Why create content, only to promote it once, then move on to create something else from scratch and never give a second thought to the countless ways this content could be used across your channels and throughout your marketing, sales, and customer strategies? That would be madness, right?
Madness indeed, if you’re trying to expand your podcast or video series across multiple channels and formats and use your show to grow your brand.
In the B2B Podcast Maturity Curve, to graduate to Stage 4: Multichannel Expansion, a brand has to ramp up the show promotion they began in Stage 3: Audience Growth. And this expansion is not purely to expose the show to a greater number of listeners or viewers by providing podcast content in non-podcast formats and channels. It also helps to fuel your overall marketing strategy and brand growth.
The central methodology behind multichannel expansion is amplified marketing, where you make your podcast the primary source of content for your entire content marketing strategy and wring out your show content.
In this post, we hear from expert B2B podcasters about what amplified marketing is in each of their brands and how they’ve used it to take a show to the next level and expand across all channels.
And if you don’t know where your podcast fits on the maturity curve, take our quick assessment:
Amplified marketing simply means using your show content to fuel other content marketing channels and reach more of your audience. There are many options to choose from, depending on your brand and your goals, but here are a few ways brands wring out their content across all relevant channels.
It’s important to remember that while amplified marketing is a way to get more mileage out of your show content, it is not about taking copy or video and slapping the exact same structure and coverage into other formats. We all love to create net-new content, but whether you’re on a large or small team, that’s not practical for everything content marketers need to do. As Salesforce’s Michael Rivo shares, amplified marketing is an effective strategy for giant brands with extensive marketing teams to do more with what they’ve already created and provide multiple flavors for your guests.
“If you have a particular video, you can turn that into a blog post, you can run it as an audio piece, you run it as a video, you do clips, you do social... I used to work with a great marketer who would call it, you know, the Thanksgiving Dinner, where you made all that food, and then, you know, for the week after, you've got your turkey sandwiches and your turkey soup, and you know everything that you could make with Thanksgiving Dinner, so I think that's a big part of our strategy, and it's something that really if you just look at each piece of content that you're making, you can get a lot of mileage out of it.” — Michael Rivo, Director, Salesforce Studio Team, Salesforce
Small content marketing teams can also expand podcast content into multiple channels when they wring out their source content. This kind of amplification efficiency is super valuable, as Hailey Wheeler from Caterpillar explains.
“So for us, I think audio and video, in just amplified marketing, is a way for us to do more by doing less. By using Casted, for example, for our podcast in particular, we're able to pull so much different content from one conversation. So transcripts, audiograms, videograms, these are all different ways to get as many eyes on our content as possible while also catering to the different content preferences that our different audience members have. So talking to subject matter experts within our podcast also gives us tidbits of information that we could possibly restructure into an article or perhaps another video. So these possibilities with amplified marketing are endless, plus it makes our jobs as content marketers a lot easier.” — Hailey Wheeler, Services Marketing Communications Consultant with Caterpillar Oil & Gas and Marine
Because not everyone has the time to listen to or view every episode in full, repurposing your show content into other channels provides convenient onramps for your audience to engage with your brand, as Ryan Cramer from PingPong demonstrates.
“If you can do an hour-long's worth of content, you can break it apart into multiple different segments of learnings and apply it to different contexts… And you can start to take that big piece of content that you created and start to dissect it. And now you have lots of different pieces that the rest of my content team can really throw out there into blocks. They can throw it out there into social media posts as quick learnings and teachings. So I know if people aren't going to listen to the podcast, we can break it apart into smaller segments. That's truly just a way to get in front of people.” — Ryan Cramer, Partnership Marketing Manager, PingPong
With every podcast episode you create from scratch, you can repurpose the content into many different formats, like social media, blogs, case studies, email, YouTube videos, paid ads — any of the places potential audience members prefer to engage with content.
Here’s how Jillian (MacNulty) Hoefer at Terminus used a surround-sound approach to multichannel amplification using a single piece of keystone content:
“At Terminus, obviously we're an ABM platform, so we love the idea of multichannel. We love the idea of surround sound. We love the idea of hitting a prospect at every angle with content that's going to be relevant to them… So we're going to take an example of a piece that we launched… and it was an ebook called If Dunder Mifflin had ABM…
“The ebook itself was an interactive experience that our incredible design team built on Ceros, which allows us to create really, really cool interactive, clickable Easter egg, hideable pieces of content. So that was the piece of content in itself. Great for high engagement.
“The way we promoted it was we had targeted display and social ads for this piece. We had an email signature banner that went out with every single outbound email that we sent… And then, we also sent out a mass email to our whole email database because we knew this was going to be a piece that most people would enjoy, because who doesn't love The Office?
“And then within the experience we took it one step further. We actually used Terminus chats to create a personalized chat bot that you could chat with different Dunder Mifflin characters… And you could chat with a bunch of people from Dunder Mifflin within the content experience. So, total surround-sound approach.” — Jillian (MacNulty) Hoefer, Content Marketing Manager, Terminus
If you’ve ever had to manually transcribe an audio or video file, you know what a massive difference transcripts make in content creation. As we hear from PERQ’s Muhammad Yasin, having a text-only version of every conversation you record makes it easier and faster to cut up your foundational content into smaller bite-size clips that you can embed in social media, blogs, and email.
“Even something as simple as a transcript, or you give that audio to your content manager, and they're able to maybe pull four, or five, six topics out of it with quotes that were out of that podcast, and have blogs for weeks, or months sometimes, and then, you mix in some audio clips maybe with that, and you've got some great audiograms for social media. You've got snippets of quotes you can use, that you can turn into images that you post on social, or on your Instagram, and your stories, or whatever. This is a great spot to start with really authentic content that you can remix into other formats down the road versus the other way around, which is far harder.” — Muhammad Yasin, Executive Vice President of Marketing, PERQ
Knowing your audience is critical in content marketing, because it tells you which channels they prefer to find content on. In Misfit Media’s case, a large segment of their audience prefer video, and more specifically they prefer YouTube for finding information, as Camberlyn Sparks explains.
“So for us, a big part of our audience lives on YouTube. They come there for a lot of our information on how to market their restaurant, simple tips and tricks, whatnot. So having that presence at our podcast on YouTube is really important for us. So Brett is producing content three or four times a week for our YouTube channel. That's in compliments to the podcast. So I'm going in there and clipping these little pieces of content. I probably will get 15 pieces of content from one episode. That brings so much value that it would be a waste to just throw it away. So I'm clipping that content and then I'm editing it. I'm figuring out the best spots in the episode that I think will hit home the most and then posting that on YouTube, on social, in our blog and whatnot, and having that whole ecosystem work together. And honestly, video has been huge for us. It's been a way for us to reach a lot of customers and create that brand equity. [It] gives a face to the name and ultimately helps Brett when he is on these calls to then already have them warmed up and buttered up.” — Camberlyn Sparks, Digital Marketing Coordinator, Misfit Media
Many brands are delving deeply into audio- and videograms to wring out their content in so many different and powerful ways. The best part for Michelle Lawrence at Lumavate is that it’s an organized and repeatable process.
“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 take 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.”— Michelle Lawrence, Senior Marketing Specialist, Lumavate
When you can take all the interesting points that are important to your audience from a podcast episode, you can create a content carousel to fuel multichannel promotion. But keep in mind that you need to document your promotion plan and that each channel has a slightly different purpose and approach. Here’s how Meg Johnson does it at OpenView Venture Partners.
“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 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.” — Meg Johnson, Multimedia Marketer, OpenView
As Dana Iskoldski from BlueCat recommends, you should always be looking for ways to reshare your podcast content, whether you’re tying an older topic to something current or just coming up with a new angle to reintroduce your content. And you should always continue sharing evergreen content that performs.
“Don’t assume that the algorithms are helping you, and get comfortable reposting things a lot, and creating a cadence where you’ve got [something] new… Here’s an announcement post, but then pull some stats or some facts out of it for the week after and then, the week after that, and the week after that. So create a bit of a drip… use your other available channels to your advantage … If you’ve got email, if your host knows people, do that.” — Dana Iskoldski, Corporate Communications Manager, BlueCat
One of the new realities content marketers have had to adapt to in the last couple years is the massive shift away from in-person to virtual events. Yet amplified marketing plays a great role here as well with how you capture your net-new event content and then wring out that content into other formats, from on-demand video to social promotion. That’s exactly what Vicky Houser did at Planful.
“It was definitely a lot of pre-planning. As Rowan said, he set a very ambitious goal to have all of the content uploaded, with transcripts, key takeaway clips, and related resources, ready to distribute by the end of the day, the day after the event so that we could immediately follow up with attendees and prospects, or anyone who couldn't make it to the actual event but still wanted that content…
“One of the features that we were definitely most excited about in the Casted platform when we first brought it on was the ability to quickly and efficiently create those key takeaway video clips. But the thought of doing that for 34 different sessions in a day, without a plan, that didn't seem possible. I actually wound up partnering really closely with our product marketing team… And essentially, together, we went through each speaker's slide deck, and we mapped out all of those key takeaways in advance, pre-planning those moments that we thought would bring the most value to our audience, in advance, before they were even spoken. Which sounds kind of nuts, but it worked. Yeah.
“On the actual day, we did have some customers in the office, and some were presenting live from home. The second their sessions ended, we had our design team ready to edit the final videos. That was an unbelievable turnaround from our in-house design team, editing 34 videos in less than a day… And, after a lot of hard work and a little bit of a miracle, by the end of that last day of the event, all of the content was uploaded in Casted, including all the related resources which we had also pre-planned, guest descriptions, et cetera. And then, when I woke up the next morning, all of those videos were transcribed, thanks to Casted, which was utterly mind-blowing…
“Yeah, then all we really had to do was go through the transcripts to find those sections that we had pre-planned and find where they corresponded in the talk track, and we'd highlight those sections, and we'd have clips ready to share in seconds. It was amazing.” — Vicky Houser, Corporate Marketing Specialist, Planful
Mutlichannel expansion is the culmination of all the work you’ve done to mature your podcast or video series. In Stages 1 and 2 of the B2B Podcast Maturity Curve, your brand experimented with a new channel and launched a podcast. In Stage 3, you focused on growing your audience and improving your show. Now in Stage 4, you take content from your podcast and use it to expand across all channels, further promoting your show, building trust with your audience, and growing your brand overall.
Here are some of the questions we ask — and help our clients answer — when we’re wringing out content:
The answer to all of these questions lies in wringing out content — spreading your resources as far as they can go with minimal effort and maximum reach, and get one step closer to that desired ROI.
For more on how your brand’s podcast can mature from an interesting idea to a full-scale marketing strategy, be sure to tune in to Casted’s series How B2B Podcasts Grow Up.