How to get a B2B podcast in the top 10% of global podcasts | The Drum

November 5, 2024 | 10 min read

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Winning The Drum Awards for B2B in the Audio category is Mitie. Here is the award-winning case study.

How to get a B2B podcast in the top 10% of global podcasts

When we launched our brand-new series in February 2024, The Science of Service Podcast, we never anticipated it would skyrocket into the top 10% of podcasts. And yet, it’s what we achieved.

The facilities management industry has traditionally been perceived as a cost centre rather than a value contributor to organizations. However, the industry is evolving rapidly, and we saw an opportunity to differentiate Mitie through our thought-leadership content. By addressing key industry issues and trends, we wanted to showcase our expertise, shift outdated perceptions, and highlight the innovation happening within FM.

To achieve this, we wanted to shine a light on the accomplishments of our clients, focusing on how we’ve supported their ambitions and driven value in their organizations. In effect, these would be audio case studies, utilizing a podcast format to broaden our audience reach and position ourselves as thought leaders. We wanted to provide a refreshing alternative to our written content – something that suited an engaging, storytelling narrative. Although we had limited experience with audio formats or a concrete way to accurately predict if the series would be a success, we felt confident in the powerful stories that we and our customers had to share. As a result, we decided to take a leap of faith with a six-part series.

Our core objectives were to grow our brand awareness and target audiences that had proven hard to reach with our existing content. The success of the series would be measured in the number of downloads we received – and as a first-time B2B podcast, we set ourselves a target of 250 downloads per episode.

The most important differentiator for our podcast was choosing to showcase real-world changes happening within the industry, through our clients’ stories. But we didn’t just want a straightforward interview format – we wanted to get hands-on to provide the listener a fully immersive audio experience. This included visiting Lloyds Banking Group at their Halifax headquarters to witness ground source heat pumps as deep underground as The Shard is high. We scaled the rooftops of Essex County Council’s archival Record Office in Chelmsford to witness their tech-enabled solar arrays and went behind the scenes at Eurostar and The Shard to understand security on an epic scale. These stories were then backed up by industry experts and Mitie colleagues to present a full picture of the impact FM is having within organizations.

Choosing to partner with The Workplace Geeks, Chris Moriarty and Ian Ellison, was pivotal to ensuring the podcast’s success. This decision was based on their ability to balance entertainment and academia, a style that aligned with our vision for the podcast. By using their investigative approach, infused with warmth and humour, we could give a human insight into facilities management and The Science of Service from an outsider’s perspective. We felt this would attract a wider audience compared to keeping the project entirely in-house and help us to position the series as one that transcended the boundary of purely professional content.

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By using Buzzsprout, one of the leading podcast hosting platforms globally, we made our podcast available on platforms our audiences were already using day-to-day, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music. This furthered our ambition for the podcast to move beyond being a professional piece of content and into something that offered inspiration and entertainment to an audience on-the-go.

The aim was to attract listeners already familiar with us and the industry as well as those without any prior background or knowledge of FM. Our target audience included industry experts and influencers, prospective and existing customers, Mitie colleagues, and our featured clients’ organizations and audiences.

We identified multiple media channels to reach both internal and external audiences. These included:

Most of our promotion directed listeners to our bespoke landing page to access the podcast. This meant we could control the brand journey and ensure any potential customers had access to a lead generation form embedded in the page. This allowed us to capture prospective customers enquiring about the services we discussed in our episodes and see any leads that were driven directly from the podcast.

Running alongside our company-wide comms, our targeted internal promotion focused on colleagues in our Bids and Sales function. The action was for them to use the series to spark conversations as well as weaving into bids for prospective clients. We broadened the reach of our comms via our featured clients’ channels, sending account-specific emails where possible when their organization was being featured.

Our in-house design team developed a visual identity that could be applied to a comprehensive suite of 101 creative assets to promote the series. This included series and episode artwork, social cards, contributor assets, web banners, promotional adverts, and more. Their approach focused on moving away from the expectations of corporate branding – elevating from a traditional B2B style to appeal to a wider audience. This was achieved through our decision to focus the designs around stylized headshots of our contributors – a further step towards humanizing our podcast and crossing over into a wider audience appeal, as we mirrored other popular business podcasts.

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Alongside the episodes themselves, there was a huge volume of supporting content to drive our promotional campaign. A few key examples include:

Blogs: To add another dimension to the listener experience, each episode had a supporting blog that dived into the topic from a slightly different perspective. These were promoted on social media alongside the respective episode to help drive traffic to our website and measured by pageviews and dwell time.

Trailers: Video trailers were shared in advance of the upcoming episode, featuring enticing audio snippets and quotes from the contributors to generate interest. We measured the success of these by video views and social engagement.

Promotional packs: We provided promotional packs to both our contributors and our client-facing colleagues, equipping them with the information needed to initiate conversations about the topics covered in each episode.

From our objective of 250 downloads per episode, to averaging 10K per episode across the series – we created a UK-based B2B podcast which sits in the top 10% of podcasts globally.

Through our content, we aimed to shift the traditional perceptions of FM and showcase the innovation that’s adding measurable value to organizations, from cleaning and security to decarbonization and workplaces. We secured six of our clients who were willing to commit their insight and time to the project, which reflects the positive relationships we maintain with these organizations.

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Based on our limited experience with this format we had no concrete benchmarks or metrics concerning download numbers and initially set our objective at 250 downloads per episode. We smashed this target with our most popular episode being downloaded over 26,000 times… and counting.

Through our podcast hosting platform, we’ve been able to get a live and accurate view of our audience and download figures. We’ve also been able to assess how our podcast has performed against 122,955 active podcasts in their database. Based on their data, all six episodes rank in the top 10% for download performance within the first seven days post-upload, with two episodes reaching the top 5%. This is a colossal achievement for a first-time B2B podcast series.

Ready to get your work recognized on a global stage? Enter The Drum Awards today. Need more inspiration, read our Award Winning Case Studies.