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Are B2B Companies Still Excited about Podcasts?
98 Plays2 years ago
In theory, podcasts are a great thing for B2B and B2B SaaS companies.
They allow companies to connect with prospects, customers, and influencers and generate a ton of content (blog posts, social media updates, videos).
But podcasts can be a hard sell for marketers. One of the challenges is that the value and ROI of a podcast are more than data-driven.
When a marketer is asked by a CEO about how to measure a podcast's success, the answer is "a podcast can be quantified but many of the benefits aren't visible".
To get insight into the B2B podcast landscape, I connect with Tom Hunt , founder of Fame.
We talked about:
- Whether companies are still enthiastic about podcasts
- How to sell a podcast to. CEO or CMO
- The role and value of an internal podcast for employees
- Whether CEOs really understand their customers, and how a podcast and creating content is a great way to discover valuable insight.
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Transcript
Launch and Impact of Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
I launched the Marketing Spark podcast in mid 2020. It has been one of the most rewarding professional decisions. The only regret is that I didn't start a podcast earlier. Podcasts have become a huge part of the media landscape and many B2B companies have jumped on the bandwagon. As a marketer and podcaster, I'm curious about the state of the podcast landscape, where it's heading and how companies will embrace podcasts.
Introduction to Tom Hunt and FAME
00:00:34
Speaker
To answer these questions and tackle some other marketing topics is Tom Hunt, founder of FAME, which starts and grows profitable podcasts for growth-focused TV businesses, and BCAS, which hosts podcasts. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Tom. Mark, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited about the next 30 or so minutes.
B2B Companies and Podcasting: Excitements and Concerns
00:00:53
Speaker
Let's start with your thoughts on the B2B podcast landscape. You and I both live in the either hurricane. We live and breathe podcasts, you more so than I, because it's your business. And my question is whether B2B companies are still excited about podcasts. That's a leading question, I admit. I know that companies love being guests on podcasts by the number of invitations that I see in my inbox.
00:01:21
Speaker
But I get the impression that not every company wants to create a podcast or they're afraid of creating a podcast. What are your thoughts in terms of the overall B to B podcast? Yeah, it's a great point. And I've got a couple of angles on this one. I'll take the first one, the most bullish of angles, which is what I typically use in sales calls as
Podcasting Benefits: Audience and Relationships
00:01:42
Speaker
well. If someone asks me this question and it's that.
00:01:45
Speaker
Well, actually, I'm going to throw it back to you, Mark. Do you know how many YouTube channels there are in total? 50 millions, I guess. That's my 5 million. 50 million. Right.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, nearly about 170, apparently. And then like, wait, let's not do active, but like total podcast, like two to 3 million. And so if you really think about like what a podcast actually is, it's just an RSS feed of audio content, just like a blog is an RSS feed of written content. And so if like literally every business has a blog,
00:02:19
Speaker
Why shouldn't every business have an RSS feed of audio content? Now that's the most bullish, but what are the other angles that I can come at this question to, which are maybe a bit more realistic or reasonable? The first is, I think there is a drive for B2B companies to create their audiences that they control.
00:02:41
Speaker
like an email list, like a podcast subscription list, because no one can stand in the way of that. I guess Apple or Spotify, et cetera, can stand in the way of that, but it's a bit more diversified. And then at the same time, so there's like this control, like no one can take that away from you. I like it like a LinkedIn following. But then the second point is that.
00:03:02
Speaker
it's much cheaper for you to then get the attention of those people because you just released the thing versus having to pay Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube for the ads.
Misconceptions and Cost-Effectiveness in Podcasting
00:03:10
Speaker
So I think there is a drive towards owning, creating own media properties on the B2B side. That's one other angle. And then actually the biggest benefit I think of podcasting isn't necessarily building up the subscriber list or getting the downloads. It's like everything else that can come through like learning about the niche, about building relationships with guests that could be customers or partners. And then also
00:03:33
Speaker
Those are the two big ones. Oh yeah. All the other content that you can create from it, not just the audio. So those are a few different viewpoints on that question. That's a lot of topics to discuss in, in, in one, uh, in one answer. Why don't we step back and look at the suggestion that every B2B company should have a podcast just as.
00:03:58
Speaker
nearly every B2B company has a blog. There are people out there that fervently believe that this should be the case, but obviously it isn't right now. So A, do you think that this should be the case, that every B2B company should have a podcast and
00:04:16
Speaker
What's holding companies back when you look at the benefits, the obvious benefits, and the ROI of a podcast?
Unique Relationship Building Through Podcasts
00:04:23
Speaker
Why are many companies just sitting on the podcast side? I'm going to pick one. Well, yeah. The first question I think was about why people should have the audio feed, and then I'll take the second one. The first one,
00:04:34
Speaker
And I'll just zoom into one, and it's the ease of which you can build a relationship with someone through creating that content. Relationships are built by going on like a rollercoaster with friends, like the friends you aren't traveling with when you're younger, like your closest mates. And so if you think about collabing on a blog post versus collaborating on a podcast episode, like for example, this, like we're going to become friends in theory, or we're going to become closer after this, and it's taken us literally 30 minutes each, maybe a bit more for you for researching, et cetera.
00:05:04
Speaker
And whereas if we were going to clap on a blog post, one of us is going to have to write it. The other one is going to have to review it or add stuff. That's probably going to take more time. And so I think that's the biggest benefit here is that the host or someone from the B2B company is going to get to know other people in the space is going to learn from them.
00:05:20
Speaker
And so why people are sitting on the sidelines, it's a great question. I think five years ago, it was quite hard. It was much harder than it is now. It's getting easier every year, like Descript, Anchor, et cetera. All podcast agencies are making it much easier and cheaper to do. So I think people think, B2B company think it's like a bigger effort than it actually is, which is great for my business, obviously.
Convincing CEOs of Podcast ROI
00:05:46
Speaker
A couple of thoughts here. One is that two or three years ago, I was intimidated by the idea of doing a podcast, the technical requirements, the costs involved, but the barriers to entry have come down dramatically. I spend probably, if you don't include the time spent to edit and prepare, I spend 30 bucks a month preparing my, on my podcast. But the other angle is that I think a lot of marketers have a tough time selling a podcast to
00:06:14
Speaker
the CMO or the CEO because many B2B companies, it's all about data, it's all about KPIs, it's all about metrics. And when you go to a CEO and you say, I want to do a podcast and the CEO says, well,
00:06:31
Speaker
How are you going to measure ROI? How are you going to quantify whether this podcast is a success or not? You could turn, as you say, to a number of subscribers, streams, downloads, but that's not the number. So a marketer may say, but it's going to build brand awareness. It's going to help us build relationships. It's going to build trust and affinity. And the CEO is going to go, well,
00:06:51
Speaker
I can't really measure that. What's your advice to marketers who need to convince a CEO that this is a no-brainer idea? First point, and you did touch upon this. In the short term, we always advise, like the ROI in the short term probably isn't going to come from the audience.
00:07:07
Speaker
Podcasting is actually not a great way to build an audience. It's a great way to build a better relationship with an existing audience. So if you think you're going to start a podcast, everyone's going to listen and they're all going to buy your stuff, it's probably unlikely. So what we say is that, let's say we're doing a biweekly show over six months, we're going to build relationships with 12 people, 12 guests. Now we're not going to pitch them and they might be ideal customers or they might be ideal partners, but you're going to build those relationships and you make the guest experience amazing.
00:07:31
Speaker
And then you may expect one or two of those people to progress down your sales or partnership funnel. So that's what we typically say is actually don't look at the listener side for the first six months. Because if you then get a deal, let's say from the guest side, you can reinvest into the content, make it better, build the audience, increase the likelihood of the ROI on that side. That's the first point. Now, the second point is that
00:07:54
Speaker
The way we're going to get the ROI from the listeners side is not by tracking those numbers. It's by adding a free text field on the demo form saying, how did you hear about us? And then over 12 months, if we're doing things right, that should start to happen typically after like six months. The third point, and this is something that I've been exploring recently in my own world of B2B, is that I think that the new metric that B2B marketers should be tracking, and it's a leading metric to revenue,
00:08:23
Speaker
And I think it's the closest thing you can get to, to measuring brand. And I'm calling this total targeted impressions. And so this is just the number of impressions that your content is getting every month. Targeted means that from people that ideally could be buyers and one feed into that metric, I think is the podcast download and impression is essentially like them showing that they want to listen to your episode basically.
00:08:48
Speaker
And so I combine that with LinkedIn impressions, podcast downloads, impressions on any other social platforms, email opens. And here's a metric that I think is a great thing to measure to show the goodwill that is building for you in the marketplace. And so podcast downloads would feed into that. So those are the three things I would speak to the CEO about. Let me step back here. In the B2B world.
Podcasts as a Content Engine for B2B
00:09:15
Speaker
Everybody accepts the reality that content is king, that if you produce insightful, valuable content, that's a good way of building trust, establishing relationships, positioning yourself as the go-to resource in a particular area. And one of the things that I think many CEOs don't understand is that the content
00:09:38
Speaker
from a podcast can be repurposed and reconfigured in lots of different ways. And it can be your content catalyst. It can sit at the core of your content engine. Is that something that you think many business leaders aren't aware of? Because maybe they're not content people. They overlook the idea that there's a treasure trove of intelligence and insights and content just sitting there waiting to be explained. Yeah, you are totally right. I would expect
00:10:08
Speaker
Why do people not realize that? Yeah, I'm not sure. I think it's just quite shocking the amount of, like when you do one video podcast, F30 is shocking the amount of information you can pull from that.
00:10:20
Speaker
Um, and if you, so A, you're going to get a load of information from it, but then B, because you're including someone else in the process of creating it, they're incentivized to share it. Right. And so I, I'm going to bring this back to the third point of my previous answer where I didn't actually make this clear, but if we think about total, total targeted impressions, again, like hat, like doing the podcast and getting all those video snippets and having someone else incentivized to share your posts or comment on your posts is going to blow up. It's not going to blow up. It should increase that total targeted impressions metric over time. So.
00:10:50
Speaker
I think you're right as to why people are not doing it and don't understand it. I think it's just something that you have to experience. The first time you record this, you realize you get the transcripts and you're like, okay, I could probably have seven videos from this episode. So yeah, you make a very good point, Mark.
00:11:09
Speaker
The other question I wanted to ask you about podcasting before moving on to other topics is the idea of internal podcasts.
Internal Podcasts for Employee Engagement
00:11:16
Speaker
I saw a buffer post that companies should look at creating internal podcasts for employees to engage, inform, educate.
00:11:27
Speaker
maybe even entertain. And then I was talking to Steve Schmidt, a very well-known salesperson on LinkedIn, who was talking about the idea that you could use an internal podcast to bring marketing and sales together. The head of marketing and the head of sales can do a mini podcast every week and talk about the things that they're working on and the things that they've achieved.
00:11:49
Speaker
So I wanted to ask you about whether an internal podcast is maybe a way to get companies to get on the podcast. Market might be paying you for this consulting session. Like that's such a good idea. Sales and marketing combined. I'm literally going to go and pitch that to our clients. No, that's such a good idea.
00:12:08
Speaker
I think if we back out, take a step back. To actually answer your question, yes, you're totally right. People should start to experience the magic. It's really the closeness you experience when you listen to someone else's show. I listen to true crime pods all the time, and so I just know all of these true crime journalists. They're my best mate.
00:12:28
Speaker
I think if we step back and really understand what happens when you put someone else's audio in your ears, is that you build this like incredible relationship. And you can use that to, how do I say influence because it sounds dark, but you can use this to try to change people's behavior in a good way. And that's what we're kind of trying to do with the podcast externally, because they're trying to influence the market subtly to come and understand the problem that I've got itself.
00:12:52
Speaker
the objective is exactly the same internally. What are the things that you need to educate your employees about to influence their behavior, to increase productivity, increase job satisfaction, and increase employee engagement? And a show just like it should be part of an external marketing mix, I think should also be part of an internal marketing mix, which is basically internal com slash HR.
00:13:15
Speaker
I think it'd be a great idea. It's a great way to really engage your employees because that's one of the biggest things that we're struggling with right now is the fact that you've got a hybrid work environment. You've got remote workers, people, some people are even working together in person, but they're not connecting and maybe a podcast is a good way to make that happen. I want to jump around a little bit into some other marketing topics and to be perfectly transparent
00:13:40
Speaker
These came from the post that you did on LinkedIn. You as a podcast guy, obviously this is an area of expertise, but you're also interested or passionate about a lot of different things. So why don't we bounce around and I'll ask you some questions about some of the things that you talk about and give me some, you can elaborate on some of what you're thinking. You talked about something called interruption based marketing, which is a term that I hadn't heard before.
00:14:04
Speaker
How is it different or better than other approaches to marketing? Yeah, totally understandable that you wouldn't have heard that before because I made it up. Now, interruption, for fame, the impact that our business has on other B2B companies, I think our enemy or the opposite of what we do is interruption marketing.
00:14:26
Speaker
Which is the way I define the difference between interruption at marketing and value ad marketing is really the reaction to the ideal buyer as they see the thing. And so let's just take a really obvious example. A cold Facebook ad that's driving someone, that's like getting in the way of someone's feed and driving them to get a demo of your software, even though they've never heard of you before.
00:14:51
Speaker
versus a podcast they've been listening to for half a year. They see a new guest that they're really interested come up on the podcast feed and they see that and they click on it, right? So this I would say is interruption. This I would say is like value add.
00:15:04
Speaker
The screen that I would ask every B2B marketer to look through as they're going to be sending that email, as they're going to publish the ad, as they're going to publish that blog post is, do I think that the reaction to this from my ideal buyer is going to be a positive one or a negative one as I interrupt them with this thing?
00:15:22
Speaker
Um, so maybe I need to think of a better name because like technically whatever we send and put in front of it by is going to be an interruption, but it's more about the reaction to it. Do they see it as an interruption or do they see it as something that's going to improve their lives? That's an interesting concept because there are two kinds of interruptions. One annoys you. You see the ad or the piece of content. It's not relevant. It's not interesting. And in fact, it's distracting and, and causes you to, to.
00:15:51
Speaker
Breakdown and whatever you're doing at the moment. And the other one is, uh-huh, that's interesting. I'm curious about that. Whether it's the title or the content or whatever. And it can completely generate a different reaction immediately. It's an interesting game to play. And I think you're right. I think a lot of markers really need to think through what kind of content, what kind of advertising is out there. You talk about.
00:16:18
Speaker
CEOs understanding their customers. And if you go through a LinkedIn feed, there are tons of posts about the value of understanding your customers and being empathetic to their needs and interests and talking to them. My take is a lot of it is talk as opposed to walk is marketers in theory love the idea of talking to customers and prospects, but they don't do it because they're busy or they've got different priorities.
00:16:43
Speaker
But one of the realities of being a CEO, especially as the company's growing, is you get farther and farther away from your customers. When early days, you love your customers and you're the CEO and the chief salesperson. So you have very intimate relationship with prospects and customers, but as the company grows, you get busy and you do other things and you stop talking to customers.
00:17:04
Speaker
So my question to you is what are best practices to make sure that CEOs are aligned and connected with customers and prospects?
CEOs Staying Connected with Customers
00:17:13
Speaker
How to make sure that there's not this
00:17:16
Speaker
wall between them because a CEO has other responsibilities to focus on. Yeah, I mean, seven points obviously host a podcast, loud joking. They're typically even necessarily the CEO, but here's a great question and I did get a good reaction when I posted on LinkedIn because my view is exactly that, that I think the CEO needs to be the person in the business that knows the customer the most. And people responding were saying that with bigger companies, it should be like sales, customer success to know that.
00:17:42
Speaker
So I'm still of the belief that the CEO needs to know the customer the better because they are ultimately making the big decisions that impact like what products are being made and how they're being sold. So to your actual question, which is how did the CEO actually do this? I think, and I've thought about this a bit, I think
00:18:00
Speaker
The best way is for the CEO to create content because when you create, for my life experience, pretty limited, but the best way for me to learn is to teach, which is why I write on LinkedIn, which is why I host a podcast. They're going to learn about the thing that they're creating content about more as they create it. And then the great thing is that if they're creating it and posting it ideally from their own social profiles themselves.
00:18:25
Speaker
then they are going to see the responses to that content and even get into the comments and interact and really learn from the people that are reacting to the content, which ideally are also the customers. I think that is probably the best thing. I guess the, the alternate is for like the CS team to set up calls for the CEO to jump on and ask questions, but I don't know if that's going to. To get the deep enough knowledge that I essentially think that creating content could
00:18:54
Speaker
build deeper knowledge for the CEO. And the benefit there is also that it's going to help grow the company. Yeah, as a content marketer, someone who totally believes in the value of content, I think the CEO should be creating content on a regular basis. But the pushback that I get when I suggest that is that they've got bigger things to focus on. It's not a priority. It's really not a good use of their time.
00:19:23
Speaker
So how do you convince a CEO that yes, they should be creating content? And the other adjacent question is, do you think the CEO should be hosting podcasts or co-hosting podcasts, whether it's to an external or internal audience? The reason why you get that pushback is because it's so hard to source or attribute the source of a good idea. A CEO.
00:19:48
Speaker
If completely ignorant of the idea that they could be getting from their customers, that's going to completely change the direction of the business or how they sell their thing. And so it's so hard to track that. And so that's how I tried to get it across, but obviously it's not going to be that convincing. Maybe I would say, look, CEO, we're going to do this for a month. If we don't see the numbers growing and if we don't feel like you're learning about the customer, then we can stop. Maybe I'll just say we can try it.
00:20:14
Speaker
Well, we're actually going to go full circle back to, we were talking about the benefits of podcasting versus writing blog posts. If you like nail down the processes, you were saying, Mark, like this episode might take you like 40 minutes, including finding me and prepping the questions. Um, and then obviously if you can hand everything over to an editor, et cetera, or to the marketing team, then you can get the time down for a CEO to record an episode to like 35 minutes.
00:20:40
Speaker
And so they're going to learn from the guest. Ideally, they're going to feed them feedback on the show or get a report from the marketing team about how it's doing, including like qualitative feedback. And like the Theo ideally is going to be a pretty good host because they normally know the subject matter and have good communication skills.
00:20:54
Speaker
I think that is one route to creating content for a CEO's podcast. Now, we might be jumping onto another question, but I think there's the best way to become famous in any B2B niche basically combines three things. It's very simple. Just start written posts on LinkedIn. They can have a video and image in them, and so the CEO can do this. They can get the insights from the show. Start hosting their own podcasts around the niche.
00:21:18
Speaker
And then go guest on other podcasts in the niche, do those three for six months. And that's going to like make the CEO and the business famous. Admittedly, that is going to take the CEO quite a bit of time. So where possible, we're going to hand over some of those tasks to the marketing team, like the marketing team could get the books on the other shows and marketing team can do everything for the podcast apart from the host. And by actually writing that post, the marketing team can prep the video, but the actual writing of the post, I would say it does need to be done by the CEO.
00:21:48
Speaker
On a related note in terms of understanding your customers, you talk about how organizations need to become better listeners. And I'm, as a reporter, a lot of the best information I got during an interview was simply listening and not talking, letting people fill in the pregnant pauses with information that they would never have told you otherwise because they're uncomfortable with silence. So I think that listening is an awesome thing and an awesome skill.
00:22:17
Speaker
How do you teach people to listen better? How do you make them understand that it's not about talking? Because we all love to talk. And if you ask somebody a question, they'll talk until the cows come home. But what about listening? How do we improve listening from a business perspective and even from a personal perspective? It's such a good point. And I don't know how much thought I've committed to understanding how to make people a better listener. So maybe I'll try and respond by understanding how I've become like a relatively good listener, I think. It might have been like,
00:22:48
Speaker
In my earlier career, I was starting small startups, none of them worked. But I do remember reading the Eric Rees book and the other one that inspired Eric Rees, so Celine Startup, and then the other one is called The Fourth Step to the Epiphany. And they just hammer so hard on the fact that the product should be brought out of you by the customer, it should be pulled out of you.
00:23:13
Speaker
Y Combinator say this, they basically just say make stuff people want. And so I think it was hammered into me from like the startup world and reading those two books, it becomes very clear that ultimately the gold is the thing that you're going to create that people actually want. And I got this wrong for like five years, right? So maybe I learned through the pain, but maybe I would recommend like reading those books. I'm not going to say that B2B marketing manager in a big company should go and start their company so they could start their own company so they can learn how to listen.
00:23:40
Speaker
So if, but it's exactly the same in marketing, like the messages that are going to resonate don't sit in your head. Maybe they do kind of, if you used to be the ideal customer yourself, if you used to be that buyer, but maybe you didn't. So you just need to sit down and listen to these people. So I don't know if that was a good answer, Mark. Well, I think it's a good answer. And I think what you're putting the spotlight on is the idea that if you listen to your customers.
00:24:06
Speaker
They will tell you what you need to know. They will tell you what they need to do their jobs better. They'll give you great ideas for content. They'll give you great feedback on your product. And so if you combine customer insight with listening, it's a powerful one, two punch.
00:24:24
Speaker
going back to our original discussion about podcasts, I want to ask you about SEO.
Google Algorithm Changes and Podcast SEO
00:24:31
Speaker
I listened to one of your other podcast interviews and a big focus was SEO and the role that it plays in helping you
00:24:39
Speaker
promote your own podcast and those of your clients. How has Google's recent algorithm change impacted SEO when it comes to podcast? Yeah. So my, literally the only thing I know about the new algorithm is like, well, I read on a couple of LinkedIn posts and my understanding is that it's prioritizing content that people actually want to read, like interesting content.
00:25:00
Speaker
And I kind of thought they were doing that anyway with scroll rates and click rates, et cetera. So maybe they're just honing that. And it makes total sense. And I think really for the last seven years of SEO, people have started to realize that you can't game it. And you literally have to make content that people like.
00:25:15
Speaker
The opportunity for businesses for FEO with a podcast is simply just to ensure that you are able to pull out and create a webpage or a blog post from the episode that actually adds value to people. And so this typically consists of like the embedded player, the embedded video, if you have it, the key takeaways, uh, and the transcripts and then links to the guests typically. Now that's like the standard.
00:25:42
Speaker
And if you really think about the user journey there, like somebody, I don't know, they're going to feed on social posts, they're going to click, then they're going to click on the Apple link on the player that on their phone maybe, and then they're going to subscribe and listen to it later, which is fine, but then that's not really going to help with, with FEO. So we can like brainstorm a bit on how to make that page better if we want.
00:26:02
Speaker
So the first thing we want to do is try and get some backlinks. And so what we do here, we go to the guest and be like, Hey, we made this awesome page for you. Maybe incentivize them somehow to get the link from their domain back to yours. What we've been testing is like writing a written summary of the post, giving that to the guests for them to post on their blog. And in that we'd embed a link back to ours. We typically get like a tick box when the guest is booking. Like if we write, if we write a sub, will you post on the blog and say, yes, then we'll write it. So that's the first thing. Second thing is maybe I would like take out
00:26:32
Speaker
We haven't tested this yet, but take out the embedded player or video and just link to that at the bottom of the post and then tell the story of the episode in the blog post. That's something to test. We do still recommend putting the full transcript, not if it's automated, but if it's a human review transcript, like getting that on the page, maybe with a click thing. So you click it to fully release it. That will probably help with Google as well. But to zoom out again,
00:26:59
Speaker
The way you're going to get more organic traffic is by creating information that people actually want. And so if you are able to like pull out good insights in your episode and then communicate them on a webpage on your domain, then you should be able to get organic traffic.
00:27:12
Speaker
One final question that's around fame. I described fame briefly off the top, but perhaps you can provide a more full-blown description of what fame does, who it serves, and the value that it delivers to clients. And I'm also interested in your approach to marketing these days. What kind of channels are you using? What works? What hasn't worked for you?
FAME's Services and Marketing Strategies
00:27:35
Speaker
Great. Yeah. So fame, B2B company.
00:27:38
Speaker
In one line, we started growing podcasts for B2B brands and the business started because I was head of marketing at a B2B SaaS company. We started podcasts, went really well. I left. Fortunately, they became the first client and then they're still a client today.
00:27:52
Speaker
And we've just then taken that process we built in-house and applied it to 55 different B2B businesses. Now, in terms of marketing, it's such a relevant question, Mark, because I was literally spending this week working on this. And this is like a Chris Walker thing, but I've taken all of our growth programs, I call them, and I've added them into a credit board that's like ideas, experiments, positive signals, repeatability, operationalizing scale, fully integrated.
00:28:15
Speaker
And currently we have nine on there. I'll quickly run you through them. Now, nothing is past repeatability yet, but in ideas, we have LinkedIn ads, not started there yet. In experiments, we have my podcast, still an experiment, a service led growth. So this is how we can get exposure for fame through the content we produce for clients. Well, if we get approval, we have LinkedIn organic for another one of the team is in there. Then moving to positive signals. So these are things that we started working on. We're getting good feedback from.
00:28:43
Speaker
Uh, we have a community called SaaS Marketer, biggest SaaS marketing community on Facebook that I've had for like three years. So that's in there. Uh, my LinkedIn organic is positive signals. Me being a podcast guest, how relevant here, um, is in positive signals. And then we just have two in repeatability, which is Google organic and Google paid. So those are like all of the programs and my job as CEO and CMO is like prioritizing and trying to move them through that, that Trello board.
00:29:10
Speaker
And what's your approach to paid these days? Because a lot of companies are pulling back on paid, they may not be seeing the results they want, they may not be seeing the engagement. Yeah, a ratio of paid spend to revenue, if only Google paid, so people that if they've captioned demand, people that are Googling for what we do.
00:29:30
Speaker
I have a ratio of like 1.5% and so I'm trying to push that up while still maintaining like cost per convergence they're acceptable and we're kind of hitting this limit so I wouldn't say we're scaling back if I could find a way to pay more maybe I just need to get better at Google Ads I would but I need to find someone who's going to do it with me but that's how we're doing on paid.
00:29:52
Speaker
Well, thanks, Tom, for the great insight about podcasts and lots of other topics that I'm sure people will enjoy as we bounce around from topic to topic. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a globally positive review. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. And of course, share via social media.
00:30:13
Speaker
And to learn more about how I help feed of these SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, and positioning and messaging guru, email mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.