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How to Scale Authenticity with Meg Johnson of OpenView

For the last episode of The Casted Podcast’s 8th Season, we are joined once more by one of the true marketing wizards in the B2B world, Meg Johnson, Senior Manager of Creative Strategy at OpenView Venture Partners. Meg is a longtime multimedia content marketer who believes in the power of using every relevant channel to reach a brand’s audience, has adopted an amplified marketing strategy to unleash that power, and has helped make OpenView’s Build with Blake Bartlett a successful B2B podcast that speaks to real people about real pain points. 

If you’ve never heard Meg talk about content marketing or the connective power of B2B podcasts before, prepare to be inspired. Like for real. Content marketers have a tough job, a “never-ending danceathon,” as our guest calls it, and in the midst of all the creative focus, planning, execution, and performance tracking, we can sometimes forget that mostly what we strive to do is be a genuine human being helping another human being who has a problem to solve. 

Doing that in a way that connects communities, promotes brand awareness, and builds a relationship on trust and reliability requires one hard-to-qualify characteristic: Authenticity. When you’re genuine and real, your audience trusts you and your brand. As we’ll hear in the episode, this kind of brand building and customer marketing has to go beyond a transactional relationship. People like people (or in this case, the people working for a brand) a lot more than they like brands just trying to sell them something.  

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.

Is Authenticity Scalable? 🤔 

One thing a B2B podcast does well that no other content channel can is put a human face or voice on your brand’s marketing. Consumers generally don’t trust brands who simply try pushing products at them. They want to know what a brand stands for, what a brand values in their customers beyond the transaction, and whether a brand is human enough to care about building a solid connection with customers based on trust.

That’s what being authentic is all about, and some brands have yet to embrace that idea. Not OpenView, though. Meg Johnson has been a vocal proponent of authenticity for many years now. “I think people really care about people. They don’t care about your brand.” And for those who question the value of being genuine in your podcast and other content and whether that’s scalable, Meg’s answer is pretty stark: “If you’re being true to yourself — you’re being true in your intentions — why can’t you scale that?” 

Talk to a Casted Crew Member!

How to Test and Refine Content 👩‍🔬 

There seem to be two schools of thought around when a piece of content is ready for the world to see. Some creators want the content to be perfect the first time out of the gate, which is a nearly impossible goal, considering you can’t know if the content’s going to engage your audience until it’s out there and you can track reactions. The other school of thought is that content’s so simple to create, content marketers should never treat it as precious and just put stuff out.

As Meg shares in the episode, “People often just think that content can be a really easy lift, that you'll just make a really quick podcast recap, blog post, or something, and it'll just do the work because it's just like SEO, like it'll just take off. And that’s just not the case.”

Instead, Meg recommends looking at perfecting content as an ongoing process where you continuously improve through iterations and learn how to better connect with your audience from every podcast episode, blog post, social post, and more that your brand produces. 

Being Confidently Yourself with Your Audience 😎

As Meg says in the episode, “Marketing is like the never-ending danceathon that you just have to keep yourself on your toes and you have to learn all the different types of moves to dance with a lot of different people.” And she’s right. It’s a lot. 

If you’re struggling to see how your brand can scale authenticity, Meg has a couple valuable tips to help you focus your thoughts and creative energy:

  1. Be clear with your intentions for your podcast.
  2. Unpack what authenticity means for your brand.
  3. Track what resonates with your audience. 
  4. Do not be afraid to show your personal brand as a way to connect authentically with your audience.
  5. When proving ROI, marketers need to be communicators and translators about how content touchpoints contribute to business goals. 

Interested in More from OpenView?

For more on how OpenView Venture Partners builds community through authentic conversation, be sure to visit OpenView’s website. And if you’d like to hear an exemplary B2B podcast that leverages authenticity to connect with human audiences, check out OpenView’s Build with Blake Bartlett

Want to skim through Meg’s episode instead of listening? Read the transcript here

For more on authenticity in content marketing, check out Meg’s other full episodes on The Casted Podcast and the Amplified Marketing Podcast

About Season 8 of The Casted Podcast

Welcome to Season 8 of The Casted Podcast, where we focus exclusively on our customers, brands who know the value of delivering high-quality podcast, video, and written content that their audiences truly want. Hear from the most forward-thinking brands discovering how to harness the power of conversation and amplify their content marketing in a range of formats and channels — and how they build integrated marketing strategies around podcasting. They're practicing what we preach, and we want you to hear all about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and most of all, how you can do it too.