How and why to use podcast marketing? 7 SaaS companies advise

10 min readOct 21, 2021

Hosting your own branded podcast comes with many benefits, including:

Positioning yourself as a thought leader and building your personal brand
Starting relations with guests — experts, potential customers, partners
Reaching your guest’s network and expanding your audience
Generating different formats of content from a single episode
Monetizing your podcast and generating extra revenue

But do people really listen to these podcasts? The percentage of Americans who listen to podcasts has grown from 44% in 2018 to 57% in 2021. Plus, podcast listeners are loyal and mostly listen to all or most of an episode.

Many SaaS companies have already acknowledged the growing and lasting trend of podcast marketing and launched their own podcasts. And recently I interviewed some of them asking a few essential questions:

What marketing goals are you pursuing with your podcast?
What results have you seen?
What’s the ONE most important thing to make a podcast successful?
What’s your most popular episode and why?

These 7 SaaS companies reveal their podcast marketing tips, goals, and are ready to inspire you to launch your own show.

7 SaaS companies hosting branded podcasts: Key takeaways

Our first guest’s company has seen high engagement and brand mentions on social media along with reaching tens of thousands downloads:

#1 Kendall Aldridge, Marketing Manager at OnePitch, Tool for connecting PR professionals and tech journalists

“OnePitch hosts a podcast called Coffee with a Journalist. With the podcast, we wanted to give journalists a moment to showcase themselves while also giving PR professionals tangible tips to lead stronger PR efforts.

Our goal is to continue to expand our audience and the OnePitch customer base through listenership and education.

We recently hit 33k downloads and have seen tremendous traction through social media with brand mentions since its start in 2019. We’ve also seen over an 80% increase in loyal email subscribers since inception.

Podcasting is a tremendously hard space to break into, so the most important thing is to combine entertainment and education in a way that no one else is doing. Get creative with your format, go after strong guests, and create a unique community. You have to be different to breakthrough in this space.

Our most popular episode was with Sophia Kunthara, formerly at SF Chronicle and now a reporter at Crunchbase News, back in June of 2019. She’s a force within the industry and shared her unique background with fellowships in the journalism field and discussed a plethora of tangible takeaways for PR professionals. It’s a great episode for PR professionals to learn about building relationships with journalists and the best tactics for doing so.”

Our second guest uses podcast marketing to connect with potential buyers and to support their content marketing efforts:

#2 Justin M. Nassiri, Founder and CEO, Captivate.ai Content repurposing platform

“Our podcast goal is different from most. I use my podcast, Beyond the Uniform to:

(1) create relationships with a sales prospect. It is easier to schedule a podcast interview with my target customer than it is to schedule a sales meeting. The quality of the relationship is far deeper after an interview than a demo .

(2) create a content marketing engine. Each episode produces

3–5 blog posts,
5–10 videos for LinkedIn,
3–5 Instagram Reels,
3–5 YouTube clips, and
5–10 graphics for Twitter.

I get a whole month of social media content from a single podcast episode. With this approach, I’ve closed over $20k in monthly recurring revenue in the last three months, and it’s a lot more fun than traditional sales.

The most important aspect of a podcast is guest selection. Guests should be selected for either having:

(1) unique knowledge valuable to your Ideal Customer Persona

(2) a large network of Ideal Customer Personas (ie. their sharing an episode will provide you with exposure to your target customer)

My favorite episode is the interview with Jocko Willink (author of Extreme Ownership). He has a cult following and his episode attracted a large new audience to our show.”

Our next guest talks about the importance of research prior to the podcast launch and mentions that you can grow with podcast marketing organically:

#3 Madhurima Halder, Content Specialist at Recruit CRM, Applicant Tracking System for Recruitment Agencies

“Recruit CRM started its own podcast named Recruitment Entrepreneurs back in 2020.

We had researched a lot about podcast marketing prior to its launch. Our main marketing goal as a SaaS company was to attract our guest’s audience and leverage it to help recruiters and recruitment entrepreneurs know about our product.

And since the launch, we have seen a growth in our ROI organically. We never did any sort of paid marketing with regards to our podcast and the traffic that we generate on a daily basis via these episodes is extensive.

The ONE most important thing to make a podcast successful is to be original. A podcast host plays a crucial part in its success. And Recruitment Entrepreneurs today is successful because of Sean — our CEO and host of the show. He takes it upon himself not to stick to a questionnaire and to help the guests bare open their recruitment entrepreneurial journey. Originality is always the key.

Our most popular episode was with Dandan Zhu, Founder and CEO of DG Recruit. As a company we always believe in diversity and bringing a collective global voice of recruitment entrepreneurs on our podcast.”

Our fourth guest talks about partnerships and customers that their podcast has helped them gain. Besides, he recommends being confident when approaching your potential guests and being open to discussion:

#4 Neil Thacker, Go To Market Manager at PlayBox Technology, Communication and information technology company

“Our main goal with our podcast is to create brand awareness and strengthen our ties with the broadcasting industry. We achieve this by speaking to like-minded industry experts and our own partners & collaborators. We learn a lot and have a great time doing it!

We have created some fantastic new working relationships and partnerships from our podcast. It is a hugely important tool for reaching new people and businesses — whether that be in a customer or collaborator capacity. As such, the podcast has helped us gain new business, form beneficial partnerships and expand our digital content library.

The ONE most important thing that makes a podcast successful is guest selection. Guests are the people who will help you reach new communities and audiences, if that is your goal. Don’t be afraid to reach out to potential guests, no matter how popular they might be. You would be surprised how open they can be to doing podcasts!

It’s a good idea to focus on production quality. Purchasing a decent sound setup and utilising applications like Adobe Audition will ensure you hit the ground running with your new podcast.

In our most popular episode, we speak to Gareth Jones from Host Broadcast Services (HBS). HBS is most well-known for taking on the role of being the Host Broadcaster for the FIFA World Cup tournaments. It’s a short episode and our promotion of the episode garnered a fantastic reception.

Furthermore, HBS did their part in sharing and promoting the episode amongst their employees and customers. It worked out really well and we’re very proud of that episode.”

Our next guest’s company quickly noticed how saturated the internet is with written content and decided to switch to audio content. And now podcast marketing helps the company to rank and generate leads and face less competition on Google:

#5 Paul Katzoff, CEO at WhiteCanyon Software, Cybersecurity software

“With our podcast, we are looking for unique content that goes beyond the typical tech docs, whitepapers, and case studies that are now published in large volumes.

The overuse of written material has caused Google to update their algorithm, and it is no longer a key metric. We looked at the situation and felt that to be a market leader, you must be out there in front. So we created the Data Management podcast and we use that as a means to reach a wide range of listeners interested in data management.

We’ve seen positive results both in terms of ranking on Google and getting new leads. Our web ranking has increased because of the legitimacy of the podcast and the links to/from the interviewees and organizations. And unlike Google Ads where we generate leads only when paying for ads, the podcast is a source that continually drives quality leads.

We feel the most important item to make a podcast successful is to make it ENJOYABLE. We mix important content with color — whether it’s soccer referees, school buses, you name it, we mix it in to keep it lively and a frank, honest chat. That is what people want to watch/listen to. Also, the content gets ignored if it’s too slow or boring.

Our podcast episode with Backblaze was very popular. They are a well-known manufacturer and have a very informed, passionate consumer base.”

Our next guest emphasizes the multiple benefits that podcast marketing helped their company reach and recommends having an amazing host:

#6 Liz Beechinor, President and Founder at Coefficient Marketing, B2B marketing agency

“JBKnowledge is a technology solutions company for insurance and construction businesses.

With The Content Crew podcast, we wanted to establish JBKnowledge’s CEO and consultants as thought leaders in the industry — not just solving existing challenges but talking about the future of the industry. We also wanted to align ourselves with the companies and influencers we admired in the industry by getting them on as guests.

The podcast has driven product leads, services leads, media invites, and speaking engagements since it began. It drove leads for the company but was also a revenue generator in and of itself. It was one of the first tech podcasts in the construction industry and so big construction conferences actually paid our team to come out to their event, record live and cover it!

I think the ONE most important thing to make a podcast successful is an amazing host (or in our case, three!) You can have all the fancy recording equipment and branding in the world but if your host isn’t someone people WANT to listen to and be interviewed by — no one will listen.

One of our popular episodes is the interview with Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs talking about why more people should consider working in construction trades and how people underestimate the skills and compensation you can get! He was a big name from all his TV shows and beloved in the construction industry.”

Our last guest mentions that your podcast won’t succeed if you aren’t passionate about the topics you discuss:

Listen to SaaS Boss podcast episodes for SaaS founders

#7 Nick Gallo, Co-CEO at ComplianceLine, Compliance management, hotline & sanction screening solutions

“My brother and I first came up with the idea to record a podcast that served our companies’ mission, not our lead count.

Initially, our goal was to meet and share ideas with thought leaders in our industry and grow together. Once we started, we realized that because our products also served that core mission, our buyers had a chance to see and connect with us as fellow leaders who care.

I believe the reason we have been successful is that we truly believe we are making a difference through these conversations. And we love the growth we are experiencing with our audience.

If you are hosting a podcast and your interest in your guest or topics is disingenuous, your audience will feel that and wont engage with future content.

So it’s not a coincidence that our most popular episode was with Andy Hinton, Former chief compliance officer at Google. My brother and I teamed up to interview him and we have such a strong admiration for his work that I know it came through to our audience.”

Final thoughts

Source: Freepik

Podcast marketing is an underutilized tactic for SaaS companies who want to generate leads and build trust.

I will show you how you can get started with minimal equipment required, and have well-known experts accept your interview invitations for free.

I have already guided dozens of SaaS companies through this process and host my own show — SaaS Boss. It’s for SaaS founders and helps them get actionable advice on startup challenges, remote team building and grow as successful leaders.

If you’d like to know how to launch a podcast and ways to market it, contact me.