How Podcasting Became a Tool for Customer Education in Construction Tech
Behind the scenes on the Built Different Podcast via DroneDeploy
Brian Vizarreta is the Head of Growth Operations at DroneDeploy, where he accelerates customer sales cycles by designing scalable training programs and driving adoption strategies.
With a background rooted in construction, Brian previously served as Assistant Superintendent and Innovation Manager at Consigli Construction in Boston, leading their reality capture initiatives with drones, laser scanning, and 360 cameras.
A Boston native from a family of builders, Brian merges construction expertise with technology, having launched his first company right out of school prior to joining Consigli.
Over 2 years ago, I helped re-launch and co-hosted Built Different, a podcast run by DroneDeploy.
At the time we saw a need in the industry, and after the acquisition of StructionSite by DroneDeploy, we were provided the opportunity and flexibility to identify how a podcast could be used to highlight those truly building different.
What we found surprised us.
Instead of using podcasting as a top of funnel activity to increase customer inbound or demo requests, we found it incredibly effective in supporting our customer internal education function.
The reason why was it provided us a platform to highlight at length key clients, while also strengthening our relationship with them by providing a space for them to reflect on lessons learned with building a reality capture program.
This insight changed the way we approached finding guests and the metrics we tracked.
Instead of ROI being new sales or top of funnel activity, we noticed that an increase in that specific account activity was the goal.
It was a counterintuitive approach but is reflective of a wider trend in B2B audience building. It is not about the size of the audience, number of views or clicks. Instead, it’s about the value of the audience, who is listening and how engaged they are with your content.
In this article I’ll be breaking down the process of starting a podcast with actionable first steps. But before we get there, I’ll start with the why (and if) you should start a podcast.
Let’s dive in.
Contents
Who actually listens to podcasts?
Why you should start a podcast
So how do you start?
Choosing a format
Pre-work - what you need to start.
Starting the Podcast
First: Practice
Second: Define the length
Third: Commit
Fourth: Show the value upfront
Who actually listens to podcasts?
So often we make assumptions as to who listens to podcasts.
It’s similar to how we assume TikTok is only used by Gen Z but I’ve seen my parents scrolling. Ultimately, people engage with content if it:
Provides a niche or specific value
Is engaging.
This means people will listen to your content if it resonates with them.
The challenge is that your content isn’t just competing with other construction startups. You’re competing in the attention economy with the likes of Netflix, YouTube and Social Media.
Knowing this helps to refine your podcast strategy as generally only a very committed power user or high achiever is choosing to listen to your podcast in their own time over a Netflix episode, viral TikTok or the latest true crime series.
For us this means we focused on maximising our listening rate over the size of the audience.
It meant that we weren’t excited by having 300 people who just opened the podcast, but preferred 10 people with a 100% listening rate (Spotify provides data on how long and what minute listeners drop off).
Given the value of the audience and the type of user attracted to a construction podcast, these 10 people could be key internal champions or people on accelerated career pathways. Having a dedicated relationship to quickly and easily provide information to this audience is valuable.
Why you should start a podcast
When you start a podcast, it’s challenging as you’ll often be starting from zero.
If you’re a startup and you already have a newsletter or other content that people aren’t engaging with, they aren’t suddenly going to care about your podcast. Building a voice and becoming a trusted source of information is a challenging and long term endeavour.
As a startup, people will always expect that you are going to ‘sell’ to them, making creating a voice even more challenging.
It was easier for DroneDeploy as even before we started the podcast we had a history of creating content and sharing this with our audience. We had libraries of videos, reality capture educational series and site visit documentaries.
Our content library had grown organically over time based on pull or demand from our audience. This meant we, as an organization, had an understanding of our brand positioning and how and what kind of content resonated with our audience.
So when we started the podcast, we had a framing on what the content might look like.
For us we took an interview podcast approach focusing on our customers. This allowed us to showcase immediate value to our business as we framed it as us having very strategic conversations with key accounts that our customer success team could not.
The reason why is that people want to go on podcasts and are therefore very generous with their time.
It’s one of the few formats in which a key stakeholder will take 1 to 1.5 hours of their day to sit and reflect on the value, the realistic shortcomings and formulate how it could be improved to increase internal adoption.
These were insights that could be used by our customer success function to improve engagement with the account and prioritize our roadmap.
Podcasting is a customer success nurture play not a sales motion. Focus on the people who already use you. Give them more resources to learn even deeper and those people will spread the word if they’re actually happy.
An additional point is we never told people to talk about the product even going so far as saying they don’t need to mention DroneDeploy.
It’s because this is not a sales conversation and if you do go in with this goal it can come off as transactional and people will feel that.
Our only intention was to strengthen the community and we often noticed higher levels of engagement in the region of the person we talked to or the kickoff of new initiatives in the area.
So how do you start?
Once you’ve decided to start a podcast, your first step is to set your intention and goal.
If you have internal subject matter expertise, for example if you’re an AI startup, this is an area to showcase it.
However be mindful that as a construction tech company, no matter how good your content is, there will always be skepticism towards your content. People will think you are trying to sell to them.
Therefore you must be relentless about providing value.
To ensure this, complete customer discovery to ensure that your content will resonate with your audience. Before you start, talk to your target audience (the customers you want to engage with) and ask:
Do you listen to podcasts?
Which ones do you like?
What do you love about them?
These insights will help inform on what kind of content you can create.
Choosing a Format
There are different styles of podcast which you can choose to deliver.
An example style is the personal diary style. This is where you have a short, targeted episode without a guest and talk about a specific topic you want to influence including your thoughts and learnings. Alex Lieberman’s podcast ‘The Founder’s Journey’ is an example of this style. Each of his podcasts answer a specific question and provide value as and when his audience needs it. It’s a great opportunity for startups in niche’s to showcase their industry expertise e.g. AI or Scheduling.
The most common style is the interview format where the hosts ask questions of their guests.
However to be effective in this style, the host must provide their own input to ensure it is a conversation. This approach also helps us to align different themes or conversation topics.
For example in the early days of Built Different we were talking a lot about the reality capture lifecycle and how it goes across the entire project lifecycle. Guests would mention they would use it for high leverage capture milestones such as handover or preconstruction.
We’d provide our input and mention how other guests (referring to the episode to listen to) were capturing their jobsite weekly and presenting it to the owners. This led to engaging conversations while informing them of novel ways to use our solution based on their peers.
At the end of the day, don’t let the traditional format of what you think a podcast is to be your limiting factor as much as the fact that it is a spoken word type of medium.
Choose a format which overlaps in terms of your goals and the feedback from the target audience during the customer discovery conversations.
Pre-work - what you need to start.
Once you start a podcast, people expect a regular cadence which you need to keep up with.
With interview style podcasts, it isn’t just showing up and speaking. You need to undertake research on who the guests are and have an acquisition strategy on how to get them on. Understanding this informs the time commitment required.
For a ConTech startup, their initial guest strategy might be talking to a specific persona at each key account (e.g project executives) with the intention of getting feedback and improving adoption rates.
A persona based guest strategy can be effective as we found our most engaged listeners were often guests from earlier seasons or episodes. They knew how we would ask questions and wanted to know how their peers answered them.
Additionally it meant we grew a small, high value audience and deeply understood what content they were engaging with by focusing on metrics such as listening rate.
With the right guest acquisition strategy, your key accounts / solution champions may start listening to your podcast every week staying up to date with the latest feature updates and adoption best practices.
Starting the Podcast
Before you start the podcast, there is upfront work to be completed.
First: Practice
Recording a podcast can be a new skill which your hosts are unfamiliar with.
If you have chosen an interview style, find 3 test guests and record a podcast with them. You don’t need to publish anything yet.
Instead, review the content and this will provide an idea on the podcast style or medium which feels most natural for the hosts.
Second: Define the length
Based on your target audience, ask yourself:
What do you want a listener to walk away with?
If the goal is to deepen your relationship with a key account, what do you want your guest to walk away with?For each episode define ‘what is the title going to sound like?’
Ensure this topic is discussed during the podcast.
One reason podcasts fail is because it’s just a couple of people recording themselves talking about random topics. These questions ensure that the end user or listener knows what to expect prior to listening.
Third: Commit
Make a commitment to:
A consistent format (e.g 20 minute episodes)
A set number of episodes (e.g 6 episode for Season 1)
A topic or focus area for the season (e.g Superintendents in each key account or a region).
This provides a structure for the first set of podcasts and helps clearly define expectations to the listeners.
Fourth: Show the value upfront
As a final point, the first few seconds of every video is the most important.
While the most engaged listeners understand where the conversation is going and what you are trying to achieve, for the first time listener, you need to showcase value upfront. This could be a trailer or a hook drawn with sound bites of the conversation highlighting what to expect.
Additionally, each podcast should be broken into ‘shorts’ or video snippets to be posted on other platforms.
Some of your audience will only ever listen to these clips. Ensure that these shorts are deep enough on intricate topics and a proportion of these viewers will convert into engaged listeners.
Podcasting in construction tech isn’t just a marketing channel, it’s a relationship building tool. We discovered that the real value lies in strengthening engagement with existing customers, deepening product understanding, and building internal champions.
When done right, a podcast can become a quiet but powerful engine for customer education and retention. Start small, stay consistent, and focus on delivering value. The right audience will listen and act.
Brian Vizarreta is the Head of Growth Operations at DroneDeploy, where he accelerates customer sales cycles by designing scalable training programs and driving adoption strategies.
With a background rooted in construction, Brian previously served as Assistant Superintendent and Innovation Manager at Consigli Construction in Boston, leading their reality capture initiatives with drones, laser scanning, and 360 cameras.
A Boston native from a family of builders, Brian merges construction expertise with technology, having launched his first company right out of school prior to joining Consigli.
Probably should have followed this advice 😅.