Why B2B Marketers Ought to Be Bullish on Podcast Advertising

Why B2B Marketers Ought to Be Bullish on Podcast Advertising

A contributed blog by Brandon Lutz of Miro

In B2B SaaS, the value of top-of-funnel and offline advertising is well-established in consumer brands like CPG, pharmaceuticals, and hospitality. However, it’s often underutilized in B2B marketing. Many B2B SaaS brands have relied heavily on performance marketing channels like search, SEO, and affiliates, which deliver immediate returns and click-based attribution. While these tactics satisfy short-term goals, they are more difficult to foster long-term brand affinity.

Long-term brand building is just as crucial in B2B. Yet, convincing executives to shift dollars away from short-term performance can feel counterintuitive.  It’s like telling a tulip farmer to stop planting flowers and plant an apple orchard instead – they’re sacrificing the consistent, annual, predictable profit in favor of something that will take years to profit from. You can see the results of paid search instantly, but brand growth isn’t as immediately visible. The reality is that only a small portion of your target audience is ready to purchase at any given moment. As Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science, notes:

“Paid search, in-store display, price promotions, special offers – all of these things catch people when they fall. But people who aren’t in the market do not see them – and most people are not in market.”

Given that B2B SaaS deal cycles can last months or even years, and many leaders misunderstand the costs and risks associated with offline advertising, it’s crucial to emphasize the value of staying top of mind before your brand is needed. But where can a B2B SaaS brand best bridge the gap between performance marketing and top-of-funnel advertising?

For me, the answer is clear: podcast advertising. Here’s why:

1.) Podcast Listenership Is Growing

Podcast listenership is steadily increasing worldwide. This audience tends to be high-income professionals, often in white-collar positions, making them highly relevant to B2B brands. Additionally, podcast listeners are engaged, with the average weekly listener consuming over six hours of content weekly,

2.) Support for Any KPI or Funnel Stage

Podcasts can be tailored to any stage of the funnel, depending on your brand’s goals. Struggling to secure buy-in for offline media? Consider running incrementality studies or geo experiments with a programmatic buy. Ready to leverage the power of third-party endorsements? Host-read ads are your go-to. It’s important to note that programmatic isn’t just for brand building, and sponsorships aren’t solely for performance. There are numerous opportunities for measurement based on your business’s capabilities and appetite, with several partners ready to help you measure brand impact.

3.) Offline But With Minimal Financial Risk

Traditional media like linear TV, OOH, and terrestrial radio offer broad reach but come with high penalties if your media needs change. Today, brands need to be nimble with media budgets and committing to annual spend can be trickier. Podcast advertising can offer strong, targeted reach like offline media without high financial risk especially with programmatic buys where you can stop spending at any point.  Additionally, audio ads are cost-effective to produce and can be deployed quickly compared to TV, OLV, or OOH, which can have high production and installation costs.

4.) You Don’t Need Millions

Contrary to popular belief, a sound podcast strategy doesn’t require millions of dollars. While entry costs may exceed what a seed-stage business is ready for, you can run a podcast experiment without breaking the bank. With a budget of $15,000 to $20,000, you can test the waters—whether by sponsoring a handful of shows for a month or running programmatic ads in select cities and measuring conversions along with signals like organic and paid branded search traffic.  The key is to ensure you have enough time to measure changes.  That may mean letting a channel run for 5-6 weeks to build up enough frequency and reach in market

5.) Context Is Key

In podcast sponsorships, the real value lies in finding the intersection of audience, product, and content. If you can sponsor shows where the content is contextually related to your product, your audience is already primed for your message. Few media types allow you to execute this strategy at scale like podcasts do.

Transitioning a B2B marketing organization’s media mix is challenging. The channels that drive growth to $1M ARR won’t be the same as those that drive $10M, $50M, or $100M ARR. As your brand scales, so should your mix of long-term brand building and broader reach tactics. Podcast advertising bridges this gap. It offers the flexibility of programmatic and more bottom-funnel tactics, with the growing engagement of an invested audience that can generate greater long-term brand awareness and consideration. Whether your brand is at $10M ARR, or surpassing $1B ARR, podcast advertising should be a core part of your strategy and especially in B2B, it’s a no brainer.

6.) Targeting Targeting Targeting

In a B2B context, targeting is always going to be a big question related to media investment; your target audiences are comparatively small.  So when broaching above the line, media wastage will be at the forefront.  True all broader media has some form of wastage, but podcast advertising has the targeting to narrow this in two different contexts:

• Programmatic -> Dynamic Insertion buys give you the freedom to select 3rd party and contextual audience criteria, in addition to more basic demographic details.  While not going to be 100% transparent in WHO you actually wind up reaching, you have much more control over who you talk to and what they look like (at least the picture their data paints them as)
  
• Host-Read -> Here is where I think the superpower of targeting really shines in programmatic.  With sponsorships, you have the ability to hone in directly on a narrow audience segment that is not possible via programmatic or other broad tactics.  To me, it’s all about the “holy trinity” of host-read:

In the “holy trinity” you have the right audience, the podcast topics/themes are contextually relevant to your product or service, and finally (and ideally) the host is familiar with YOUR product, or at the very least your category.  Focusing on evaluating shows based on this criteria can help you establish confidence that you’re reaching the right people in the right way, in a contextually relevant moment, with host familiarity helping to deliver that magic “authentic endorsement”.  A brand of dog harnesses/leashes, probably would do well for example to serve their ads on a podcast related to dog training, hosted by a trainer themselves vs on a crime podcast whose host loves cats.  

7.) Consistent, Dedicated, Repeated Listenership 

Unlike broad forms of media with less consistent consumption i.e. a monthly trade publication, podcast listeners in the US tend to be:

• Active, weekly listeners (23% of weekly podcast listeners spend 10 hours or more listening to the medium each week)
• Loyal to their hosts, subscribing to, and actively downloading shows of hosts they enjoy

What this provides is the opportunity for enhanced, consistent frequency that other forms of media do not have.  

The other benefit to this medium is that podcast listening can be an active or passive activity.  You can listen to podcasts while you commute, clean, do laundry, work, or you can actively be consuming content specifically.  This flexibility means more opportunity to have your brand come to the listener throughout their day.  We all wish B2B buyers just sat on LinkedIn, but the truth is that the buyer is still a person and they have media consumption habits like any B2C or D2C buyer.  Podcasts add an additional, unique touchpoint that digital channels don’t have.  Going to the above example in 6.) – that dog harness brand, who is sponsoring a show about dog training, hosted by a dog trainer, can be talking about that harness while someone is listening while walking their dog – it’s not going to happen all the time, but the chances of striking gold like this are possible and certainly that convergence is NOT possible on other media tactics.  

To learn more about Miro and the value that their technology provides global businesses, visit https://miro.com/.