Mandy Hornaday: Hey Tom, welcome to the Growth Activated Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Tom Hunt: My pleasure, Mandy. I'm excited. I'm excited for the discussion.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, me too. I discovered you through one of our podcast guests a few weeks ago, Gabe Lullo. His team actually, I works with you and Fame and had reached out to coordinate him as a guest. And he spoke so highly of you. And ever since then, I've been following you on LinkedIn and really actually appreciate your entrepreneurial and founder wisdom as a solopreneur over here. It's been really fun to watch.
Tom Hunt: our first shout out to Gabe. It's been a pleasure working with him. Expert podcast guest and host now. But yeah, thank you for the kind words as well.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. So Tom, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your background and how I know you tried from following your story on LinkedIn. I know you started a lot of different companies in your time and certainly landed on Fame, which is a B2B podcasting company. So we'd love to hear a little bit about that journey and how you ultimately made it stick with podcasting and why that was a space you were interested in.
Tom Hunt: Yeah, I think my approach was just to like throw loads of rubbish at the wall and see what stuck. Like I'm not very good at being strategic, but I'm quite good at doing, action. I'm moving fast. So ever since I realized that I wanted to leave my job in 2014, I set myself the goal of replacing my salary in 12 months in the, calendar year of 2014. And I did it. But ever since then, so that's now been 12 years, which we like doing loads of stuff. Like even now of Fame, just do loads of stuff.
Tom Hunt: even if I should maybe sit back and be more strategic. Now the downside of that is sometimes it can get you in trouble. Sometimes it confuses people, but the upside of that is that you learn. And so over the past 12 years, I have learned quite a lot, mainly just about selling stuff online. This is really why I am a, is a marketer. So if we, if we follow that story forward, the thing that became the, the, the baby made the most money early on.
Tom Hunt: Was this podcast agency. I think that's because of two things. A, as I mentioned, like I just got really good online marketing because I did it so much for like eight years before starting Fame. The other thing I did learn is I spent four years in management consulting. So I learned how to like run meetings, send emails, really management. And so if you're good at marketing, you're good at management, then starting a marketing agency is a logical step. So there's really eight years of prepping for starting Fame.
Tom Hunt: We started in 2019 and it started because I spent six years trying and failing so much so that I ran out of And so I had to get a job. So 2019 or 18, I was head of demand gen at a B2B SaaS company. We started a podcast. It went really well. So I left, they became the first client and then were a client for five years, churned recently. And that's essentially Fame. just, I think it's quite a good way to start a B2B company if anyone's listening. It's like.
Tom Hunt: get really good at running a process inside your business, like being employed, you both are getting paid to do R and D. And then if you can skillfully and navigate out of the company and get them to be your first client and then bonus points, and then you just copy and paste it to other clients.
Mandy Hornaday: I love that. actually, so I'm a fractional CMO. was a VP of marketing and ran growth strategy at a few different companies and became a fractional CMO. And I totally view it as like my playground. It's really fun to test new strategies, learn, sort of build a strong point of view across these different clients and then apply it to my own business, which is fun. So I think that's.
Tom Hunt: Yeah. you, so you followed a similar path to me then. you, you like it. but an interesting question that I like to ask is that obviously you could have like stage just being the VP of marketing or CMO for one brand for like decades or whatever. And they just kept doing that by jumping, but don't even companies. What was it that is that made you want to do like be fractional and have multiple clients.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, the freedom. So I, the freedom of, I guess I say that with the caveat of there's some freedom that opens up with being fractional and then there's some freedom that is almost taken away that people don't always think about. But the freedom of being, we love to travel and work abroad. So being in control of my own schedule, like I don't work Fridays. I get to set my own schedule. I choose my own clients. And if I don't enjoy, if they don't,
Mandy Hornaday: follow the same methodology of me or how they think about marketing, I get to leave. So I think the, and of course the ultimate idea of working from wherever I want is really, is really nice. So I've thought about going back in house because there would be loads of things that would be easier. But I think that for me, the opportunity and the freedom it opens up has just been a game changer.
Tom Hunt: Then the added challenge, you have those finding the clients. So that's not something you'd have to do if you're in-house.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally. And I actually took a different approach. I'm on the bench of a marketing agency who finds and finds and places fractional CMOs. So I have the benefit of not having to do my own business development. Now I do work with clients outside of them, but those clients have come to me through my presence on LinkedIn, through my previous network and referrals.
Tom Hunt: Yeah, and I, that's like a good safety net to have the marketing agency there placing you. Presumably you don't get paid as much when they place you cause they have to take a cut, but it's good. It's good to for the safety net.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. So, so Tom, I would love to hear your perspective. So you landed on, podcasting. Obviously there was a huge need in the market for it. Clients saw the value. You leaned into it. how has it evolved in the last last six years and is it still something you're going all in on or are you expanding based on how the industry is expanding and viewing podcasts? Would love your perspective on.
Mandy Hornaday: sort of what's happening in the podcasting space.
Tom Hunt: And maybe more because of luck, but I think we didn't know the timing for B2B podcasts in 2019, especially as COVID happened, more, uh, marketing budget shifted to online stuff. So we nailed the timing. What's happening in the market. More and more companies is like when we started, it would be rare for a company, a B2B company to have a podcast. And now it's rare almost for a B2B company not to have a podcast. So I would say there's more, more, uh, competition, which essentially means that.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. Yep.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm.
Tom Hunt: Your show has to be better for a more specific person in order to get their attention. So we've had to know, like when we do strategy for podcasts, we've had to try to force clients to narrow the niche to get narrow as possible early on, because that makes it easier to make it better for someone to listen to your show than someone else's. And that's how you get the early audience. So slight change in strategy at the start. If we had a company in like the sales niche, we could probably start like a sales leadership podcast and it would get listeners, but now we might have to.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay.
Tom Hunt: focus on something even more niche. In terms of what Fame does, 90 % of our revenue is just through running podcasts for B2B clients. That's always, well, it was 100 % at the start, now it's 90%. And that's always been our focus, is the one thing that we try to tweak and improve almost every day. We do have some ancillary service lines that we've added on either through acquisition or through me developing new things.
Tom Hunt: And that counts for about 10 % of revenue, but it's essentially a service where we just do the viral social clips, a service where it's much more stripped down and we just do the editing, unlimited, lower cost, and then a service where we book clients on other podcasts. So those are three bits, only 10 % of the revenue.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. And I'm curious with it almost feeling like to your point that everyone has a B2B podcast these days, like what in your mind are the prerequisites for having one? When will a podcast fail for one of your clients because they don't, maybe they don't have a strong point of view, maybe they don't have executive buy-in, where...
Mandy Hornaday: Where should marketing leaders stop and think, is this actually, if I don't have one, is this the right strategy for me?
Tom Hunt: Yeah, three, three things. First is not getting the positioning right. Podcast positioning is broken up into two areas. So the first we've already covered, which is the niche. So it needs to be as narrow as possible. The second is what we call the edge. So here's the thing a listener would tell their friends about. I'll give a quick example. My show used to be called Confessions of a B2B Entrepreneur. So B2B entrepreneurship, very clear on the niche. Probably just about narrow enough. And then the edge with the Confessions piece where I tried to.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay.
Tom Hunt: get guests to faking if they wouldn't normally share. So if a niche and an edge. So a client may come to us and want to do a show if they have sales software, they might want to just do a show about sales. We would advise them heavily against that. Or a email marketing company might want to do a company, email marketing software company might want to do a podcast about email marketing. We'd be like, We would advise them to do a podcast about open rates, for example, especially to start with, go narrow as possible.
Tom Hunt: and the edge, if you, you lay the edge over a nice, narrow niche, then it's very easy to get the listeners. So that's the first thing. The second thing is being strategic about guests. ROI from podcasts can come in the short term, typically through relationships with guests and long-term through building an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you.
Tom Hunt: With most clients, the CFO wants to see some benefit in the first six months. And it's very hard to get listening to ROI in the first six months. So what we like to do is work with our clients to just be strategic about guests. bring on guests that are an existing customer, not to talk about the work you do, but to build a relationship to secure the renewal or potential customers or potential partners so that we can show the CFO in the first six months that this, the podcast has generated one partnership, which has driven five leads.
Tom Hunt: And then that enables the business to double down to build the audience, is where the long-term, more valuable ROI comes from. And the third, then, is being consistent. So if you start with a cadence or you don't have the budget to get past six months, then it's almost wasted because you never get to the point where you can have this, when you can cultivate this group of ideal buyers that know, like, and trust you. So they come to you as they or...
Tom Hunt: They come to you when they actually need to need to buy the thing. So those are the three things that we see when clients fail.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. And do you typically see long-term success when I've, actually have a few clients that have run podcasts for the sole purpose of lead generation with bringing on their guests. They actually don't care about the audience. They don't care if they're building anything beyond having a conversation with the guest and then being able to sell to them. That's actually happened to me too, with a few podcasts I've been on. where it was, that was very obvious to me that that was the ultimate goal. Do you see.
Mandy Hornaday: Benefit and like long-term success from that strategy or is that really short-sighted with the investment of a podcast?
Tom Hunt: The, the, the Holy grail is, is building the audience that knows, likes, and trusts you. That's a much more scalable version of ROI. Cause if you're just trying to pitch guests, then you obviously limited by the amount of guests you interview. And to be fair, you could just, if you could book them, you could interview a guest every day and then interview 20 a month and then bring them into your pipeline, which I think is a valid strategy, but you just have to ensure like the guests have to have a good experience. They.
Tom Hunt: Like if they don't and they think they're just on there to be pitched, then they're not going to convert. they're the word of mouth is going to be bad about your business. So I think the best approach is to focus on the longer term ROI. EG don't jeopardize the audience growth because you're just bringing on someone to sell to them. But if someone is genuinely going to be good for audience growth of the guest and they
Tom Hunt: our existing customer, potential customer or partner, then that's just upside, right? Because you're going to build a relationship with them and then that could lead to something down the line.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Okay. So we talked about what people get wrong. what, is on the flip side, sort of the top 1%, 5%, 10 % of the clients that really get it right. What are they doing? What are they getting right?
Tom Hunt: My view on, I think having a...
Tom Hunt: Hmm, let's go with skill of the host. Well, let's do a top three and we'll put skill of the host as second. So like success modes or like the way you make the...
Tom Hunt: Basically the best clients end up building the audience that knows, likes, and trusts them. Right. And the way you do that is by creating great episodes. So I'll explain how you make great episodes. First is guests. Here's the thing that has the biggest impact on the, on the episode quality is choosing the guests that can add value to the audience, but within the framework of your podcast positioning. So you could bring on the, the best guest that exists, but then if they're not talking or if they're not creating content through the structure that you believe is going to be the most valuable for the.
Tom Hunt: listener, then it's almost a waste of time because your podcast positioning is basically a thesis that this content type with this type of guess is going to be valuable to our ideal listener. So you just have to keep executing about that, executing on that, reviewing the metrics and then learning and improving. So first is getting the guess that can add value within the framework that within the content structure that we think is going to be valuable for the customer. Second then is the skill of the host. So
Tom Hunt: There's small things you can do. Like we want to track the ratio of the host speaking versus a guest. want it to be between 20 and 30 % of the host. We want to track the host filler words. Are they using so to, match? they using like, et cetera? Are they genuinely interested and engaged in the subject matter? So we get the right guest. That's going to create content within that structure. We improve our host skill. And then if we do that, then we should start seeing the numbers go up. And then once we start seeing the numbers go up,
Tom Hunt: Then we want to just work out what's the next step in the funnel. That's going to take a listener who likes the show and bring them that one step closer to the, becoming a customer of the business is typically some kind of piece of information or some kind of offer. that doesn't cost any money. That often is in exchange for an email address that will then get them into the, into the CRM. Cause you, can't, you basically can't get someone, you can't retarget someone or, or get someone into the CRM that listens to your show on Apple Podcasts.
Tom Hunt: So we want to create those great episodes and then we want to have a seamless step, next step down the funnel to bring them into the CRM. those are the, if we see a client doing that, or if we're able to do that with a client, then typically it ends up being a success.
Mandy Hornaday: I love that. Now you'll have to rate me at the end or something or give me some feedback. But that's really helpful. one of the things that stuck out to me is with the host being such a critical part of the podcast success, do you typically find that when people are starting, let's say I work for a B2B SaaS security company,
Mandy Hornaday: should, if I'm a marketing leader or CMO that's creating a podcast, should my host be my CISO, like my cybersecurity expert, or would you choose someone that could have those conversations but maybe isn't in that seat? I guess, how do you typically help organizations identify who the right host is, since it's such a critical
Tom Hunt: Yes. Three things. So availability, do they have the time to record? Do they have the subject matter expertise and interest? So in that case, if you're a cybersecurity, VP of marketing, starting a podcast, then yeah, you'll see so, or your chief evangelist or co-founder could be a good option. And then finally is, they have the communication skills? So some chief evangelists, especially technical companies, that they may not, that this type of person may not have the...
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, yep.
Tom Hunt: the communication skills we need. And so then it could fall onto someone in sales, CS, or even the CEO. So it's com skills, subject matter expertise, fashion, trust, and then availability.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Now let's say people are listening to this and a podcast, starting a podcast sounds overwhelming. Tom, when, at what point would you suggest or recommend that someone goes all in on being featured as a featured guest on other podcasts, rather building sort of the info instead of building the infrastructure for their own podcast that they have to manage? Like how do those two strategies play together or separate in your mind?
Tom Hunt: Yeah, I think if the goal is to explore podcasting, the much easier route into this is to become a guest on shows. Especially if that person could eventually become the host of the show, because it's good to be able to practice your online communication skills. It's very easy to set up, much lower cost, and you, guess, will start to see whether...
Tom Hunt: Like you can potentially reach ideal, ideal buyer through going on another podcast. If you do 10 guests on 10 shows and you don't have anybody coming in bound saying they heard about you from a show, uh, could mean that maybe it isn't worth creating your own show. That fed one good promotional strategy for your own show is obviously to be a guest on other shows and then direct people back to your show because those people listening by definition like podcasts. And so it should be listening to your one as well.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Okay. and I guess on that note, if we talk about the investment, you, you, you did share early on, you feel like, CFOs, lot of your clients want to see the return on an investment within six months, obviously audience and follower growth takes probably a lot longer than that, I would imagine, but how would you,
Mandy Hornaday: What do you recommend to CMOs and VPs who are considering launching this? What type of investment people resourcing spend, you know, and what is sort of the return, the green flags along the way that they should be looking out for and communicating back to their team that this is working?
Tom Hunt: Yeah. So the, let's talk about the green flags first. The, the first thing you want to see is people that are not your employees saying they like the podcast. could be comments on a LinkedIn post. could be reviews on Apple Podcasts. That's the first signal that you're going in the right direction. The second signal. And so that ideally you get in the first month. The second signal, which comes from month two to two to six is.
Tom Hunt: Is the metric total downloads? And so that includes like plays on Spotify plays on Apple Podcasts views on YouTube. Is that increasing by five to 10 % a month? Cause then the theory is that people are coming back and more people are listening to the show at the same time with tracking total downloads. The other metric that we like to look at is to average consumption, which is Apple Podcasts or on YouTube is average view duration.
Tom Hunt: So is that metric longer ideally for episode six than it is for episode two? It is the content getting better every episode. So that's the next thing we want to see. And then the kind of holy grail from the listener side is having somebody come to your website and then in the form where you ask them how they found out about a C-C podcast. If that happens in the first six months, amazing.
Tom Hunt: And then the other thing, if we are being strategic about guests, it would be some kind of relation or like some kind of pipeline built through either a guest becoming a customer or a partner.
Tom Hunt: So those are the things in the first six months that we would expect to see or would like to see. And then in terms of investment, there's typically three roles. First is the host. Their investment is anywhere between one and two hours per episode. Second is what we like to call, we call it the main contact, but he's typically a marketing assistant, marketing manager, who's essentially responsible for the show. And they're probably finding guests.
Tom Hunt: prepping the host, managing the third role that I'll talk about in a second, and then doing promotion. The third role, it could be one person or it could be multiple. This is essentially, we call it the creative role, which is the person that would be creating the written assets, creating the visual design, creating the audio, the video, and the video clips. can be one person, but it also could be like part for multiple people. So once two hours of the host, which their time is typically quite expensive.
Tom Hunt: let's say one day a week from the, from the marketing manager. And then let's say six to eight hours perhaps. So maybe for the creative person. So you can assign costs to those and at a, maybe it would come out to $5,000, maybe less than that, maybe between three and $5,000 a month, depending on really the cost of the time of the host is probably the biggest variable there.
Tom Hunt: Because if it's like the, if it's a thousand-person company and it's the CEO, that time might be worth like thousand dollars an hour.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep. Yeah, that really hits home because I solo do this alone. when I started, had no idea how much time, how much time commitment it would be. So it's a lot of work. AI for me has made things a lot easier. I'm actually exploring with Claude Code right now how to automate a lot of the post-production workflow, which has been interesting. I haven't gotten it to work totally yet.
Mandy Hornaday: can't speak to the quality of the output, how are you finding, how is your team either leveraging or finding AI to make some of this easier or harder? Because I'm sure it's also creating more saturation and noise in a lot of ways.
Tom Hunt: Yeah, so we built an application called Famer.ai in 2022, I think, when ChatGPT came out to essentially, you upload the audio of the episode, and then it produces the written assets and also host coaching. So it's a big percentage, et cetera, filler words. Back then, the written assets weren't good enough. But now they're getting much closer. we have a lot of the written content automated, but obviously we have the writers slash producers review that.
Tom Hunt: because you can't put anything out in a client's name if it hasn't been reviewed by a human. We haven't yet been able to bring AI into the actual editing process in terms of actually manipulating the audio and video files, but that's probably coming, I would have thought. But it is quite good. You feed the episode, and then it can tell you what clips could be good, for example. So it can help with the post-production in that way.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Yeah. And where are you? guess one of the things that came to mind is cause video, you know, I think me personally, I'm moving towards video. was an audio only podcast and, seems like such a miss because of course I'm doing guest interviews, like with yourself on video, but do you recommend that when, when clients are starting a podcast that they always are video first and they're
Mandy Hornaday: maybe creating and optimizing for YouTube in these days or how do you sort of view, I guess, video versus audio?
Tom Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. The discovery on YouTube is better than Apple Podcasts and Spotify. EG is better to get, or it's easier to get organic views for free with YouTube. So having long form video, ideally in person as well. I see obviously it's a lot more expensive to hire a crew or to hire a studio that we do see like live recordings perform better. And then we also will get better shorts. so YouTube Shorts, et cetera, TikTok, and Reels is the other best way to get free attention for a show.
Tom Hunt: Typically, in-person recording typically performs better than remote recording, which performs better than just audio form videos.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, interesting. Any other growth tips or growth hacks while we're thinking about it? So video is a must for sure. And it sounds like doing reels and things also helps grow visibility. what else I guess is, what else would you suggest to people who want to grow their show?
Tom Hunt: Yeah, what would I say? I would say that.
Tom Hunt: posting high volumes of snippets, because you can always have your theory on what's going to perform, it's quite unpredictable what will pop off organically. so you're posting high volumes of snippets on all places that will allow you to post vertical video, and then just waiting for something to pop. And then as it does, that's when you would add a bit of ad spend, just like $50.
Tom Hunt: because if it's popping already, then you're going to get a lot more mileage from that, from the $50. so this can be done on LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts. So that's probably the most effective way to use ad spend. If you're looking to promote a show, a let's do an organic one. So there are, if every single niche, many articles that are blog articles that lists the top X podcasts.
Tom Hunt: I don't think these people know how valuable those, those rankings are. And so it's relatively easy to get featured. either just pay them a bit. You either do some kind of deal like you get the, let's say it's a company you get, you bring on their CEO as a guest on your show. If they put your show in that list or you create your own, or you do some kind of backlink exchange from your domain. And so just running a campaign to get your show in those lists. It's like a lot of upfront work, but if you are successful then.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Tom Hunt: That should be like this slow drip of new listeners to the show.
Tom Hunt: So an organic one, there are essentially thousands of articles in various niches that list top podcasts in that space. And they're relatively easy to get into. You can do some kind of deal by bringing someone from their business on your show. You can exchange backlinks. You can pay them a little bit. And if a lot of upfront work to lift.
Tom Hunt: find the and then do outreach. But then if you get that right, you get placed ideally high up in those lists, ideally with a link to the show into Apple or Spotify, YouTube, then you will just get a stream of listeners into the show. And the final organic one that people are not sure understand, which is important when you are in the positioning process for the show, e.g. what's the name of the show, what's the description. It's just like really basic SEO stuff. And so if there's a core keyword for your niche, you just want it.
Tom Hunt: to be at the start of the name. Like the first word of the podcast is the highest SEO signal in Apple and Spotify and YouTube, cetera. And so if your podcast is about SEO, just have the word SEO at the start and then have the word SEO in the description, et cetera. So like that's quite basic. But that's a paid one and that's two organic strategies.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. I've always thought about going after the best of list, I guess I didn't realize that it's as easy as maybe it actually is. So I'll definitely think about prioritizing that. certainly, I imagine, and in the research I've done, the LLMs are referencing a lot of those lists for credibility as well.
Tom Hunt: Yeah, exactly right. Especially if the list is like, ranks well on Google was published five years ago. That is going to look at us trustworthy. So getting a show in there will definitely help.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Wow. And so even if it was published five years ago, they're, they're open and willing to adding a lot of people you find are open and willing to adding new shows and
Tom Hunt: You just have to hustle, know, you just have to make the deal good enough. Like some of them, like you, you don't even have to do anything for them. You'd be like, Hey, this is a podcast. Got this many downloads, this many reviews. I feel like it deserves to be in the list. And like that might work out at one in 20 times, but then if you offer to pay someone $500, that'll work like one in two times, you know, so just have to hustle.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. Yep. Yep. fascinating. What is a good download rate for B2B podcasting? Because it seems like I would imagine that the viewership isn't nearly as high as consumer podcasts, but I'd be curious to like, is a good benchmark?
Tom Hunt: I think it depends what the company is trying to achieve. And then also on the niche of the show. Like if we have a show that's in the governance space for cybersecurity, so they're interested in cybersecurity professionals that are responsible for governance. And so I don't know, maybe there's like a thousand people of those in the US, thousand people with that role in the US.
Tom Hunt: So if they get to like a hundred downloads per episode, that's like pretty amazing. 10 % of their audience. But then we have some clients where the show is like about just sales and there's probably, I don't know, 5 million salespeople in the US so that if they, if they only had a hundred downloads per episode, then that might not be as good. So instead of like the absolute number, what we like to look at is the growth rate. And so what is a growth rate for the first six months?
Tom Hunt: we typically like to see 10 % a month. Assuming that in month one with the launch, et cetera, there's a thousand downloads, then in month two, one thousand one hundred, and then it compounds from there. I think if you launch with two thousand, if you grow at 10 % a month for the first year, then you get to around five thousand downloads a month. And so if the niche is relatively broad, then that is what we'd expect.
Tom Hunt: But if it was like the cyber security governance professionals show, then the launch might be 100. then by 12 months, it might be, I don't know what that compounds at, but it might be like 500.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting. Okay. Well, this has been fascinating. I've learned so much personally. I'm excited to try and also for my clients too. I'd love, Tom, I'd love to hear like, what is one of your favorite case studies with your clients? Where has podcasting just really exploded or provided a lot of opportunity or sort of been best in class? Is there any examples you could point to that to maybe inspire us?
Tom Hunt: Yeah, so that's one that like our biggest growth story in terms of downloads with actually a B2B2C show. So was a little bit cheating. So I won't choose that one, but essentially over about nine months, got 240,000 downloads a month, largely because of a Facebook ad post strategy. was in the root cause medicine space. And so we are really just targeting people that are interested in different types of root cause medicine. And so what we're able to do for that is
Tom Hunt: have, we bring on doctors that were experts in different types of root cause medicine. And then the promotion strategy was just focusing on that, like one or two quotes from that episode from that doctor that was like very uplifting and motivational, putting in those quote images on Instagram, actually, and then just running Meta ads to those images. And then the CTA was to listen to the episode. Spent quite a lot on ads to get to that 140,000. In terms of B2B,
Tom Hunt: What would I choose? I would probably say if I had to choose one, the show called CFO Weekly that we've been running for about four years. And they like the down, if they feel like relatively large niche, the downloads are decent, but the probably the best outcome of that is the business impact that the show has had. The business is like outsource CFO functions or.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay.
Tom Hunt: outsource accounting functions. so obviously CFOs are ideal customers. And once you get to like a critical mass of high named guests in a niche, like in the CFO world, then it's just relatively easy to find other than actually they start coming inbound to you. And so had many big CFO names and it's just now a stream of CFOs that they get to build relationships with. And they're not directly trying to close deals with guests, but they're just.
Tom Hunt: Every week they get to build a relationship with a new CFO, which is obviously great for their business. So that's a good B2B example.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, amazing, amazing. Well, thank you so much, Tom, for your time today. guess to close us up, I know you've got so many great tips for entrepreneurs and founders and marketing leaders. What would be something you'd leave us with that you wish more CMOs either paid attention to or did in their daily work?
Tom Hunt: I would say like, if you're trying to grow a podcast, actually that's the last thing you should grow. The first thing you should grow as an organic social audience. If you're the CMO, you either do it for yourself or you do it for someone in leadership. And you grow that without trying to send people off to your email list or to your podcast. And so do that for a year, maybe build the audience. And then only I would move down the funnel to email. And so I would, after that, spend a year or six months building an email list.
Tom Hunt: Again, like value only just, just adding value on specific topics. And you can drive people there from the social audience. Now that you've added enough value on that social platform. And then only then would I start the podcast. And then it's going to be very easy to go to the podcast. If you have an active social and email list. So the podcast, if the heart, hardest to grow, but we'll have the biggest impact on that audience once you've created it. And so you've actually not started the podcast stuff, start with organic social, build an email list and then start the podcast.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, I've done it. I have not done it in that way, but I going to start thinking about how I can continue. That's awesome. Well, thank you, Tom. I so appreciate your time today. Obviously, if people want to get in contact with you, is LinkedIn the best way? Should they go to Fame? Where would you encourage people to go?
Tom Hunt: Yes, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn and then I can take you to the best place.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate your time today.
Tom Hunt: Amazing. Thank you, Mandy.
