This is a guest article by Todd Chambers, CEO and Founder of Upraw Media. Upraw Media is a specialist B2B SaaS PPC agency. They help ambitious SaaS teams improve paid media performance through campaign management, analytics and conversion rate optimisation, with a focus on generating measurable pipeline and revenue.
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Podcasting is often treated as a brand awareness channel. Build an audience, publish consistently, get the right people listening and trust that familiarity will pay off later.

For SaaS brands, that is only part of the opportunity. A good podcast can help you: understand what your audience cares about, create more relevant paid and organic campaigns, build useful audience segments, support nurture and remarketing, and give sales better content for conversations already happening in the pipeline.

• Understand what your audience cares about.
• Create more relevant paid and organic campaigns.
• Build useful audience segments.
• Support nurture and re-marketing.
• Give sales better content for conversations already happening in the pipeline.

The commercial value therefore goes well beyond downloads. The more useful question is what your podcast can contribute to the rest of your marketing and sales system.

Use Podcasting To Understand What Your Market Actually Cares About

A podcast gives you something many marketing channels struggle to create: sustained attention around subjects your audience has actively chosen to engage with. Over time, the pattern of that engagement can tell you a lot about the problems and ideas that matter to your market.

The podcast platforms themselves provide more useful signals than raw download counts. Apple Podcasts Analytics, for example, reports metrics including followers, listeners, engaged listeners, time listened and episode consumption. Spotify for Creators has also expanded the analytics available around how people discover and engage with individual episodes.

For a SaaS brand, the useful question is not simply whether those numbers are going up. It is what the pattern of engagement tells you about your audience.

Imagine you sell accounting software to growing businesses. Episodes about payroll, cash-flow forecasting and preparing for year-end accounts might attract very different levels of interest. Or perhaps you sell software into life sciences, where your audience responds much more strongly to conversations about laboratory data management than to broader discussions about digital transformation.

Those patterns do not tell you that somebody is ready to buy, but they do give you useful evidence about what is attracting attention from the people you want to reach.

The conversations themselves add another layer. A 45-minute discussion with a customer, practitioner or industry expert can reveal things that are difficult to find in analytics alone: how people describe a problem in their own words, which priorities are changing, where common frustrations lie and which questions keep coming up.

For a SaaS marketing team, those are valuable inputs. They can influence future content, campaign messaging, paid creative, landing pages and even the way sales talks about a particular problem.

Through Masters of SaaS, we have seen this value first-hand. Long-form conversations give you context that a dashboard cannot. The useful part is not just having another piece of content to publish, but getting closer to the way experienced people in your market actually think.

Turn Podcast Engagement Into More Useful Audience Signals

There is an important distinction between understanding your podcast audience and being able to market directly to individual listeners.

Podcast analytics are largely aggregated. You may be able to see which episodes attract followers, generate more listening time or hold attention for longer, but that does not mean a podcast platform hands you a list of identifiable people who listened to a particular episode.

Commercially, things become more interesting when podcast engagement connects with the rest of your marketing ecosystem.

Someone might discover an episode in a podcast app and later visit the corresponding page on your website. Another person might watch several clips from the same conversation on LinkedIn or YouTube. Someone else might subscribe to your newsletter after reading an article developed from an episode.

Those behaviours start to create signals you can act on.

Suppose you sell financial software and one part of your audience repeatedly engages with content about forecasting, while another is much more interested in international payments. They are showing different interests, so there is little reason to give both groups exactly the same follow-up.

Where your tracking, consent setup, audience size and advertising platforms allow it, those signals can help you build more relevant nurture and remarketing. LinkedIn Matched Audiences, for example, can build audiences from behaviours including website visits and video engagement, while Google Ads audience segments can be used to reconnect with previous website visitors.

You might create audiences around visitors to particular topic pages, segment email content according to the subjects people have engaged with, or serve a relevant case study to someone who has already spent time exploring the problem it addresses.

The point is not simply that somebody listened to a podcast. It is that their behaviour around the content can help you make the next interaction more relevant.

For SaaS teams managing limited budgets and long buying cycles, that relevance matters. Better segmentation can reduce wasted impressions, improve the quality of nurture and make your acquisition activity more efficient without demanding that every podcast listener immediately becomes a lead.

Use Podcast Engagement To Inform Paid Media

Paid campaigns usually start with a hypothesis. You believe a particular audience cares about a particular problem, so you put a message in front of them and see whether the data supports that assumption.

Podcasting can give you better raw material for those hypotheses. It is the same principle we apply to B2B SaaS paid media: understand the audience and the problem properly first, then use campaign, landing-page and pipeline data to see whether the idea holds up at scale.

Perhaps a guest explains a problem in a way that generates a strong response from your audience. A clip built around the same point then receives noticeably more engagement than your usual content, particularly among the people you want to reach.

That does not prove you have found your next winning campaign. It gives you a signal worth testing.

You could turn the underlying idea into paid social creative and see whether it continues to attract the right audience at greater scale. If it does, you might take the same message into a landing-page experiment or use it with a more specific audience segment. From there, the normal commercial questions apply: do those visitors convert, do the resulting leads look qualified, and do they progress into pipeline?

The journey might look something like:

Podcast conversation → audience response → paid test → landing-page experiment → pipeline data

The podcast does not replace proper experimentation. It can help you find better things to experiment with.

That is commercially useful because campaign ideas are no longer being generated entirely inside a planning meeting. They are informed by real conversations and by evidence of what your market is already choosing to engage with.

Use One Conversation at Different Stages of the Buying Journey

A 45-minute episode does not need somebody to consume all 45 minutes to create value. Within one conversation there may be several ideas that can help your audience at very different stages of their journey.

A short, self-contained opinion might make strong top-of-funnel creative. A deeper explanation of an industry problem could help somebody already researching the subject. A customer story could support consideration, while a detailed discussion about implementation, risk or internal buy-in might be more useful to somebody actively evaluating solutions.

Cue has explored this from the content-production side in its piece on turning long-form podcast conversations into content for LinkedIn. The commercial extension is to decide where each of those ideas can help the buyer, rather than simply how many social posts you can produce.

Imagine you sell project-management software and record an episode about why complex projects break down during cross-functional handovers. A short clip explaining the problem could introduce the issue to a new audience. A longer article might help someone diagnose it inside their own organisation, while a remarketing campaign could take the next step and explore ways of creating better visibility between teams. A relevant customer story could then show what improving that process looks like in practice.

Those assets are connected by the audience problem, not just by the fact that they all came from the same recording.

That should be the test whenever you repurpose podcast content: where could this part of the conversation genuinely help the audience next?

Give Sales Something Useful To Send

Podcasting can also create a useful bridge between marketing and sales, particularly in B2B SaaS where buyers often do a considerable amount of research before they speak to a vendor.

Research from 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report found that buyers typically made first contact with sellers well into the buying journey. It also found that the eventual winner was already on the buyer's initial shortlist in the overwhelming majority of cases.

That makes what happens before and between sales conversations commercially important.

Deals stall. Priorities change. New stakeholders appear. Projects that looked urgent in May can disappear until September. During that time, sales needs useful reasons to continue the relationship without every interaction becoming another request for a meeting.

Relevant podcast content can help.

Suppose a prospect tells your sales team that getting different departments to adopt a new workflow is one of their biggest concerns. If you have already recorded a thoughtful conversation with a customer or industry expert about that exact problem, sales has something genuinely useful to send. It does not need to be the whole episode. The relevant five-minute section might be enough.

Over time, a well-planned podcast can build a library of material around the problems, questions and objections that regularly appear in your sales process. Marketing can organise that content by subject, buyer type or stage so sales can actually find the right piece when they need it.

The commercial value comes from usefulness. A prospect is much more likely to welcome a relevant perspective on something they have already told you they care about than another generic “just checking in” email.

Support the People Who Are Not Ready To Buy Yet

For many SaaS companies, a large part of the potential market is not actively buying today. They might recognise the problem but not have budget yet, be comparing different approaches, lack the right internal sponsor or simply be months away from a point where your product becomes relevant.

Trying to push everyone towards a demo is unlikely to change that.

A podcast gives those people a lower-pressure way to stay connected to your brand around subjects they genuinely care about. Over time, they might listen to an episode, encounter a few clips in their feed, visit your website for a related article and eventually subscribe to something more directly.

That repeated engagement builds familiarity, but it also gives you opportunities to understand their interests and make later interactions more relevant. Someone who has repeatedly consumed content around one problem does not need the same nurture journey as somebody who has consistently engaged with another.

You do not need to infer somebody's entire buying journey from a handful of content interactions. The goal is simply to use the signals you have to make the next touchpoint more useful.

When the buying window eventually opens, your brand is not starting the relationship from zero. That can improve the efficiency of the wider acquisition process even if the eventual conversion is attributed to another channel.

Measure the Role the Podcast Is Actually Playing

The temptation with any marketing channel is to look for one number that tells you whether it works. Podcasting does not really give you that luxury.

Downloads alone say very little about commercial impact. At the other extreme, putting the podcast into a vague “brand” bucket and giving up on measurement is not particularly helpful either.

A better approach is to define the jobs you expect the podcast to do and then look for evidence that those jobs are happening.

Start with the audience. Are you building followers and returning listeners? Which themes consistently earn attention, and are they the themes you want your brand to be associated with? Metrics such as engaged listeners and episode consumption can help distinguish between somebody pressing play and somebody actually spending meaningful time with the content.

Then look at what happens around the podcast. Are people visiting relevant areas of your website, engaging with clips, subscribing to email or returning to consume more content on the same subject? Are those behaviours giving you useful segments for nurture or remarketing?

Further down the funnel, look at whether podcast-related content appears in real buying journeys. Are known prospects engaging with it? Is sales using it during active opportunities? Are prospects mentioning episodes or guests in sales conversations or self-reported attribution?

Finally, measure what the podcast is teaching the rest of your marketing team. Which conversations have generated campaign ideas? Which themes have become paid-media tests? Which customer problems have influenced landing-page messaging or content strategy?

None of this gives you perfect causality, and it does not need to. The objective is to build a credible picture of whether the podcast is contributing to better marketing decisions, better audience engagement and ultimately better commercial outcomes.

Build the Commercial Journey Around the Podcast

If you want podcasting to contribute beyond awareness, much of the work happens outside the recording itself.

Before launching a show, planning a new series or recording the next batch of episodes, it is worth answering a few practical questions:

1. Who in our market are we trying to engage?
2. Which problems and subjects matter most to them?
3. What do we want to learn from the conversations?
4. How will we distribute the useful parts beyond the podcast feed?
5. Where can interested people go next?
6. What signals can we realistically capture from that engagement?
7. How can those signals improve our nurture, remarketing or paid campaigns?
8. Which parts of the content might help sales?
9. What evidence would convince us the podcast is contributing commercially?

You do not need a perfect attribution model before recording episode one. You do need to think about what should happen after somebody listens.

Your podcast might cover financial management, laboratory workflows, cybersecurity, creative production, customer service or something completely different. The subject depends on your product, your customers and the market you operate in.

The commercial mechanism is much more consistent. You engage your audience around problems they care about, learn from how they respond, use those signals to make the rest of your marketing more relevant, support people who are not yet ready to buy and give sales useful material when they move closer to a decision.

Podcasting can build awareness and an audience. Both are worthwhile outcomes.

Connect that audience and the content it creates to the rest of your funnel, though, and the commercial case becomes considerably stronger.
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Here at Cue Productions we offer end-to-end podcast production services - including concept development, recording, editing, distribution, insights, and analytics. If you want our expertise to create a professional, engaging, and successful B2B podcast then book your discovery call today.‍