‘Flipping our KPI’: Why Vodafone Business is investing in social-first podcasts

Following the recent merger of Vodafone and Three, Vodafone Business is shifting tactics and moving to an always-on social-first model aimed at “empowering” UK SMEs.

The business has partnered with Steven Bartlett’s FlightStory Studios on the launch today (4 August) of monthly social-first podcast and content series Business.connected, aimed at equipping SMEs with business knowledge. Vodafone’s B2B arm previously skewed towards longer-form content on its V-Hub platform, making this pivot towards digital videos a departure for the brand. 

“We’re seeing everything become more digital,” notes Maria Koutsoudakis, chief brand officer at VodafoneThree. “Businesses are building themselves digitally.”

Launched in the pandemic, Vodafone’s Business.connected initiative has already supported more than 800,000 small businesses through free online training and workshops.

The decision to focus on social-first came after the merger of the Vodafone’s business and brand teams in December, which Koutsoudakis explains led to a review of what the company offers SMEs. This involved analysing how much time customers were looking at the site and going through the full-funnel journey. The team discovered “a lot of traffic, but not a lot of depth”.

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“[Business.connected] was never about driving traffic. The point of this was always to educate businesses on digital marketing and digital skills,” Koutsoudakis explains.

“By flipping our KPI and focusing on the end objective – which was education and making a meaningful impact to these businesses – there was the strategy to take knowledge and information to where the businesses are, rather than force them to come onto a website and go through a self-learning journey.”

The podcast will be pushed across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, opting for a “bitesized” format focused on “self-education”. Through this, Koutsoudakis hopes to get “more businesses learning from Vodafone”.

“Our approach to business marketing needs to be as flexible,” she explains.

Merging the B2C and B2B marketing teams has provided “more opportunity to experiment and learn”, Koutsoudakis adds, particularly around the optimisation of creative, media buying and sponsorship. Making use of the consumer team’s relationships with the likes of YouTube is another benefit.

Vodafone Business is also developing its influencer strategy with help from the B2C team, particularly around how to get its branding across to ensure the network is given credit, but the content is still authentic to the influencer.

Acknowledging that it’s harder to show a brand that doesn’t have a specific product, Koutsoudakis says Vodafone Business “will probably go a little bit slower than some of the more visual brands” with regards influencer marketing, although it is still a “massive agenda”.

Overall, the capabilities learnt from the consumer team are strengthening the B2B arm.

“We’re just richer, not because of capability, but because of opportunity to experiment. So now what we’re able to do is take a lot of those learnings of what makes great content and we’re applying the same learnings onto business content straight away,” says Koutsoudakis.

Building reputation

Whether it’s a 30-minute episode or a single social media clip, the hope is the Business.connected content inspires SMEs to “do something differently in the business”. This approach was informed by Vodafone Business’s previous tie-up with Steven Bartlett on Digital SOS, a documentary film series aimed at small business owners, where the “journeys weren’t designed in a digestible, accessible way”.

Instead of a speaker and host, the unscripted podcast is bringing together a rotating panel of entrepreneurs and experts discussing a series of topics, the first being ‘How to be creative in digital marketing’. Vodafone hopes each episode will be “relatable”, from tackling the loneliness small business founders experience to helping with the challenges they face.

Georgia Gibson, co-founder of .tbc, Marisa Poster, co-founder of matcha brand PerfectTed, and Will Little, founder of coffee brand Little’s Coffee, will feature on the digital marketing episode.

Vodafone is using FlightStory’s FlightLab testing framework to shape the work and ensure content is as relevant to the audience as possible. Of the partnership, Koutsoudakis says it’s valuable as podcasting “isn’t necessarily” Vodafone’s area of expertise.

“They [FlightStory] know how to produce, test, optimise and market podcasts end-to-end. So, we’re learning all that capability from them,” she explains.

Success and effectiveness will be measured through brand uplift studies, analysing consideration of Vodafone as a future provider.

[Business.connected] was never about driving traffic. The point of this was always to educate businesses on digital marketing and digital skills.

Maria Koutsoudakis, VodafoneThree

Future topics for the podcast include building a business as a solo entrepreneur, AI tools for small businesses and selling online.

As part of the restructure, Koutsoudakis created a content team to “focus on building the reputation of Vodafone consumers” and create positive conversations around the brand to build trust and, ultimately, lead to sales, whether that’s in the short or long term.

This also involves the team listening to what consumers are saying, using social media and one-to-one conversations to get feedback on how initiatives, like the podcast series, are running. Feedback will also be considered from within the business.

“I’m hoping all the way from the rational sales element to the warmer hearts of brand, there’s a piece in it for everyone and the bet we took in setting up the team, putting a focus, shifting away from the traditional V-Hub model will start to pay dividends,” Koutsoudakis adds.