Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter, by Media Voices. We’re heading to Newsrewired in London on Nov 27th - it’s got a fab lineup which you can check out here. Afterwards, we’re hosting Pod in a Pub, a live podcast with drinks and festive nibbles at the White Swan in Aldgate. Numbers are strictly limited so if you want to join us, grab a ticket!

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3 lessons on creating and selling B2B podcasts from Farmers Weekly

Smaller numbers of listeners shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge for B2B publishers. By focusing on the quality and engagement of that audience, and working with existing sponsors on expectations and packaging, podcasts can be a decent revenue contributor.

One common misconception when it comes to podcasts is that they are difficult to monetise without a vast audience. For some topics, that will certainly be true. Publishers with existing audiences on other platforms already have a headstart when it comes to promoting a show, but may get frustrated with revenue potential if listeners plateau.

The topic of listener numbers, and how many listens everyone else is getting, is something we’ve covered before (hint: if you’re getting more than 29 listens in the first week, you’re doing better than average). Publications should easily be able to build an audience of more than that, but even established podcasts from niche and B2B publications may find they get listens in the hundreds or thousands rather than tens of thousands.

B2B publishers have a particular advantage here: a focused audience which may be hard to reach by other means. One of the finalists for Best B2B Podcast at this year’s Publisher Podcast Awards was The Farmers Weekly Podcast, from magazine brand Farmers Weekly. The Mark Allen Group-owned title has around 23,000 subscribers and 600k monthly website users, as well as producing apps, events, awards and conferences around British agriculture and farming.

The Farmers Weekly podcast launched shortly after lockdown, and passed 1 million downloads shortly after the brand’s 90th anniversary in the summer. Daniel Smith, Managing Director of the Mark Allen Group’s Agriculture division, joined The Publisher Podcast this week to discuss creating a podcast for farmers going about their day’s work, where it fits in terms of subscriber acquisition, and their monetisation strategy.

Smith gave some helpful advice in the episode for B2B publishers looking to launch podcasts or improve monetisation on existing podcasts. Here are three of the biggest lessons he’s learned from four years of the Farmers Weekly Podcast.

1: Collaborate with existing sponsors

Publishers have a huge advantage when it comes to launching and monetising podcasts that many independent podcasts don’t have: they already have existing relationships with sponsors.

Smith explained that they went to their best existing sponsors for Farmers Weekly, and the ones they had the strongest relationships with, to take a collaborative approach to launching the Farmers Weekly Podcast. “We wanted it to work for them, so they had input into the discussion of what that sponsorship package looks like,” he said. “That has really helped with those customers, and creating a proposition that is saleable and has flexibility as we approach other businesses.”

The team initially worked with three sponsors to define what the proposition needed to look like to make it valuable from a buyer’s perspective. They then had the benefit of having commercial support for the podcast’s launch.

Smith said that bundling the episodes into series - although a common sales tactic - was what sponsors found most convenient. They settled on offering six week ‘series’ with a variety of different advert lengths within the podcast itself. The Farmers Weekly podcast runs two to three sponsor messages concurrently in each episode, with advert lengths ranging from 20 seconds to 1 minute.

Monetising through ads may not work for all sponsors or publications; branded content and native episodes may offer more value for both sides. But opening up the conversation with what your best sponsors are likely to buy is a good way to get them on-side and will help shape a proposition that’s appealing to others.

2: Upsell ad production

For B2B publishers looking at podcast ads for monetisation, dynamically-inserted ads are unlikely to bring much of a return, especially for smaller audiences. However, there’s a place for ‘baked in’ ads when the audience is valued appropriately.

In Smith’s experience, one factor holding some companies back from sponsoring the Farmers Weekly Podcast was a lack of audio production know-how. Whereas most marketing teams have visual assets ready or easily modified for various purposes, having a 30 second piece of audio suitable for a podcast advert is much less likely.

As Farmers Weekly don’t yet do host-read ads, Smith said that having a creative department on-hand to be able to upsell audio ad production has helped get key sponsors over the line. 

“It makes [podcast advertising] as simple as possible to purchase, trying to overcome that lack of production expertise,” he noted. They are able to offer their own support with a reasonably basic in-house production offering to make it an easier purchase.

Importantly for clients, Smith emphasised that the advert doesn’t have to be perfect.  “The authenticity of having someone from that business talking about a product or service that they offer… people are much more inclined to engage with something that’s really authentic than something that’s perfectly produced and polished,” he explained.

3: Focus on the frequency of interaction

One of Smith’s biggest learning curves has been in demonstrating the value of the podcast and telling a story around why companies should sponsor the podcast. Where they have seen success is emphasising the frequency of interaction with the brand, rather than focusing on topline numbers.

“We might have 5,000 downloads per episode each week, but we know that a certain proportion of those listeners are listening every week, they’re really engaged, they’re listening to the whole episode,” Smith explained. “So we try to use those metrics to build up a story that frequency of interaction with your brand is much more likely to give you a positive outcome when that person - that listener - comes to make their next purchasing decision.”

Smith pointed to the example of one advertiser, tractor manufacturer Massey Ferguson. “Making a purchase of a tractor is not a quick decision,” he noted, saying that it’s a big investment for a farmer. “For those types of businesses, [it’s appealing to have] multiple touchpoints - viewability or listenability - with the brand being front and centre, so when that next decision needs to be made on machinery, that it’s their brand that’s thought of.”

One mistake I see publishers make a lot is expecting listener numbers to be in a similar ballpark to website traffic. Smith pointed out that on Farmers Weekly, pieces can sometimes get huge traction with a wider audience, for example writing about Jeremy Clarkson. But the podcast listeners who come back with any frequency are a core audience who are likely to have an interest in and knowledge of farming.

He acknowledged that these aren’t easy conversations to have with a sponsor, when trying to convince them to part with thousands of pounds to sponsor a podcast. 

For Farmers Weekly, the reality is that many of their clients are selling services and products that are complex decisions to make. “They’re not going to get an immediate return of someone saying, ‘Oh I heard your ad on the podcast,’” Smith noted. It’s something his sales team are well acquainted with dealing with however, as print advertising has similar challenges.

For B2B publishers, podcasts are less likely to bring in high listener numbers than publishers with a wider audience. But that’s not to say podcasts can’t be highly profitable, if the right listeners are cultivated.

Studies have found that few publishers convert more than 10% of their audience to paying subscribers. But mitigating churn and fostering retention is challenging in today’s landscape. So what are media and publishing companies to do?

Find out what the leading causes of subscriber churn are, why first-party data is the key to growth and profitability, and what strategies you can employ to retain subscribers and reduce churn in BlueConic’s free resource, A Publisher’s Guide to Mitigating Churn and Increasing Subscriber Retention.

More good reads from the week: