As a veteran content marketer, Tim Glomb, VP of Content and Data at Cheetah Digital, is in it for the long run. He knows it takes time to build a strong relationship with potential customers.
That’s why Cheetah Digital, the globe’s largest independently owned, multichannel marketing platform, focuses so much on relationship marketing. They provide an end-to-end platform that allows enterprise brands to activate their customers’ marketing lifecycle through the four stages of relationship marketing — acquiring, understanding, and engaging new customers — plus retention through loyalty programs.
Before finding Casted, Cheetah had the same challenges we all face at one time or another. With several thought-leadership podcasts, Cheetah had tons of great content, but they weren’t sure they were getting the most out of their strategy the further down the funnel customers would go. The brand wanted to make the whole customer journey easier, both for customers engaging with Cheetah’s content and for sales and marketing to manage on their end. And like their namesake, they had to be fast, identify their target customers, and reach out with bite-size content in the moment.
Casted had the chance to sit down with Tim Glomb to learn what he sees as valuable in the ongoing effort to improve Cheetah’s opportunities through relationship marketing.
Cheetah’s podcasts include Thinking Caps, The Pulse, Uncaged Wisdom, and several client case studies and success stories. These provide ample amounts of thought leadership content that marketing and sales can use to guide customers down the funnel.
A huge part of their relationship marketing strategy is driven by video, which became a far more valuable format during the pandemic. “Video is a dynamic tool,” Tim tells us. “Videos scaled [connection] tremendously during COVID when people could not have those in-person events.”
Now Cheetah’s podcasts are all video that are 10 minutes or less. “It's video, because we use a lot of graphics,” Tim says. “We cite a lot of visual things, whether that's eMarketer Insider Intelligence, bringing graphs to screen as well as quoting articles from Forbes and Wall Street Journal and things. So, video is crucial to us as a podcast.“
But it’s got to be short. “If you drag on further than 10 minutes, you don't retain the bulk of what the podcast was trying to convey,” Tim says. “In 10 minutes, you can take away 60% to 70% of what we were trying to convey. So, that strategy has worked very well for us.”
With two colleagues devoted to video, Cheetah’s lean content team published over 60 hours of video in 2021 and around 150 written pieces, including case studies, whitepapers, blogs, guides, and checklists.
With two colleagues devoted to video, Cheetah’s lean content team published over 60 hours of video in 2021 and around 150 written pieces, including case studies, whitepapers, blogs, guides, and checklists.
Cheetah has all this valuable content to serve their audience along every stage of the customer journey, but making content is not the difficult part.
“Creating content is not hard,” Tim says. “It's assembly line work. You've got a process behind it… We do it at scale with a small amount of people. The biggest challenge is, number one, getting it in front of the right eyeballs. Just how do you get it in front of them? We have hundreds of thousands of people on an email list, but not everyone opens. Not everybody clicks after they open. How do you get people to watch? That is the big thing. You've got to be compelling. You got to be short. You got to nail the pitch.”
“You’ve got to be compelling. You got to be short. You got to nail the pitch.”
“The second part of that, which is equally as important because, if you can get the people to watch, that's great, high five. But if you don't know what they watched or how they consumed or how many they've watched, you have no idea if this person is just bored and opened their email and watched something, or if they're actually searching for and consuming content around a particular topic that can help you sell your services or products to them… Does this person have the intent around this topic and do they need my help? If they don't, I'm badgering them like a salesperson. But if they truly are giving me the signals that they're digging into a particular topic, then I can help them.”
It’s not about producing massive amounts of top-of-the-funnel content. It’s about getting relevant content to the right customer in the moment.
“For a business like ours, you don't need 10,000 views on a takeaway or website. You need the right 10 views. We found, in fact, Thinking Caps, our podcast, because we syndicated some things out to LinkedIn, we know we booked over $3 million in business from it. So, talk about an ROI on a podcast. I know, specifically with a nationally recognized restaurant franchise, the decision maker found a takeaway that was on my LinkedIn page and said, ‘Hey, Tim, I want to talk to you about that topic.’ It was the 90 seconds that mattered. That one view was nearly a million-dollar revenue view.”
“For a business like ours, you don't need 10,000 views on a takeaway or website. You need the right 10 views.”
When sales can reach out in the moment a customer expresses interest in a topic, that increases the likelihood that the customer will want to set up a call or demo. But when you can’t do that, maybe because you don’t have the in-house staff, you’re typically paying a third party to create content. That costs money and time. But worse, the slowness to respond may cost you an opportunity.
As Tim points out, if Cheetah hadn’t found Casted, “We would pay four times as much in labor to do what Casted does for us instantly.” But it’s the speed with which you can create takeaways and clips that’s more important. “It's not even the [financial] cost,” Tim says. “It's the opportunity cost... If the video people can just get the long form up and load it, then somebody else with zero video chops can create as many takeaways as they want. That's the power. That's where the efficiency comes in. That's where the savings comes in.”
“We would pay four times as much in labor to do what Casted does for us instantly.”
Ultimately, successful B2B brands make the journey easier for the customer and easier for a team to create and amplify content. But that can get tricky to manage with a large audience. Since Tim Glomb came to Cheetah two years ago, their marketable database has grown into hundreds of thousands, but just having a giant audience isn’t what drives revenue and pipeline. “I'm looking at intent data,” Tim clarifies. “Growth, if we get it, it's good, but it's not a key metric that I'm looking at right now.”
What are the metrics he’s looking at? “I measure by who actually watched,” Tim says. “Ooh, that's a whale. Coca-Cola? I'd love to have them as a client. Three people from Coca-Cola watched? Awesome. That is a great month. That was worth creating that content. 3,000 unknowns watched? Couldn't care less. So, in the B2B space, it's not about quantity; it's the quality for sure.”
What initially drew Tim to the Casted Platform was simple: Key Takeaways give you a great, snackable look at the most important topics or statements. They’re easy to make and easy to amplify through your content channels.
“I've said it from day one,” Tim says with a grin. “Casted's competitive advantage is the Takeaway. I can make one piece of 28-minute content and do 20 different bite-size [pieces]. I would imagine 75% of the people that watch our content never watch the long form. They don't have the time. So, it's all about snackable, it's all about quick, and it's all about meaningful. That's what the Casted platform allows us to do with the takeaways.”
“So, it's all about snackable, it's all about quick, and it's all about meaningful. That's what the Casted platform allows us to do with the takeaways.”
Being able to create clips quickly also helps Cheetah amplify their content and contribute to the ROI on everything they produce.
“Every bit of content that we create specifically in a B2B situation, anything we point a camera at has to be repurposed at least five times to be worth the ROI,” Tim explains. “A good example of that: we're going to launch this interview with Starbucks around relationship marketing. It's a 28-minute interview. That interview will launch as the standalone, long-form 28-minute interview… I would be surprised if bits and pieces of that interview were not repurposed at least two dozen times in the two months after. They'll get put into montages, they'll get put into top five quote clips for different topics, loyalty, email, CDP, personalization. So, when you talk about amplifying content, it really does become a content farm.”
In addition to the Key Takeaways, Tim’s team can create clips (videograms) to drive engagement and ultimately ROI, but the return isn’t the main thing Tim’s looking for. More than just brand awareness, more than growing an audience, Cheetah wants to target the right customers and increase the number of successful interactions.
That’s where putting takeaways and clips in the hands of the sales team makes such a huge difference, as Tim outlines: “I really do believe the power is in instantly having a long form turned into takeaways in less than five minutes that can enable a sales team of a thousand people... That's incredibly powerful.”
“I really do believe the power is in instantly having a long form turned into takeaways in less than five minutes that can enable a sales team of a thousand people… That’s incredibly powerful.”
How easy is it? “Well, we got to go into the transcript and create them, but very, very quickly, without a MacBook Pro, without a tower, without some big editing machine,” Tim says. “I mean, anybody can do it from a web device, create these takeaways, put it in a title. It's lickety-split.”
When your sales team can go in and create clips or snag a takeaway, the marketing team doesn’t need to go back later to make sure they’re using the content. Sales knows where the valuable content is. This allows marketing to continue moving forward with content strategy and creation, which is exactly what’s happened at Cheetah.
“The content team stays focused on creating more content,” Tim says. “The sales and services team that needs this content to tell the story and continue conversations to drive more business, they're completely capable. And by the way, for an SDR team, which has the highest turnover in any organization, I mean, they're young, they're paid lower, and they just turn over in this churn, the training is minimal. It's like, ‘You ever use YouTube? Cool. Go in here and hit the Search bar. Search for ‘emotional loyalty.’ Boom. Here's what comes up.’ It's like, ‘Oh wow, we have our own little YouTube.’ Yes, we do. It's called Casted."
“‘You ever use YouTube? Cool. Go in here and hit the Search bar. Search for ‘emotional loyalty.’ Boom. Here's what comes up.’ It's like, ‘Oh wow, we have our own little YouTube.’ Yes, we do. It's called Casted.”
If your customer journey is fragmented or difficult in any way, you won’t see many opportunities. But all that changes when you can take clips and build a personalized customer journey for your target audience.
“We know our products and services," Tim says. "So we know we have to create X amount of content that explains our products and services. What's interesting is once you create all of that content, it's now creating an individual journey for each consumer… A lot of brands will just throw stuff against the wall and throw everyone into the same funnel. You and I have different needs, different dietary needs, different physical needs. Why treat everyone as one mass? So that's one of the reasons I really like Casted is all the takeaways, the themes. If I have 50 hours of content, I might have 5,000 nuggets. Now, how do I stack those nuggets in a line so that they create a meaningful journey for someone.”
Again, it’s that speed and relevancy that helps Cheetah improve the journey. As Tim proudly says, “When an entry-level SDR, when they can literally go in and find the 90 seconds to continue their conversation with a prospect, the tool works. It just works. That makes the journey flow better. “
Cheetah’s relationship marketing strategy relies heavily on Casted, and the Key Takeaways’ functionality alone has helped Cheetah hit their goal of being empathetic and achieving customer consideration. And as Tim illustrates, it’s simple.
“‘Hey, I know you don't have a lot of time, but this 90 seconds will tell you how we fix this problem.’ And it's worked very, very well. Not only that; it's scalable. Because my business development team, they write these similar emails, they're plain text, and they just copy and paste them, change the target. It could be Betty Jones at American Express or Tom Jones at Coca- Cola. But the same story resonates, so it's been incredibly efficient.”
There’s a lot to be said about having one place where all your podcasts and videos live. It’s not scattered over several different systems or platforms, which gives you faster reaction time to reach out to customers with the right content.
“The other thing that is nice,” Tim adds. “Clearly you guys amplify out to YouTube, to Spotify for audio, and Apple Podcasts and everything. You're a single distribution point for us, which is great. It saves a lot of time and efficiency… But when it comes to amplification, we know certain people get this on Apple Podcasts. Certain people will just listen on Spotify. So you being that single point, not just being a player with cool takeaways and transcripts and a great visual player, but being that amplification point to those downstream, syndicated platforms is huge for us.”
Tim gives us a look at how this works in practice: “What Casted allowed us to do is, let's say I do an interview with Starbucks. I probably would create 5 individual video clips from that interview as marketable content. But again, they now are their own individual piece, and I've got to track each one of those assets. I’ve got to put each one of those assets on LinkedIn. All the metrics for each one of those assets became a new video… When you do a hundred videos a year, now you've got 500 elements that you're tracking. The funnel and the metrics and the data is crazy. It's too much.”
The Key Takeaways make assets so much easier for Cheetah’s content team to manage and sales to leverage in making connections. Tim carries the hypothetical Starbucks example a little further:
“If Starbucks ends up being 20 takeaways, now you've got to manage 20 clips in the long form. So, you've got 21 clips, and which one am I sending and where? Which one's on LinkedIn, which one's not? The takeaways inside Casted give me one asset, one video with 21 different distribution opportunities.”
By leveraging video engagement data, Cheetah’s sales and marketing teams can quickly drill down into who’s watching and which takeaways are shared the most, as Tim outlines here:
“With Casted, not only can we say, ‘All right, somebody watched a video,’ but we can literally look at what are they watching. What are the most viewed takeaways inside a particular piece of content? …That intelligence in aggregate is incredibly important, because it informs our larger content strategy. Now, that intelligence on an individual level [might show] Betty Jones from American Express just consumed this. That's incredibly important for our customer relations, sales cycle, and retention program. Casted brings us a granularity in video consumption that the other tools just weren't giving us. Not only that, we can throw takeaways into our outbound triggered emails or SMS messages. If we know you've watched something on relationship marketing, I can now trigger an email waiting in the wings that only has 90 seconds from a 30-minute webinar that I know is going to resonate with you. So it's incredibly important to have that granular, slippery, shareable, snackable content that the Casted player provides.”
“Casted brings us a granularity in video consumption that the other tools just weren't giving us.”
As a result, Tim can see Cheetah’s salespeople increasing opportunities: “The people who are booking more meetings are consistently throwing Casted Takeaways into their outreach mix, they are the ones that are succeeding… They care more about getting the right piece of content to the right person to continue that conversation. But Casted is a huge, huge ingredient in that mix.”
The customer journey is everything in B2B marketing, as Tim affirms: “Our revenue is well into the millions annually. [The cost of Casted] to enhance that customer journey, it's a no-brainer. You can't even argue it.”
It’s not just about leveraging a platform or tool. You have to have a strong promotional strategy that aligns with your company’s goals, and you have to know your audience well enough to understand what they’ll engage with and what they won’t.
For Tim Glomb, who already had the strategy in place, a platform that lets him execute that strategy faster than his competitors gives him the competitive advantage he needs.
“The way I justified Casted over any other player was that it absolutely made the consumer journey far easier. So again, what we were doing before is like, ‘Hey, we got this interview up... It's like, go watch it. It's 28 minutes. Just no one was doing it. That's a horrible consumer experience. I don't have 28 minutes. Can you tell me very quickly how you treat emotional loyalty? I know it's in that 28-minute thing. Casted to me was an investment in the customer journey… We just want the consumer to be able to find what they want very, very quickly and easily. That is how I looked at the investment in Casted.”
For more on Cheetah Digital and Tim’s insights, go to cheetahdigital.com and check out any of their podcasts, like Thinking Caps, The Pulse, or Uncaged Wisdom.
To learn more about how Casted can help you, visit casted.us, and subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest on all things B2B podcasting and video, content marketing insights, and more.