A podcast featuring interviews with top B2B marketing professionals on how B2B companies can become Best Answer Brands.
“Consistency creates distinct brand clarity.”
Today Lee Odden, the creator of Beyond B2B Marketing shares his story of marketing podcast.
► Tell us about you and your podcast
I am the founder and CEO at TopRank Marketing, a B2B marketing agency serving some of the top B2B brands in the world with thought leadership content, influence and SEO/GEO solutions. For over 25 years I’ve evangelized B2B marketing best practices and have been recognized by the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and The New York Times for marketing expertise. I am the author of the book Optimize, a blogger for 20+ years and have given hundreds of marketing presentations in 20 different countries.
The Beyond B2B Marketing podcast explores how leading B2B marketers are navigating a fast changing marketing environment being transformed by AI, shifting buyer behavior, and the demand for more human, creative, and data-informed strategies. Each episode is meant to uncover personal journeys, strategic insights, and practical examples of how B2B marketers are pushing beyond the status quo and go beyond blending in to become Best Answer Brands.
Listeners are senior and director-level marketers at mid-to-large B2B technology and services companies, including CMOs, VPs, and heads of brand, content, demand generation, and digital strategy who are navigating complex buying cycles, leading cross-functional teams, and looking to elevate performance through creativity, data, AI, and thought leadership.
► Why & how did you start this podcast?
With overwhelming amounts of content being produced in the marketing world, I felt that podcasting would be a way to create useful insight in a format that is more personal, interesting and trustworthy for an audience of senior marketing executives. My experience has taught me that B2B marketing leaders want to hear from people like themselves, solving increasingly complex marketing problems with pressure to perform using fewer resources and also how to best use technology like AI. That’s why I invite guests who are mostly senior marketing executives from B2B companies. They are on the front line themselves or manage teams solving for the very challenges that our listeners are looking for insight on.
I listen to about 5 to 10 marketing podcasts myself with a handful I am loyal to like Exit Five, B2B Marketing, Marketing Against the Grain, and the rest on rotation. Having been actively engaging with marketers as an author, event speaker and blogger for many years, I know the format could provide the kind of useful insight many marketing leaders are looking for. At the same time, a podcast would allow me to communicate our thought leadership narratives as we work to elevate the craft and outcomes of more creative, adaptable and accountable B2B marketing.
The Beyond B2B Marketing podcast was started in early 2025 after I returned as full owner and CEO of the agency, TopRank Marketing. Having been publicly active in the marketing industry for many years, I have a large network of B2B marketing professionals to invite as guests and a skilled designer who has experience creating video podcast assets, so it took just a few weeks to release the first episode.
► How’d you find the time and funding to do this podcast?
We release an episode about every 3 weeks. I would like to get the cadence to twice a month as the process is refined. It takes about 12 hours in total to produce an episode. That includes sourcing and researching guests, question development, recording the episode as a video, production and editing of the video for output as an audio file and video, creation of episode promotional graphics and several video shorts, writing a blog post summary of the episode and social share messages, and finally publishing all of that.
Podcasting is a central part of the marketing for our agency, so guests are clients or people important to the topics our clients care about. It does take a lot of time but it’s also an important investment in content which can be repurposed in many ways and advances relationships with guests. We hope the podcast is also something that our audience finds to be an essential resource on their marketing journey to become the best answer for their customers.
The podcast is entirely funded by my agency’s marketing budget.
► What do you gain from podcasting?
At the moment we do not take sponsorships. But as we finish off our first season, we will be more diligent about running house ads that promote relevant services for our marketing agency. Our agency is our sponsor and we are not currently looking for outside sponsorship. However we are increasingly using the podcast to conduct co-marketing and media sponsorship engagements with partner companies and marketing industry events.
Whether listening or creating podcast content, I have found that podcasting benefits me in multiple ways. First, I continue to learn about substance and style as it relates to B2B marketing as a discipline as well as how marketers are talking about the things that are important to them. This insight is priceless as we evolve the narratives around how our marketing agency solutions are most relevant to buyers. Another great benefit is that virtually all of the guests from season one and I expect season two are contacts of mine from the marketing industry. These are people I know and the podcast interview experience strengthens that relationship. Last, the podcast helps me reach new audiences and maintain relevance with existing audiences of marketers that might refer us, hire us or work for us in the future.
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► How does your podcasting process look like?
For our first season I sourced all of our podcast guests from my own business network. Marketing executives from LinkedIn, IBM, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Inuit Mailchimp, Bain & Company, etc are connections I’ve made or clients we work with. We are now getting pitched every week by others that want to be on the podcast and I’m working through at what point we’ll entertain any of those requests since we have quite a queue already.
We use Riverside to record podcasts and Adobe products for editing, graphics and video creation. I would like to start doing interviews in person, but my market of guests is spread throughout the U.S. and Western Europe, so it’s more practical now to interview online.
Each episode has a theme based on the guest’s expertise. While I know the guests, they are researched thoroughly to develop questions that best reflect their expertise and the intersection with the narratives of the show. Questions are shared with guests in advance and it runs pretty smoothly that way. In the future when we take on guests outside of my network that I don’t personally know, we’ll probably do a short prep call to prepare before questions are developed.
► How do you market your show?
Marketing of our podcast is done through posting on our blog and sharing to our agency social media channels, especially LinkedIn. I also have 130,000 followers on LinkedIn so I promote podcast episodes to my personal social networks as well. Our podcast is listed with all major podcast destinations like iTunes, Spotify etc. We also publish the video of the podcast on a YouTube channel. We feature the podcasts in our email newsletter and provide guests with resources to promote the podcast to their networks.
The marketing channels that are most useful with our minimal promotion efforts have been LinkedIn, YouTube and Google. Currently we do not solely evaluate the success of the podcast by total listens or downloads, but qualitatively by mentions of the podcast when B2B brands reach out to us with comments, requests for our services, invitations to present at industry events or to be a guest on another podcast.
► What advice would you share with aspiring (new) podcasters?
With Beyond B2B Marketing having only one season of 12 episodes done, I’d say I’m still pretty new and figuring things out. However, a few lessons learned would include:
The value of depth over volume. Each episode has leaned into meaningful, in depth conversations with experienced B2B marketers. In my case, I think the strength of the podcast is in its ability to surface nuanced insights about the marketing topics we cover.
Consistency creates distinct brand clarity. By anchoring each episode in recurring themes like humanizing B2B, AI’s impact, and breaking out of “boring B2B,” the show has begun to develop a clear editorial identity that resonates and stands out.
Preparation is great, but personality is better. The prep we do has helped maintain a high standard of quality, but the moments that stand out across episodes have come from spontaneous situations when guests shared personal stories, frustrations, or future-facing stories that went off-script.
► Where can we learn more about you & your podcasts?
You can find an index of episodes plus information about the Beyond B2B Marketing podcast here: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/beyond-b2b-podcast/
Our TopRank B2B Marketing TV channel on YouTube is here: https://www.youtube.com/user/toprankresults
Our B2B marketing agency has a blog and other useful resources here: https://www.toprankmarketing.com/blog/
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