How to promote a B2B podcast

Akshay Datt

Founder of Unnati and host of Founder Thesis, a long-form interview podcast with company founders. Over 400 episodes since 2020.

Promote a B2B podcast through people your buyers already trust: the guest, your own sales team and colleagues, and YouTube, where four in ten listeners found their favourite show. Directory submissions and review drives move almost nothing. The job is getting each episode to the right few thousand people, sent by someone they listen to.

Podcast promotion is the work that puts each episode in front of the people it was made for once it is published. For a consumer show that means the public. For a B2B show it means a list of accounts, which changes almost every tactic.

Where do people discover new podcasts?

Most people find a new podcast on YouTube or through someone they know. App stores and charts come a long way behind.

The pattern is that a podcast travels from person to person. A brand account posting the episode is the weakest version of that. The guest posting it to their own network, or a salesperson sending it to one buyer with a line about why, is the strongest.

Who should promote each episode?

The guest. They chose to spend an hour with your show, their network is made of their peers, and a post from them is the personal share that most social discovery runs on. A B2B podcast with a guest every week has a new distribution channel every week, and most shows hand it nothing.

Send the guest a kit on release day, so posting takes them two minutes:

• the YouTube link and the audio link
• two or three clips of them at their sharpest, captioned, under a minute
• a quote card with their best line
• a drafted post in their voice, which they will rewrite, and that is fine

Choose guests with this in mind. A guest whose peers are your buyers promotes the show to exactly the right people. That is the guest strategy and the promotion plan in one decision.

Should a B2B podcast be on YouTube?

Yes, every full episode, recorded as video. YouTube is the podcast platform used most often by four in ten listeners, more than Spotify and Apple Podcasts combined, and it is where they find new shows. An audio-only feed misses both.

Clips are a different question. Cut from a conversation between two people the viewer has not heard of, Shorts usually draw fewer views than the full episodes they came from. Make them for the guest to post and the sales team to send. Do not count on them to grow the audience.

Do podcast reviews help with ranking?

No. Apple ranks Top Shows and Trending Episodes on listening, follows and completion rate, and says ratings and reviews are not part of that algorithm. Reviews only help indirectly, by persuading someone browsing the show page to press play.

So the ask at the end of an episode should be “follow the show”, the one listener action Apple counts. For a B2B show the charts barely matter anyway. A podcast built for a few thousand senior buyers will rarely chart, and does not need to.

How should sales and the team share episodes?

One episode at a time, one person at a time, with a reason. A salesperson who sends a prospect the episode where a peer at a similar company explains how they solved the prospect’s problem has given them something worth an hour. That is a personal recommendation, the kind most listeners act on.

Make this easy rather than hoping for it. Give the sales team a short note with every episode: who the guest is, the two minutes worth hearing with a timestamp, and the kind of account it suits. Track how often episodes get sent, because that is one of the few podcast ROI signals that ties the show to pipeline.

Employees work the same way. Skip the all-hands request to share. Ask the two or three people whose networks match the episode’s topic, by name, each time.

Does paid promotion work for a B2B podcast?

It can, when it is aimed at the accounts the show was made for. A third of the people who found a show through social media found it through sponsored content, so paid social has reach. The waste comes from aiming it at an interest category rather than a list.

LinkedIn lets advertisers upload a list of target companies and narrow it by job function and seniority, with a minimum audience of 300 members. Promote an episode’s best clip to the buyers at those accounts and the spend goes to the only listeners who matter. Podcast ad networks and listener-acquisition campaigns buy general downloads, which a B2B show has little use for.

How to promote a B2B podcast, episode by episode

Promotion is a routine that runs every release, the same way, whether the episode is strong or not.

1. Before recording, pick a guest whose peers are your buyers, and tell them you will send a promotion kit.
2. On release day, publish the full video on YouTube, the audio everywhere else, and send the guest their kit.
3. The same day, send the sales team their note: who the episode suits and the two minutes to send.
4. In the first week, put a paid clip in front of the target account list if the episode suits those buyers.
5. Every month, look at which episodes got forwarded and by whom, and book more guests like the ones whose episodes travelled.

None of it helps a show whose feed goes quiet. Promotion compounds only for a podcast that keeps publishing on schedule.

Frequently asked questions