My Turn at the Mic: Talking Thought Leadership as a Guest on the B2B Growth Podcast

My career has included coaching CEOs before interviews with business press and TV appearances, but it’s not that often that I’ve been the subject of an interview myself. As my agency’s business focus turns more and more to thought leadership, I hoped that might change. And as it turned out, my first interview in 2019 was a great venue to talk about what we do, helping B2B firms change the outcomes in their businesses through thought leadership, to an audience that might actually be able to benefit from our experience and one can hope, our services, too.

In my appearance on the B2B Growth Podcast (episode 998, available here and on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify), we talked about quite a bit in only 20 minutes:

• How thought leadership and storytelling has changed over the last 30 years. We’ve evolved from PR-based initiatives in traditional print and broadcast to today’s fractured media landscape, including media that your company can own.
• How to know that your company might need thought leadership to achieve its objectives. We talked about three specific situations: a turnaround for a brand or company, need to elevate the message to the c-suite, eroding sales and profits.
• A couple of case studies. We discussed the value of company-owned online magazines like Adobe’s CMO.com and one we built for Kodak, ChiefPackagingOfficer.com.
• The need to marry thought leadership campaigns to KPIs that matter. We’ve all seen thought leadership programs that die on the vine because their sponsors move on. If you tie your KPIs to the revenue side of the business, no one will want the campaign to end (see Kodak example above that’s survived two sales of this SaaS company).
• Our six-step methodology for thought leadership marketing. We talked about how the Content2Revenue method helps us to build campaigns that created campaigns that change the outcome in B2B markets.

It turned out that not only was it my first time as a podcast guest, but my host, Nikki Ivey was launching her career as a podcast host on that very day. We had a great interview and the resulting podcast truly encapsulates what we do at Austin Lawrence Group. I hope you’ll give it a listen. You might also want to read my post, “11 Tips to be a Great Podcast Guest,” and see how I did.

Being a podcast guest should be on every CEOs PR plan for 2019 and the foreseeable future. Why? Because there are podcasts for nearly every interest. And while the audience for many will be small, those who do listen are often quite enthusiastic in following their favorites. In early 2019, nearly 62 million people listen to podcasts weekly – and those listeners are taking in an average of seven podcasts a week all according to Edison Research.

The company that runs the B2B Growth Podcast, Sweet Fish Media, is in the podcast production business. And they really know their stuff. The whole process was seamless… and I’d recommend checking them out if you are thinking of publishing your own podcast. The service is end-to-end and provides you with everything (from a production process POV) you need to be successful.

For agencies and others who market based on their expertise, podcasting can be a fabulous lead generation tool.

Listen to the episode of the B2B Growth Podcast here.