B2B podcasts can be beneficial, but only if you focus on growing your pipeline and not just an audience.
October 08, 2025
By Rachel Smith
If you haven’t already, you or someone on your team is bound to propose starting your own podcast at least once. It can seem like everyone has a podcast these days. But you’re a B2B business. Can you really expect to see a return on your investment from starting a podcast?
A survey by Signal Hill Insights reports that 83% of senior executives reported listening to a podcast in the last week. Edison Research tells us that 74% of people listen to podcasts to learn new things. These statistics are often cited in articles about why B2B podcasting is so great. I, too, have listened to a podcast in the last week to learn something. It’s called My Favorite Murder, and I learned why arsenic poisoning is quite hard to detect. Am I saying all of the senior executives surveyed are listening to true-crime podcasts? No. But I am saying, based only on those statistics, they could be.
When you start digging, you’ll find a LOT of numbers floating around about podcasts, business podcasts in particular. But be careful, because some of those numbers, while correct, are misleading. And some of them, while correct, don’t matter at all.
There are an estimated 4.57 million podcasts worldwide. Is that true? Technically, yes. But back in 2022, when Spotify announced it had 4.4 million podcasts on its platform, Amplifi Media took a closer look. They found that 47% of podcasts produce three episodes or fewer and that only 12% of podcasts have been updated within the last 90 days.
So, what do we know about B2B podcasts specifically? Those statistics are harder to find. We know that 15% of podcast listeners have listened to a business podcast in the past 30 days (although not specifically B2B). We also know that 36% of B2B marketers are now incorporating podcasting into their content-marketing efforts.
While it’s difficult to compare B2B-podcast numbers to other podcasts, we can compare them to other forms of B2B content. While B2B video only has a 12% completion rate, B2B podcasts retain 80% of their listeners through the entirety of an episode. These numbers are impressive but don’t do a good job of telling us whether it’s worth the effort to produce B2B podcasts. Why is that so difficult to determine? Because most organizations with B2B podcasts aren’t tracking the metrics they should be.
According to B2B-podcast agency Fame, most B2B podcasts are tracking metrics like downloads and where they rank in their podcast category. While these measurements can be helpful for determining how much people enjoy listening to your podcast, they don’t give you any indication as to whether your hard work is bringing you revenue.
How many closed won deals is your B2B podcast responsible for? That’s what you really need to know. B2B podcasts are not about building an audience; they are about building your pipeline. Fame reports that, “Three years ago, CMOs could justify podcasts with ‘brand fit’ and ‘thought leadership.’ Today? CFOs want to see an influenced pipeline, sourced opportunities, and multi-touch attribution that ties podcast touchpoints to revenue.”
B2B podcasts can be extremely effective at growing your pipeline, but you have to plan strategically, measure what really matters, target very specific personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs), get your content out on the right channels, and squeeze every last bit of content you can out of each episode.
Fame puts it bluntly. “The brutal truth: without measurement, distribution, strategic content, and repurposing, your B2B podcast strategy is just expensive noise in an already deafening market.” But they also say that “companies implementing pipeline-first podcast strategies see 3x higher ROI, with attribution rates jumping from 5% to 47% of influenced deals.”
Just like true crime, comedy, or news podcasts, B2B podcasts need to be promoted on social media. But for B2B podcasts, the channels are often harder to track. Most B2B decision-making discussions are taking place on dark social. Don’t worry, dark social isn’t anything sketchy like the dark web. The term refers to social channels that aren’t trackable. Think Slack channels and private Facebook groups.
Your B2B podcast should be targeted to exactly the audience you want to end up in your funnel. Once you know who this is, think about how they are communicating with their colleagues and consuming information. Make sure you’re creating content that is easily shareable on these private social channels. As Nick Leighton, in a recent article for Forbes, says, “Content that is mobile-friendly and entertaining or sparks conversation is more likely to be shared.”
In order to make the work you do for your podcast worth it, the content created should go well beyond the podcast itself. As Fame reports, “Every B2B podcast episode contains 12+ pieces of pipeline-driving micro-content trapped inside. The companies winning at B2B podcast marketing strategy don’t just publish and pray, they systematically extract every ounce of value through strategic content multiplication.” A single podcast should provide several video clips, several LinkedIn articles, and 10–15 social posts.
I know I just explained how much intention, thought, and work need to go into creating a successful B2B podcast. While that’s true, AI makes it ridiculously easy to play around with podcast creation. Let’s say you have a fantastic blog post with so much valuable information that you want to share it with as many people as possible—even people who might not be likely to read an entire blog. Enter NotebookLM, a Google AI tool that lets you turn written content into a conversational podcast at the click of a button. Maybe you want to share this blog with a colleague who you know isn’t a big blog reader. Maybe you want to share this blog with someone who is so busy they only consume information in ways that let them multitask. Well, here is this very blog in the form of a two-minute podcast.
B2B podcasts can bring in business, but you have to develop an attribution strategy to know if it’s working. If you’re going to jump into B2B podcasting, spend time solidifying your strategy. And if you’re going to solve mysterious deaths, always suspect arsenic poisoning.
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