3 Ways to Measure the Success of Your Video Podcast - with Kap Chatfield
We talk to many founders and B2B CEOs who want to do a video podcast to grow their company, and their first question is “what’s the ROI?”.
It’s a valid question! Podcasting is a long game, with a a considerable amount of invested time and resource, so you want to be sure it’s actually moving the needle for your organization.
In this article, learn the 3 categories of metrics you should be looking at quarterly to measure the success of your video podcast.
In this episode of B2B Podcasting, our CEO Kap Chatfield talks about the three different categories of metrics that you should be looking at with your team to assess whether or not your show is moving in a successful direction.
There are a number of reasons you may want to start a show:
- Go deep with thought leadership expertise
- Mine the gold out of subject matter experts on your team
- Scale your content output with micro videos and graphics from each episode
- PR strategy of inviting featured guests on your show
Here’s the thing: regardless of your WHY for doing a show, it’s not a one-time event. The purpose of a podcast is that you keep coming back to it weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, to build rapport with your intended audience over time.
That strategy takes TIME and RESOURCES.
So, like any good business leader, you’ll want to make sure that you’re investing in something that will pay off for your company down the line. There are 3 categories of metrics you should be looking at, and we’ll cover each one in this article. You can also watch the podcast episode for more in-depth coverage of these metrics:
- Content Performance
- Audience Growth
- Business Development
Content Performance - Not just a vanity metric!
Content performance is a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to determining the success of your podcast.
This covers multiple things:
- Number of views: how many eyes and ears are on your content?
- Engagement: people are actively viewing your content vs. passively
- Open rate: how many people actually open your marketing emails?
- Click-through rate: the rate at which people follow your CTA
When these metrics are trending up, this tells us that our message is resonating with our audience.
The purpose of a video podcast is primarily to communicate to the market about your value, vision, and product or service. When content performance is good, it means that your audience likes your content, is engaging with your content, and will keep coming back for more.
You want to win their trust, but first you have to capture their attention by creating content that’s meaningful to them. These metrics help us understand if you’re reaching a good number of people, if they’re excited to view and engage with your content, and best of all, if they’re actually going to click a call to action.
Audience Growth - Do they want more?
The second group of metrics will tell you if the message resonates so much that they want MORE. This communicates a high level of trust and rapport with the people you want to do business with.
Email subscriptions are a direct line to your audience
When people sign up for an email subscription, they’re saying that they find your content so valuable that they don’t want to miss it. This is helpful for two reasons: 1) you know you’re on the right track with your content and 2) you have better access to them through email instead of wading through the social media algorithms. Your content is going straight to their inbox.
LinkedIn is the most important place to do business for a B2B platform
LinkedIn is an essential platform for B2B companies. If people are following your personal or company page, that’s communicating “I want more content from you because what you say has value”. When your followers or audience members go up on LinkedIn, you know you’re winning trust with the audience.
Consider LinkedIn like Costco free samples. People hang around the aisles to get the free samples, but it’s only a matter of time before they convert and buy the real thing.
Private community memberships
Private community memberships, like Slack or Discord channel, are an extremely valuable way to know if you’re building trust with your audience. If they’re taking the time to go to another platform to communicate with you or other audience members, you know you’re really building deep trust and relationship.
Business Development - the Super Bowl touchdown metric
Ultimately, the biggest metric for measuring the success of your video podcast is your business development. Are you winning new business? Is your business growing?
If you’re doing a content strategy and not seeing results yet, we recommend sticking to it for at least 6 months and measuring the other metrics consistently during that time. At the end of the day, if content performance and audience growth metrics are going in the right direction, they should influence your business development.
SQO’s (sales qualified opportunities)
How many new deals are being created and put in the pipeline for your sales team to nurture?Consider putting leads from ebook downloads or newsletter sign ups in the audience growth category, as they might not be ready to buy yet.
If they sign up for a demo, schedule a discovery call, reach out to a sales rep, it’s a SQO. You can measure this by adding a “how did you hear about us” section on your form when they sign up to contact you. This is a great way to understand how your business development is attributed to your content strategies.
Win rate
Track the win rate of your SQOs: divide the number of closed-won deals by the total number of all closed deals (closed-won and closed-lost). This will give you your win rate as a percentage.
If your win rate is going up, that communicates that you’re getting really qualified people in your pipeline and that you’ve nurtured them well. When your content strategy is on point, win rate will often go up because your market is better educated about your product or service.
Time to close
As somebody enters your sales pipeline, does the time to close a deal go down? If that’s happening, you know that the SQO had already consumed a lot of your content and are sure that they want it—they’re already sold. Even if they aren’t quite ready to buy yet, but you’re enabling your sales team with your content to help close the deal.
Revenue—the most important metric
The most important metric at the end of the day is revenue. If web-sourced revenue is going up, you know your strategy is working. After that, look at how much your revenue surpasses the investment you made into the content strategy. This determines the real ROI of your thought leadership podcast.
Don’t quit a strategy too early
With all these metrics, you may not see measurable results right away. Remember—video podcasting is a long term strategy. Track content performance, audience growth, and business development for a solid six months before pivoting or giving up on your video podcast.
If you’re overwhelmed by your content strategy or don’t know where to begin, contact us today. We’re here to serve you as you create B2B video podcasts to reveal your vision to the market.
