How B2B Podcasts Grow Up: Squeezing the Juice Out of Your Podcast

Lindsay Tjepkema: Up to this point in How B2B Podcasts Grow Up, you've learned all about the first four stages of, well, How B2B Podcasts Grow Up. You start with experimentation and show creation, then you focus on audience growth, then multichannel expansion, and now you've conquered all of these milestones. But you're still growing and learning, nothing's perfect, but you still have a huge hunger for more out of your podcast. More content, more impact, more measurable ROI. Welcome to stage five. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, a lifelong marketer and proud CEO and co- founder of Casted, the B2B marketing platform for brand podcasters. And I've teamed up with experts across the top sales and marketing teams in the world to detail each of the five stages of this maturity curve and what you can do to launch and grow a show with confidence. This is How B2B Podcasts Grow Up, an original series from Casted. Okay, quick recap of where we are in stage five. Your show, multiple seasons in. Your audience, growing subtly. And you know who they are and the impact it's being measured and reported to your executive team. More on them later, by the way, but they play a bigger role in this stage. Rest assured. First though, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Resources. Maybe you're like, " Whoa, hang on, Lindsay, I can't be on stage five. There are only two of us working on this show. That team growth never really happened for us in stages three and four, we just scaled with what we had." I hear you. Truly, I do. So let me clarify. Does stage five mean unlimited resources with stellar growth and that mountaintop mentality of, well, nowhere else to go from here, we've peaked? No. Absolutely not. Not even a chance. What makes stage five something really noteworthy is that our friends over at Zylo like to call squeezing the juice. It's this mentality that I will let them explain.

Meredith Albertson: Honestly, and this is one of the reasons I think just there was so much synergy with Casted from the start was amplified marketing and our terminology for it internally before we met Casted was a little bit not as beautifully worded, but we called it Squeeze the Juice. And that was something that I feel Nicole as well as our Senior Director of Content Communications, Meghan Spork, who is just fantastic as well, we really connected at the very beginning. So I've only been with Zylo just over a year, this was what we wanted to do from day one. I was building a lot of the team from the ground up and so there was an opportunity to really structure that team with that in mind, with that at the heart of our strategy. And so I don't know if I would've structured the team differently, however, I think our focus would've been different if we were going down this more traditional route. But I think, man, just the efficiency we've been able to drive this year, what we've been able to do with a relatively small powerhouse team, it's just been incredible. And everybody was bought in from day one, this isn't coming from other organizations, talking about squeezing the juice or amplified marketing is not something that everybody is talking about, but just from day one, everybody was bought in, super passionate, excited about what we're doing. So I don't know if I would've structured the team that differently, but definitely it was at the center of our model from the start.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Zylo has a textbook stage five story. They've expanded their show, SaaSMe Unfiltered into various channels and are ringing out their content by embedding clips to amplify and promote the brand's thought leadership. But like their CMO, Meredith Albertson said in that clip, it was less about how many resources they had at their disposal and much more about how those resources were being used. If you've created a team that gets it like Zylo does, they squeeze the juice, they use amplified marketing, whatever you want to call it, then you're moving right along into stage five. Today, Zylo is looking at the big picture of how their content impacts revenue, which is key to stage five. That is the indicator is impact on business and revenue and how engagement insights help make a predictable and repeatable part of content marketing. And guess whose attention they're grabbing with revenue impact? You guessed it, that ever important C- suite that we mentioned a little while ago.

Meredith Albertson: Our executive team throughout this podcast process has just been such champions and so fantastic. Our CEO, Eric Christopher, just bought into the vision immediately was like, " How can I help?" I remember sitting in my office in indie talking to Cory Wheeler, who is one of our co- founders and Chief Customer Officer, and I was like, " All right, Cory, so I have this little crazy idea that we're thinking about." And I walked him through it and he just looked me dead in the eyes and he was like, " I love it. Let's do it." And to have him, he was so excited about it and that Ashley Hickman, who is our Customer Success Manager at Zylo, she was on board. I mean, just everybody has, from day one, really just been the champion across the board for the program that we're building here.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Now, maybe you're not like Zylo, maybe your C- Suite wasn't bought in from day one, that's fine. That's why this stage is so important. It's time to start thinking about proving the value that your show has on the business in ways that will turn heads in the boardroom. This is the time to start thinking about impact on the actual business. What does success look like for your show? Is it pipeline acceleration? Is it conversations generated? And most importantly for this stage, how are you tracking that success in a way that can be proven in your next marketing session with your leadership team? Again, if you don't have these metrics documented yet, don't worry, it's not too late to start, it's never too late to start. And you have a bit of an advantage having a few seasons already under your belt, impactful patterns could already be emerging. Here's Tim Glomb from Cheetah Digital, talking about some of the expectations that he set and surprises that he experienced as they started tracking these metrics for their video podcast called Thinking Caps.

Tim Glomb: Well, the first thing was, yeah, it was an idea, but we had a goal. The goal was, will this move the business forward? Do people even care? I'm not looking for 10, 000 views on any given video, I could care less what the numbers are. I used to be in television, used to get 3 million viewers per night on a Sunday night on MTV, that's when metrics mattered. The bigger the number, the more you made, the more successful you were. Here in a B2B space, it's getting the right people to see the right content. And we knew it was working early on because we landed business. Literally, you go through business, you sign a big deal, one was a big hotel chain, and through that onboarding process you're like, " How did this all start? Did you go to our website? Did you look at other things?" And they said, " We were getting hit constantly with your podcast Thinking Caps. When we came to RFP, we were like, 'Yeah, that company does that, we need to go check them out.'" We dug in a little more, they found some other content from us and said, " Whoa, these guys actually share the same ideas of where the future of marketing and data is going." So we already had a leg up when they went into RFP and then we ultimately won it. I have multiple stories like that where they said, " Yes, this thing was annoying me in my LinkedIn feed, I constantly saw your podcast, but one day I clicked on it and we knew it was driving business." So now there's three people dedicated on the video team here across all brands. If a camera isn't rolling each day, something's awry. So we are 110% committed to video case studies, client stories, thought leadership. Pretty much anything we do, we try and include a video format for the campaign.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I think Cheetah is a phenomenal example of how stage five really plays out. Their content strategy is video first and they leverage several shows with several seasons each including Thinking Caps, Signals and Uncaged Wisdom to expand their customer reach. And of course, they're amplifying the heck out of each episode. All of their content goes out onto social media, it's used in newsletters, blog posts, and so much more. At the top of the maturity curve, Cheetah is identifying and measuring how their content and marketing is truly impacting the business and how it's driving real measurable revenue better than most other brands. And what I love about Tim and his team at Cheetah, lots of things, they don't forget the absolutely foundational truth that we learn all the way back in stage one. It's all about the content.

Tim Glomb: Everybody or at least the innovative ones or the ones willing to take a step in their particular space, whether you're an email marketing platform, whether you're an ice cream company, whether you're anything in between, go try and tell your story and tell the stories that your consumers and prospects care about and you'll be rewarded for that. So that's content creation. It started as this little corner office in some companies and now it permeates everything. We're content first, where I landed today at the CM Group, everything is about content first. That's the way to scale a conversation, scale your offerings, and also scale your values and what you stand for. Why are you even in business? What problem are you trying to solve? Video allows you to get that out there very quickly and differentiate because there's a lot of signal- to- noise text content out there these days and I can't even cut through it anymore.

Lindsay Tjepkema: You see, this is the tricky little thing that I want you to remember when entering stage five. You cannot lose sight of the content, of the story, of the audience and what they want from you. Yes, stage five podcasts at their best should be driving real, measurable, impactful business results. But the reason that they're driving these results is because your content is resonating. Stage five just means that you can measure it. The best stage five teams let their results guide their promotion, distribution, and guest management strategies while also improving their listener experience. Never, ever jeopardize your audience for a business result. It doesn't work that way. It just doesn't. Just listen to that. If you're jeopardizing your audience for a business result, it's not going to work. After all, they're the reason that you made it all the way to stage five of this B2B podcast maturity curve. So thanks so much to Zylo and to Cheetah Digital and their teams for their amazing and impactful insights. Next episode, we are diving into a story very near and dear to my heart. We're sharing about our friends at Zylo and how they're taking amplification way beyond the ordinary. We'll see you over in the next episode.