Episode Summary
Lindsay has spent her career in marketing, usually on brand content and customers’ experience. She wanted to broaden her reach and explored using voice. However she found that the technology for marketing with the spoken word was hugely lacking.
While many pieces of the puzzle existed for podcasting, nothing existed to pull all the pieces together. Lindsay wanted to create a new way of using the podcast as part of a content marketing strategy.
The podcast as content marketing allowed her to make podcast content of other companies accessible for many other uses. “Use the transcript from [the podcast] to create supplemental written pieces like blog posts…and there’s myriad other formats….We allow marketers to…pull clips…to be used in the sales process on social media [and] your website.”
Now in addition to tracking how many times customers use the podcast itself, you can really see “the impact that [her company’s service is] making on the brand metrics that really matter for B2B customers.” This makes understanding how content performs much more accurate, so that Casted can say that “this is how your content is performing….This is how your show is performing….These are the lagging indicators. These are the leading indicators.”
Guest Profile
- Name: Lindsay Tjepkema
- What she does: Lindsay has 15 nears of marketing experience and is the co-founder and CEO at Casted, a podcast-oriented content marketing company.
- Company: Casted
- Key Quote: “What exist[ed] before Casted [was] really a bunch of one-off tools and point solutions….There [were] all these little pieces of the puzzle, but there was nothing that really pulled the whole puzzle together, especially not for me or for my team that [were] doing brand marketing."
Key Insights
- Brand loyalty is very important to cultivate, to develop relationships between brands and customers so that customers feel committed to using those brands. However it is difficult to measure how close these relationships are. While there are always unmeasurable aspects to content marketing, using the podcast in the way that Lindsay explains can lead to much greater insight into how well a B2B company’s content does with its audience.
- Lindsay discovered that the podcast as content marketing “helped to humanize [Casted’s] brand. It literally gave [them] a voice.” Because this was new territory, though, not enough resources existed to maximize the strategy. “As I mentioned, it was just this shock and awe that the technology that I really expected to see was not there.” So she saw an opportunity to fill the technology void, which became the “the seedling” of her idea.
- The technology Casted employs makes it incredibly easy for users to create additional material out of the podcast itself. It first starts with a transcript of the podcast. “So you have this great transcript. What opportunities exist there for you to create a blog post? So you can just pull directly from the transcript….You can also…highlight, just hover, over parts of the transcript….As you hover over it, and you select that content, you can create a clip.”
Episode Highlights
- A new player in the world of content marketing
- New podcasting strategy enabled by new technology a game changer
Now with Casted, podcasts can be dissected and used for other content marketing opportunities by harvesting from transcripts. Take the written word from the spoken and use it for blog posts and short audio clips.
Written material may be used all over the internet, and short clips can be attached to other marketing materials, such as social media. “But then we say, Why would you stop there? Why not use that content? Wring it out and use [it].”
- Moving some of the unmeasurable into the measurable
Any time a business can develop ways to move quantities from immeasurable to measurable competitors are going to notice. “[N]ot everything that matters can be measured and not everything that’s measured that can be measured matters. [I’m] not the first one to say that.”
“[T]he more you can humanize your brand and help people to build a relationship” the better. While emotional responses cannot be quantified, Casted can measure how well the podcast content does.
- The content marketing and podcast nuts and bolts: working with Casted
After uploading the finished podcast, Casted goes to work. Using podcast content for blog posts or as the entire transcript is now possible, as is creating short audio clips that can be sent out everywhere, including text and social media. Track the metrics from the Casted dashboard.
“You have one conversation with an expert. Why in the world would you leave it at just sharing that full episode when you could wring it out and share pieces of it…so that people can engage with it in different ways.”
- Improve your organization of content to make more cohesive pushes
Without Casted, using podcast content for other means involved technological gymnastics. “So [content marketing pre-Casted is] either really challenging and very manual, or it’s not happening at all. And we’re hearing both from brands large and small.”
Podcasts start and fail because organizations don’t take them seriously.
Not only financially, but in other ways. Podcasts fail because leadership doesn’t buy in. Employees are handed podcast duties with few resources, no budget, and the podcast fizzles. “If you have a podcast over here by itself, on an island, and the person, or couple of people who’re doing it aren’t given the resources that they need, the time, money, energy, bandwidth, then it’s going to fail.”
“That’s how so many podcasts start, fall flat, and fizzle out, because whoever’s behind it gets burned out. They’re exhausted.”
- The future of podcasting means every brand will need one to survive
