Will Bachman 00:01
Hello and welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional unleashed is produced by Umbrex. And you can visit Umbrex.com. I’m your host Will Bachman. And I’m excited to be here today with James Carbary who is the founder of Sweet Fish Media, and they help companies run and produce b2b podcasts. James, welcome to the show. Thank you so much,
James Carbary 00:28

Will. I’m really excited for the conversation. This is gonna be fun.

Will Bachman 00:28
So James, you were telling me that a lot of your clients are SaaS companies doing b2b podcast? Can you tell me like I’ve actually never listened to a podcast by a SaaS company? I’m probably not, they’re probably not their target audience. But tell me a little bit about, like, what types of companies are doing podcasts? And like, maybe even a sass company that’s doing podcasts? And then are you I mean, are these typically? You just giving tips and tricks on the product? Or are they interviewing, like clients that use their product to discuss the use case? Or like a question? give me give me some tips that you have on how to create a great b2b podcast?

James Carbary 01:28
Yeah, so. So there are a lot of, you know, particularly marketing technology companies, I think there are 7000 plus Mark tech companies in the world right now, SAS just seems to be kind of eating up everything. It’s obviously a really smart business model. We’re actually in the process of building a SaaS product. Now, I mean, the margins are insane. And, and so what we found is that SAS companies tend to be really innovative in the way they go to market. And they’re there because there’s so many of them, they’re trying to differentiate from there, you know, other competitors in their space. And so doing things like a podcast, right now, at least in a in a 2021 world where very few companies have podcasts today. It’s, it’s a really smart way for them to be able to stand out. So Mark tech companies, we’ve got a sales engagement platform outreach that we work with, we’ve got an account based marketing, SAS platform Terminus that we’ve worked with for several years, there’s a video email platform that we work with their company is bom, bom, so. So lots of lots of different companies like that. partner with us, and we make their podcast app.

Yeah, so our point of view will on b2b podcasting is it’s pretty counter to I think how most people look at their their podcasts, most people want to brand their show, around their own expertise. And we actually advocate for, for doing the opposite. Instead of branding the show around around their expertise. We want them to brand the show around the expertise of their buyers. And whenever whenever they do that, what they’re essentially doing is they’re positioning their show to to be a resource for other potential buyers. And that allows them to feature their ideal buyers as guests on the show. So I’ll use our show for earnings. For example, our podcast is b2b growth. And we had a very important decision to make in the in the early life of starting our show, we could make the show about our expertise, which is b2b podcasting. Or we could choose to make the show about our buyers. And by choosing to make the show about our buyers and calling it b2b growth, we now get to interview our ideal buyers as guests on the show. So we’re talking to VPS of marketing it at these, you know, 50 plus person SAS companies, which is our ideal buyer. But not only are we getting to build a one to one relationship with each guests that we teach on the show, and we end up doing business with a lot of those folks that come on as guests on our show. It’s a much more natural way of building relationships, that doesn’t require you, especially within a COVID world. It doesn’t require you to, you know, gladhands folks at conferences, or do you know, a lot of the traditional stuff that we have to do with business development, you can really meet with anybody at any time anywhere in the world, just by simply asking them to be a guest of your show. But when you make the show about yourself, you alienate yourself from being able to build this kind of relationships and feature your ideal buyers on your show. So going back to our example, if I were to go ask a VP of Marketing at a b2b SaaS company that was our ideal buyer to be a guest on a on a podcast about podcasting, which again, is our expertise. They they wouldn’t want to be a guest on that show because they don’t know anything about podcasting. If I if I’ve done my prospecting well, then I know that they actually don’t have a podcast yet which makes them nice ideal client for us. And so, so making it about their expertise allows me to build the right relationships. But it also allows me to create content that is going to be hyper relevant for other people that are like then other ideal buyers. And so instead of our brand kind of being the mouthpiece for the content, we allow our ideal buyers to be that mouthpiece. And so we’re talking to, you know, people that are experts in category creation, or marketing automation, or, you know, a wide variety of marketing disciplines, account based marketing, things like that. And by talking to VPS, of marketing, that are in the trenches, actually, their marketing practitioners, they can speak much more intelligently to those topics. So it’s a two fold benefit, we get the relationship with our ideal buyer through the content collaboration process, while simultaneously, actually we make our content more relevant to other ideal buyers, by shining the spotlight on you know, a marketing practitioner or a marketing leader, as opposed to just, you know, doing all of the content ourselves probably not being as relevant, probably talking about our expertise more than what our listeners would care to hear about. Because that’s not their expertise. It’s not what they’re focused on doing so. So that’s our approach there. We really try to so for example, the show that I was telling you about bom bom show, they’re, they’re a video email platform. But their podcast is called customer experience podcast. So it’s not the video email podcast, it’s it’s a show about customer experience, because they know their buyers care about customer experience, their buyers are sales and marketing and customer success folks that care about the art of customer experience. And so they’ve made their show about their buyers expertise.

Will Bachman 06:46
Yeah, no, you I think one way I found you is someone who posted on LinkedIn, this very cool, podcast naming, you know, tool that you that you built. Tell us a little bit about your philosophy around naming a podcast because I thought it was in a really interesting perspective.

James Carbary 07:07
Yeah, so podcast naming is an interesting, a very interesting thing. So I, we first stumbled onto this again, back when we very first started our podcast agency, we started off as a blog agency shifted into becoming a podcast agency. And in the early days, realized that so many of our customers wanted to name their show, after, after their, their company name, or they wanted to name it after, you know, one of their values. They wanted to name after themselves. And that that makes a lot of sense for you know, most of our content marketing efforts, we want to showcase our expertise. So like, I want to talk about b2b podcasting. on our blog, I talk a lot about b2b podcasting on LinkedIn. But particularly with a podcast, because of the strategy that we choose to really buy into, we’ve got to make a podcast about the expertise of them. And so we’ve got some some naming formulas that the tool that you mentioned, helps people work through and those four formulas, I’ll just walk through them real quick. The first one is your ideal buyers industry, plus your ideal buyers role. So an example of a schoenen that uses that formula would be the healthcare CFO. So you’d imagine like if you’re some sort of consultant that serves healthcare CFOs, you can go after that persona and ask them to be on the healthcare CFO. And it’s pretty likely that you know, some of them, at least, maybe not all of them are going to say yes to being on the show with you. The second formula is, you know, the primary activity that your ideal buyer is responsible for. So an example of this could be, you know, if you sell to real estate agents, you can name your show selling homes. The third formula is the aspirational identity of your ideal buyer. This is actually my favorite one. And so an example of this one would be, you know, say you sold a product or consulting services to event coordinators, you would call that show masters of events. So it’s the aspirational identity is what is what you’re baking into the name of the show there. And then the fourth one, this this is a fun one and one that we develop later in the process, but it’s vilifying the enemy of your ideal buyer. And so, for example, if you’re selling to content marketers, the name of your show could be stopped the noise that Content Marketing Show, we produce a show for another customer of ours, that account based marketing platform that I referred to earlier. And they do this really well. They named their show, flip my funnel, and it’s a show about account based marketing, which is all about flipping the traditional marketing funnel on its head and so they named their By vilifying the enemy. And for them for their category for their brand. They are villainizing, kind of the traditional marketing funnel, and saying that there’s a better way to do it. So those are the four naming formulas that you’re referring to there, we created a little tool that allowed people to, you know, allows folks to put in some criteria and some characteristics about their buyers. And then we spit out different names based on those formulas.

Will Bachman 10:27
What are some mistakes that you see people make when they set up a b2b podcast?

James Carbary 10:33
Yeah, there’s a lot of a lot of mistakes that we see folks make. One of the ones that I think is probably the most prevalent, is we see podcast hosts, not really uncovering any sort of unique point of view from the guests that they’re featuring on their show. And so we’ve found that the more distinct and unique of a point of view your guest has, the more compelling the content is, and the more compelling the content is, the more people are going to want to come back and listen to your show. But so often, as hosts, particularly if you’re using this as a business strategy, it’s really easy to just kind of take it easy on your on your guests, and not really press. And when you do that, that the guest ends up giving very surface level content, that’s just not all that helpful, to be honest. And so so we have what we call a POV discovery process. And we advocate for our customers that they actually do a separate pre interview, before their actual interview where they can, you know, it’s a 15 minute call, and they just simply ask these three POV discovery questions to their guests. The first question is, what’s a commonly held belief about your, whatever their expertise is that you passionately disagree with? This gets them talking about something that usually they’re pretty passionate about. And it’s counter advice. It’s not, it’s not the same old stuff that everyone else in this space is saying. The other two questions are similar with a slight tweak. The next one is, what is something that everyone in your space or in our space, should stop doing today? that they are doing right now and is pretty detrimental? The last one is what should what should people in our space start doing today that they’re not already doing so by by talking about what people should stop or start doing? It’s action oriented, and the listener can can walk away from something in that episode, that is that’s really tangible. And so by asking those POV discovery questions in a pre interview, you as the host, can listen in to their responses to all three, and assess, okay, what have I not covered before on our show, what’s an interesting angle, maybe that hasn’t been talked about before with all of the other guests that I’ve had. And you can focus your actual interview on one of those points of view. And it ends up being really, really compelling content, by just kind of separating out doing a pre interview, nailing down on what that POV is going to be for that guest you end up making them look awesome. And you end up creating great content as well for your show. So that’s probably what that’s one of the biggest mistakes, I would say the biggest mistake is, is naming your show after yourself. Instead of naming your show after your ideal buyer, if if the purpose of your show is to connect with ideal buyers and to build one to one relationships. But the second one, I think, is, is not uncovering unique points of view from the guests that you’re featuring.

Will Bachman 13:48
What are some tips that you have, if you’re doing a show where you’re interviewing potential clients of how to outside the interview itself? How to make that a great experience for your guests and also to kind of solidify the relationship? So maybe it’s not meant to, you know, give you a few ideas? I’d love to hear you build on or challenge these would be, you know, do you give the guests like a pack of tweets that they can send out when the show is published? Or content that they can put on LinkedIn, or on their website? Or do you you know, do you send them a thank you gift? Or, you know, do you give them a transcript? Like what are some things that you have found work really well, to, you know, make sure that the guest finds it a memorable experience?

James Carbary 14:37
Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, and the answer is all of that. I mean, the more the more you can do the better. Right? And so, some of the companies that we work with, they’ve got, you know, larger marketing teams, and so they can do more of this stuff, repurposing the content in as many forms as you can. I would, I would strongly suggest repurposing each episode into a well written blog posts not just a transcript, but a blog post that can actually rank for a specific keyword term in Google. I’ve found that most transcripts just don’t do very well at ranking for keywords. And so having a writer or you know, whether it’s Freelancer somebody internally, repurposing that episode into a blog post, one, it’s just a good luck for the guest, it’s another touch point for you to be able to say, Hey, we repurpose the episode into this piece of content as well. But then it also just allows your show to get found the Google in addition to you know, all the podcast players where your shows already living. So that’s a great one. You mentioned, you know, packaging up tweets or social posts, you can certainly do that. Micro videos, that’s something we talked about before we hit record. You know, if you are recording your show with video on something like zoom, or Riverside, or a platform like that, you can chop up the interview into little micro, you know, 32nd to two minute videos, those do really well on LinkedIn, you see them, I think Gary Vee kind of made those famous with the headlines at the top and the status bar and the captions below. So repurposing the content is a great way to do it

Will Bachman 16:16
Just a bit more on those micro videos. So let’s say, a listener out there is, you know, starting a podcast or has one, but doesn’t really have the personal time or bandwidth to create these micro videos. What’s your thought on finding people to do that for you? Like, roughly, you know, how much would someone charge? How would you find someone who just gonna know how to do that? Like, game? Tell me a little bit more about how to make those happen?

James Carbary 16:45
Yeah, so so going to sites like, like, we use upwork.com? a lot. And so if you go to Upwork, it’s just basically a marketplace for freelance.

Will Bachman 16:56
I’m very familiar with, folks. Yeah, so.

James Carbary 16:59
So going to Upwork. And just putting in, like, you know, putting in a job that says, hey, I want to repurpose my podcast into micro videos, you can find videos on video editors on that platform that would do that type of work for probably, I don’t know, 25-30 bucks a video. So it’s pretty, it’s pretty efficient from a cost perspective. And if you did, you know, two or three videos, you don’t even need to do that hack. If you did one micro video from each episode, you’re doing more than what most podcasters are doing, frankly, I strongly, I would probably recommend doing a blog post over micro videos, if you’re strapped on resources, and you and you just don’t have the bandwidth of the team to repurpose into multiple pieces of content. I would say blog posts first but but micro videos to me is a is a very close second there. Because they do perform pretty well and social from from what we’ve seen.

Will Bachman 17:56
And would you recommend the same thing there? Have you found people have success going to Upwork or some other place? And like if you don’t have time to write the blog, post yourself finding a freelance writer who can turn that transcript into a into a blog post into a blog post?

James Carbary 18:13
Yep. And typically, you’ll have to do a little bit of work on the front end to just coach the freelancer on the on what you’re looking for. So you can find another podcast that you think does this really, really well. There’s a lot of super popular podcasts that you could that you could see like, hey, how do they take their podcasts and turn it into blog content. And so it takes a little bit of coaching on the front end, if you’re not using an in house team. And you’re and you’re trying to put a group of freelancers together to do this. But you can absolutely show some examples. And I think do it pretty effectively with with a freelance writer and a freelance videographer.

Will Bachman 18:50
And what what should you be asking for in terms of length and so forth? And get what’s it like a ballpark cost for a typical person to turn that into a blog post for you?

James Carbary 19:01
Yeah, so I think you could, I mean, for a blog post, I would imagine somewhere between 50 to $100. I mean, you’re gonna find folks that you know, want to charge significantly more than that. So, but we we have not had a problem finding writers for our team, just as we build out our own freelance team to do this for clients, in that kind of 50 to $100 range for a blog post between, you know, 750 to 1500 words, depending on, you know, how competitive the key word is. One, one thing I’ll mention Well, that’s, that has been super helpful for us, just as we’ve been trying to optimize our own podcast content. It’s it’s a methodology that our Director of audience growth brought to us when he joined our team last April, and it’s called Google alphabet soup. And it’s essentially a way of an approach to SEO and to ranking for specific keywords without needing to get in the weeds on a bunch of like SEO Tools. And essentially what you do is you you look for a core keyword, you just open up Google. And you think about a core keyword that the, whatever the episode was that you were doing, what what is the core keyword that that episode was about? And so say it’s sales enablement. For example, you would go to you would go to Google put in sales enablement. And then you type, you put, you know, tap the spacebar and then type the letter A, and just see what searches let Google auto suggest tell you what searches people are searching for as it relates to sales enablement. And hence the name Google alphabet soup, you just kind of go down the alphabet, so sales enablement, space, a sales enablement, space B, and so on all through the alphabet, and get an idea for that this can help you plan topics too. So instead of doing it, after you’ve already done the episode with somebody, if you do this at the beginning of your show, while you’re you know, while you’re getting geared up and getting the cover art ready, and like figuring out who your guests are going to be. This can give you a solid 2530 topic ideas, as you’re reaching out to guests to say, hey, I’d really like to do an episode on you know, insert this topic. And that way, whenever you create the content and repurpose it into a blog post, it’s very, very strategic from a marketing perspective, because not only are you building relationship with the guests, you’re creating great audio content, but you know that you’re also going to be able to create written content that hopefully allows you to rank for that specific keyword. And we found that with, like longer tail keywords, if you write the post well, and you are directly answering the search intent of the searcher, the post, you don’t need a lot of backlinks. I think there’s a lot of SEO people that think that you need to have a ton of backlinks on your site to be able to effectively rank for for targeted keywords. And we just had found that not to be the case with with our show, as well as a couple of other sites that our Director of audience growth Dan has worked on. And so that’s one little one little tip there that I think would be really helpful for folks that are trying to figure out like, how should I repurpose my podcast?

Will Bachman 22:12
Can you give me an example of a keyword that that you worked to, to to get ranked on?

James Carbary 23:54
Yeah, so So for us, right, we actually have one that we’re working on right now. For it’s a bottom of the funnel keyword for us, because we are a podcast agency. So we just put one up this morning. That’s what to look for in a full service podcast agency. We’ve got another one here, I’ll just pull up our blog real quick. And I can, I can show you a lot of these so we we try to batch, multiple articles around specific keywords. So I mentioned what to look for in a full service podcast agency. We’ve got another one that looks like podcast agencies, five types, how to choose and recommendations. There is one here called six keys for a bankrupt solo podcast format. And so I can tell just by looking at the headline of that what we’re trying to rank for, I’m assuming is probably solo podcast format. So we intentionally wrote a post to try to rank for solo podcast format. Scrolling through here, I see full two person podcast recording equipment checklist. That very much sounds like you know, something that people would be podcast recording equipment checklist is probably something that gets searched pretty frequently. I didn’t do the keyword research for these, but I’m just guessing as to the keywords we’re going after here. That’s the business podcast equipment setup. So those are a couple examples.

Will Bachman 23:32
Fascinating. So and these micro videos you would put on LinkedIn, would you put them other places?

James Carbary 23:54
Yeah, I would also embed them in the blog posts. And so what’s powerful about the micro videos is they work really well on social, which is great. But then when you embed them into your blog posts, it keeps people that find your posts on your website longer on those blog posts longer and in time on page is is pretty critical with SEO. So the longer people are staying on that blog post, the more it tells Google, hey, this needs to be this needs to be highly ranked, because people that are coming to this article are staying on it for a while. So yeah, those would be the two places that I think micro videos work really well.

Will Bachman 24:32
Okay. What other approaches have you recommended to your to your clients on building their audience and just marketing the podcasts? We talked about several we talked about tweets, LinkedIn posts, micro videos, blog posts. What else?

James Carbary 24:50
I’ll mention something. This is something that I’ve been hot on for probably the last four or five months and it’s original research. There’s a guy named Andy crestodina he runs a marketing firm called orbit in Chicago. And Andy has become a friend of mine over the years. And he has been a massive advocate for original research, because people want to share content that’s rooted in data. And so what I found is people with a podcast, actually have this awesome opportunity to conduct their own original research simply by, you know, figuring out a handful of questions that they can ask in either the pre interview or post interview with every guest that they’re doing on their show. So, I know, with you Well, you’ve done over 300 episodes of your podcast, imagine if you know if in all of your pre interviews, or in the post interview, right after you record, you asked, you know, a series of, you know, four or five questions, and rounding up the responses to questions and say, I would say every 100 guests or so would give you really, really valuable insights, that would probably be very interesting for the audience that you’re trying to reach. And so for a pretty small lift in terms of like, what it adds to your podcasting process, you can get massive reward from it, because you can end up turning it into long form written content, you can turn it into gated content, so something that you can use to allow you to, to get people to give you their email address, because they want access to the data. But then it also can give you a lot of really solid social posts. So we’ve just, we’re just finishing up some research that we’ve been working on the last three months. And we’ve asked, we’ve asked 100 b2b Marketing Leaders, because that’s our buyer, the same 15 questions. We did it in the pre interview. And by doing it in the pre interview, in addition to our POV discovery questions, it just, it was even that much more fodder for us to figure out a good angle for the guests show. But we didn’t have anybody say that they didn’t want to do it. And so we asked him to be on our show. In the pre interview, we asked him these rapid fire questions. Sometimes people elaborate on those questions a little bit more, but it usually takes five to seven minutes for them to answer our original research questions. And we’re now in the process of bundling up all of those answers. And a few different people on our team, we’re gonna be sorting through looking at all the different answers and coming up with insights that we think are going to be really relevant. So.

Will Bachman 27:33
So what’s an example of a question that that you that you ask, just to give us a sense of a sense of the types of things you’re asking?

James Carbary 28:23
Yeah. So one of the questions we asked was, what is a? What is a? How do we, how do we frame it? What’s an, we asked him, you know, what’s, what’s been one of the best marketing books that you have ever read? What are some of the marketing podcasts that you listen to? So we asked those types of questions. And then we asked, What is the most overrated b2b marketing trend right now? And what’s the most underrated b2b marketing tactic? Those questions were super interesting, as an example of the kind of insights that you’re able to pull from doing this kind of thing? Well, one of the question we asked around marketing books, was really interesting. I was expecting people to say, you know, Seth Godin, and Seth Godin book or a mark Schaefer book or a Gary Vee book. But most of the time, what I ended up hearing was something to the effect of, well, it’s actually not a marketing book. And then they would go on to tell me about a book about creativity, or a book about psychology, or a book about strategy. And so the insight there is, you know, most of most marketers don’t actually read a lot of marketing books or don’t enjoy marketing books as much as they enjoy books about these other fundamental pillars. That happened to be very significant as it relates to marketing. And so those kind of in that I would have never gotten that insight. Have we not asked, you know, 100 b2b Marketing Leaders the same question.

Will Bachman 29:55
Okay. That’s a pretty neat idea. Yeah.I wish I had spoken to 350 episodes ago.

James Carbary 30:04
I mean, we we were about 1500 episodes. And before we had the Epiphany, so Believe me, I was kicking myself

Will Bachman 30:10
1500 episodes. My God

James Carbary 30:13
We’re about, we’re about 2000 episodes. And now we do multiple episodes a day where our entire business, so we’re out, we kind of have to drink our own champagne.

Will Bachman 30:24
Yeah, I’d like to hear a little bit about the service that you offer. So. So, yep. So why don’t you just tell me about that? Like, there’s the there’s a b2b just they just the company just have to show up. And then the interview of guests, you take care of everything else? Or what what is it that you? What is it that you take care of?

James Carbary 30:43
Yeah, so so we help with all the guests coordination on the front end. So I guess going back to the very beginning, we helped get the show launched. So we help them brand, the show, we’re doing the podcast, cover art for them. We’re helping them nail the strategy with the name of the show should be who they’re who their target audience should be to their target guests should be. So that’s on the front end, and we get the show launched. And we get to put in all of the major podcast platforms, but that’s when the real work begins is once the show’s launched. Now. Now we’re going after and trying to get their ideal customers to be guests on the show. And then we’re also on an ongoing basis. Every quarter we do a what we call a QPR, most companies do QB ours we do QPR is a quarterly podcast review, where we just view their goals. So how many of their ideal clients did they get as a guest on their show over the last three months? What were some what some of the anecdotal feedback that our writing team has on the way that the host has been conducting the interviews? Could they ask questions more succinctly? Could they dig deeper on certain points of view? And so we’re giving that ongoing coaching and consulting, helping them make sure that they’re getting the right people as guests on their show, and that they’re turning those guests into potential opportunities for their sales team. So they’re actually driving revenue with their show. But yeah, the the guest outreach and doing all of that audio production, repurposing of the content, and the micro videos, blog posts, and all that stuff. We’ve got a full, full team of creatives of writers and videographers, and audio engineers and designers, so we’re able to handle all of the content repurposing for our clients as well. So that’s, that’s a snapshot of how we work with companies.

Will Bachman 32:28
That’s cool. Um, I don’t know if there’s something you can share publicly, but you know, order of magnitude what, what’s sort of the, you know, the different packages or the the fee for, for getting that set up? and running.

James Carbary 32:40
So, yeah, so we, we typically work with folks in blocks of six months commitments, and depending on what level of hand holding you aren’t, we got some folks that are in kind of in the two to $5,000 range, we’ve got other folks that are enough, in the five to $15,000 range, that tends to be more hand holding more episodes, you know, guest guest selection, guest outreach, that kind of stuff. We’ve got some some clients that are, you know, in the, in the 15 to $30,000 range, where they’re, they’re doing, you know, a daily show, and we’re doing all you know, a lot of different content repurposing, so it really just kind of spans the gamut, anywhere from a couple grand a month to 30 grand a month. So you will, your firm would, you know, identify, go out and sort of search LinkedIn or search the universe find potential guests reach out to those guests, get them booked. So the host mainly has to sort of show up to the interview and ask the questions. And then yeah, show up to the we ask our hosts to show up to the pre interview, and then to show up to the actual interview. So 15 minute time commitment for the pre interview. And that’s really a relational touch point as well, just getting familiar with the guest. That way whenever you jump on the actual interview, it feels like you’re jumping on a call with like somebody you’ve already built rapport with, should already have friends with at that point. So yeah, the they jump on the pre interview. And and then they do the interview. And then we do everything else.

Will Bachman 34:10
What’s your thought about having a podcast newsletter, where you know, people that might not listen to every episode, you try to get their email address, so that you could send them news of the most recent episode, so forth?

James Carbary 34:25
Yeah, so we actually this is something we just recently started working on for b2b growth. We got our newsletter spun up and at the bottom of the newsletter, we try to not make it all about the podcast, we have some other things that we talked about that would be helpful for our ideal buyer. And then at the very bottom, we plug some of the most recent episodes, we decided to pause that honestly because it’s it’s going to take a whole lot of focus for us to really try to grow that newsletter and I was the one writing it. And I just felt like a lot of the time that I was spending writing that newsletter could have been spent spent, you know, elsewhere we’re getting, we were getting a few 100 people opening the newsletter. But if I can write a LinkedIn post and get 15,000 views on LinkedIn posts, my time is better spent doing that until we have a better system in place. But I wholeheartedly agree that if you’ve got the bandwidth and time to do some sort of a newsletter, I always think that being able to capture an email address for your listener, and start to be able to communicate with them outside of just the podcast channel is a very, very smart move.

Will Bachman 35:38
What’s your perspective on for a beat someone as a b2b podcast? Does it make sense for them to advertise the podcast to try to get more listeners?

James Carbary 35:48
So you can we we have not been massive advocates for that primarily because we it’s really hard to do. So you can, you can pay other shows in your space shows that your ideal listeners or ideal buyers would also be listening to and you can either pay them to pay those shows to talk about your show and try to try to siphon listeners from their show over to yours. Or you can do you can find shows that have a similar audience to yours and just do it for free. And so we we’ve done that in the past with a show called the marketing book podcast, and it ended up working out really well are some of our listeners ended up, you know, listening to their show as well. And we were able to get a good bit of their existing audience to come over and listen to our shows, because as everyone knows, people listen to more than one podcast. So doing collaborations like that we found can be really helpful. But doing things like Facebook and Instagram advertising, we have just not seen the needle move very much. For context, our show b2b growth gets about 160,000 downloads a month. And that’s primarily because we rank for the term b2b and Apple podcasts. So that’s something I haven’t mentioned yet well, but I think one of the most strategic things you can do with your shows name is try to rank for a very strategic keyword, I think we’re in a, we’re in a sweet spot in time right now, because there’s only about a million podcasts in Apple podcasts at the time, maybe just a little bit over that a lot of people think oh my gosh, that’s crazy. But when you think about the fact that I think there are more than 30 million YouTube channels and a ubiquitous number of blogs, you look at, you start to see that a million really isn’t all that much. And when you look in your space with with your the expertise of your buyers, the people that you’re trying to reach out to, there’s probably there’s probably not any, or only a handful of shows that are even in that space, and seeing how most most folks name their show after their own expertise, not something their buyers are searching for in podcast apps, there’s massive opportunity for you to name your show around a keyword that you think people are going to be searching for, and then end up ranking for that keyword. So as the podcasting medium continues to grow, we’ve been able to ride the wave of ranking. I think whenever you put in b2b and podcasts, we were one of the first or second shows to pop up. And we hear all the time about how that’s people. That’s how people found our show. And so that is a very strategic way to grow your audience, simply by naming your show in such a way that people are going to search for a term that they’re interested in learning more about, and and find you in that way.

Will Bachman 38:32
Fantastic. So, James, where can people go online to find out more about your firm and some of these cool tools like your name, recommender engine, and so forth. Give us give us some links.

James Carbary 38:47
Yeah, so she can go to sweet fish media.com, really. And you can find everything there. We’ve got a nice little search function on our website. So you can kind of use our site like Google, and just search podcast naming, you can see the articles that we’ve written around podcast naming or anything else, that would be helpful. We read a lot about b2b marketing. And, and so you can go to Swedish media.com and find that you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. So my last name is car ba ROI. So just James Carberry on LinkedIn, I post about a lot of this stuff on a on a pretty regular basis. And so would love to connect with you on LinkedIn as well.

Will Bachman 39:28
Fantastic. And I will include your LinkedIn URL in the show notes, James. So thank you so much for joining today. This was a fantastic episode and listeners, I alluded to it earlier, if you go to Umbrex.com slash unleashed, you can sign up for the newsletter for this show. And if you don’t want to listen to every episode, that’s cool, but my if you’ll get the newsletter, you’ll find out all the recent episodes and see which ones you want to check out. And if you want to give the show a five star review on iTunes, that would be awesome and helps people discover the show and it makes me feel fantastic. So, thanks for listening, you can email me at unleashed@unbraked.com. Thanks for listening