Entrepreneurs love talking with colleagues about the nature of running a business, so why not record and broadcast those chats? That’s what the team behind the Grow The Dream podcast—Grow The Dream founder David Johnson, consultant Josh Muccio and The Thomson Group founder Rod Thomson—decided to do, and now the podcast has been ranked by Hubspot as the No. 2 “Podcast You Should Be Listening To.” SRQ got the Dream team to talk some more.

Why did a podcast seem like a good way to speak about growing businesses? Muccio: Podcasting was the right medium for helping out business owners to think more strategic with their marketing efforts.  By providing great content and bringing on top-notch guests, we’ll be able to grow our listener base over time. Though, being featured on the HubSpot blog certainly helped accelerate things. Johnson: Podcasting is undergoing a bit of a renaissance lately. Nearly all of us carry smartphones everywhere we go that have always-on internet connections. At the same time, mobile apps for discovering and listening to podcasts have improved dramatically, and the number of listeners is exploding right now. All three of us understand the value and importance of content marketing. Thomson: Our entire economy is going through a huge change, shifting to an on-demand economy characterized by the Uberization of services. In that vein, podcasts are a perfect fit. People are coming to expect to get more and more on demand, at their own timing and pace. Podcasts are a perfect vehicle for that.

What sort of preparation goes into an episode? Johnson: Each of us lives, breathes, eats and sleeps digital marketing every single day. So we prepare for the Grow The Dream Show in our day-to-day work. Questions we get asked by clients, struggles and challenges we have to overcome and campaigns we roll out that succeed or fail all inform the discussions that we have each week. We recently had Jay Baer on the show, who is at the top of the content marketing business right now. I read his New York Times bestseller, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype, in advance of the interview to be better prepared. But all three of us had been reading his blog and had listened to some of his podcast episodes beforehand, so we were comfortable enough to just dive in and start asking questions. Thomson: We don’t often need to do a lot of prep when we tackle a specific marketing/messaging/communication issues. When we have guests, we try to be well-versed. Great guests, with large social identification, can help grow the podcast organically, so we really want to make sure it is a great show and they will want to promote it through their own channels.

Do you work to make the topic of each episode timeless?  Thomson: Evergreen content is the best for most podcasts because of varying listening habits. Many listeners, including myself, tend to binge listen to different shows, either new ones that are discovered or ones that we just have not got to for awhile. We can see that listeners do just that, as the download count on early episodes continues to climb. Muccio: We try to include principles of marketing in every episode. But we do spend some time chatting about the latest tools and other current news that affects business owners looking to grow.  Johnson: When we first got started, we made a very intentional strategic decision to avoid spending large amounts of time dealing with overly “current” topics that would have a limited shelf life. Things are constantly changing in the world of digital marketing. At the end of the day, we have to address some of the time-sensitive areas that our listeners face as business owners trying to be effective.

Read an extended version of this interview at SRQMagazine.com