Season 5 of the Casted Podcast is all about our customers. And no, it’s not about our platform or how they’re using it (that wouldn’t be very authentic and off-brand for us), it’s about how our customers are using podcasts to fuel their strategies. Some of our best inspiration at Casted comes from the amazing customers we have and the podcast strategies they’re bringing to life. So, it’s time to celebrate that!
We’re kicking this Season off with Meg Johnson, the Multimedia Marketing Manager at OpenView Partners and producer of their show Build. You can check out her full interview here.
Meg and her team are doing some pretty amazing things with their podcast - and it’s paying off. Over the last year, they’ve seen their podcast listeners almost double! So we wanted to dig into their strategy a bit more. So we’re breaking down why the OpenView team wrings out their podcast and how they do it - with real examples.
Why Wring Out Your Podcast?
For OpenView, there are a lot of benefits that come along with wringing out their podcast. Let’s break down a few of the reasons why they believe so strongly in doing more with every podcast episode.
Extending the shelf life of their podcast
Too many brands churn and burn podcast episodes. But to give each episode more room to breathe, OpenView even moved to a biweekly publishing schedule. This gave them the chance to extend the immediate life of every podcast episode and increase their listenership. Bonus: it helped them create more buzz and love for each guest.
A higher ROE (Return on Effort) for their podcast
When you work hard to produce something, it’s pretty disheartening when it’s shared once and filed away in the archives rarely thought of again. For Meg and her team, it’s important to reuse and repurpose their content to get more value out of every episode. The more value you create from a podcast episode, the longer shelf life it has and the more your brand will get out of the effort you put into it.
Contributing to the Content Carousel
Content Carousel or Marketing Merry-Go-Round? Whatever your preference on this brilliant (Meg Johnson copyrighted) phrase, this is an incredibly valuable way to look at all of your content, not just your podcast. But for OpenView, they use their podcast as a way to fuel other content. Content that, well, takes you on a ride… a ride you don’t want to get off. As Meg describes it, if people are staying on the ride (clicking on a blog about a podcast from a newsletter > reading the blog > listening to the podcast > doing it all over again) chances are, they like what you’re doing.
Okay so now that you know WHY Meg and her team wring out their podcast as a part of their marketing strategy, let’s jump into HOW they're doing it.
How OpenView Wrings Out Their Podcast
For Meg, reusing and repurposing content has been an important part of her own strategy, even before OpenView. So it’s no surprise that her team looks for ways to extend the life of each episode by repurposing their podcast into several different pieces of content.
Identifying 3 takeaways from every episode
Each episode has tons of value for the OpenView team. They can be used to fuel blogs, social posts, newsletter copy… the list goes on. But it’s important that they diversify out from just a recap post for every episode.
Meg identifies 3 opportunities to create content from each episode. She schedules her first blog to go live with the episode, and schedules out the additional two pieces of content further out in her content calendar to extend the shelf life of the episode and give it room to breathe.
Giving their episodes room to breathe
What started out as a way to give Meg more time to complete each episode, turned into an awesome opportunity for OpenView to see more value with each episode they were producing.
By switching from weekly to biweekly episodes, OpenView saw their listenership and engagement for each episode grow, as well as an improvement in the overall guest experience.
Tease the 3 main takeaways in your promotion
When launching and promoting an episode, Meg teases the three main takeaways (that have blog content tied to them) to give their audience a taste of what’s to come. This has been great for them to keep their listeners (and readers) excited about the episode and offers the chance to keep people engaged with each episode longer.
Bringing in listeners through traditional channels
The OpenView team has a pretty substantial newsletter following, so they are very used to taking their content and reusing/repurposing it in different ways for their newsletter. This didn’t stop with their podcast.
As Meg mentioned when discussing her “Content Carousel” concept, they’ve tried to bring people into their podcast through different channels, including their newsletter. This could be from sharing the podcast episode directly, or creating content that introduces subscribers to the newsletter.
They’ve had a lot of success in converting their readers to listeners by employing this simple tactic.
Examples of OpenView wringing out their podcast
Now that we’ve talked about the why and how, let’s see their strategy in action.
Example 1: Building to Last
Building to Last is a podcast miniseries by OpenView about growing a business in a downturn.
After publishing this episode, the OpenView team didn’t settle with just a few social media posts and move on. Instead, they used this podcast to create two additional pieces of content.
Building to Last: Mental Health is a Marathon, Not a Sprint was first published on May 13th, the same day that the episode went live. 
The second blog post for this episode, Leadership Advice in Times of Crisis - from Highspot’s Oliver Sharp and Robert Wahbe, went live June 23rd. Giving this episode a revival nearly 6 weeks later.
In this post, Blake digs deeper and reflects on different aspects of the conversation. This is a great example of how you can pull further on different topics in an episode to uncover more insights and add additional value to current listeners and have an avenue to bring in a new audience to your show.
Example 2: Howie Liu (Airtable) on the Future of Low-Code/No-Code
For this episode of the Build podcast, Howie Liu (Airtable) on the Future of Low-Code/No-Code, the team launched with a more intensive recap the same day the episode dropped. In this blog post, OpenView embeds the episode twice (ato the beginning and at the end) to make sure they’re giving readers multiple opportunities to easily listen to the episode.
In their initial promotion of the episode, the OpenView team shared a social post that contains the 3 main takeaways from the episode (what Meg identifies and then uses to help guide content creation) and they also utilize audiograms. Audiograms are a great way to increase engagement and give a native listening experience in-app for your audience.
As you might have guessed, they created 2 additional blog posts for this episode and scheduled them out over the next five weeks.
In Building a LEGO Kit, Not a Solution - Airtable’s CEO on Catering to Diverse Use Cases, the OpenView team was able to pull on a thread of the interview to dig deeper into what makes Airtable so unique. And the best part about this blog? It’s not just OpenView telling you about examples of Airtable’s diverse use cases, it’s clips and quotes from Airtable’s CEO himself.
From Bottom Up - Airtable’s Approach to Distribution and Adoption is the third article they were able to pull out of this one episode. This article also does a great job of reflecting on another topic that Howie Liu discussed on the show.
The key for BOTH of these articles is that they’re not just glorified recap posts. They take different topics within the episode and dig deeper into them to create interesting articles that are incredibly complimentary to the episode itself. These are great examples of why podcasts are such great fodder for content.
So there you have it. This is how OpenView is turning their podcast into content that fuels their marketing strategy. And as discussed in the beginning of this article, they’re having a lot of success with this strategy in the form of growing listenership.
Meg had some advice for other marketers looking to do more with their podcast.
Interested in learning more about different ways you can use your podcast to fuel your marketing strategy, engage your audience, and drive more leads? Schedule a demo to learn more about how Casted can help take your podcasting strategy to the next level.
