.V. Discovery. And it’s just basically A3A set of three questions that we have our customers and we do this with B2B growth as well. We ask a set of three questions in the pre-interview. The pre-interview could actually be on, you know, right before you hit record. So on the same call. I actually like doing a separate call like you and I did for this allows you to build some relational depth, but also gives you some time to really chew on what the person said and build a great episode around it. But those P.O.V. discovery questions that you can ask in the in the pre-interview are simply this What’s a commonly held belief in your space or around your expertise? So you, as the host would know what that is. So you would say that. So what’s a what’s a is for you? I would say, Bill, what’s a commonly held belief about thought leadership that you passionately disagree with? Right. Question is going to invoke a passionate response from you and it’s going to invoke a response that that gives me an answer that I probably haven’t heard before because it’s counter to what everybody else is saying. In my world, I hear everybody talk about sales and marketing alignment, sales, marketing, alignment, sales. Everybody’s got to be on shelves. Marketing have to be aligned. And if I hear that one more time, I’m going to throw my face through a wall because everyone’s saying that, Yeah, of course I know that sales and marketing needs to be aligned if. But if someone told me that sales and marketing did not need to be aligned, now my ears are perked up. And so when you ask that question, what’s a commonly held belief around your expertise that you passionately disagree with it, it invokes those kind of answers. The second and third question are similar. What is something that your space should start doing today that they are not doing currently? So what’s something that people in your space should start doing today that they are not doing currently? And then the second or the third one is what is something that people in your space should stop doing today that they are currently doing. All of those three questions will give you a bank of options to choose from. And I typically say go with the go with the response. That’s the most passionate response from your guest, and then start to build an episode around that point of view. So you’ve identified in those three questions, three different points of view. And now it’s just a matter of building an episode around that singular point of view. And then we transition into what we call the what, why, how framework. So getting them to share the point of view, why that point of view matters, why people should pay attention to it, why they should subscribe to that way of thinking, and then how the action guide, what can people actually do to deploy what it is that you’re saying? Yeah, make the content actionable. So between P.O.V. Discovery and what? Why, How? I think any company that serves any type of customer could take this collaborative approach to content creation, go partner with their ideal buyers or strategic partners, create content with them, and actually pull out really substantive, meaningful content from those guests. And everybody wins. They look awesome. Your company gets great content and you get to look awesome as the as the host and facilitator of the conversation and everything moves forward.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think what we’re looking at now, as well as the democratization of content. Right. One of the things that I aspire for in conversations is. Is it’s you and I in a coffee shop or who whichever guest I’m sitting down with and talking to. And I want people who are part of my target audience to feel like they’ve pulled up a chair in the coffee shop and they’re just listening in to a conversation that’s relevant and they find himself going, Yeah, I want to sit in and I want to listen more. And if you can create that relevance and one of the things that I think is absolutely essential is you’ve got to focus obsessively on relevance for your audience. And that means you can’t be all things to all people. You have to accept that most of the people in the world aren’t going to care about your podcast, Right? And so dial into that, embrace this piece of narrow casting, but make it so like you said before, it’s content that they don’t want to miss.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Bill Sherman I want to ask you a question because you do something really interesting in terms of original research and market intelligence as a podcasting tool. And what I like is you’re taking the methodology of a podcast and really multitasking it for multiple purposes to serve the organization, which I think a lot of people are not doing. They’re recording a podcast and checking the box and saying, I did that right. So let’s talk about the podcast as a tool for research and why that’s so essential.

James Carberry Yeah. So we’ve it was a few months ago we started we had the idea that we needed to start doing original research. I’ve heard people like Andy Christina talk about original research. I’ve heard Ian Locke talk about it. There’s all these people saying that, you know, B2B marketers should be doing original research because the insights that you glean from that research actually fuels really a really fantastic content strategy. So we knew we needed to do it, but the thought of going and surveying a thousand people, getting, you know, getting 1000 people to fill out a survey was just really it wasn’t some surveys.

Bill Sherman Nobody wants to do it right.

James Carberry Yeah, it’s crippling. And it’s why I think a lot of people don’t do it because that’s really the only way that I’ve heard people talk about doing it is in that way. And I said, You know what? We’re already doing this podcast. We’re already talking to the people that we would ultimately want to do the survey. What if we just tacked on and you know something after the interview or before the interview in a separately recorded call where I asked them a set of 10 to 15 questions and we just recorded their answers and I could do that with 100 people, and I could give the recordings of each of their responses to each question to our team so that we could just listen one after the one after the other. Listen to 100 different people answer the same question. We would probably be able to pull out some really interesting insights. And so we started doing that where I think 56 interviews in to that, and we’re going back to some past B2B growth gas. We’re doing it with our current B2B growth guests and we’re just asking them the same 15 questions. Things like, you know, what’s your most successful marketing channel? What’s the most underrated B2B marketing trend right now? What’s the most overrated B2B marketing tactic? Questions that are going to be really valuable, especially as we start to see how did 100 B2B marketers answer this question? And to your point, Bill, the lion’s share of the people that we’re talking to are our VP or CMO, VP of marketing or CMO at B2B SAS company. So that adds even more and have depth, depth and focus to our original research. But I’m all right, we’re only 55 interviews in, and I’m already gleaning insights from these interviews. I’m learning things like one of the questions we ask is what’s your what’s your all time favorite marketing book? What I’m hearing over and over again that everybody seems to respond to that in a very similar way. They open the answer by saying, well, it’s not necessarily a marketing book. And to me, when you hear that 25 times in a row, you go interesting for people that want to accelerate their career, they want to get to the next level. They want to become a VP or a CMO. You probably need to start reading books that aren’t necessarily marketing books. They’re reading books good to great. They’re reading books by Malcolm Gladwell. They’re reading books on creativity, on psychology. That’s a really interesting insight.

Bill Sherman Or to borrow a title from Marshall Goldsmith. What Got you here? Won’t get you there. Right there. Yeah, exactly.

James Carberry Yeah. If we can be the deliverer of. Those insights because we’ve done the work of doing the original research and it’s a very low lift. Like we were talking about our find, like you’re already doing the podcast interview with them have 10 to 15 questions and t them up right after the interview or right before the interview and say, Hey, we’re doing some original research. This actually won’t go live. This is just used for internal purposes. But would you be up for answering these ten questions real quick before we dive into the interview recorded separately? So it’s a separate file and you’re going to sit on a mountain of incredible data that people honestly, a lot of people would probably pay for that data. But I’m just thinking about it in terms of the quality of the content that you can put out. So when we finally get done, we’re asking 100 people these questions. It’s basically going to be a big chunk of the future for our 2021 content strategy, and I’m super excited about it. But I think anybody with a podcast should be doing this.

Bill Sherman Well and as an organization or an individual and thought leadership, it’s around. It’s about looking around the corner, seeing into the future and finding either risks or opportunities. Yes, and you can do this by sitting at your desk and thinking great thoughts or looking at internal documents and research, but that client customer contact and accelerating. And the beauty of it is you’ve married the day to day cadence of a podcast with also day to day market intelligence collection so that your ability to look forward into the future isn’t relying on an annual survey or annual benchmarking, but you’re getting the zeitgeist in a much quicker, much more immediate way that you can respond to. And that’s how you separate the signal from the noise is you’re looking forward into the future.

James Carberry Though one of the questions that we ask you, you said something that made me think of it. One of the questions we ask is if you were going to ask a hundred or if you had to ask a hundred of your peers in whatever it is they’re, you know, an expert in thought leadership, marketing, whatever, you had to ask a hundred of your peers one question, what question would you want to ask them? And that question is so strategic because it now gives you a continual line of questions that you can continue to ask people. So when we get done with, you know, these hundred, these hundred interviews that we’re doing, nobody asked the same question. They all have different questions. They’re all curious about different things. And so we’re going to now go back and have a hundred more questions to refuel the 15 that we’ve already asked. And those questions are actually the questions that our ideal buyer, they want the answers to that came from them. It wasn’t you know, these first 15 questions came from us. We were like, what would be the most interesting? But because one of those questions is, Hey, what question would you ask your peers? We can now be the deliverers of information that we know they want to hear, because they told us that they wanted the answer to this question. And if they want the answer to that question, it’s likely that a lot of their peers want the answer to that question, and.

Bill Sherman It’s market validated in terms of their interest rate. Yeah. Yeah.

James Carberry I mean, so.

Bill Sherman You’re starting a cycle, a market validation.

James Carberry Round? Yeah. Our second round of original research is going to be even better because it’s fueled the questions are going to be fueled by the people that we asked in the first round. These are the questions they actually want to know the answers to. And so I’m so as you can tell, I get really fired up about it. I’m really excited about this because I think it’s going to position us to be the most helpful resource on the Internet for our buyer persona, the B2B marketing leader at a B2B SAS company. And so, yeah.

Bill Sherman Well, and I want to go to something here because I think you are keying into something that I’m also seeing as well, which is that thought leadership in communications is going from the one directional I stand on the stage and present or I write a book or we write a research report or a white paper to it’s this ongoing conversation. And even what you’ve done with the podcast to make it a 2 to 2 dimensional conversation where you’re getting input from the guest that’s refining the podcast and shaping the questions and the information. Let’s talk about that process of making the communication to directional, because I think it’s essential to what’s going on now in social.

James Carberry So when we so making, making the conversation.

Bill Sherman It’s not just a push. It’s an ongoing conversation.

James Carberry Right? Yes. And I think that I think that you can do that in India, even if you weren’t doing the original research stuff that we’re talking about. Right. Like you having the engagement. If you have a podcast and you’re interviewing guests, that that naturally. Right is a to what you and I right here in this in this interview we’re going back and forth what you’re exactly what I’m saying what I’m saying is feeding what you’re saying it’s a two way street. And when you can when you can take those types of engagements and conversations, it can inform really great content on social. The original research does that even more. And then another thing that we’ve been playing with, we’re just launching our first B2B growth group. Bill, I can’t remember if you and I have talked about this before, but it’s another thing that elaborates the point that you’re making here, which is this You want this to be a dialog, you want it to be a two way street, not just the company pushing out a message. Right. And what we’re doing with our growth groups is interesting because I see a lot of people talk about community, especially on marketers, talk about community. But it seems like the success metric that they’re using to tell themselves whether their community is successful or not is the size of their community. And I actually think that depth is more of a predictor of success with community than it is than it is size. And so we’re going back to some of our B2B growth guests and we’re saying, Hey, would you want to be a part of a small group of your peers that have also been on B2B growth at some point? And it’s going to be a monthly call, a 60 minute call, and we’re going to put 5 to 7 people on this call, plus somebody from our team to facilitate the conversation. And it’s a very structured call. So the first 15 minutes somebody in the group is going to be sharing a lesson learned. So something that has helped them accelerate their career. It could be productivity, it could be negotiating their salary, something that they’ve done that’s allowed them to experience success over the course of their career. Ten minutes of them teaching, five minute Q&A, people asking, digging in the next 15 minute block is because, you know, our groups are B2B marketers. It’s going to be somebody talking about a successful marketing campaign or an experiment that they’ve run in marketing and what the results were ten minutes, them teaching, five minutes, people asking, digging in. So there’s lots of learning happening in that first 30 minutes of the call, the last 30 minutes of the call, 25 minutes of it is dedicated to the group helping one person on the call solve a problem. So for the first five minutes of that block, somebody else that’s a member of the group shares a specific business challenge that they’re trying to solve. And then the rest of that 25 minutes is everybody asking questions, thinking about how this person could go about solving that very specific problem. The those responsibilities for who brings what to the call change every month. So everybody’s going to get to contribute a lesson learned. Everybody’s going to get to contribute a marketing experience. Everybody’s going to get their business challenge brainstormed, and then the groups actually rotate every six months. So every six months you’re going to get put into a new group with other peers. So you’re constantly meeting new people, learning from new people, and you’re also getting to contribute. But it’s done in the micro. So we’re going to do we’re going to do multiple groups like this. But what it’s doing for us, because we’ve got somebody from our team facilitating these groups, these are not a discovery call in disguise. We likely won’t be talking about B2B podcasting at all in these groups, but what it’s doing as we get more and more people from our team facilitating them, our team is going to intimately understand the wants, desires, challenges of our buyers because we’re facilitating these mastermind groups. So whether it’s the podcast itself, the original research or the mastermind groups, it facilitates this two way, this two way approach to content that you’re referring to in a way that your competitors are likely light years away from.

Bill Sherman Well, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to get you on this conversation, because specifically you’re looking at the podcast from a strategic perspective rather than just an isolated one off event. And I think if I were to step back and sort of pull together a theme on this, it’s about looking at the elements of the podcast and then saying, who are you trying to reach and how do you become relevant with them and stay relevant? Because if you just have someone as a guest and you never talk to them again, you’ve missed the opportunities. And so from the B2B perspective, you’re using the podcast for relationship building, which I think is wonderful.

James Carberry Yes. Yeah, you’re exactly right. I say all the time, you know, how many people do we meet one time? Yeah, we do. We meet people for one time every single day of our lives. And those people don’t have an impact on our lives or our careers. It’s the second time you get to connect somebody. That’s where magic happens. That’s where friendship starts to be born. And I say this often to our team and to customers. I don’t think we use the term friendship enough in business, and I think we should. I think I’ve already said relationships are the backbone.

Bill Sherman Absolutely.

James Carberry I think everything in business. And so we’ve got to start figuring out how do we create genuine friendships with the people that we’re serving, with our customers, with our partners, with people on our teams. And I think when we do that, not only does it drive business results, it actually makes business a heck of a lot more fun.

Bill Sherman Well, and. Also with that, it allows for space for a little bit of vulnerability. You can open up, you can share more and it it feels less like work and more like living, right? Yes. And so I’m a big believer that when it comes to thought leadership, whether you’re an individual or an organization, you’ve got to speak from a place of passion and you’ve got to bring yourself into the conversation. And I think that’s what you’re doing here is immersing that passion and showing, okay, this is what I get jazzed about. This is what I care about, and hopefully you do too. Let’s find common interests. And that leads to good conversations that lead to other things. So as we start wrapping up, James, I’ve got a question for you. So put yourself in the position of you’re inside an organization, that large organization, you’re that CMO that you were talking about, for example, and you’ve got a podcast which is sort of limping along. It’s doing its thing, but it’s not successful. Give me a tip or two that someone who’s listening or someone who’s responsible for curating content within the organization, what should they be going and thinking about after this podcast?

James Carberry Yeah. So I would be thinking about is the podcast. Are we looking at the podcast as a tool to be the most helpful resource on the Internet for a very specific persona for our ideal customer, or are we using the podcast to elevate ourselves? So if your podcast is named around your company name, I think you need to completely rebrand your show. It should not be around your company name, it should not be around your values unless it’s a internal podcast. Obviously there’s a use case for that. Yup. But the show should be branded. If you’re using it for a marketing perspective, it should be branded around your ideal buyer. We did not name B2B growth, the B2B podcasting show or the Sweet Fish Show one. We would be alienating the people that we actually weren’t listening to it from listening to it because they think of our buyers think about podcasting a sliver of their time. It’s just exactly, you know, for them, you need to be creating a resource that makes them hungry to learn from you every single day, even if you’re not doing a daily show, right, If it’s every week. So rebranding your show, naming the show around your ideal buyer instead of yourself would be, I think the number one way that that somebody in that position could start to actually get traction on that show. The other thing that that helps, you’ve got to think about what is your ideal listener or your ideal customer? What are they searching in Apple Podcasts? So for us, the reason we have over 4 million downloads today on our show is because we rank for the term B2B and the term B2B marketing. So technically the name of our show, if you go to Apple Podcasts and find it, it’s B2B growth. Colin, your daily B2B marketing podcast that’s named very strategically because we don’t want to just rank for B2B, we want to rank for the term B2B marketing as well, and we rank for both of those. So you’ve got to reverse engineer. What are your ideal listeners searching for? That’s how a lot of people find podcasts. They’re searching for topics they’re interested in, and the people that are searching for B2B, podcasting, which is our expertise, are likely our competitors, not our customers. Our customers are looking for things related to B2B marketing holistically, B2B.

Bill Sherman And you got to put yourself in their shoes rather than get stuck inside your own head.

James Carberry Yes, and I see so many smart marketers fall into the trap of thinking that their content needs to be about their expertise when in reality it needs to serve the person that you are ultimately trying to do business with. And the best way to serve them is usually to go one level up from your ex.

Bill Sherman And so I want to thank you, James. This is such a fun conversation to have. Obviously, your passion comes through on this, but more importantly, I think you’re pointing us towards things that need to change in the B2B podcasting space that even if we took a few small steps now, we’d be connecting so much better with our target audience. Totally agree. Thank you very much, James.

James Carberry Thank you, Bill. This has been a blast, man. Thanks for having me.

Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.