As we’ve discussed here in the blog for the last few weeks, marketers choose their jobs because they love marketing, but the rising expected output of a traditional content marketer can overwhelm a team into a churn-and-burn cycle that marketers don’t love so much. They want a better kind of content marketing, one that gives sales and marketing access to the same data, allows the team to create multiple pieces of content from one original source, and can show the business just how each piece of content is contributing to the bottom line.
That’s why we’re talking about amplified marketing. Simply, it’s a modern content marketing model that allows you to access, amplify, and attribute your content marketing in ways that the current model can’t.
One problem is that the old way is pretty entrenched, and some leaders are afraid to leave a system they understand (even though it doesn’t perform well and doesn’t necessarily reach the intended audience) for a new way of doing things.
So, is anyone out there taking any of this advice and flipping their content marketing upside down already? The answer is a resounding YES! We’ve been lucky to work with several brands that have already been using the conversations they’re having on their podcast and videos to forge a new approach with great success. What’s more is they were gracious enough to share their experiences as they continue to take hold of this unique amplified marketing approach. Here are the highlights from what these brands had to say on the podcast.
Salesforce
Salesforce has more than 25 shows broadcast worldwide, which they use to build strong connections with their audiences. They’ve also aligned their podcast to company-wide campaigns to allow the conversations they are having to support initiatives across the business. For Salesforce, their bottom line comes down to being resourceful and leveraging the things that they have access to and getting the highest possible return for their effort.
Initially, that meant they needed to understand who their audiences were for each of their shows and what each show’s value would be. Listener value is central to amplified marketing.
To determine the value for the audience, Salesforce did something very smart — they had conversations with experts that listeners were truly interested in and that discussed current topics relevant to that specific audience. Why is this so different?
The great goal of content marketing is to reach your audience, your customers, your community. But to do that, you have to know them well enough to understand what they’re truly interested in. It’s not advertising, but beyond that, what do you have that they want? Currently, the way that gets answered is from within the brand. They look at their industry, their competitors, social media, conventions, and make an educated guess about the content the audience wants. Then they count downloads and click-throughs to gauge the success of that educated guess.
But imagine if you actually talked to (and recorded these conversations) with experts in the field, and then imagine you turned that into a podcast or a video and you could clearly see what assets the audience engaged with most. That’s how you define the value you can give your listeners.
And that’s just what Salesforce did with their Marketing Cloudcast.
"Yeah, I would say the biggest thing… I've been on both sides of non- corporate podcasting and then corporate podcasting. So one thing that I would just suggest that I feel like Megan and Tina do a really good job of is understanding the value to the listener. There is the value to the company, but you also have to provide value to the listener. The Marketing Cloudcast, one thing that I've noticed is we rarely mentioned Salesforce products. And even though it is a Salesforce-sponsored podcast, the biggest point of value for our listener is that they're hearing practitioners or people in their role. Or maybe it's like a CMO comes in and talks about things that they want to hear about, and it's not necessarily guided around Marketing Cloud or Pardot or our other tools. So, I would definitely take a look at what's the value, yes, to your company? Because obviously that's how you're going to keep the podcast running. But what's the value to the listener as well? If you're editing and listening to this, what are you getting out of this? Take it from your listeners’ perspective, and then that's really all you need for a successful podcast in my opinion,” says Conor Wiegmann, Data Strategy Analyst, Strategic Solutions at Salesforce.
Of course, you have to be cognizant of how your content marketing rolls up into the brand's overall strategy, and for Salesforce, that also depends on the value of these conversations. It doesn’t hurt that they are incredibly passionate — and intentional — when it comes to their goals and vision. Chief among these is a fundamental shift in the way the brand thinks about podcasts. Instead of a separate siloed channel within the marketing arsenal, Salesforce recognized that a podcast contributes to the bigger strategic picture in more powerful ways than content marketers have previously thought. For example, the Marketing Cloudcast has evolved to become a more central part of Salesforce’s campaign process. The value of amazing stories benefits different areas of the business, and this formed a big part of their overall value strategy, especially during the trying times of 2020.
“But it's just, again, being very intentional, right? So what is it that you want to achieve? What's the goal? Is it [that] you want to increase ROI? Well that's... You jumped a couple of steps because you have to build your listenership, you need to build trust. And you have to really, at the end of the day, share some topic or conversation that is of value to your listeners. So, being very thoughtful is something that's really important. A lot of the legwork is done in the beginning, and then as time goes on, you start to evolve. And so this year, I think it was a massive transformation for the show because one, 2020 hit, and the world experienced the first pandemic ever. And everyone was just like,"What the @$&! is going on? What are we going to do?" And it actually benefited us because Megan had this brilliant idea,"You know what? Let's be a little bit more thoughtful and prescriptive, and let's have a series." And we really leaned into... When the pandemic hit, we had a Leading Through Change series. It was all about how are you guys doing today? How are you actually feeling? Topics were all about that. And then as time went on, [we] realized this isn't ending, this is here to stay for a while, we're not physically going to see each other for a while. Then we leaned into the business, and we're like," Well, what's really topical right now? What do people want to know? How do marketers want to be better?" And that's when we started being more prescriptive and leaning in with our campaigns team of... Let's say, we wanted to do an ABM series because now people have to be more thoughtful and more focused. They are having less money to invest in scaling in more grand ways, so now we're more focused and topical. And so I think it's just being very intentional, but also paying attention to what's current. Like what's going on in the world? Because if you're talking about things [that] are irrelevant, then you're missing the boat, and you're speaking to deaf ears basically,” says Tina Rozul, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce.
For Salesforce to pull off a highly engaging podcast during incredibly unusual times, they stopped doing business as usual and listened to their fanbase. That’s what allowed them to create content that really resonated with real people looking for just this kind of connection. That might sound like what anyone should do with content, but it’s also a foundational principle of amplified marketing.
HubSpot
HubSpot has created a network of shows that they use to fuel many different areas across their business. Among its podcasters, there are absolute pioneers who are forging the path forward in a way that is revolutionizing this niche. We used one of our recent podcasts to dive deep into how these marketing leaders are using podcasting as a way to humanize and grow their brand, and it’s only just beginning.
In terms of amplified marketing, HubSpot has been ahead of the curve, first realizing the need for human-first content marketing to speak to humans (not search engines) about the things that audiences find valuable. In some cases, this allowed HubSpot to find whole new audiences.
“We wanted CMO, CRO, CEO, COO, C- level to have heard of and know what HubSpot is, or some high level and have a positive brand affiliation with it. And so what we decided to do was say, ‘Okay, those folks have less time to read blogs, they're not going to go to webinars. Content specifically about marketing is not that interesting to them. What's interesting to them? Growth. And who do they want to hear from? They want to hear from their peers.’ So The Growth Show was a show about growth, and all the interviews were only with C-level executives, SVP level, etc., but it was very senior people. And we had some amazing guests in the first 10 or 20. We had the founder of Tough Mudder, one of those race things which he gave us a story about how they built a brand, things like that. We had a CMO from Slack on, we had a bunch of like CEOs, CMOs, CRO type of folks from really interesting companies and brands and just had them tell their story, and that was me interviewing them in most cases,” says Mike Volpe, former CEO at HubSpot and Host of the Growth Show.
Figuring out what your audience wants is the key first step in creating effective content, and with so many podcasts underway, HubSpot learned a lot about what makes great valuable content for different audiences. Even though they have since sunset their legacy podcasts, HubSpot went on to create a podcast network that hosts shows their audience finds helpful (and they’re not even HubSpot-centric) showing how dedicated the brand is to giving their audiences what they want.
“When I was there, HubSpot had experimented with a few different shows, like the Growth Show had been going on for at least five years. We had just started a new more broad awareness show, Weird Work, that I had been hosting where I interviewed people with weird jobs. And then we also had a show that was very educational focus called Skill Up that the first season was about SEO. And I think looking at HubSpot, one of the great things was that each show addressed a distinct need and distinct audience. Whereas Weird Work was a good way for us to get brand recognition, to build brand affinity, to have this interesting voice in the market and gain a lot of exposure there, you could see Growth Show as a thing for thought leadership, a lot of lifting up our core brand values. One of the things that brands will come to HubSpot for is to learn educational things and get better at sales or marketing or SEO or whatever it is, so Skill Up provided an avenue for that. So I think one of the great things was just seeing how HubSpot was tailoring shows to different audiences,” Sam Balter, Director of Editorial Content and Host of ZoomInfo’s Talk Data to Me.
Meghan Keaney Anderson, formerly VP of Marketing at Hubspot and presently CMO at The Wanderlust Group, illustrates that if you treat every channel or piece of content the same, you’ll never connect with much of an audience. “Each podcast has a distinct problem that it's trying to solve and/or a distinct theory that it's chasing down,” she says. “So every new show that we add, we hope it will teach us something. We hope it will help attract an audience that's distinct, but we also hope it'll teach us something about podcasting.”
And because podcasts are a unique content format and you can track engagement (one of the pillars of amplified marketing), you’ll know when listeners are hooked, as Anderson shares with us:
“That is the beautiful thing about podcasts is when people sit down to listen to a podcast, they listen all the way through. You're getting their attention, their full attention in many cases for 20, 30, 40 minutes. And that's so rare there. So certainly, those listenership and growth numbers are what we're looking for, we're looking for distribution and access to a broader audience. But there are all sorts of secondary benefits to doing podcasts, and for me, one of the biggest ones has been, for the Growth Show in particular, it's created access points to some of the most incredible business leaders and stories that I've ever come across.”
LogicGate
The amplify part of amplified marketing is all about getting the maximum mileage out of everything you create and build out from your podcast to drive your entire content marketing strategy.
LogicGate is a prime example of how you can both put podcasting at the center of your content strategy and wring out — or amplify — each episode across channels. We were able to chat with LogicGate’s Director of Marketing, Carolyn Chapin, to discuss the brand’s podcast strategy, specifically diving into exactly what they’re doing to squeeze the juice out of every single podcast episode.
First, Chapin had to deal with the same problems all content marketers have had to struggle with (hence, the need for a better model of content marketing):
“And so when I started at LogicGate a little over a year ago, and I first heard about GRC & Me, I was super excited because I knew it was great content that the team was creating. But my brain immediately went to: how does Google and how do search engines process audio files? How does this fit into our SEO strategy? And I was more focused initially on more traditional content, like words on the page. So that was one of the first things I started wondering about. And I love podcasts. It's something that I listen to a lot in my personal life, but I was curious about how this would fit into our digital strategy. So the first lens I brought was, ‘Okay how do we make sure that people are finding this and that this is optimized for SEO?’ And then also I have a demand gen background. So my second thought was, ‘Okay, how do we tie this into revenue? Is this influencing pipeline? Is this helping us grow the business?’ And at the time we were mostly just tracking how many downloads and how many listens we got. So it was hard for me to wrap my head around, ‘How do we make sure that this is doing what we want it to do?’ So that was the initial lens. And then it was only when I started talking to our leadership and hearing stories from the field that I was like, ‘Oh, this is really more... It's helping us build our community and boost awareness. And it may not fit into how I had traditionally approached SEO and things like that in the past, but it was still a really important part of our strategy.’”
Next up, Chapin discovered a whole new way of creating a content stream from LogicGate’s podcast conversations:
“So my role at LogicGate encompasses demand gen, content, our digital strategy, all of our digital channels. And so James on my team is really the podcast producer. So I work closely with him and with Megan Phee, our host of the podcast to ideate on the concepts that we're going to cover. And then really thinking about how the podcast fits into our content strategy. So how do we take these great episodes that Megan and James have created, and really thinking of the podcast as the orange, and squeeze the juice out of that?
“How do we incorporate the podcast into our email nurture streams? How do we incorporate it into how we are positioning our blogs? How do we enable our sellers to use the podcast in how they are talking to their prospects and in the buying process? So really looking at the podcast and thinking about how do we use the ideas and concepts that are being discussed there. And how the audience is responding to them. And use those same ideas in other parts of our content strategy. And then, like I said, actually taking the podcast and using the Casted clips, and the videos that we capture when we're recording the podcast, and placing those in different channels and using them throughout our strategy. And then also using the podcast to actually connect with both the guests who are appearing there, but then also with the community that we're trying to build in the risk management space,” says Chapin.
LogicGate is also focused on measuring engagement in ways that traditional content marketing doesn’t, as Chapin shares:
“Also, just another way that I'm seeing the impact is the social conversations. Because we are, especially since we started using Casted and sharing the clips in social, then that way people can actually listen to a bite-sized clip if they aren't ready to make that commitment and spend a bigger chunk of time with us. We've seen some of the conversations that are happening in social that either thought leaders in the space, or consultants, or potential customers are talking in the comments. So we're seeing that, that we're able to be part of the conversation and able to get the conversation going. So that's another way that I can see the impact. And then our sellers and just the internal buy-in I see... as any good marketer should, I sometimes listen in on sales calls. And when I hear our sellers talking about the podcast and they're so excited about this very well-produced professional sounding thing that we're doing.”
Chapin also speaks to another amplified marketing tenet, that content marketers need to change the way we look at performance data.
Lindsay Tjepkema: Would you say that your view about it having to be directly attributable to this exact metric has changed? Or do you think that... Because on one hand, it seems maybe that's not really how it works, but on the other hand, maybe you're getting a lot more data that says maybe it's not just impacting this one thing, it's impacting lots of things.
Carolyn Chapin: Yeah. I think it's more the latter. Sometimes the demand gen marketers can be like... Or thinking of it from even a field marketing standpoint, you're like, “Okay, how much influence did this have? What percentage of pipeline did this influence?" So I think we do have the softer engagement metrics. And that's important too, especially for a company at our stage where we're trying to boost more awareness and win more mind share in the market. So yeah, I feel like we are increasing the amount of data that we have. And yes, my perspective has changed a little bit on like, it doesn't have to be, “Oh, it was X amount in revenue that this influenced.” But getting a thousand new people who are aware of our brand is super exciting as well.
Drift
We interviewed Dave Gerhardt, former VP of Marketing at Drift, pioneers in conversational marketing and sales, who explained how he first started their podcast (and how you can, too). Gerhardt created Seeking Wisdom when as their first and only marketer, he needed to extract information from Founder Dave Cancel. But Drift’s commitment to podcasting didn’t stop there. They know the power that lies in podcasting and have continued to explode their podcasting and video content.
The first rule of amplified marketing is to begin with conversations, and that’s exactly where Gerhardt started.
“When I went to Drift, I had a really cool opportunity to work with David Cancel, and I was the first marketing person at Drift, and I just needed to get marketing content out of him. And so I just started interviewing him with my podcast gear that I had, and I was just going to ghost write for him and that transformed into us... He wasn't very good at just being interviewed and then just having to talk for 30 minutes. And so it became more of, I had to do an interview back and forth with him to get more stuff out of him, and that morphed into this really cool conversation about these two people at completely different ends of their spectrum. And from a career, you have this proven CEO and this like no name, up-and-coming marketing person. And we ended up turning [it] into a podcast called Seeking Wisdom. And so really quickly over the course of a year and a half, I had launched three podcasts, and now it's just become like a pillar of anything that I do in marketing, because I think it's like having your own... If 20 years ago somebody said to you, ‘Hey, you can have your own radio station, and you really wouldn't have to pay much to do it. And if you do it right, you could get thousands of your dream customers to listen to you. Would you want to do that?’ For whatever reason, people still don't seem to think of that when they think of podcasting,” says Dave Gerhardt, former VP of Marketing at Drift and present CMO at Privy.
When he eventually moved on to Privy, Gerhardt took what he learned at Drift and started with a marketing strategy specifically built around podcasting, a true amplified marketing approach.
“When I started at Privy, it was the first thing that we did, and it was intentional because we wanted to create something that was an anchor for the brand. The short answer is I think it's the most important piece of a brand opening strategy, not an overall marketing strategy. You've got to generate demand, and your podcast is not going to be a direct-response marketing channel, at least in the early days. But from a brand-building standpoint, it's the number-one strategy,” says Gerhardt.
But you get a lot more than just podcast episodes with amplified marketing, as Gerhardt shares, “Because, if you start with that podcast, then you have audio, and ideally you film that all, so you have video too. If you have those two things, then you can easily — you can get so much content out of that one episode. You can get blog posts. You can get video clips. You can get decks. You can get graphics. I've seen a lot of people think that you build a brand through…’Well, we're just going to blog our way to a brand and tweet our way to a brand.’ That doesn't work that way.”
Fuzzy myths around what podcasts are about and how they contribute to the bottom line abound, as Gerhardt points out:
“I think that the biggest misconception is that people like, ‘Oh, you don't use the podcast enough, and that means that you need to email your list more about your podcast and promote your podcast more.’ No, it's not that at all. You need to take content. It's like writing a book, right? If you wrote a book for your company, it would be silly to not try to... if you had hired a writer and you had a 300-page book about your core topic as a company, would you only use that content in a book that's going to sit on a shelf? No way. I would want to break that out and write two blog posts a week based on that content. I would want to start a YouTube channel based on that content. I would want to make decks and presentations based on that content. So, I think it's to use the podcast as a way to get all of this content for your brand.”
Content marketers need to reorient themselves past blog-centric strategies. They don’t engage as well as podcasts, and therefore they don’t bring in as much of a return. But they do serve as a longtime source of further content that comes straight from your podcast:
“Then, from there, we can turn all of that podcast content into all the other things that are going to feed the marketing machine that we have. So, the podcast drives email content. It drives video content and all this stuff that I mentioned before. It was honestly the first thing that we did because I think it's the most... it's a marketing channel that gives you the most leverage, I think. If you can start,” Gerhardt advises.
Drift knows the importance of this kind of content, including the powerful storytelling component, and they actually consider it foundational to their entire marketing strategy. For example, Mark Kilens, VP of Content and Community at Drift, considers his podcasts cornerstone content that they use to fuel so many other things across their brand.
“So I think of a podcast as like a virtual campfire. The campfires where the stories get told. It's a very communal place. It's typically [a] very safe place. So it's a virtual campfire. And with that CMO series that they did on Seeking Wisdom, this goes to another point we should talk about, which is how I view a podcast as a cornerstone piece of content. It's an episodic type of piece of content, typically. It's a show. You could have audio-based shows which are podcasts or video-based shows which could also be a podcast now.
“I think you folks started talking more about that. But what we did with that CMO series is we used all of that content to create now, one of our digital books, that is performing really well for Drift called CMO Secrets. So you just, you got to think about the podcast from everything you said, but also as this great resource for future inspiration of content. How can you repackage the content? Reposition it. We call it CMO Secrets now, into some new formats while also then referencing people back to the podcast. Because they might find out about the book first CMOs Secrets and then find the podcast. So we included some audio clips in the book, things like that. But I think that's the other power of podcasting. It's not only a great way to reach a new audience, to grow an audience, to expand your brand. But it's a great way to also create demand gen, customer marketing type of materials and content, that really can unify the story across your content, your customer experience, life cycle,” says Kilens.
Cornerstone content is how you amplify everything you’re creating, and it’s worked incredibly well for Drift and the other brands included here.
OpenView
OpenView is a brand that absolutely impresses us with their expert use of podcasting to fuel their strategies. We sat down with Meg Johnson, the Multimedia Marketing Manager at OpenView Partners and producer of their show Build, to talk about the amazing things she and her team are doing with their podcast, specifically discussing how they dedicate themselves to wringing out content.
Where Drift has a workflow set up around cornerstone content, Meg Johnson has what she calls the Content Carousel, and it’s a big way she manages a reusable content workflow and gauges performance.
“I think for us, we primarily use the podcast as a form of branding and of thought leadership, particularly around product-led growth, or PLG, as we like to call it. It's a little bit unique in that our business model as a VC firm differs from a more traditional sales process, but it's still really important for us in the marketing department to create programs and create awareness and excitement around OpenView before our investment team even reaches out. So one positive is if we have a podcast where people are excited to participate, that helps us create a great first impression with the types of people we want to invest in. On top of it, just being a great way to get a warm welcome with some prospects and build our network. It also provides us a lot of content that we use on our blog and in our newsletter. And then in turn, the blog and newsletter kind of turn it back to the podcast, which is something I like to call the marketing merry-go-round or the Content Carousel.
“But like a carousel, people come along for the ride. And so there'll be ups and downs in engagement with your content when people are more or less interested in what you have to say, but as long as they're still on the ride at the end, you must be doing something right. And on the other hand, if people are flying off your merry-go-round before the ride's over, but it's also, when that happens when people are flying off your merry-go-round or no longer interested in your content, that's when you need to ask yourself, is the ride that you're providing worth it for them? And if not, how can you change it so it is?” Johnson says.
The Content Carousel gives OpenView a great way to reuse and repurpose content, which wrings more value out of every episode, and Johnson appreciates the time savings and efficiency of the improved workflow in particular.
“I think I really learned the importance of repurposing content from being on the work creative side of things. So I work primarily as a designer, and if I spend X amount of hours, days, weeks designing something and then it gets one social post, that kind of feels not so great. And it also doesn't feel like the best use of our resources because I spent all this time creating this big thing and we only share it in one avenue or one time.
“So that's kind of where I first really learned the importance of it because, on the receiving end, it just doesn't feel great for the people that are putting in all of the hard work and effort into it. And then, as I kind of branched out into more of a social media marketing role, I started thinking, ‘Okay, I need to fill this content calendar and also get more podcasts listens, how can I creatively solve this problem in a way that hits two birds with one stone?’ so to speak.
“And for us, we do blog posts. We'll have usually around two to three blog posts per episode. So the first one will be the day the episode launches, and that'll just be the social copy that I write that we're going to share on LinkedIn and Facebook and et cetera. And then we do two other posts based on topics discussed throughout the episode. And so what I try to do when I'm writing that initial social copy, I give a little bit of a brief intro, and then I'll have three bullet points that say, ‘You're going to learn one, two and three takeaways from this episode.’ And basically, you talk about the first one in the first bullet point in the first posts with the social media copy, and then the two blog posts are just those two other bullets.
“And so it makes it a lot easier when you think ahead of time about, ‘All right, what can I do to really extend the shelf life of this episode while also calling back to it at a later date so that people come back to the feed, they listen not only to this episode, but the episodes previously?’ And we've seen really great success with that. And we also do that in our weekly newsletter. So we have a pretty large subscriber base there, and I just think we'd be total fools if we didn't utilize that. So instead of just saying, ‘Hey, listen to the podcast, listen to the podcast, listen to the podcast,’ over and over and over again, we're saying, ‘Listen to the podcast,’ over and over, but in slightly different ways so that whatever language connects with that person brings them back to whether it's a blog post or the podcast, whichever. And it's really great, embedding that Casted player into our blog posts, it's such an easy avenue for us to get people to listen,” Johnson says.
Johnson also discusses the dire need for human-first marketing, creating content with humans, not algorithms, first in mind, and that’s central to the amplified marketing way of starting every piece of content with how the audience will value your offering, not how high Google might put you on a search results page.
“Yeah. I love that, and I am a huge advocate for making marketing more human. For a little bit of context on like how we kind of take a pulse check on our audience or stay connected with our audience, before joining OpenView, I really didn't know much about product-led growth, but coming from a small SaaS startup, I understood some of the problems we were trying to help our audience solve. What was most eye-opening to me was as we were interviewing extremely successful CEOs and CCOs and all these higher ups at huge, really successful companies. I started realizing they were experiencing the same pain, and that made me realize that there are shared pain points across all different parts of the industry, and that's the kind of key to really connecting with people,” Johnson observes.
With an eye on the improved attribution of amplified marketing, OpenView is also exploring more meaningful metrics than subscription rates.
“And I also think that checking metrics, especially, this is a little bit of a plug for Casted, and no, Lindsay is not paying me to say this, although I do accept payment in the form of sushi or donuts, but the Casted metrics have been extremely helpful for us as we look through what episodes are performing the best, what short clips or pieces to the episodes is really interesting. Whether it's the person or the topic, it really allows us to dive a little bit deeper than just that general downloads or that general listens number. And so just kind of, again, looking through the metrics and also just seeing what people are commenting and saying about the show, or maybe what they're not saying. If no one's saying anything, it might be a little bit difficult. But again, always doing a pulse check on your audience and what they want and what they need in that moment. For example, that might be something very crystal clear today, but next week, who knows where the world will take us? And that might be a totally different message, that you need to stay agile, able to pivot so you don't come off sounding like a tone-deaf jerk raving about how awesome your podcast is when the world's in flames or something like that,” Johnson says.
Lumavate
Lumavate’s a stellar brand that amplifies their marketing straight from each podcast episode to deliver the utmost value to their audience. Stephanie Cox, VP of Sales and Marketing, and Michelle Lawrence, Content Marketing Specialist, share invaluable insights they learned from transforming the show Mobile Marketers into Real Marketers, to make the podcast even more targeted, relevant, and valuable to the people listening.
“For me, if you think about your show — really have a purpose. You need to do your research, you need to go on iTunes. And if you're going to do a marketing show or home improvement show, it doesn't really matter where the show is, and you need to see what else is already out there. Because if you're just another fill-in-the-blank type of show that already exists, you're going to struggle. It's going to be hard to break through the noise, unless you have some unique spin on it, or you can get some different guests on that,” says Stephanie Cox.
Lumavate is also extraordinarily adept at a key amplified marketing principle. They are geniuses at squeezing out every drop of value from each episode, which significantly cuts down on the time it takes to make everything from scratch. It also makes execution smoother.
“So our episodes are about 30 minutes, and so the other day I took one episode and created this whole content strategy around it. So for example, I created three different mini-blogs based on the three main takeaways of that episode. You can create one overall blog post with the overarching theme of the episode. And then based on that, you can create as many as 10 to 15 different social media posts. Whether that's just taking line-by-line little excerpts from the episode and just posting it on social. Or, like I mentioned earlier with the audiograms, some people don't have the time to watch like a 30- to 45-minute episode. So those audiograms can really pick the most important snippets from your episode and then put it in a more digestible form of content on social media while you're just kind of mindlessly scrolling anyways. And then you can pick these little mini-blogs, and you can kind of put them together in a larger form, maybe like an ebook or an infographic of like lessons we learned from this episode. And then you have the rest of your team create these different social media posts based on what resonates with them. So you can really kind of beat the horse to death on content generation with just a single podcast episode,” says Michelle Lawrence.
Ultimately, amplified marketing can make life a lot easier for content creators, and it helps marketers find the right balance of valuable quantity without diminishing valuable quality.
“Yeah, it is. And they want more, which I guess is like a good thing. I think that's one of the things where if you're doing content right, your sales team is always asking, can you create more, can you create more? Which is like a blessing and a curse all at the same time, right? Blessing, because they want it and they find it valuable for them in their outreach and just really even helping position us as strategic partners with these enterprise brands that we work with, right? If we're providing content and we have people on the show that are leaders that they would look up to, it really does help us, especially from a sales perspective. The flip side is, there are only so many hours in the day. And as I tell Michelle and another person on our team, Lily, that writes a lot of content for us, I don't want to break your brains.
“So there's a balance between getting enough great content out there that people are excited about, but also making sure you don't... it's not even oversaturate, but it's more about like, but it's still quality content, and it's content that is going to be engaging versus, can Michelle create like 100 social posts off of a single podcast episode? Yeah, definitely. But is that going to, at some point, diminish the value? Probably. So I think we're trying to find the balance between how to create content that is engaging and the team loves, with also this ability of not creating so much that it breaks anyone's brains, but also I kind of like this idea of always have them wanting more, both internally and externally, right? I always want them to ask for more because that tells me we're doing our job and what we're providing and the value of it is so high. When they stop asking is when I get worried,” Stephanie Cox advises.
The Bottom Line
As all of these incredible brands have proven, shifting from internal topic identification and only blog- and SEO-centric content marketing to something that makes more sense — both from an internal resources standpoint and a greater connection with customers who will convert when you give them value — is not an impossible task. For some of these brands, the shift wasn’t even hard.
But they were all thinking out of the box about how to be more efficient and more effective with their content marketing program. That’s when you’ll see and seize opportunities that can truly accelerate growth and make your content marketers love their jobs all over again.
For more on how amplified marketing can change your game, check out The Amplified Marketing Playbook.
