As a small business owner, you need all the help you can get to secure results and stand out from your competitors. Social media, content marketing, email marketing, and all the top marketing practices require planning and strategizing if you’re to be successful. Thankfully, the Internet is an incredible source of information, much of it completely free.
Here are the 5 best marketing and business podcasts for small business owners.
The Social Media Lab, by Agorapulse
Social media marketing seems, at first glance, quite straightforward. However, it’s an ever-changing medium, with new social networks popping up all the time and new trends taking over people’s preferences. Basically, what this means is that the things you thought worked very well, could very well mean nothing in a few months’ time, and that what used to get you amazing results last year, might not work at all this year.
Let me ask you this: how many times have you tried something on social media that should’ve worked, only to not get any results? This, unfortunately, can happen quite a bit – popular methods become outdated, and some are just not that good.
This is where the Social Media Lab comes in; the guys and gals behind Agorapulse, the popular social media management tool, started this very interesting project, where they’re investing approximately $15k every month to investigate different social media practices and methods. View them as mythbusters; they take a popular social media marketing idea and then test it to see whether it actually works or not. And sometimes, the testing leads to new discoveries, that can help you get even better results.
Although it’s a relatively new project, they’ve already performed quite a few different tests. For example, they’ve looked into a method for getting 100 new Instagram followers in 24 hours, all for free, as well as into whether posting with third party apps affects your Facebook reach in any way. I’m not going to tell you the results (they’re a bit more complex than a simple “yup, that worked”, or “nope, that didn’t”), but make sure to check out the Social Media Lab page to read their findings, or listen to the Social Media Lab podcast.
*hint* they didn’t get 100 new followers in a day, but they did find out how to get almost 400 new followers in 5 days
Entrepreneurs on fire, with John Lee Dumas
When it comes to podcasts for entrepreneurs and small business owners, you can’t go wrong with John Lee Dumas’ Entrepreneurs on Fire.
The podcast appears every day, 7 days a week, and although the episodes are quite short (around 20-30 minutes) they’re jam packed with useful advice for entrepreneurs and business owners.
Each episode features an interview with a top entrepreneur. Some of the past interviewees included Pat Flynn, Seth Godin, and Gary Vaynerchuck – and those are just a few of the over 1800 interviewed entrepreneurs.
What I love about this podcast is that you get to listen to real entrepreneurs and their journey to success; they aren’t afraid to get into the nitty-gritty of running a business, or to talk about the struggles they’ve faced along the way – and how they managed to overcome them.
It’s a great mix of entertaining, interesting, and educational – and short enough that you can easily listen to a whole episode during your commute.
The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast, with Pat Flynn
Pat Flynn is very well-known and respected in the online business/blogging world. Apart from his very successful blog, he’s also the host of one of the top podcasts for online business owners: The Smart Passive Income podcast.
Although the focus of the podcast is on creating passive income streams, there’s always amazing advice for business owners as well.
New episodes appear regularly, every week, and they feature interviews with top entrepreneurs, successful business owners, and top marketers who share their own stories and lessons learned with Pat’s audience.
The podcast covers a very wide array of subjects related to online business; you’ll get to learn how to use social media marketing to your advantage, how to make money with online courses, ebooks, and podcasting, how to optimize your website for search engines, how to build authority and trust in your business, and so much more.
The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling, with Brian Burns
The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling is a podcast with “no BS allowed” – only practical tips and advice that actually work.
I love that about this podcast; it’s not just words, but an actual focus on the things that really matter – the methods that will help you achieve better success.
The podcast is mainly for B2B businesses that want to make more sales, more efficiently. That said, in my experience, the advice and lessons learned can be very valuable to any business that deals with sales.
Although the podcast has a very clear focus, it doesn’t just cover cold calling and other popular methods; rather, it looks into all the different ways that you can sell to your audience, including advanced selling skills and strategic selling, LinkedIn and other social media, as well as sales leadership and sales management – just to name a few.
The Social Media Marketing Podcast, with Michael Stelzner
Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner is one of the top influencers in the social media marketing world. He has years’ worth of experience in social media marketing, which he shares in his aptly-named Social Media Marketing podcast.
New episodes are posted every week, and they often include interviews with big names in the industry, such as Guy Kawasaki and Joe Pulizzi.
But most importantly, they feature some of the best advice for digital marketers and business owners who use social media marketing to promote their business. Each episode focuses on one main subject, such as how to optimize your Facebook ads properly, how to get started with Messenger chatbots, and how to use Google Analytics to determine your social media ROI. With over 270 episodes already published, there’s quite a lot of valuable information to wade through.
Conclusion
There are so many good (and some not-so-good) podcasts for business owners, that it can be difficult to find a few regulars to listen to that will provide you with the most valuable information in the shortest possible amount of time, but I hope you’ll find some valuable resources in this list to help inform your business strategy and start getting better results.
So, what are you waiting for? Grab your headphones and make your commute a little more interesting, and a lot more productive.
