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05: Building A Podcast That Fuels Your B2B Company with James Carbary
62 Plays1 year ago
James Carbary, the founder of SweetFish, has helped grow hundreds of B2B podcasts as well as his own, B2B Growth. We dive deep into questions like: Should we do interview-style episodes? How to conduct original research with your guests? How to validate ideas that resonate with your audience?
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Transcript
Introduction to B2B Strategy Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B strategy podcast, your roundtable of B2B strategists guiding you in every decision you make in growing
Guest Introduction: James Carberry
00:00:06
Speaker
your business. Today we'll be talking to James Carberry. James is the founder of Sweetfish, a B2B podcast agency, the host of the B2B growth podcast and the author of content based networking.
Sweetfish's Insights into B2B Strategy
00:00:16
Speaker
This is the third consecutive episode of interviewing someone from his company, Sweetfish.
00:00:20
Speaker
Why? The reason is very simple. They've conducted hundreds of interviews with the best B2B marketers on their podcast. Because of that, they have a deep understanding of B2B strategy that you can't find anywhere
What is Content-Based Networking?
00:00:29
Speaker
else. In this episode, we'll be diving deep into content-based networking and how James has used this strategy to skyrocket his agency's growth.
00:00:37
Speaker
It's not what you know, it's who you know. It's a pretty well-known cliche in the business world. I think for the most part, it's an accepted piece of advice that networking is important. But the problem isn't the idea, but rather the actual practice of it, applying that advice. So many questions come up. How can we do networking that doesn't take so much of our time? How do we build relationships with people that have no idea who we are? How do we do it in a genuine way without feeling salesy? James, what is content-based networking and how does it solve these common problems with traditional networking?
Critique of Traditional Networking
00:01:04
Speaker
So content-based networking is essentially using content collaborations as a way of building friendships with people. And so the traditional networking of going to these events where people that you actually want to do business with or potentially have some sort of partnership with, you don't know whether they're going to be at those events or not. And so it's a little bit of a crapshoot, at least in my experience it was.
00:01:29
Speaker
Oftentimes the folks showing up to those events are not the kind of people that you actually want to connect with. And so you've got to be more intentional with who you're trying to build these relationships
Breaking Barriers with Content-Based Networking
00:01:43
Speaker
with. And when you are reaching out to somebody who has no idea who you are,
00:01:47
Speaker
and you have no reason to reach out to them, the default assumption is, well, this person is reaching out to me because they're trying to sell me something. We have been conditioned to be able to sniff that out from a mile away and we just don't respond. We figured out that what we call content-based networking is essentially just asking someone to create content with them. When you do that,
00:02:16
Speaker
breaks down that wall and actually allows you to be able to connect with people and gives you a reason to reach out to people.
Sweetfish's Transition to Podcasting
00:02:23
Speaker
And so the more research you can do on the front of that, the more reasons you would be able to give them for, hey, this is actually why I want to create content with you. I saw that you did this, this, and this. I saw that you've been able to drive these kind of results.
00:02:40
Speaker
And I would love to create a piece of content with you. It tends to work. And so we built our business on the back of it and have seen a lot of other people do the same. So before I, you've written a whole book on it, but before we go into the book, you have used this strategy with Sweetfish to build Sweetfish.
Strategic Focus Shift to VPs of Marketing
00:02:59
Speaker
Could you tell me a little bit how you guys did that?
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah. So with Sweetfish, we started as a blog writing agency in 2015 and pivoted into podcasting in 2016 because I had had a personal podcast with a buddy of mine and realized that anybody that we asked to be a guest on this podcast said yes. And these were people that
00:03:19
Speaker
They had no business. We had no business talking to you. They had no reason to want to talk to us, but they were really influential people and doing really cool things. And because we had a show and we asked them to be on it, we're now magically friends with these people.
00:03:34
Speaker
So I saw an opportunity in the B2B space for this to apply to build relationships with people that could potentially represent six or seven figure deal sizes and nobody in B2B was talking about it. So we started doing it back then and I initially thought that it was going to be sales leaders that were attracted to this strategy.
Growth Through Strategic Podcasting
00:03:57
Speaker
So
00:03:58
Speaker
If you go back to the first 150 episodes of B2B growth, I was just interviewing VPs of sales because I was convinced that the VP of sales would be the person that would bring us in. It just goes to show how little I knew about the B2B space because I'm hard headed. So it took me 150 conversations to figure out that I should actually be talking to the VP of marketing, not the VP of sales. I heard
00:04:23
Speaker
one, two, and eight VPs of sales say, oh yeah, you should talk about what you guys do to my marketing counterpart. So you hear that enough and you're like, okay, I'll switch strategies. And sure enough, it worked. When we started interviewing VPs of marketing and they would find out what we do, we would build interest and then go through the sales process. And at the time we were kind of the only game in town doing it.
Crafting Valuable Podcast Content
00:04:49
Speaker
So
00:04:50
Speaker
So it was pretty straightforward and we were able to build a really good business on the back of it. So in the book, you talk a bit about the spotlight effect. So I know your thoughts have changed on this topic since you wrote the book four years ago. Maybe you could describe what the spotlight effect is and maybe how you're thinking about that concept has changed over the years. Yeah. So when we first started the business and the podcast that we were producing,
00:05:18
Speaker
were aimed at a very specific result, which was building relationships with prospective clients on behalf of our clients. So the shows were not designed to be any particular market's favorite show. There wasn't a lot of
Avoiding Commodity Content
00:05:38
Speaker
thought put into how good the content was. It was really, is this show allowing you to connect with people that you want to connect with?
00:05:47
Speaker
in a one-to-one relationship, like via one-to-one relationship specifically with your guests. I really, I think I said publicly multiple times, I don't care at all if the show has any sort of an audience whatsoever.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I think if I went back in time, I would probably still say the same thing because at the time, it was really effective. And what happened was as time went on and people started to get wise to the fact the podcasts were really effective at actually engaging an audience.
00:06:20
Speaker
and building a community, lots of other agencies started popping in and lots of companies started wanting to produce a show. And so over the years, we realized that what we had built was really a commodity content shop.
00:06:37
Speaker
And we now villainize commodity content, but the reality was we were, we were a big creator of
Building Audience Affinity
00:06:43
Speaker
it. Um, and so a lot of the content we were creating was, was very templatized. Um, and it was kind of like a factory of, of just, you know, it doesn't matter whether it's good. It doesn't matter whether the point of view is differentiated, uh, you know, or the strategic narrative is strong. Um, it just talked to the people that you want to talk to, have a conversation about whatever they want to talk about and it'll be fine.
00:07:09
Speaker
As more and more competitors stepped into the space, we realized that that was no longer going to be effective for us. It didn't actually serve our clients long-term very well either. When we shifted our approach about a year and a half ago,
00:07:28
Speaker
to saying, hey, we want to build shows that can become your market's favorite show and build affinity for both you and your company with your market.
Host Presence vs Guest-Driven Content
00:07:39
Speaker
That's a much more long-term win, and there's scale to it, right? Because you can build affinity with
00:07:46
Speaker
You can create one piece of content and build affinity with thousands of people as opposed to the more one-to-one approach is just limited. If the content sucks, sure, you can build affinity with that one guest that you brought on, but it stops at that one guest because nobody else wants to listen to your show because it's just frankly not very good. It's very disjointed. Every guest has a different point of view. It's not connected to your point of view.
00:08:10
Speaker
And it can be harder to make those shows work. Now, I think there's ways to do interview shows well. I don't think a lot of people are willing to put in the preparation required to actually do an interview show well. And so we've changed our tune a bit now and we say, hey, maybe you sprinkle in an interview every now and then.
00:08:30
Speaker
when it really makes sense if it's a particular voice that your audience really wants to hear from and has an affinity toward. But we like to say that if you're sacrificing your own thought leadership and the affinity that you personally can build with an audience by handing over the microphone to a guest in every single episode as opposed to putting yourself in that seat and really
00:08:56
Speaker
having the audience be drawn more
Engagement with Personal Insight Episodes
00:08:59
Speaker
to you. And the story here with B2B Growth, we were probably three or four years in and we were getting about a thousand downloads an episode. And I started doing these behind the curtain series where I was just talking about our business, the behind the scenes of our business, what we were doing that was working, what wasn't working. And immediately noticed that we went from like a thousand downloads an episode to like 2,500 or 3,000 downloads an episode.
00:09:24
Speaker
And it was a stark difference because we titled the episodes differently. So when it was an interview, we titled it one way. When it was just me doing behind the curtain episode, it was titled different way. So when I went back and looked at the analytics, all of the behind the curtain episodes,
00:09:39
Speaker
or just had a spike in downloads. And so it just made me realize that audiences are hungry for you. They don't necessarily care as much about your guests as they do about you. Like, you're likely the reason that they signed up to listen to your content
Balancing Guest and Host Dialogue
00:09:59
Speaker
in the first place. But I think we sacrifice a lot of that by handing it over to our guest when the show's sole focus is interviewing guests.
00:10:09
Speaker
Right. So my first thought of that is if I invite someone onto my podcast, and if I end up speaking a lot,
00:10:19
Speaker
Is that going to, could that have a bad, almost bad feeling with them? You know, I invited them to be a guest on this episode. And if I end up talking all the time, you know, they don't really feel all that special because I almost made it about me and not them. Is that possible?
00:10:41
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely don't think that the strategy should be invite guests and then do all the talking. I think it looks more like not inviting guests at all and carrying the weight with yourself. And I really like having a co-host personally. I think the conversation flows a lot more when you've got a regular co-host and it's a lot more fun to prep for episodes when you're doing it with somebody as opposed to by yourself. At least that's been the case for me.
00:11:09
Speaker
But I think you can do interviews well when the host has a... When the person you're interviewing, you genuinely connect with a particular part of their point of view or something that they believe, you resonate with it deeply. So one of the hosts on B2B Growth, Benji, does this really, really well. He started to... We used to say, hey, just go get any VP of marketing
00:11:38
Speaker
at a company with 500 to 1200 employees and get them on B2B growth.
00:11:44
Speaker
And when that's the qualification for who you're getting to be on the show, it gets really hard because a lot of those new pieces of marketing, they don't have a very public voice. And so it's hard to do research. I'm like, okay, what does this person actually believe? I'm getting them on the show because I want to build a relationship with them, but I don't really know how to guide the conversation in a way that brings them to life. And I don't know how to talk about things that they're really passionate about and that I'm also passionate about because
00:12:13
Speaker
They don't have a very public persona. It can be really challenging, but when you shift your guest strategy to, hey, I'm going to go after people that I know my audience is already engaging with, and I'm only going to talk to people where I know I can be a passionate contributor to the conversation. It ends up not being guest talking 90 percent of the time. It's more like guest and host are talking about 50 percent of the time.
What is Nearbound Marketing?
00:12:43
Speaker
because there's energy coming from the host side and from the guest side if you've done it well that obviously that ends up being you talking to a bunch of influencers and i used to very much poo-poo on that because influencers are typically not the buyer of your product but again kind of evolved our thinking from
00:13:02
Speaker
the guest is who you're trying to do business with and transact with to the audience being ultimately the people that you want to eventually buy from you. And so if you build affinity with that audience over time, the idea is that it's going to create a lot of demand for your product or service longer term. So it's a longer term play than
00:13:26
Speaker
Uh, then content based networking, but I think it's ultimately more strategic and more valuable in the long game. So this was actually very similar to what we were talking about on the last episode with Logan Lyles, who worked at Sweetfish with you for several years, talking about near bound marketing and how inbound marketing is, you know, with the magnet you're pulling, you know, you're pulling instead of pushing.
00:13:50
Speaker
But near bound marking is where you have multiple magnets because you're creating the content with your ecosystem, with the people that are trusted, the trusted figures in whatever niche you have. And you're creating content with them to gain the trust of their audience
Aligning Narratives with Partners
00:14:07
Speaker
and your audience. And that combined trust creates a stronger magnet and end up getting them to buy from you. So I'm guessing that's...
00:14:20
Speaker
I've talked with Logan a little bit about this. The challenge I think that they're going to find with or run into with Nearbound is finding the right partners that have
00:14:31
Speaker
that have enough in common to have a shared narrative. I think you certainly can do it. For us at Sweetfish, it's Audience Plus. They've got a very aligned narrative with our narrative. They're a technology platform that's basically saying, hey, we can deliver a Netflix-type experience on your website.
00:14:52
Speaker
It makes a lot of sense for us to go after accounts together because we are the media team that can actually create the media and they're the technology platform that where you can house that media in a really clean and friendly way. But aside from them, I'm like trying to think of who
00:15:10
Speaker
Who else is in the space that were like-minded enough with the narrative that we have that you could really partner up and do some really compelling stuff with? I think it's possible, but it's just something you've really got to put that thought into it if that's going to be core to your strategy because I see that being a challenge for a lot of companies. It's hard enough to get people in your own company aligned on the narrative.
Using Content Franchises Effectively
00:15:38
Speaker
And so when you start trying to align your narrative with people in companies that aren't even yours, I just foresee that being tough to pull off, but not impossible at all. I think if you can find the right partners, I think Nearbound is a fantastic approach to this stuff and a great evolution of Inbound, honestly.
00:15:59
Speaker
Would it be better to go 100% only inviting people to kind of have a near bound strategy and not invite ideal clients onto your show or does it kind of depend on different things? Yeah, I think it would depend. I would probably try to think about it like content franchises and I would probably have a content franchise
00:16:22
Speaker
with a compelling premise, a compelling format that could involve both. So this content franchise, we focus on talking to people in the market. So they are decision makers in the market that you could actually transact into business with, but the format would probably look a little bit different. What you would talk to them about might need to look a little bit different.
00:16:45
Speaker
as opposed to when you're talking to an influencer in the space that has probably done more work developing a point of view and developing really more clear thoughts on where they think the space is going or something that's broken in the space that they think they've got a handle on how to fix. And so it's different. But if you try to interview both of those types of people in the same way, the same format, the same
00:17:14
Speaker
premise, I think that's really where it goes awry.
Starting a Podcast: Key Advice
00:17:19
Speaker
And so it just, it comes down to like, you look at how
00:17:23
Speaker
You look at how media companies do this, right? ABC has their, they have soap operas on during the day because they know the audience watching is a particular demographic, but then their seven to 9 p.m. block of shows are geared toward a very different type of audience. And then their nine o'clock to 11 o'clock run of shows are geared toward an even different type of audience. And so the format of each of those shows changes
00:17:53
Speaker
And I think we've got to adapt to that same type of thinking into B2B media as well. Okay. And do you think that, no, as you said, you're thinking about this has kind of changed over the years and now you're suggesting more of a near bound approach collaborating with other creators or audiences. Yeah. Do you think that
00:18:15
Speaker
the possible reasoning behind that is because as your own audience grew it's a lot easier to collaborate with others because from my thinking is that when you're just starting out with a show it's a lot harder to get someone that already has an audience. Let's say you don't have an audience and you're creating an audience
00:18:33
Speaker
with someone, they might not be as likely to come on to your show as perhaps an ideal client, or perhaps is easier for someone for a company that's just starting a podcast to think that way.
Building a Content Library
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think when you're first starting out,
00:18:51
Speaker
And we're still in the midst of trying to reorient our clients around this way of thinking. But I think when you're first starting out, one, you're spot on that it's really hard to get other people to want to collaborate with you if the show is brand new. One, you're probably not going to be that good of a host.
00:19:09
Speaker
the beginning. If you've never done it before, it's a skill like any other skill. It takes time and it takes reps to get good at it. You almost want to, I think you should be trying to create
00:19:26
Speaker
as much content with just like you and a co-host. Solo episodes can work for some types of personalities. I listen to some shows where it's just a single talking head and it's great. You've got to have a certain type of talent to be able to pull that off. But I would try to do the first 10, 15, maybe even 25 episodes
00:19:46
Speaker
just between you and co-host, getting comfortable with the subject matter that you're covering, how you want to cover it, what resonates, what doesn't in terms of the clips that you repurpose on social. You can learn so much across those first
00:20:02
Speaker
several episodes, and you start to build a reputation so that you've got a bank of content that when you go and ask somebody to be on your show, they can go and see a library of content that hopefully has gotten better and is
Conducting Effective Podcast Research
00:20:19
Speaker
good. And so they feel comfortable going, yeah, I want to be a part of that. And hopefully you started to build the foundation of some semblance of an audience that they would be interested in getting in front of.
00:20:30
Speaker
And in your book, along with the blog on Sweetfish and other evangelists from Sweetfish have talked a lot about the benefits of being able to conduct original research from interviewing so many people in your industry, getting so many different perspectives on things. You can kind of understand very clearly how things are working, how
00:20:52
Speaker
the trends that are going on. How does someone create a plan behind conducting original research to get the insights that they can later on share with their own audience? Yeah. So we've only effectively done this once. I think we bit off way more than we could chew whenever we did it.
00:21:16
Speaker
But we basically said we want to go to 100 people that we've had on B2B Growth in the past. I think we're over 3,000 episodes at this point. So coming up with 100 wasn't tough to do. But we wanted to reach out, do another episode with them on B2B Growth. And during the pre-interview,
00:21:32
Speaker
we had a list of, I think it was 10 questions that we asked. So we just hit record, asked the 10 questions, and then we had a team of virtual assistants basically chop up their answers and organize the answers by question.
00:21:49
Speaker
And then what we did is we went and we did an episode on each one. So we had somebody listen to all of the, all hundred answers. Again, I mean, this took forever. I think you could do it with a much smaller sample size than a hundred.
00:22:05
Speaker
But we went through and we had somebody listen to, so question one was, what's a commonly held belief about B2B marketing that you passionately disagree with? And we would have somebody listen to a hundred answers and come up with maybe four or five key themes from those 100 responses. You could do this with, you could like transcribe the responses and analyze it via written word, or you could do it via audio, whatever would be easier for the person who's making
00:22:33
Speaker
who's doing that analysis for you. I also think it takes us a different type of skill to be able to do that analysis. I was not very good at it. Like when I would listen to those hundred responses, I don't feel like I was able to really come up with any really great insights from listening to it. But a guy named Timmy, who was on our team at the time,
00:22:55
Speaker
was able to listen and go, oh yeah, these four or five things were my takeaways after listening to that or consuming those hundred answers. So having the right talent in that part of the process I think is really important.
00:23:09
Speaker
And then we would do an episode on those four or five takeaways where our co-host team, I think it was Dan, myself, and I can't remember if Benji was co-hosting the show at that point or not, I think he was. We would basically just riff on that one specific question. So we ended up getting 10 episodes out of that piece of content.
00:23:31
Speaker
We didn't get as much juice from that squeeze as we could have. We could have turned that into a report that we then, you know, we could have put it behind a gate. We could have not gated it.
AI's Role in Developing Insights
00:23:41
Speaker
There are a lot more things that we could have done with that research, but
00:23:45
Speaker
If you're already interviewing guests on your show, I think you're missing a massive opportunity to not do original research by just coming up with a set of maybe you don't even need 10 questions. Maybe it's three questions and asking those during the pre-interview. It could even be a part of your show. It could be like a rapid style thing that you do as a closing segment of the show. And so yeah, that's where I think the opportunity is for original research. You look at folks like Gong who have done this.
00:24:15
Speaker
They're actually pulling data from the use of their tool, which is super smart. They're getting data at scale and they've got an entire team of people that analyze that data and help them develop insights with like when you should not say the F word in a sales conversation versus when you should.
Conclusion and Sweetfish Shoutout
00:24:33
Speaker
They're coming out with all this crazy research.
00:24:35
Speaker
Um, but you look at that and that, that content, you know, it ranks really well in Google. Uh, it's the kind of stuff that people share. Uh, it can be repurposed like crazy. You can turn it into social clips. It can become podcast content. Um, so I'm, I'm a big fan of original research. We should be doing more of it at sweep fish, but again, like everything it, you know, it, it takes time and you got to dedicate resources to it. Yeah. I think it was something that Chris Walker had said. Um, I think why.
00:25:04
Speaker
one of probably many people saying it, but with AI coming out and so much commodity content coming as a result of it, the only way to really stand out and position yourself as an expert in the industry is to have insights. So whatever can allow you to have that data and insights is going to be key in any kind of inbound strategy. So
00:25:29
Speaker
Agreed. And it is not an easy skill. I think I made the mistake of thinking anybody could do it. I was like, oh, of course I can do it. And who knows? I don't know of any AI that helps you develop insights, but I'm sure it's coming with as quick as this stuff is moving. But I think you spot on there. I think that is still a very unique way that marketers can add value is
00:25:58
Speaker
use AI to take care of all of the organizing and all of the core stuff that has to happen for you to be able to get to the part where you develop an insight. But at least right now, I think it needs to be the marketer's job to critically think and then develop those insights.
00:26:18
Speaker
I hope this episode helped you understand how you can use content based networking to create relationships with ideal clients as well as other trusted creators in your niche's ecosystem to build more affinity with your audience. A big shout out to James for joining me today. If you're looking to create a podcast for your B2B company, definitely check out Sweetfish. Hope to see you all next episode.