Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Love learning about business and how some of today’s most successful entrepreneurs and companies are operating? Business podcasts serve as a great way to stay informed (and inspired) on the happenings.
All you need is your smartphone and a pair of headphones to tune in to everything from one-on-one interviews with today’s top leaders to recaps of the day’s most pressing business news.
So whether you’re a seasoned executive looking for something to listen to during your commute or just someone who’s always itching to learn something new, this list of the best business podcasts is for you. From Kai Ryssdals’ Marketplace to Tim Ferriss’ self-titled collection of wisdom, the following seven business podcasts will teach how to strategize, lead, and grow your business. 

12 Best Business Podcasts
1. iDigress Podcast

Troy Sandidge, host of iDigress Podcast, has a track record of generating over $100M for various business ventures. He’ll use his experience to expertly guide you through the world of marketing, moving you away from confusion and towards the techniques and tools that will help you forge a path to business success. iDigress is a great fit for all marketers seeking across the board advice, from how to identify a business direction to finding clarity in your messaging. 
Episodes are 30 minutes or less, making it a great snackable podcast for on-the-go listening. 

 
2. Radical Candor

Radical Candor is all about how to succeed at work without sacrificing your humanity and happiness. Amy Sandler hosts discussions about why it’s important to have honest communication when working (with yourself, management, and coworkers), and how honesty will help you build relationships that will lift you up and help you succeed. 
Topics discussed on the podcast include how to have candid conversations at work, how managers and business leaders can create a culture of guidance and feedback, and how to stand up for yourself in the workplace. 

3. Duct Tape Marketing Podcast

Duct Tape Marketing Podcast features interviews with expert authors and thought leaders who share actionable business marketing tips and resources. As a listener, you’ll learn about various topics like how to maintain happiness at work and best-practices for retaining customers. Fast Company named this podcast “One of the Best Podcasts for Business-Savvy Listeners.”

 
4. The Goal Digger Podcast

Jenna Kutcher, host of The Goal Digger Podcast, is an experienced educator and digital marketer. Described as a live workshop, the show helps businesspeople learn first-hand about how to define their own personal success and chase after their dreams. 
Topics covered include productivity hacks, creating business pitches, improving your website’s SEO, social media tips, and how to build the job of your dreams. Kutcher is often joined by notable guests and industry experts, like entrepreneur Lori Harder.

 
5. CodePen Radio

CodePen is an online tool for web developers to test HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code snippets. Hosted by CodePen employees, CodePen Radio contains personal stories about successes and failures they’ve come across when scaling their company. It’s great for professionals in the software industry, as you’ll gain valuable insight into everything involved in starting and maintaining a web software business. 

 
6. Choose Inclusion

Three hosts, Mike Hess, Nina Baliga, and UB Ciminieri, have authentic and honest conversations about the different ways diversity, equity, and inclusion impact businesses. It’s a great listen for all professionals as they discuss everything from developing a DEI program at your own business to being an active participant in workplace events. 

 
7. The MarTech Podcast

The MarTech Podcast, hosted by Benjamin Shapiro, shares the stories of marketers and the different ways they use technology to achieve growth and business success. Each episode features a different business leader and marketing professional, making it suitable for listeners in all industries. All guests provide insight into MarTech best practices through real-life experiences and recommend tools and tips for success. 

 
8. Brown Ambition

Brown Ambition Podcast features financial advice from two professional finance reporters, Mandi Woodruff-Santos and Tiffany Aliche. Listeners can leverage the host’s experience and learn how to make smart career choices that contribute to financial success personally and in business. 
The hosts also tackle issues commonly faced by communities of color, acting as a resource for groups often left out of financial wellness conversations. They also have entire Q&A episodes dedicated to answering listener questions, helpful for those with a unique situation they want advice about. 

 
9. Happiness At Work

Happiness At Work is an interview-based podcast featuring authors, entrepreneurs, coaches, and leading industry experts that discuss, well, happiness at work. 
It is great for business professionals looking to create a better work-life balance or those simply looking to maintain their happiness levels on the job. As a listener, you’ll learn actionable tips for creating a positive and uplifting workplace culture and the benefits it brings to the workplace. The best summary of the show comes from the creators themselves — “We believe that happiness at work should be the ‘norm’ and not the exception.”

 
10. Inclusion Works

Inclusion Works focuses on discussing the importance of creating a workplace culture that is inclusive to all communities. Hosts speak to seasoned DEI business professionals, like Jiquanda Nelson and Margot Slattery, who provide actionable advice on DEI strategies that work and help businesses thrive. 

 
11. HBR IdeaCast

HBR IdeaCast is a weekly podcast that features notable leaders in business and business management. Rotating hosts give listeners a different experience, and topics range from workplace innovation and productivity to creating a better work-life balance to managing employees. Running between 20 and 30 minutes, episodes are snackable and easy to consume on-the-go, or during work breaks where you’re looking to decompress. 

 
12. TED Business

TED Business is a great podcast for high-quality snackable business content. Host Modupe Akinola talks listeners through getting a promotion, setting realistic goals, and forming positive workplace relationships. You’ll leave with actionable tips for forging your path, as, at the end of every show, Akinola gives a mini-lesson on how to apply the tips discussed within the episode. 

Ready to Listen?
Select the show that best fits your needs, and start listening from wherever you are, whenever you want.

As marketers, we become experts in our target audiences. We know their typical demographic, what they like, the platforms they spend time on, and what they value in a product.
But unlike sales reps — who talk to and learn from their biggest prospects each day — we don’t always know tiny, but crucial, details about the brands or people we most want to sell to. So, how do we bridge the gap to better help our sales teams sell to high-priority clients? The answer to this question could be account-based marketing (or ABM).
While inbound marketing is vital for pulling general audiences and demographics to your site, service, or store, account-based marketing can help you to reel in prospects or qualified leads that are most likely to buy your product.
To show you just how beneficial account-based marketing can be, while also informing you of the challenges it comes with, here are 38 stats you should know in 2021.

37 Account-Based Marketing Stats to Know in 2021
General ABM Stats

In 2021, 70% of marketers report using ABM, up 15% from 2020.

67% of brands leverage account-based marketing.
“Researching Accounts” and “Identifying Target Contacts” are the top two tactics used by marketers within an ABM model.
In 2019, the top five account-based tactics were sales development rep outreach, digital advertising, direct mail, marketing email, and events.
Additionally, marketers strongly agree that personalized content (56%) and advanced data management (43%) are keys to ABM’s success.

57% of professionals say their companies target 1,000 accounts or under with ABM.

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90% of companies say the top goal of their ABM efforts is new business generation.
Most organizations intentionally only pursue 38% of their target accounts at one time.
By 2019, 55% of marketers rated their ABM strategy as “established” compared to just 43% in 2018.

Primary tactics companies are using around ABM include identifying target contacts, creating custom content, researching accounts, and measuring results.
Companies dedicated 29% of their marketing budgets to ABM in 2019.
It’s estimated that ABM budgets saw an average increase of 41% in 2019.
The most common metric marketers use to track ABM is revenue won.

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Two other metrics marketers most commonly track to measure ABM efforts are the number of pipelines created and account engagement.
In 2019, 7% of marketers reported a decrease in dedicated headcount for ABM teams, showing that this strategy is going mainstream and being implemented within regular processes.
In 2019, 40% of the average marketing team was dedicated to ABM.
43% of companies implementing an ABM strategy are in the early stages.
57% of marketers say their organizations have implemented ABM for more than one year.

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Benefits and Challenges of ABM

Marketing and sales teams that take an ABM approach together can be up to six percent more likely to exceed their revenue goals than teams less ABM-advanced.

According to Rollworks, 87% of marketers say ABM outperforms other marketing activities.

62% of marketers say they can measure a positive impact since adopting ABM.
80% of marketers say ABM improves customer lifetime values, while 86% say it improves win rates.

One in five accounts targeted through ABM becomes considered a qualified sales opportunity.
Organizations with a strong Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — which is similar to a buyer persona — achieve 68% higher account win rates.

More than two-thirds (69%) of top-performing account-based organizations now have a dedicated account-based marketing leader.

70% of companies that started account-based initiatives in the first six months of 2019 have dedicated ABM leaders.
Companies with mature ABM strategies credit 79% of opportunities and 73% of total revenue to ABM efforts.
42% of companies that missed their account-based objectives don’t have dedicated leadership.
The most common challenge with ABM is delivering a personalized experience.
The top three challenges of implementing ABM are delivering a personalized customer experience, knowing how to choose target accounts, and knowing what content to use.

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ABM Technology

By 2021, over half of all sales phone calls will be analyzed by software.
The conversational intelligence market was estimated to grow by 3x in 2019.
Voice assistants will account for at least half of automated data entry by mid-2020.
An estimated 55% of sales data entry was eliminated by automation by 2020.

Smarketing Benefits and Challenges

The most common measurement of success for content marketing programs is Total Sales.

85% of marketers with an SLA think their marketing strategy is effective.
Only 7% of salespeople said the leads they received from marketing were very high quality.
Only 28% of salespeople said marketing was their best source of leads.

Create an Effective ABM Strategy
As a marketer, it’s important to know what makes ABM techniques successful and how they differ from other target audience marketing tactics.
Additionally, you’ll want to learn about the companies you’re interested in marketing to, similar to how you learn about a target audience. For example, before creating an ABM campaign, you’ll want to learn about the pain points of companies in your industry, company missions, and what their top decision-makers value in a product or service.
Once you discover valuable data about the accounts you’d like to market to and feel ready to create a campaign, check out our account strategy templates below.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Nike. McDonald’s. Airbnb.
What do these three brands have in common?
All three have developed a strong global presence. It’s why you hear about the Whopper in Spain, or spot Nike Jordan’s on the streets of Indonesia.
Fortunately, global marketing isn’t just for big corporations anymore — nowadays, technology has significantly shrunken the ‘cost per entry’ when it comes to developing an international brand.
With social media and search engines closing the information gap between countries, I’m willing to bet some international consumers have already stumbled across your business’ website.
But the question remains: How can you properly market and sell to international audiences? And how can you ensure product-market fit with communities outside your own?
To investigate how startups and small businesses can scale their marketing efforts for a worldwide audience, I sat down with André Barrence, Head of Google for Startups LATAM.
Keep reading to learn Barrence’s tips for how startups can effectively sell to international audiences.
Let’s dive in.

4 Tips for Globalizing Your Marketing Strategy
1. Start with an understanding of your global user.
When developing a global brand, you want to start by identifying the most important factor: To whom are you marketing?
Your user(s) might vary in preferences or lifestyle from country to country, but their challenges — and how your product can meet those challenges — will remain consistent cross-globally.
In other words, how your product can help a user in the U.S. likely mirrors how your product can help a user in Europe or Asia.
As Barrence points out, “What is always a good first solution is to start understanding who your user is, and who your user is everywhere, you know?”
Barrence adds, “I think that startups begin building a product with a specific user in-mind — and startups operate on this idea of serving on a match need, or serving some particular challenge that hasn’t been sold yet. And I think the beauty of technology is that you can basically serve the entire world at this point.”

At this stage, using highly effective analytics tools is key to ensuring you understand your global target persona.
Additionally, you’ll want to use data to determine which region(s) seem most interested in your products or services. This information will help you select a few countries for which you want to create a targeted, localized marketing strategy.
2. Figure out which stories appeal to different audiences globally.
While your product might serve the same needs across the globe, the stories you tell to highlight your product’s key benefits will vary significantly.
As Barrence puts it, “Once you’ve formed a hypothesis on who your user is and why they’re searching for your product, you’ll want to build a marketing strategy that is locally relevant, because the worst experience is when you’re trying to solve for a local need of yours, and for something you’re facing in your own country — but the product that you’re searching for is built for a different experience entirely.”
This is where it’s vital to build credibility in local regions.
Credibility, Barrence adds, is a critical component that is oftentimes forgotten in the hustle of scaling a startup. Startups are often driven by performance — such as traffic, or user acquisition — and building a brand is usually an afterthought.
This is a mistake, particularly when globalizing your business.

“Startups are great at a performance mindset,” Barrence says, “but each time you’re attempting to reach new markets, you want to make sure you’re building a brand, as well.”

Barrence adds, “Once you test a few ways to position your brand in a local market, you’ll want to start developing a more robust strategy for acquiring those users or creating stronger relationships with them.”
3. Pay attention to local flavors when taking your product to the market.
There are a few key factors Barrence encourages every startup to take into consideration before expanding into new, international markets.
First, it’s critical your marketing team understands how to position your product in a new regional space.
As Barrence told me, “It’s very hard for a startup to easily take a position in the [Latin American] market, for instance, because startups in LATAM already understand the user, and they know how to communicate with them and position themselves in the market … So ignoring the local flavors in how you take your product to the market is a big mistake.”

While he acknowledges this doesn’t have to be perfect, Barrence does tell me the bare minimum requirements when marketing to new international audiences includes:

Designing a localized version of your product — including language, user interface, and experience.
Translating your materials into the local language, and using more relevant, local examples or references in your marketing messages.
Offering support in the local language so users can access help easily when they have questions.

If you don’t have the time or resources to follow the above tips, you might want to reconsider whether it’s a good idea to globalize — since without these fundamentals, your users will have a poor user experience and your brand value will suffer.
Which leads me to my next point …
4. Know when globalizing isn’t a good idea for your business.
There are plenty of startups and small businesses that likely have untapped potential in markets outside of their native countries … but there are still others who should focus their efforts locally, at least for the time being.
So — how do you know which category your business falls into?
Ultimately, Barrence says it comes down to whether or not you have a strong foundation. As he puts it, “One big mistake startups make are scaling prematurely; and the second big mistake is ignoring the signs that you haven’t found product-market fit.”
If you try scaling prematurely, he warns, you risk compromising your existing user’s experience and the health of your entire company. So it’s better to be cautious here.
He continues, “I think testing the waters and making sure you know how to navigate not only the market, but also how to navigate your product and operations within that market, is key.”

Barrence advises, “Not having enough strong evidence for product-market fit is the potential dark side of globalizing your marketing efforts … [If that’s the case], you should focus on building a successful business within your own country first.”

As the world becomes increasingly connected, you’ll want to dive deeper into your analytics to determine whether there is already a demand for your product or service outside of the U.S. — and, if there is, how you can address that demand with fresh, localized content or even revamp your marketing messages to ensure they’re global-first.
Ultimately, the decision to globalize your marketing efforts isn’t an easy one, but it could have big pay-offs in the long run. Among other benefits, globalizing your marketing materials expands your consumer-base and provides you with more opportunities to reach — and sell — to more customers. 

It’s been several months since Apple’s iOS 14 update went into effect and the dust has begun to settle. One of the main questions has been, “How are advertisers handling the mobile tracking changes?”
Earlier this year, we talked about how this change could impact advertisers, but now, we want to follow up. Have any new strategies evolved? What have advertisers been doing to reach their target audiences?

In this post, we’ll discuss how advertisers have navigated the iOS 14 mobile tracking changes and give you a few tips on how to have continued success with social media and online advertising.

Wait, what happened with the iOS 14 update?
To summarize, at the beginning of 2021 Apple released a new update that would impact the way that advertisers reach their audience. With the iOS 14 update users needed to opt-in, or give permission, to an app to track their activity outside of the platform.
So, why were advertisers and marketers concerned? Well, a lot of ad campaigns target audiences based on their behavior online. If an app can’t track that information, ads will become less personalized, and in turn, could be less effective.
The concern for marketers was that they wouldn’t be able to deliver their ads to people based on certain activities, like if they’d visited their website, for example. This meant that ads would likely have smaller audience sizes and less accurate reporting.
Additionally, with this update advertisers are only allowed to use up to eight conversion events from a single website domain. This means if you run a campaign and track several different conversion types (like Lead, Landing Page Views, Purchase) you’ll now be capped at eight at any given time.
Now, you might be wondering, “What have advertisers been doing?” Let’s discuss it below.
How Advertisers are Navigating the iOS 14 Mobile Tracking Changes
While the iOS 14 update has made advertisers jump through some more hoops in setting up their ad campaigns (getting domain verification and aggregated event management), the update ultimately hasn’t been the death of retargeting or Facebook ads.
Of course, there have been changes. So far, it looks like more than 90% of users are opting out of data tracking. This is more than industry experts were predicting.
So, what have advertisers been doing?
1. Diversifying ad spend.
The main story of how advertisers are navigating the latest iOS tracking update is diversifying ad spend.
This means companies have shifted some ad spend that was previously allocated to Facebook to other platforms like Google because of the remarketing features and the ability to target users based on search intent.
2. Reporting Facebook success with Google Analytics.
While some money is still being used to advertise on Facebook, there are different ways of reporting.
Companies have begun using UTM parameters on their site’s URLs to generate data tracked by Facebook to Google Analytics. This means you can use Google Analytics to track some of the activity on your Facebook ad campaigns.
3. Using owned data for lookalike audiences and retargeting.
Strategies such as using lookalike audiences or retargeting an email list have continued to drive results. With privacy updates becoming a norm for the big tech companies, marketers will need to begin focusing on owned data to inform their campaigns.
With your owned data (such as an email list), you can target lookalike audiences or retarget those very people.
Keep in mind, you can still use the old method of retargeting campaigns because not all of your audience is on iOS devices. You can still use the channel as a cost-effective way to see some return on ad spend (ROAS).
4. Using other Facebook advertising options.
Besides these new ways of approaching ad campaigns, some advertisers are investing in other ways to reach audiences on Facebook.
For example, you can use the messaging objective to create a lead-generating chatbot on Facebook Messenger. There are options to retarget users who reach out to you on messenger and start conversations with new leads who click on an ad of yours.
Additionally, Facebook has another strategy that advertisers have explored: the Facebook lead ads (in-app lead form).
While using your own landing pages is definitely the preferred method, in a cookieless world, using lead forms on Facebook can help you generate leads and capture first-party data.
The iOS 14 mobile tracking changes have made Facebook ads less effective, but there are still ways for advertisers to target their audience and generate leads on the platform.