B2B podcasting done right: A playbook for science marketers

Podcasting has exploded in popularity across B2C industries, but in B2B marketing, its potential remains underutilized and misunderstood. Too often, companies launch a podcast, produce a handful of episodes, and then abandon it when the download numbers don’t skyrocket overnight.

So, how can B2B companies, especially in niche industries like life sciences, make podcasting a powerful tool for thought leadership, relationship-building, and even lead generation?

To answer that, I’m joined by Jason Bradwell, founder of B2B Better and a specialist in helping companies turn podcasts into a real business asset. With over a decade of experience in B2B marketing, Jason has worked across multiple industries, refining strategies that make content not just engaging, but commercially valuable.

In this episode, we dig into:

• Why so many B2B podcasts fail and how to avoid common pitfalls
• How podcasting can fit into an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy
• What makes for a compelling B2B podcast format and branding
• Real-world case studies, including the success of Data in Biotech
• The key metrics that actually matter when measuring podcast success

If you’ve been considering launching a podcast for your brand—or want to make an existing one more impactful—this episode is packed with practical insights you can use.

🎧 Listen to this episode:

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📖 Or read the interview:

The interview below is based on the transcript of our conversation but has been edited and rearranged for conciseness and clarity.

Introduction to podcasting in B2B marketing

Can you start by telling us a bit about your background and your experience producing podcasts in B2B?

Jason Bradwell: I consider myself an audiophile today, but I haven’t always been. For 10 years, I worked in B2B marketing across various industries, predominantly in the enterprise media sector—helping leagues, teams, federations, broadcasters, and telecommunications companies build the next generation of fan engagement products. Throughout this time, I saw how effective content-driven approaches, like podcasting, could drive not just brand awareness but real business impact.

The businesses I worked for ran a predominantly sales-led go-to-market approach. As a marketer within those businesses, my job entailed defining better positioning and messaging strategies—since we were doing a lot of things for many different people—and equipping our executive team to sell better. That was predominantly done through thought leadership, which is where podcasting played a huge role.

While working for these companies, I launched several media programs—podcasts, video podcasts, webinars, and newsletters—that demonstrated tangible ROI through a strategic approach to both content and distribution. One example: we would interview members of our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) on our podcast, using it as an opportunity to build relationships with those target customers. We were also strategic in packaging and distributing that content via an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) approach.

After doing this for five years, I decided to set up my own shop. Now, we work full-time with B2B service and solution providers across various sectors, including life sciences, helping them build podcasts that drive pipeline and align with their overall marketing objectives.

How to turn podcasts into a lead pipeline

On your website, your company explains that you focus on helping B2B brands turn podcasts into pipeline. Can you explain what this means and why podcasts in B2B are so different from those in B2C?

J.B.: It’s become almost cliché in marketing circles to say, Hey, we should launch a podcast. It’s as common as a new VP of marketing wanting to rebrand the website. What we see often is B2B brands launching a podcast or a video show, doing a few episodes, seeing low download numbers, and then giving up. Ultimately, it turns into a failed vanity project because the strategy wasn’t there to begin with.

At B2B Better, we believe the problem isn’t with the medium itself but with the strategic approach brands take. There’s often not enough deep thought about both the content and its distribution. Many businesses treat podcasting as an add-on rather than integrating it deeply into their marketing stack.

When we work with clients, we take a structured approach:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are your primary messages?
• Where are you seeing success and failure in marketing?
• What are your overarching marketing objectives?

Using that information, we develop a podcast strategy that serves every stage of the customer journey. Many brands think podcasts are purely for brand awareness—top-of-funnel marketing—but we believe you can structure a podcast to serve the entire funnel. It influences branding, guest selection, content format, distribution strategies, and even how it integrates with sales and events.

B2B podcasts tend to be more educational than entertaining. However, there is a huge opportunity for brands in “boring” or misunderstood industries to break the mold and lean into edutainment. Done well, a podcast can be a company's best tool for thought leadership and demand generation.

Tips for branding a B2B podcast

When you work with a client on a new podcast, do you create a totally new branding—sometimes separate from their main brand?

J.B.: Absolutely. Every show that we work on needs its own identity, both visual and audio. Now, it's really important that we work with the client to understand what the brand identity looks like at a top level. What does your style guide say? How does your tone of voice sound, et cetera? And then we will use that information to distill it into a bespoke identity for the podcast that we're developing.

It should feel like if I'm listening to the podcast from B2B Better, it doesn't look wildly or sound wildly different from what I'd expect to see on the website or across other content formats. But yes, a big part of our work is creating that identity for the show.

Case study: CorrDyn's Data in Biotech podcast

Since 2023, you’ve been producing Data in Biotech for CorrDyn. Can you tell me more about this podcast and what you’ve learned from it?

J.B: Data in Biotech is one of the shows I’m most proud of. From the start, the host Ross Katz, the CEO, James Winegar, and I had a shared vision: positioning CorrDyn more effectively in biotech while creating something genuinely valuable for the community.

Too often, brands launch podcasts to please their executive teams rather than serve their industry. With Data in Biotech, we focused on addressing the needs of data professionals in biotech. This helped us find the right guests, ask the right questions, and distribute the content effectively.

Now, the show performs well with a defined audience. It gets shared in online communities, people mention it at events, and it plays a role in community engagement. That’s what great B2B podcasting looks like. We’ve learned that creating a show with community-driven content, rather than self-serving promotion, is the key to long-term success.

How to measure podcast success in B2B

How do you measure a podcast’s success? What are the key metrics?

J.B: Metrics are a really important part of this because podcasts are notoriously difficult to measure in terms of ROI. A couple of observations from the clients we service: downloads and views are typically seen as the gold standard metric—if downloads are high and increasing, then we’re winning. But this can be a red herring.

It can lead you to believe a show isn’t performing well when, in reality, its success depends on the context in which it operates. For example, if you’re selling deep-sea drilling equipment and launch a podcast for that niche, your total addressable audience is going to be relatively small. In that case, looking at download numbers doesn’t tell you much.

If you’re looking for just one key metric, I’d recommend consumption rate—how much of each episode is actually being listened to. I’d rather have 100 CTOs listening to my data-focused podcast and consuming 80% of the episode on average than 10,000 listeners who drop off after five minutes.

You can find consumption rate data in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube analytics, and I believe it’s a better quantitative marker for early success than pure download numbers.

Other useful metrics can be more qualitative, depending on your goals. For example, if your podcast is part of an account-based marketing strategy to move into enterprise accounts, you might run an eight-episode season and find that, by the end of it, you’ve built four to six new enterprise relationships through the guests you interviewed. If you’ve designed a follow-up strategy to nurture those relationships post-interview—moving them toward conversion—then that’s a clear success.

Another example: Marketing and sales alignment. Often, marketing and sales teams operate in silos—marketing is doing one thing, sales is doing another, and they’re not talking. A podcast can act as a unifier—if both teams collaborate on guest selection, questions to ask and how content can be repurposed for sales materials.

Then, when sales reps are at events, they can say: "Hey, check out this conversation I had with the VP of Digital over there." This strengthens internal collaboration, and you can track engagement and conversion metrics tied to that relationship-building.

So, ultimately, there’s no single “golden metric” that applies to every podcast. Success depends on:

• What you’re trying to build
• Who you’re targeting
• How you’re deploying your strategy
• Over what timeframe

All of that will determine how you should measure success.

What to consider when podcasting in the scientific community

What are the key strategies to keep in mind for someone creating a podcast in an environment where science and technology play an important role?

J.B: One, the scientific community can see through BS pretty quickly, right? Coming from a sales and marketing background, and working in the sales tech and martech spaces, I’ve noticed there's a lot of fluff and not much substance in B2B marketing and sales content. But you can kind of get away with it because everyone’s patting each other on the back, saying, This is great, go you! and keeping things upbeat all the time.

In the scientific community, though, if you put out a podcast that’s just a thinly veiled sales pitch, people will see right through it—and they’ll never tune back in. You have to be deliberate about your message and articulate it in a way that truly serves the community. You only get one shot. If you let them down, they won’t come back.

And I bring this up because some marketers will go back to their executive teams or sales teams and suggest, Hey, maybe we should start a podcast. But what they might face is pushback from leadership saying, Oh yeah, we can really push our products and services on the podcast—people are going to love it!

They're just not.

Lead with value first. The deeper you can go—depending on your audience—into technical topics while framing them in a strategic context, the better. Those episodes tend to perform very well.

And finally, the scientific community is incredibly strong. If you're interviewing guests, equipping them with the tools to promote the podcast to their network is essential. Across all the shows we work on, we see major growth when we feature a great guest with a compelling story—someone influential in their community. If it’s easy for them to share the episode once it’s live—providing clips, copy, and maybe even a blog post—it lowers the barrier for them to promote it. They don’t have to create anything themselves.

How pharma companies use podcasting for patient advocacy

I’ve seen several examples of podcasts produced by pharma companies focusing on patient advocacy. For example, Untold Stories by Argenx discusses autoimmune diseases, and Eisai has a podcast on Alzheimer’s disease. This positioning is a bit different from what you’re doing. What do you think of the strategy of using a podcast to help patients better understand their condition?

J.B: I’ll be honest—I hadn’t heard of those podcasts before you shared them with me. And as you say, it’s a bit different from what we do at B2B Better, since we work with B2B firms trying to attract a B2B audience.

But my takeaway is that what these pharma companies are doing is investing in serving the community—they're creating resources and materials that help people understand their conditions better and feel part of something bigger.

My grandmother had Alzheimer's towards the end of her life. And, you know, there were stages to it. In the early stages, she still understood what was happening, but things weren’t quite right. I know that in the early stages, she suffered from loneliness—she didn’t really understand what was happening to her.

So I imagine this kind of patient advocacy approach by pharma companies is a way of serving that community—helping people feel like they’re part of something bigger, like they have a support network. So yeah, I mean, the bottom line is—I’m all for it.

There’s also a level of education on the therapies and available treatments. So I think it definitely aligns with the idea of educating the community.

J.B Absolutely. Because, you know, we’ve all been to the doctor or the hospital—hopefully not too often—but we’ve all been there. And sometimes, you sit across from a health professional just hoping you can articulate what’s wrong and that they’ll understand and give you the right advice.

My wife is great at this. If anything’s wrong with me, our daughter, or herself, she’ll do a ton of research—not medical research, but enough so she goes in prepared, with an understanding, at least with questions. She’ll say, I heard about this, or I read about that—is this relevant to me? And that way, she can have a more thoughtful conversation about it. And I think these podcasts that you’ve highlighted play a role in that as well, as you said.

Common challenges in launching a B2B podcast

Going back to the B2B side, what are the most common challenges life science companies face when launching a podcast?

J.B: I think one of the biggest challenges is not knowing where to start.

There’s a lot of appetite for the medium, especially among marketers who understand that podcasting can play a significant role across their marketing strategy. But many don’t really know how to go from step zero to step one. That lack of understanding often leads to inertia—so they just don’t do anything.

You don’t need to work with an agency like B2B Better to get started. In terms of equipment, you don’t have to spend a huge amount of money to produce a podcast that sounds great. Spend 10% of your time thinking about production and 90% thinking about content and distribution strategy.

Ask yourself:

• What’s the premise?
• How will it stand out from other podcasts in the market? (Because you don’t want to just add to the noise.)
• How do we bring on the right guests who will help generate awareness for the show from day one?
• What kinds of thoughtful, differentiated questions should we ask?

Another thing people often overlook: Most brand-run podcasts focus too much on guests and not enough on the company’s own perspective. If you're running an interview-based show, you’ll spend 95% of the time talking to the guest—and your brand won’t have much of the spotlight. So think about incorporating a segment or engineering a moment where you can showcase your own expertise. That’s important.

All of these are common barriers for brands that believe in podcasting but aren’t quite sure where to start. But honestly, it’s not as hard as you think.

How to find the right structure and format for your podcast

Great. Is there any particular format or structure that works best for a science-focused podcast?

J.B: I think the format you choose should be determined by the goals you’re trying to achieve.

If brand awareness is the ultimate goal, then an interview-based format with influential guests in your industry is ideal. That way, when they share the episode, you gain early traction and exposure.

If the goal is more about establishing credibility as a brand—which is further down the funnel, in the consideration-to-conversion phase—you might want to adopt a narrative approach. In this format, you could still have interviews, but they would be interspersed with commentary or narration from the brand itself.

A couple of examples to illustrate this:

• On my podcast, B2B Better, we do something similar. I interview a guest for half an hour, but only about 10 minutes of that interview makes it into the final episode. The remaining 20 minutes consists of my own insights—commenting on what they’ve said and sharing industry observations.
• Another great example is the Noiser podcast, Short History Of…. It’s not science-focused, but they do hour-long, narrative-driven episodes that are interjected with short, five-minute expert segments from an academic they’ve interviewed.

Some shows work well with just the host or a group discussion format. For instance, we’re about to launch a podcast—not in the scientific sector—where four hosts from the brand have water cooler-style discussions about industry topics. The goal there is to showcase the brand’s personality by putting its people front and center.

So, when choosing a format, I’d say: go back to your goals. What are you trying to achieve? Let that guide how your show is structured.

Promoting and growing your B2B podcast

How do you promote and grow a podcast in a small B2B niche like life sciences?

Yeah, I actually think this is a concern that a lot of brands have, but it’s somewhat unnecessary. There’s always a fear that we’ll launch it, and it’ll just fall flat. But in my experience, the more niche you go, the higher the chances that your show will stick.

It’s really hard to launch a general marketing podcast because there are already so many out there. But when you look at biotech, life sciences, energy, utilities—any niche industry—the competition is far lower. That gives you a much better chance to stand out.

But to answer your question directly—how do you distribute a show?

1. Think hard about the launch.

The first 48 hours of a podcast’s life are crucial in determining how much traction it gets early on. You should be ramping up to launch day at least three to four days in advance with teasers, tagging guests, and firing on all channels—email, web, ads—building anticipation.

2. Launch with at least three episodes.

If someone listens to your first episode and loves it, they won’t want to wait a week or more for the next one. Give them something to binge on from day one.

3. Be strategic about your podcast category.

Business and marketing categories in podcast directories are extremely competitive. But positioning your podcast in a less saturated category—like news—could help boost visibility in rankings, giving you something to shout about post-launch.

4. Consistency is key.

Set a realistic publishing schedule and stick to it. If you commit to weekly episodes, but then disappear for a month, your audience will drop off.

5. Leverage your sales team.

Sales teams in B2B are often an underutilized distribution channel. Bring them into the process early so they understand the podcast’s purpose and how they can share it with their networks.

6. Use thought leadership ads, especially on LinkedIn.

You don’t need a huge budget to get traction with ads. But if you do run LinkedIn ads for a podcast, promote the posts of the people sharing it (like your host or guests), rather than just boosting the brand’s own post. That tends to get better engagement.

What kind of download numbers should you realistically expect from a podcast launch?

J.B. It comes back to my point about downloads being a bit of a red herring. But I get it—when marketers report to executives, those executives want to see a dashboard with numbers, and they want to see that number in green, with the graph going up and to the right.

I wouldn’t say there’s a strict benchmark—like, if you get above a certain number, things are great, and if you get below it, things are terrible. It depends on factors like the size of your existing audience and the total number of potential listeners in your target group.

That said, Buzzsprout provides some general benchmarks. The last time I checked:

• More than 120 downloads in the first seven days puts you in the top 50% of podcasts globally.
• More than 240 downloads puts you in the top 25%.
• More than 480 downloads puts you in the top 10%.

You can use these numbers as a guide when reporting after the first week of your podcast launch. If you can tell the exec team or stakeholders, “Hey, we’re in the top 50%, 25%, or 10%,” it gives context.

But couple that with other important metrics, like consumption rate. If your consumption rate is 85% but you only get 100 downloads, I’d still tell executives, “We should be really happy with this—we’ve got resonance, we’ve got stickiness, people care about this.” I can fix reach—give me an ad budget, and I can get you as much reach as you want. But fixing resonance is much harder. If people are dropping off after 20% of an episode, we might have to go back to the drawing board.

What if companies don’t have an ad budget?

J.B: For brands that don’t have an ad budget, there are other ways to increase reach:

• Guests: Make sure they know when the episode is going out, provide them with assets, and actively push them to share it.
• Internal team: Ensure your colleagues are aware of the podcast and commit to sharing it on their channels.
• Brand partnerships: If you already invest in trade media or events, leverage those partnerships.

I remember working at a company where we spent 10K on an email banner, and we just kept renewing it without thinking. Instead, pick up the phone and ask your trade media partner: "Hey, we’re launching this podcast. Can we align the launch with your next email blast?"

Launch is incredibly important, and on launch day (and the following days), focus all your marketing efforts on that launch. Paid is great, but if you don’t have the budget, there are still ways to drive downloads.

Emerging trends in podcasting

Are there any emerging trends in podcasting that you think companies should know about?

YouTube is becoming incredibly important. It's the second-largest search engine in the world, obviously, and they’re really pushing hard on podcasting. I believe it may have even overtaken Apple and Spotify as the number one podcasting platform of choice. So, if you're distributing a podcast, YouTube absolutely needs to be one of the channels. And ideally, it should be video.

We’re seeing a trend in podcasting where more and more brands, when talking about launching a podcast, actually have a video show in mind. The reason is that the video content can be repurposed much more effectively than an audio-only program. You can create YouTube Shorts, publish the full-length interview on your website, turn clips into ads—you can do a lot more with it.

So, if you’re launching a podcast, video-first is the way to go.

Another trend: a lot of people get hung up on production value. And sure, there’s something to be said about high-quality, polished video content—it has its place. But I don’t think that should come at the expense of sitting on something for six months before releasing it. People have a higher tolerance than you might expect for content that isn’t perfectly polished, as long as the story, message, or insight is top-class.

So, in summary, video is key, production should be as high-quality as possible, but content should also be published without excessive delays. Those are a couple of the big trends we're seeing.

Resources for aspiring podcasters

What resources do you recommend for people who want to learn more about podcasting?

J.B: I’ll shamelessly plug my own stuff first—thank you for the opportunity!

• B2B Better podcast – Great for learning about podcasting and B2B marketing in general.
• My LinkedIn office hours – Every Tuesday at 4 PM UK time, where people can ask me anything about podcasting.

Other resources:

• The book Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel: A fantastic book on storytelling. It’s in a comic book format and goes behind the scenes of This American Life and other legendary radio shows. Great for anyone interested in audio storytelling.
• Listen to more podcasts. The more you listen, the better your own show will be.

I always say: there are no truly original ideas anymore—only evolutions of existing ideas. If you listen to a fashion podcast, you might find engagement techniques that apply to a pharmaceutical podcast. If you hear something great in a life sciences show, maybe it could work in supply chain content.

So, consume as much as you can—it will make you a better creator.