Casting an eye over the future of content marketing - Casted CEO Lindsey Tjepkema on the role of audio and video

Lindsey Tjepkema is a fifteen-year veteran of B2B marketing and has tracked the growth of content marketing during that time. Based on her experience working with several companies, she found content marketing a very manual and time-consuming process, with no way to measure its performance. She decided she wanted "to be the change she wanted to see" and that's where the idea for Casted was born.

I first wrote about Casted in October 2019 when the B2B podcasting platform was introduced in pre-release to the market. At the time it was nice to see a podcasting solution available that catered to the needs of B2B companies who wanted to build podcasts as part of their content marketing strategy. 

A year and a half on, I spoke with CEO Tjepkema about her drive to create the platform, how it's evolved, and where it's headed. 

Casted then and now

Casted started with audio content and provided ways for marketers and salespeople to use that content to share with audiences and prospective customers through sharing the podcast, transcripts, and clips (both text and audio-based). The platform provided a show page and individual episode pages. It also offered metrics that help marketers understand how their content was performing.

Since then, Casted has introduced support for video content, including everything from video podcasts and shows, webinars, and live virtual events. Users can create audio and video grams from the longer-form content. All content is transcribed by humans.

The transcripts are all searchable, and that enables two things. First, there is an SEO benefit to the company because people can find the content when searching on Google. And second, marketers and salespeople can search their Casted content to find relevant content for marketing activities and other campaigns, for sales enablement, customer support, and more. Importantly, the content isn't hidden away inside the Casted platform. 

The platform also has improved metrics and KPIs that show engagement and how the content influences revenue and fuels pipeline. 

The future of content marketing starts with audio and video

The way marketing works today in many companies is we start with blogs, websites, and other written content assets. We decide what to write by planning for SEO and conversion. At the same time, some companies are trying out the audio and video content that audiences want. 

It's important to recognize something at this point - there are a lot of great content marketers out there, but they aren't necessarily experts in the business they work in. That makes it challenging to create great content without the help of experts inside and outside the company. So the answer is obviously to have conversations with these experts. And if you are going to have these conversations, why not record them and build your content marketing around them? Tjepkema says: 

I've been that person, I've led that team where you're selling something really complex, and you're trying to get into the head of the subject matter experts internally and externally. You kind of ghostwrite on their behalf in a way that will outrank the competition at a velocity that is a breakneck pace. It's broken. And then, in the spare time that you don't have, also go create rich content. It has become content that serves algorithms over audiences. And that's backwards.

In Tjepkema's view, we need to turn our approach to content marketing on its side.  What we need to do, she said, is start with a conversation and use that conversation as fuel for everything else. This conversation-first approach is what Tjepkema and Casted are calling Amplified Marketing: 

Amplified Marketing is the next generation of enterprise marketing that focuses on putting expert interviews and conversations at the center of your content strategy, and then amplifying those voices into your marketing and business strategies.

Amplified Marketing starts with a conversation created through audio and video content. It then takes that content and amplifies it across multiple channels in different formats: social media content, blogs, whitepapers and ebooks, audio and video clips, email content, sales content, and much more. Tjepkema explains: 

When you start with the conversation, and you use that as source content to fuel everything else, it makes your team more efficient. It makes your content more effective and makes your whole strategy more engaging.

It also relieves pressure on your content team to be experts in your business, instead relying on the subject matter expertise of employees, customers, and influencers to help you share the information your audience and customers want and need. 

My take

Casted is doing something right. It lists as customers big brands such as Drift, Salesforce, Paypal, and HubSpot. It integrates with a number of key marketing solutions, including WordPress, Drift, HubSpot, and several marketing automation platforms. It also recently completed Series A funding of $7 million and. Tjepkema plans to expand her  team and its marketing, as well as implement product enhancements. 

I'm completely on board with leveraging the knowledge of subject matter experts to build the right content in a content marketing program. And yes, if you are going to interview these people and record the conversations, then why not turn that into a podcast or a video show? 

Plan it right, including doing your market research and SEO research to know what those conversations need to be around. Create the audio and visual content that will inform, engage, and, in some cases, help drive conversions.