Jens Heitland explores how a business podcast can sell indirectly by focusing on the passions of the people a company hopes to reach, using the example of a running shoe brand to show why the real starting point is the buyer, how buyers gather information, what they care about, and what they already listen to, and why a podcast built around that niche turns into a community where interest in the leader and the business grows naturally, a principle that holds for a small brand and a global corporation alike.
BRING THESE FRAMEWORKS TO YOUR ORGANIZATION
Why the Best Business Podcasts Are Built Around the Buyer
When a company decides to launch a podcast, the first conversation usually happens inside the company. Teams discuss the product, the message, the brand story, and the people who could represent it on air. The starting point feels natural, because the company knows itself well. The listener, however, arrives with a very different set of interests.
Consider a simple example from consumer goods. A company that makes running shoes could build a podcast about shoes, about feet, or about running. Each option looks reasonable on paper. The more useful starting point sits outside the company entirely, with the people who might one day buy those shoes, how they find information, what they care about, and what they already listen to on their morning run.
Once those buyers are clear, a great deal becomes visible. Their passions come into view, along with the places where they spend time and the voices they trust. A podcast built from that understanding enters a space where attention already exists. It speaks to an interest the audience has carried for years, long before any brand appeared in the conversation.
What happens next is subtle. The conversation stops resembling a sales pitch and turns into a shared exchange between people who care about the same thing. The business leader joins in as someone equally invested in the subject. No awkward moment requires introducing the product. Listeners gather around the topic, and over time they form something closer to a community than an audience.
In my experience, interest in a company rarely begins with the company itself. People become curious about the person hosting the conversation. That curiosity extends to what the person does, and eventually to what the business offers. The path to a purchase runs through trust built in many small moments, each one earned by giving the listener something they genuinely wanted to hear.
The same dynamic holds at very different scales. A small running shoe brand and a large multinational corporation face the same underlying question. Both need to understand who their buyers are and what those buyers care about beyond the product. Large organizations often have more resources and more internal voices, which can make the pull toward talking about themselves even stronger. The pattern remains the same regardless of size.
Over time, the podcasts that endure are the ones designed around the listener. Their value shows in whether the people on the other side of the microphone feel understood. When that happens, the commercial outcome follows quietly, as a consequence of attention that was respected from the start.
Highlights:
00:00 Podcast That Sells
00:13 Shoe Company Angles
00:27 Find Your Buyers
00:45 Build The Niche
01:15 Community Over Sales
01:36 Make It About Listeners
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Transcript :
If we look into the audience of a business podcast, it all starts with how do you build a podcast that is indirectly selling what you do? let's just take something very basic, You are a running shoe company, You can do a podcast about feet, You can do a podcast about running. You can do a podcast about shoes. There are many ways. What I would look into is your target audience, the people that are potential buyers of your shoes, How are they getting their information? What are they interested in, and what are the people listening to? just the example on the shoe company. In the end you know exactly what your buyers are And if you find your buyers, then you know what they're passionate about, you know where they hang out, you know what they listen to, and then you literally build a podcast that goes directly into that niche And then it's never a sales conversation. It's all about a passionate conversation about what they are about, and you as the owner or you as the leader in that business, you are passionate about it as well. So there is no awkward sales, There's just a community of like-minded people And with that, people are interested in you With that, people are interested in what you do. With that, people are interested in what you're selling, and that means more people will buy what you do. And that works for a shoe company, and that same works for a large, huge corporation. It's just all about how do you do that, that it's passionate for the people that are listening, not for you that is broadcasting it.