So you’ve launched a podcast and your audience has consistently gotten bigger and more engaged. Time to examine a question content marketers are familiar with: What next?
Now as you graduate from Stage 3 and begin Stage 4 of the B2B Podcast Maturity Curve, you shift your focus to multichannel expansion, an extension of the promotion strategies you began to leverage in the previous stage. You’re still trying to reach new audiences while retaining the listeners and viewers you already have, but you’re doing it with a greater amount of content repurposed into different formats to reach all of the channels your audience prefers.
In this episode of How B2B Podcasts Grow Up, Casted CEO Lindsay Tjepkema covers Stage 4: Multichannel Expansion and talks with podcast experts who have already been down this road of brand growth. Her guests from Oak Street Funding, Planful, and OpenView Venture Partners share their experiences and provide helpful tips about how to grow not just the audience and not just the show, but how to keep growing the brand all with a B2B podcast or video series sitting at the center of your strategic goals. It’s time to scale your authenticity, your audience relationship, and your show.
And if you don’t know where your podcast fits on the maturity curve, take our quick assessment and enjoy the show:
Digging into Key Takeaways
For each episode, we like to highlight some key takeaways. Think of it as a podcast outline or live show notes. Here are just a few of the takeaways that really stood out to us in this episode.
Think About Growth Before You Get to This Stage in Your Podcast Journey. Keyword: Flexibility. 🤸
As you move into Stage 4, you’ll shift from growing your audience to growing your marketing strategy and your brand in the process. But as Kira Singer, Senior Marketing Coordinator at Oak Street Funding, shares in this episode, it helped her greatly to already be thinking about how to expand into more channels as she went from creating webinars to launching the OnPoint with Oak Street Funding podcast. In fact, the podcast came about from asking one question: How can we get more out of our webinars that we’ve already invested in?
(For more on creating a digital strategy around a podcast, check out Kira’s episode on The Casted Podcast.)
The Size and Resources Behind Your Team Don’t Have to Impact How You Leverage Your Podcast Assets. Outsource! 💻
Expanding into different channels and platforms in Stage 4 does require more work and energy than growing your audience in Stage 3 of the maturity curve. There’s more to do, obviously, but you might not necessarily get people added to your team. So what do you do?
Peter Mahoney, General Manager of Marketing Performance Management at Planful now, has worked with both large and small teams. As a CMO, he relied on plentiful in-house resources to grow a podcast and create additional content around each episode. But when he first started podcasting, he was doing it by himself and struggling to create consistent content and proving whether podcasting was worth all the work. Peter leaned into outsourcing some of that work as a solution. (For more, check out the podcasts The Next CMO and Being Planful.)
It was a different story for Kira Singer. She didn’t have a big team and was impacted by employee churn during the pandemic. To get consistency for her show OnPoint with Oak Street Funding, Kira hired a host from outside of the company to ensure the show remained consistent and could grow over time. Sometimes the answer is to look outside your company for a vital extension of your in-house team.
(For more on connecting your podcast to your overall marketing strategy, check out Peter’s episode on The Casted Podcast.)
Position an Authentic, Vulnerable Leader at the Front of Your Podcast to Truly Connect with Your Audience 👩
Even as you’re strategically putting out more content to make more of your audience aware of your show in the channels they prefer, you should still be thinking about your core way to connect with the new and returning listeners and viewers.
For Meg Johnson, Senior Manager of Creative Strategy at OpenView Venture Partners, that means focusing on your show’s personality. As you can see in the OpenView podcast Build with Blake Bartlett, Meg wants the host to be an authentic and vulnerable thought leader, because as she says in the episode, authenticity and trust are the best ways to build a brand, and it’s totally scalable.
(For more on authenticity and building trust with a podcast audience, check out Meg’s episode on The Casted Podcast and her episode on the Amplified Marketing Podcast.)
Want to See Where Your B2B Podcast Lies on the Maturity Curve?
If you’d like to see which stage your brand’s podcast is at, what you can do to reach the next stage, and how Casted can help you along the way, take our quick B2B Podcast Maturity Curve assessment.
And for more, stay tuned to Casted’s new series How B2B Podcasts Grow Up for a stage-by-stage discussion of how a B2B brand takes a show from launch to mass marketing amplification, and all the expert strategies, tips, and insights you need to create and grow your own audio or video podcast to serve your brand and drive growth.
Want to skim through the episode instead of listening? Read the transcript here.
About How B2B Podcasts Grow Up
As Season 3 of The Amplified Marketing Podcast, How B2B Podcasts Grow Up will cover the five stages of the B2B Podcast Maturity Curve, where we discuss the best strategies and models for creating a new show in a new channel, for growing and engaging your audience, for expanding across all the channels your audience prefers, and for integrating your podcast program into your overall content marketing strategy. And of course, we’ll discuss all the ways you can create meaningful content and then get the most traction from that material by wringing it out and amplifying it across all channels.
