I am an avid podcast listener. I love a good marketing podcast, particularly when it crosses over into content marketing.
Podcasts, in general, are a growing phenomenon. On the supply side, the latest data shows there are roughly 1 million podcast series and some 30 million episodes.
On the demand side, listenership continues to grow as well. About 51% of the US population has listened to a podcast. Podcasting is one of the content marketing trends for next year.
If you’re looking to learn or be entertained, podcasts are a great way to fill lost time. For instance, you can’t read a book while walking or driving to work, but you can easily listen to a podcast.
In any case, there is no shortage of podcasts nowadays, and many of them are wonderful for catching up on the wonderful world of content marketing.
The success of an actionable marketing podcast is largely dependent on the podcast content.
Be wary, though. Podcasts that focus on broad marketing topics might not be what you’re looking for. Podcasts with a broad focus will often just recycle platitudes and never really offer tangible, step by step insights that you can implement.
A good podcast episode wouldn’t cover broad, vague marketing topics. Instead, it’d focus on actionable tips for successfully implementing an effective content marketing strategy.
This blog post will cover my favorite content marketing podcasts from many different angles:
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First off, let’s cover the content marketing podcasts that focus on the craft of writing, the art of blogging, and the science of blog growth.
One of my favorite creators and thought leaders in the content marketing space in Jay Acunzo, and this is his podcast. In it, he riffs on best practices and why they’re not always the best route to success (and often, they’re not best practice at all).
While most of the themes touch broadly on content marketing, the podcast covers unconventional thinking in business more generally. It’s a great way to get out of the echo chamber of hollow advice and to put on your thinking cap when it comes to strategic business growth and content creation.
Jay Acunzo is a great original thinker, and his podcast will give you great inbound marketing tips and help you think similarly.
Great episodes to check out:
SEO and content marketing are so intertwined that sometimes it’s hard to decouple them completely. Experts on the Wire is an SEO-heavy podcast, but it still touches on many important content creation, conversion optimization, and strategy topics.
Dan Shure is the host, and while he riffs on many original ideas, he also gets top tier guests in the field of digital marketing. They cover a wide range of backgrounds as well. Some are in-house SEOs at big enterprises, and some are freelancers or agency owners who help clients build their content and SEO programs.
Overall, it’s one of the more entertaining content marketing podcasts. Dan Shure is a great host and keeps the audio content interesting. It’s also super educational with plenty of marketing tips.
Great episodes to check out:
The Long Game podcast is a unique spin on content marketing.
Hosted by Alex Birkett, Allie Decker, and David Khim, the team conducts long form interviews with practitioners in the content marketing field.
The conversations range widely, from freelance writing to building content teams to conversion optimization and more.
At the heart of the interviews is the goal to learn about the underlying mental models, frameworks, and principles that drive the guest’s thinking.
In this way, it goes slightly deeper than the tactics of today and tries to tease out “the long game” of the experts. They also periodically do “kitchen side” episodes where the hosts debate among themselves different ideas in the content marketing world. Great episodes to check out:
Listen on Apple Podcasts / Spotify
Marketing School, hosted by Neil Patel and Eric Siu, offers bite-sized marketing tips and wisdom that is super actionable and easily digestible.
If you’re looking for a marketing podcast with smart insights and actionable takeaways, most of them focused in some way or another on SEO and content marketing, then this is the podcast for you.
Of course, they cover more than just content marketing. They walk into areas like sales, analytics, marketing strategy, social media and general business growth. Both Eric and Neil are considered some of the top names in content marketing, and as such, I think this one a must-listen content marketing podcast.
Great episodes to check out:
Have you ever wondered how thought leaders in digital marketing like Larry Kim, Jeff Baker, Rand Fishkin, and others found their success?
The Marketing Growth Podcast hosted by Shane Barker is the place to find out.
On each episode, Shane interviews renowned marketers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in the digital space. He seeks to find out how they transitioned into entrepreneurship and marketing, what challenges they faced, and the lessons they learned.
Most importantly, Shane finds out which strategies, tricks, hacks, resources, and tools they use to succeed in content marketing, influencer marketing, SEO, and more.
Great episodes to check out:
Copyblogger, now under the broader umbrella of Rainmaker Digital, is one of the leading publications in the content marketing spaces. They’ve always been a great resource, particularly in the tactical motions of copywriting, storytelling, and building a great blog.
Their podcast, Rainmaker FM, follows this trend. They dive deep into each marketing topic they explore and also feature interesting guests who are doing the work and getting results.
Great episodes to check out:
Amy Porterfield is another very well-known name in content marketing, and her podcast is a phenomenal resource for digital marketing.
It brings you expert interviews, mini execution plans, and intimate behind-the-scenes secrets from her biggest launches. All of this is super actionable, and the podcast is an enjoyable listen as well (I find some marketing podcasts to be a bit dry, but this one keeps my attention well).
Great episodes to check out:
Creative Class, hosted by Paul Jarvis and Kaleigh Moore, covers things from the freelancer angle. In it, the hosts share their experiences, expertise, and ideas about the business of freelancing. Each episode is 15–20 minutes long and is quite actionable.
While this podcast is uber-focused on the freelancer side of things, I put it squarely in the content marketing podcasts because it pertains to many content marketers. First, many content marketers work fully freelance, but even if you’re in-house, it’s likely that now or in the future you’ll do some sort of freelancing. This podcast will help you do it right.
Even if you yourself never freelance, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll hire a freelance content marketer, and this will give you useful insights from the other side.
Great episodes to check out:
The Blog Millionaire, as it sounds like, helps you learn how to blog effectively and make more money from your efforts.
Clearly, this is very important if you run your own shop – whether you freelance, own a business, sell books, sell courses, whatever. But it’s also an interesting podcast if you’re in-house, as it covers lessons to make any content marketing or inbound marketing machine more effective.
It’s more focused on the information product marketing crowd, but you can learn a ton from these folks no matter what industry you’re in.
Great episodes to check out:
The folks at Digital Marketer are a great resource for anyone in online marketing. Still, I find them particularly interesting on the topics of marketing strategy, content marketing, and business growth.
This podcast covers those topics heavily, but also expands beyond to other areas of digital marketing too. These topics include social media, paid ads (Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube specifically), and SEO as well.
The hosts are great, and I frankly just trust what they’re saying because they’re doers – they put into action what they talk about, it’s not just idle thought leadership. Also, they have a great and diverse collection of guests they interview.
Great episodes to check out:
ProBlogger is, again, one of the original and earliest voices in this space. Their blog was formative in my understanding of blogging, particularly on the business side of things.
They still offer one of the best job boards for finding blogging jobs and also for finding good freelance bloggers.
It caters a bit more towards the solo-blogger, but again, you can learn a ton no matter where you work or what size company you work at.
Great episodes to check out:
Copy Weekly by Codeless is a “bullshit-free content marketing podcast” that gets straight to the point with the best content marketing strategies and tips.
The podcast features interviews with industry leaders entrenched in content marketing at major companies like Kinsta, BigCommerce, Close, and more.
Since Codeless is a leading agency, it’s nice to hear agency experts paired with clients who are experiencing the benefits of the work in real-time. Together, they tackle SEO and content marketing and provide tactics for listeners to implement.
Great episodes to check out:
This section covers podcasts that aren’t explicitly related to content marketing. They’re data-focused shows, but data is incredibly important in architecting a content strategy, and that is becoming increasingly more important with time. Almost all of our content crafter interviews mention the fact that content marketers should get good at data skills.
These are my favorite podcasts for data nerds.
The Digital Analytics Power Hour podcast is my favorite all-around data podcast. The hosts, Michael Helbling, Moe Kiss, and Tim Wilson, are all great and engaging. Additionally, they get fantastic guests on each episode to chat through different areas of data, analytics, and strategy.
Some of my favorite episodes include:
Present Beyond Measure, hosted by Lea Pica, is focused on data storytelling, visualization, and presentation. This makes it particularly interesting to content marketers, as data storytelling and interactive journalism become bigger trends.
This podcast explains how to make your data more understandable and compelling. It’s actionable, entertaining, and has a good ensemble of guests as well.
Great episodes to check out:
PolicyViz gets a little wonky and nerdy, but it’s still a phenomenal resource for non-technical content marketers.
It’s fully focused on data visualization, but it’s not specific to the digital marketing space. I actually find that to be a huge relief, as we can often find our most interesting insights by looking at what others are doing in adjacent industries.
Great episodes to check out:
The Data Skeptic is an interesting podcast for both beginners and trained data scientists alike. Their earliest episodes are a wonderful primer in data science topics like linear regression and SQL. Their later episodes go super deep with interesting interviews featuring working data scientists.
Sometimes this podcast gets a bit advanced, but I still think it’s worthy of a listen if you want to learn and understand data topics better.
Great episodes to check out:
Finally, our last category: general business growth. I realize that many of the podcasts above could theoretically fit into this category simply because it’s very broad, but I wanted to save this one for true “Growth” focused podcasts. Things about startup growth, traction, etc. These topics are important on a macro level, and content marketing is often an engine by which companies grow. These are some of my favorite podcasts in this field.
The Growth TLDR Podcast is hosted by HubSpot marketers Kieran Flanagan and Scott Tousley. They feature interviews with growth experts from high-growth startups and agencies, and they often run about 30-45 minutes.
I find the podcast to be a fun listen, as the hosts are very personable and engaging, often touching on many topics and digging deeper with good questions (as opposed to a dry and formal Q&A format). It’s also actionable. I always walk away with a good nugget of wisdom or an old marketing tactic I want to try.
Great episodes to check out:
Scale or Die is produced by the team at Proof and featured insightful and action-packed interviews with growth experts. They aim particularly at the startup crowd and have guests on from companies like Drift, Lawnstarter, and Teachable.
Great episodes to check out:
In my opinion, one of the best-produced shows is Masters of Scale. This is my favorite podcast because of the marketing smarts involved with it and the way scaling strategies are outlined in a narrative form.
This one is by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and PayPal. He interviews amazing startup founders and thinkers and creates well-produced and narrated stories that clip together different pieces of interviews that form a cohesive story.
Great episodes to check out:
Sometimes you need to see what others have done in order to grow your business. Upside is a unique podcast founded by Jay Clouse and Eric Hornung that shines the light on companies that are built outside of Silicon Valley.
Each podcast episode talks to an early-stage entrepreneur or business owner that is focused on scaling their company. There is only one podcast advertisement per episode, so it isn’t clouded with branded content.
They speak with founders, learn about the business, and understand their challenges. They’ll lightly go over their go-to-market strategies and discuss their marketing strategies ranging from social media marketing, email marketing, digital marketing, and more.
Great episodes to check out:
How I Built This with Guy Raz is an NPR business podcast that dives into the backstories of notable companies including Instagram, Warby Parker, Spanx, TOMS, Rolling Stones, and more.
It’s a simple setup with Guy and the business owner having a back-and-forth conversation. In many ways, it feels as if it’s a coffee chat. It’s not wholly focused on growth strategies, but listeners will get a decent idea of the lifecycle of the company featured and the obstacles the entrepreneur overcame.
Great episodes to check out:
There are tons of podcasts out there — so many that it can feel overwhelming knowing where to start.
Luckily, it’s easy to try several and see which ones you like. This list should give you a great start to begin filling your dead time with amazing and impactful content marketing shows designed to educate and entertain.
Do let us know if we missed any amazing podcasts!
