B2B Podcast KPIs: Which Are Most Valuable?

There are many key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be tracked to measure the success of your B2B podcast. So many, in fact, that knowing which ones to track can be overwhelming or confusing. 

B2B podcasts come in two broad categories: those by small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and those by large, enterprise companies. The priorities are usually different depending on which category you’re in, so we’ll take a look at the best KPIs to track for each.

SMB Podcast KPIs

The most important measure of success for an SMB is tracking how much revenue is generated, either directly or indirectly, from your show. Most SMB podcasts are hosted by the founder or someone directly involved in business development, and the B2B podcast is used for some level of account-based marketing (ABM).

ABM means using your show to interview existing customers, prospective customers, industry leaders and influencers. From those interviews, you can track metrics on what deals were generated, both closed deals and those still in the pipeline. 

Let's use a weekly podcast as an example. Assuming you stay on schedule and publish one show per week, that means you had 52 meaningful conversations with thought leaders and potential customers over the course of a year.

So the most important KPI in most cases is to track the number of deals and referrals that came out of those 52 conversations. If you sent out 10 proposals and closed eight of them, that’s a pretty good return on the time and expense you put into producing and promoting your podcast. 

Nurturing Long Deals

Another way we see SMBs focusing on revenue with their B2B podcast is through nurturing relationships that lead to large deals. 

If some or all of your potential customers have long sales cycles because the deals are financially large, your podcast provides great opportunities to nurture relationships with the decision-makers on those deals. Your contact with each other will be much more natural and mutually beneficial than a series of standard “just checking in” emails or phone calls. 

The very nature of deals with sales cycles of 12 to 18 months is usually that they’re large deals financially and it is more than a simple sale, it is a partnership. Many SMBs have great success by using their podcast to create a series of touchpoints with the potential customer that start to build those relationships before any deal is complete.

The prep call and the interview are just the beginning of those strategies. Many times, the interview will be the first time you meet a potential customer, and your podcast promotion efforts give you ways to build that relationship after the interview is over. 

After you publish a potential customer’s interview, you have legitimate reasons to keep the relationship growing for months on end. Obviously, you send them a link to the show when it goes live, but it is in the promotion, especially social media engagement, where you can reach out occasionally for months on end. 

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. A typical SMB podcast will make five to 10 LinkedIn posts, usually on the host’s profile, for each new episode. These posts will be spread out over months and can be reused months down the road if the subject matter is evergreen, or at least still relevant in your industry. 

Every post is an opportunity to tag your guest on LinkedIn. You have opportunities to create assets and send them to your guest for them to use for social sharing. Now multiply that with other social media platforms, and you are putting yourself top of mind with that company when they are looking to sign a deal. 

Leads Without Cold Calls

Another way to look at your B2B podcast as a revenue generator is to track the number of sales leads that come from your show. 

As your podcast grows, you’ll be building an audience of members of your industry, and this can generate leads that can be handed off to the sales team. As you grow your audience you will naturally generate more leads as more people listen to your show and they become familiar with your and your company’s offerings.

Thought Leadership

Positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry through your podcast is another KPI to track to measure the success of your show, although it is a little harder to quantify than the previous examples.

A cool thing about B2B podcasting is that the size of your audience doesn’t matter nearly as much as who is in that audience. Because B2B podcasts are by their nature very niche to specific industries, you can quickly become a thought leader, even with a small audience.

For example, you may have a niche B2B podcast that averages 100 downloads per episode. That seems like a small number of downloads when compared to big entertainment podcasts, but most or all of your 100 podcast listeners will be in your industry and interested in what you’re talking to your guests about. 

We’ve had many podcast hosts tell us they went to an industry conference and had five or 10 people approach them to say they listened to their podcast. This is a great icebreaker and can lead to relationships, deals and referrals down the road. 

Enterprise Podcast KPIs

It is much less practical to measure revenue generated directly from a B2B podcast at a large enterprise company, such as a huge SaaS company with thousands of customers. At that level, there are many other marketing streams taking place at the same time which are also generating revenue. 

But whoever is involved in the podcast — often members of the marketing team — usually need KPIs to report to upper management to justify the expense of producing a podcast. This means you have to take a different approach than SMB podcasts.

Have an Objective

Before the first guest is booked or the first interview is recorded for a new enterprise podcast, stakeholders in the show need to come up with a clearly-defined objective for the show. When  we get a new enterprise client at Content Allies, the first thing we ask is, “What is the objective for your team by starting this podcast?” 

The answers can vary wildly, but it is important to establish the objective early to drive the decision-making process. It might be a focus on lead generation, brand awareness, product adoption or establishing the host as a thought leader in your industry.

Your objective might be to align with different business organizations or departments within the company. One example is a podcast by one of our clients that focuses on HR content. They want the podcast to focus on the amazing people who work for the company and the interesting work they’re doing. Then they can use the podcast for recruiting top talent to come work for them.

Episode Objectives

Some enterprise podcasts intentionally keep the focus wide open, which is fine. If you’re going to have a more general, catch-all podcast, make sure each episode or series of episodes has a clear objective. 

Don’t make episodes just to make new episodes. For example, a company might be looking to hire top talent in AI. They can create an entire episode with their AI Machine Learning team and use it to recruit that talent. It’s not the objective of the podcast, but it is the objective of that particular episode. 

You may be launching a new product in a few months and you want to do a series of episodes on the beta testing process and how the product will make people’s lives easier. Then the marketing team can repurpose that content into marketing content and collateral to drive sales and support that product launch. 

B2B Analytics as KPIs

When people think of KPIs, they naturally think of data tracking. And the B2B data that you can collect can be valuable, but there is a lot of it so it can also be overwhelming. You need to know what is important to look for in your organization and how to filter that data out.

One example of data we can track is which companies are listening to your show. You might see that people at Walmart had 50 total listens, Microsoft had 64 and Tesla had 70 subscribers. Over time, these numbers will start to paint a picture that you can use to move the show forward.

You can take that picture and show it to your leadership team to show the value of your B2B podcast. You might be surprised by who is listening and tweak the focus of your show. It’s a great way to keep your show healthy and grow your audience. 

Advertising KPIs

You can get a treasure trove of data about your podcast through advertising, as long as you advertise on the right channels and platforms. 

At Content Allies, we have an exciting new contextual advertising platform that provides detailed data on targeted, unique listeners, and it’s a real game-changer. 

Contextual advertising means that we can target very specific and niche audiences to be exposed to your podcast, based on articles they are consuming online. For example, you might be an e-commerce podcast about drop shipping and logistics. We can target articles that are about those topics and you only pay for the number of verified listens.

Other performance metrics these campaigns can track are click-through rate, impressions and downloads. This is valuable because you can compare verified listens to downloads to see what kind of traction you’re getting. 

All this data funnels into your hosting platform, which you can use to generate B2B analytics such as geographic details, demographics, episode retention and which players (Spotify, Apple, etc.) your audience is using.

Link Tracking

Another great analytics measurement tool to monitor the health and growth of your B2B podcast is link tracking. With link tracking, you can get a clear picture of the return on investment for your advertising campaigns. At Content Allies, we use Bitly, but there are many other options available.

By creating unique snippets of code that follow user clicks to your landing page or website, you get exact metrics on how well each campaign or offer code is performing. You can do A/B testing through Google Analytics to determine which ads are the most effective and which will give you the best ROI moving forward. 

It’s a New World

Podcasting is a whole new world for most marketers, and all this can be overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking for. But like anything else, it can be learned, or you can hire a top B2B podcasting agency full of seasoned podcast veterans to do it for you. Either way, you can arm yourself with everything you need for podcast success.