Building B2B Growth Podcasts, LinkedIn Live with Paul Jones | Hard Corps Marketing Show | Ep 466

Oh yes, this is the Hardcore Marketing Show. I'm Casey Cheshire, your host for this epic journey. Today's show is sponsored by Ringmaster on a mission to launch B2B podcasts that create relationships, generate revenue, and drive growth. ringmasterlive.com. Bam.

Well, dude, you know, it's like we've got so much time and so little say. Reverse that. We've got so much to talk about and I'm just dying to just jump into this and I threw a couple things. There's no PowerPoint death here, but mostly just so I can throw some fun photos in here. I just wanted to sort of organize thoughts for people. I would love this presentation to give some folks ammo for building that plan in 2026 to involve podcasts and not just from a they sound cool or they look cool, I love podcast type perspective, but like roll up the sleeves and like go to market in a real strategic sense like what can we do here? So and again shout out to everyone in the comments from the Connect to Market community like working and doing breakout sessions with you all has just been absolutely a blast. So really quick what we're going to just chitchat about today is just talk about what the current challenges are with go to market right now. It's a great acronym. A lot of people believe in it. But what you're going to see with some of the stats, we got some really good research, is that most people are not having success with go to market right now. And there's a reason for it. And so we're going to introduce podcasting as like a potential avenue for this, but in a very balanced way, right? I want this conversation to be ammo so that someone can use this to put that in a plan for next year. We're going to talk brand versus demand. The spoiler both can get addressed if you have a brand problem can get solved. If you have a demand, if you're trying to fill that pipe top of the funnel mid toward the end, we've got solutions for that too. And really just to share and educate in this also can't just throw out a channel out there without talking about how to integrate it with go to market. And then finally, we have a cool giveaway at the end and it's a podcast planner and it's basically how to integrate podcasting with your go to market plan and it talks through some really intentional steps. So that's the plan, Paul. What do you think?

Yeah. Relationship and revenue too. I think sometimes we get so fixated like you're saying on like creating content for content sake, but then no one comes to get it. So a lot of this is not just creating some good content or good conversations, but how do we get more people hearing them? If you've got the CEO of your company hosting a show and he's talking to another thought leader and these brilliant minds are chatting about strategy in your industry and no one hears it, it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't count. So, we got to get this stuff out to people. So, we'll definitely talk through that. Great stat. Shout out to Sam Graham, godfather of go to market. I'm just saying I'm putting out there. He's the guy. Flip My Funnel, all those events and he's got a stat that just absolutely stopped me in my tracks. We shared it on the Substack. 80% of go to market fails right now. That's like crazy, Paul, right? Like if you're going to roll the dice, 80% of the time you fail, like something's going up, right? So a lot of time what he said is like well, you know, fewer buyers entering the sales cycle. And that makes me go, well, yeah, we're doing more and more self-research and more AI research because we don't want to talk to you and you're crazy salespeople. Do nothing is the biggest competitor out there. Well, what does this really mean in human terms? Means I trust myself. I don't necessarily trust you yet as you're hawking your software at me. So, I just trust myself and myself says, "Well, it's not perfect, but I'm going to do it. I'm just gonna just do what we're currently doing." Status quo. That one kind of tells me that you haven't in your marketing or in your positioning, you haven't reached that action threshold yet.

Yeah.

Yeah. You thought you knew what the problem was, but you didn't spend enough time with the market to really know how it's framed up.

The latest stat. Wow.

What's interesting about that one that I'm hearing about right now is also a lot of companies are seeing a massive decrease in web traffic because AI summary on your Google search. People don't need to go past AI summary. So, they're not reading your content anymore. They're not going to the blog. They're just getting that AI summary, which is that's where it stops.

Did you come up with take resistant the term?

Damn, that is like I like that. Yeah, I like that a lot. I'm trying to think of how to describe it. It just

Yeah. The inbox, right? Definitely. You a great sales coach, Dave Rubenstein. He's constantly telling people, "Stop sending those emails out." And if you're a marketer listening to this, please work with your sales team to stop doing this. And definitely don't do any nurture emails that do this where you're checking in. He's like, "Dude, you're not a host. Stop trying to check in with Hey, man, just checking in on that deal. What? What? You want a free double treat cookie? Like, we're not a hotel. Stop checking." There's no value. See, with the check-in, I want your information. I want you to tell me where the deal is at, but I'm not doing anything for you. So, again, it's a take, right? So, it just constantly we're just taking.

Yeah.

But I'm also giving you my platform. And I'm not, you know, giving you content if you bartered with me to fill out the form. I'm creating content with you that you can use because you're going to be in an awesome light. You're going to be answering great questions, man. I'm creating collateral for you and your company. And there's no ask, there's no form field. There's no cost. We're just giving time and attention. So, this gets people's attention and they go, "Oh, wait a minute. Maybe you can have a relationship with this person." Inevitably, they're asking you, "What do you do?" Right? You're like, "Oh, we do this. It's not about me. It's about you." Right? And you go back to give, give, give, and at the end, your time and your treasure. We often like to send thank you gifts after a guest comes on a show, they're already thankful. And you're like, "But you know what? Thank you. Here, here's this amazing like foam thing or here's this awesome plaque with a quote you said on it." And people just like, man, you just keep giving, right? And so at some point, do you stop giving to then take? No, you keep giving and then you try to solve the problems you discovered on the podcast with them.

Yeah. It's not magic, right? I put it at the bottom. Now, I'm trying to say that like podcasts are like the golden gun. Stop doing all your other marketing. You still need everything else, but man, can I skip a lot of those games. I don't need to buy a thousand blankets at the trade show so that this person talks to this person and one day when they need it, tells that person, "Oh, there's this blanket I got. Maybe we should shop them, too." Right? It's just this wild game that we played in the B2B world and in the marketing space. I'm just like, maybe we can just give time and attention to our future customers. And they reward you for it, right? They're again, they're thankful. And they're like, how could we work together? So, next I really just wanted to talk about, okay, like maybe this is Casey. He's the hype guy. Is this just all about Beanie Babies, right? Do you remember those? That's a good documentary. All right. Anyone on the live, do you remember Beanie Babies? Did you have one? And what did you have? Throw it in there. Did you have one, Paul?

I don't see I don't even know. I think I was gifted those after the crash. But for those newer to life beanie babies, these little cute little guys, something happened and they became like apparently this rare collectible, right? And the market exploded. People like, "Oh my gosh." And they went for wild thousand billion dollar prices. And later on now we're like, "We have them and our kids have them. We're like whatever. They're just like cute little things." But it was definitely a fad. Versus if you had had one share of Apple stock in 1990, did the math, it would have split something to the point of you'd have 120 shares now. Just one share turn into 120 shares and you'd have about 30 grand.

From that one share. Imagine if you bought two, right? Or more. So clearly, you know, when we do podcast sometimes, we ask people, "What would you tell your younger self?" A lot of people say, "I'd buy Apple stock or I'd buy this stock or that stock." So really it's like, "How do we know the difference? Is it a fad? Is it not?" So I tried to, you know, look around and gather some actual stats, right? Now, I found this was fascinating. E-arketer has some stats. Content Marketing Institute has some stats. These are good groups. These are not like these are not the tabloids in the store, right? And so, what's been fascinating is people are listening to podcasts. And it's like, do we even need to say that? Yes. Because we're not just listening to fun and sports podcasts and joke and comedy, but business podcasts, too, because people want to learn. People want to meet other people, hear about them, hear what's going on, how do I deal with SEO and GEO, right? Whatever your industry, they want to know what's going on and get informed and listen to the right combination of people that are entertaining, right? So, people are listening. But what's really interesting is that business leaders are listening. Almost all of them, right, are listening on average an hour a day. An hour a day. So, business leaders are listening an hour a day. And so you'd think, okay, well, maybe advertising might give us a hint, right? Just like advertising clearly demonstrated that Google was the place to go, right? And so people kept putting money into it. People keep putting money more and more money into podcasts, right? And so I'm not suggesting you should advertise on podcasts. I'm actually suggesting you should create your own because you don't even need to advertise. It's yours and you get the relationship. But still directionally the idea that more and more marketers are spending this way and CMI even said hey 50% of the people they surveyed are actually going to be investing more in 2026 right so just this year alone four billion and a lot of people planning to spend over there in 2026 so there is some value if you have your own pod to advertising on other pods but I don't recommend advertising on pods unless you have your own podcast because the challenge is if someone's listening to a podcast and the call to action is go to my form, again, a take or go, you know, fill this thing out or have a chat with us, most people aren't going to like put the lawn mower down, pause their commute, pull off to the side of the road and complete your action. But if the call to action is, hey, we talk about this and more on our podcast over here. Come check it out sometime. Right? It's a great way to convert people over to your podcast. So just a thought there.

Often times Paul get this question like is this brand or demand? Spoiler it's both. And if we had more time we talk through more of these but essentially we're seeing two different groups that we work with at Ringmaster and some come to us and they say look we've got some demand challenges or we really want to grow. We've got some aggress. It's not so much a challenge. It's like how much of the market can we scoop up? 2026 is coming. we really want to just we have some aggressive goals. We have to hit all the channels properly and we think this one might open up the other ones for us. And it's like absolutely. So it's this currency, right? Connection currency. So we're seeing things where targeted guests exactly who you want to talk to end up in the top of your funnel, right? Sometimes they kind of skip toward the end. I had one conversation with an amazing podcast guest a couple years ago. Found out she was migrating to exactly the same software that my team at the time specialized in. I was like, "Oh man, serendipity. Let's get together." And we scoped it out, turned into a project, no sales cycle, right? Because we're friends now. We had a relationship. So, we're seeing that. We're also seeing those that like I described that are in market, they're going right to like the finish line. Everyone else, and again, it's not magic. Not everyone's in market at the time, but it fills that top of the funnel so that they can start getting nurtured as their contracts come up. Now they're shopping you. They may not even be shopping other people. They just may maybe migrating to you. And then finally, we're seeing customer stories and referrals coming out of it. On the brand side, great quote, be everywhere they are. And we're seeing also be everywhere where Google is and where GPT and all the AIs are. So you create some really cool ordered content. A lot of times people are like, well, let me just keyword stuff this and that. Catch GPT wants questions and answers. Why? Because they get questions and answers, right? And they give answers. And so if you can formulate a question already and it happens to it's just like SEO, right? It's just with an AI flavor to it. Podcasts are questions and answers. It's fantastic. It's already created that way. So, we're seeing a lot of people repurpose podcast content into a thousand other things. And that gets us on to the next thing before we run out of time. How do we integrate this with go to market? Right? So, obviously defining goals right up front. One of the biggest ways you can fail using a podcast in a B2B sense is not being very clear on the goal you're trying to achieve with it. We see this all the time. A lot of groups will come to us, they already have a podcast or like one particular group, they stopped doing it last year around October about this time last year, they stopped. It was cool, but it took a lot of work. It does spoiler and they it was like they got some clicks and nothing really happened, right? They weren't seeing the top of the funnel. They weren't seeing these other things. And so, we swooped in. We do a relaunch program and then we've got them back on the right track now. But yeah, you got to start with the end in mind. It's huge, huge, huge for podcasts. Because you start making decisions. Is it about me and my fame or is this about our customer? Other things that happen. We're making micro niches now. It is not about competing with Joe Rogan or NPR. It's about narrowly creating a niche for a particular kind of ideal customer and serving them. Right? So micro niches are totally in right now and you design the podcast to serve those. And so what you end up doing is you actually make multiple podcasts, not a giant catchall, right? So you mentioned at the beginning like I do like all these different podcasts because that's what we're doing too. We're not trying to serve everyone with this podcast that no one can really find a home, right?

And then Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, you're trying to form a habit right with these conversations and also the more often you have them the more often you're connecting with someone else. So, across the board, weekly is the starting point, and then very quickly, you're going to see adding more becomes just like the go-to move because, oh, would you like to have an additional conversation with an ideal customer next week? Would you like two or three? And how many would you like? Right? How many more relationships would you like to create to fill your funnel? And but then at least weekly for the listener because if you've ever had this, I've certainly had this with a podcast where I was like really into it. Every Friday on my commute, I'm throwing it in there and I'm excited. I'm like just have my coffee, have my pod, and then one week I don't have it. And I'm like, where is it? Apparently they took vacation. Like they're not allowed to have vacation because I like that podcast. It's part of my pattern, my flow on Fridays is I listen to that. I drink my coffee, right? And I couldn't do it. So, they had successfully created a habit in me where I really wanted to join them on their next interview, in their next conversation, and I couldn't. I couldn't. Now, by the way, amateur move. They should totally have just filmed two in one particular week and thrown that one in there. But it was clear that there's something there to having a particular pattern. If you go every other week, you might as well not do it. Or less. Yeah. Just not it's just not worth it. And now you're going to talk to like 24 people across a year, you know, like would you like to talk to more? So again, it's all about the goal in mind, too. So, if the goal isn't that, if it's just thought leadership, then maybe. But I highly recommend to really get the bang for the buck, you just go weekly.

Okay. And finally, call to action, right? Really can be helpful to have calls to action that involve either listening to this podcast, that podcast, or some kind of like they're clicking on the show notes and they're linking off to it. And then I guess I skipped over this AI repurposing, right? So people often try to confuse the two. Human production, AI repurposing, that's how you should do that. And that's not just because Ringmaster produces podcasts. Hey, it's because we've tried it. Listen, we create clips for our clients all the time. We were like clip machines over here.

I appreciate that. And like and that's not me, that's the team, but they're finding. So, one of the things we found with like AI clip generators and hey, maybe one day they'll absorb our team and then they'll be as good as our but like it's been really tough to identify the right moment. And what's the real trick here is most of the guests are not going to be talking in sound bites. Maybe some of your authors will, but most people won't. So, in the end, a really good clip is that sentence. half of this sentence and that one and that one, right? And then get rid of some of the postulating in between there. That is what makes for a good clip. It's not let me go grab 20 seconds from here, right? And so that right now, that's what AI is doing. And so that's why there's certain things you want to use humans for, but by all means, there's certain things that once you've got that core product, that conversation, that podcast episode, repurpose the crap out of it with AI. Absolutely. download it all, make your own GPTs with the transcripts, create blog posts, create social content, create all these things as long as the core started out with some human conversation and then some human was behind the scenes going like, "Okay, key key."

Key key. Yeah. And so then rounding it out, just wanted to close with this because I know we're up on time. I'm happy to answer any kind of questions on podcasting, how it might fit into plans. I can, you know, check over your plan and tell you, yeah, that looks great or watch out for this and this and this. Happy to do that. But one of the things we did is, we created this doc. And again, this is online of give, right? This is not like a take thing. This is like a give thing, a Google doc that is a podcast planner specifically with GTM in mind, specifically for B2B. And it talks you through the goals that we talked about, identifying some KPIs, understanding the timeline. Like for our team, we do a two-month launch process. So if we start November, that thing can go live in January. So a lot of people right now are talking about doing the launch process so that they can hit the ground running in 2026 and get as many numbers as they possibly can, right? So it talks through the timeline, talks through some launch gates, like what are the different things that need to happen whether you're doing it on your own, working with a team like ours. And then also how we touched on a couple integrating with GTM, but it has a whole checklist of have you done this? Have you let this team know about it? Does sales know about each episode? You know, integrate, integrate, integrate. One of the keys with GTM is it has to be integrated across channels. Can't be in a silo. And so we have some silo busting checklist and even some dashboards too of how you might report this up, down, sideways to different departments so they understand what the heck you're up to. So to get that, just DM me on LinkedIn or shoot me a quick email.

That is one of the greatest unscripted questions I think I've ever gotten on a conversation like this, but it's a really good question. Yeah, it's so important. And this ties back to the start with the end in mind. Like you do need to pick. Is it the host? Is it the guest? Or is it the listener? Who is the most important. You have to pick one and then you can serve the second and then there's the third and you have to decide the order of that. And so and I've talked to a lot of podcasters, a lot of podcast hosts who say listeners number one. And I've definitely met some folks where it's all about the host. All about the host and that's what they're trying to do and they're like make me more famous. And that does not usually work for me and our methodology at Ringmaster. It's all about the guest. We make it all about the guest. You get really good guests that way. These are guests that also could potentially turn into revenue for you, which is fantastic and helps pay for the whole program. But when you make it about your guest, you're learning essentially about your customer. And then your audience hears that and they want more, right? And so a lot of times if you make it about the listener, it feels sometimes could feel like pandering. Like for those listening, please like and subscribe and don't forget to ring the bell. Ding. Right. And so we're not making it about the listener. We're honoring them. And definitely we want to create questions in the right order. Yeah. Because they come second. To me, it's like guest first, then your listener, then yourself. And so you really want your host to shine. You're giving them some questions in advance. You're really helping them answer it the right way. You set them up to just absolutely crush it. And then with your listeners, you order questions to get them value right away. You don't bury the lead. You give them the nuggets, give them more nuggets, right? You're trying to serve them. And then finally, you come last. And to me, that's the order you really want to do it.

Yeah. Right. And especially it's your audition, right? So this is their first time meeting you. Is it squared away and organized? It's going to reflect your whole organization, even your product. Like how they met you and their experience on that podcast is going to reflect, do I look at this tool? Can I trust it? Do I trust you? There's a whole bunch of things going on. But like, don't get me wrong, the audience comes second. So, we have a lot of programs to get this into the right people's ears, right? But again, it's not trying to get into everyone's ears. You're not competing with NPR. You're actually trying to get your micro niche, your micro community to all listen to your podcast because you're trying to serve them. So, the people do come because they hear that you're not pandering and they want that kind of authentic conversation.

Yeah, definitely. Anything I can do to help, just shoot me a note.