You develop amazing content each week for your podcast. But is that enough to get your audience’s attention (or, more importantly, their ears)? Sure, you can get traffic to your episodes. However, if you’re not implementing methods to amplify your podcast, then you’re missing a golden opportunity to drive a lot more people to your show. And that’s what we’re going to focus on in this article—how to amplify your podcasts to get the most out of each episode.
This is what brands like OpenView and Drift did with their podcast content. Let’s take a look at how they’re using amplified marketing to get more value from their podcasts across their B2B marketing campaigns.
Drift: Amplifying Podcasts with Cornerstone Content
Drift more than understands the power of podcasts—so much so that they have several shows in production at once. Many brands view podcasts as a separate channel when they should be viewed as a resource to inspire and develop future content. Mark Kilens, VP of content, views them as cornerstone content—and rightly so. With proper amplification, podcasts can create a content package that drives more attention, views/listens, and leads.
Here’s a look at what Mark had to say about using podcasts as cornerstone content:
“Don’t treat your podcast as an Island. It should not be an Island. It should be something that I would argue is, if you want to use a different analogy, it’s the hub of the city. It’s a really big cornerstone piece of content that I think I looked at the stats from Casted, it’s like 10 minutes, don’t quote me on this. But 10 minutes is like two or 3000 words.
“So you have [a] 20-minute podcast … 6000 words are said. You could probably use at least a third of those 2000 words. So right there is at least one really strong blog article. We bring a few podcasts together and make one really epic blog article. So there’s just a lot of things that I think you need to think through as it relates to you your overall content marketing strategy and how podcasts can play into it.”
Drifted also views podcasts as a way for brands to build relationships and community.
“…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 very safe place.
“Podcasts are such an amazing learning tool, to understand more about your audience, to understand more about the experts that are part of your audience, part of your community. It's such an amazing learning opportunity. And then to pass that along. So for us, it's like learning and community building, go hand in hand. So we were really trying to become a very large global brand. And we believe in order to do that, we need to continue to grow the voices that are part of that brand and bring on more voices…at the end of the day, fundamentally we believe that this is about growing the community. And that means it's about storytelling. It's around getting by, around that campfire and sharing knowledge, sharing experience, sharing personal things, situations that we can all learn from. And that is deeply rooted into the values of Drift.”
Podcasting is THE tool to harness the power of storytelling, and those campfire stories and perspectives. And then make sure you’re reusing all of that content.
OpenView: Amplified Podcasts Creates a Content Carousel
At OpenView, each episode for its podcast, BUILD, presents an opportunity to do just that—build a carousel of content to fuel their marketing strategy. Their podcast brings in guests who are excited to speak with them, which creates authentic, engaging audio content.
That content then fuels blog content, newsletters, and more. And then (are you catching on to what’s happening here?), that content ultimately leads back to the podcast. As Meg, the Multimedia Marketer at Openview, puts it, if people are staying on the ride and coming back for more content, you must be doing something right!
Here’s a deeper look at Meg’s approach to podcast amplification.
“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, etc.
“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 is 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. And especially with those short clips, you can kind of hop in and say, ‘Oh, this is that point that I really wanted to learn,’ and then they can continue listening, and then they can continue listening to the rest of the episode. So yeah, we do a little bit of blog posts, weekly newsletter, and then, of course, just the kind of basic social media stuff.
We try to do two photo posts or audiograms each episode. And that way, also, we can share those with the guests, and hopefully, they’ll share [them] on their platform and share it around their company. So it’s a little bit of a co-marketing team effort, but those are kind of all the avenues that we try to spread our message far and wide.”
Auth0: Amplifying Podcasts with Visual Content
Auth0 first entered into the podcast game after the pandemic hit and canceled live events. And it turned out to be a smart move, as it helped them connect with their audience anytime, anywhere. They were able to garner thousands of listeners in a short time. Now, they’re using amplified podcasts to further guide people to their episodes.
Let’s take a look at how Rebecca Abram, Senior Global Conferences Manager at Auth0, handles this.
“So, we use the content in all the things, and I would recommend that to
content producers in general. Content creation takes up a huge majority of resources on the marketing team, but we also know that content is king. So, the more you can reuse that, the better. Early feedback that we got for the podcast because it is really technical, people wanted to kind of see what we were talking about and get some visual diagrams.
“So, early on, we decided that we were going to launch a blog that coincided with the podcast that could be used as an additional resource. We link it on our website to go to the blog posts, and then within there, we are using snippets of audio just to try and boost engagement from just reading through the blog.
And then how the players are set up are really great, as it’ll continue to play the rest of the episode. So, once you’ve got someone kind of hooked in that mechanism, it helps perpetuate the listens and the engagement. But in addition to that, obviously, it goes out on social media, and we do the audiograms in the videos, and we do the images.”
The Bottom Line
B2B companies are seeing not only the value of podcasting, but using the episodes to amplify content marketing strategies. The keyword here is strategy—having one will ensure you’re using every piece of content to work towards a common goal. In this case, to build brands, relationships, and leads.
If you’d like to learn more about creating a strategy behind your B2B podcast, then download our free Podcast Strategy Lookbook today!
