Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: My name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, a podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are fifteen minutes or less. On today's show, I'm talking with Lindsay Chekhkamah, the CEO and founder with Casted, which builds itself as the first platform built around branded podcasts. Lindsay has more than fifteen years of experience in b to b marketing, so I'm looking forward to her insight about podcasting and the digital marketing landscape. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Lindsay.
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Thank you so much for having me. I'm I'm very happy to be here.
Mark Evans: Well, let me put you on the spot to start this interview. In a recent press release, you said that Casted is revolutionizing the traditional content marketing strategy. What do you mean by that?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Over the last, you know, gosh, even twenty years, we as marketers, specifically content marketers, have really been working from basically the same playbook. Right? So you go and you you make the blog the center of basically everything you do. You you work to optimize it for search engines. You leverage keyword opportunities.
You take what the business and, leaders and marketing needs to say. You line it up with product and you push out their, written content in mass in mass quantities to kind of cut through the noise as a foundation of your strategy. And then you through CTAs and advanced content promotion on social media, that's really the foundation. And then again, over the last, you know, few years within the last two decades that we've been doing this, a few things have emerged like social media and the rise of mobile devices, things like video and podcasting. And so we've crammed those in on the side.
Even though our audiences are demanding more and more richer, more engaging types of content, we're still leveraging, kind of old, older, more outdated forms of of content production as the center. And so by revolutionizing or by really, you know, talking about next generation of content marketing and therefore really brand and marketing in general, we're saying, okay, all of the pieces of the puzzle still apply. Blogging is still very effective. Lots of people like to read blogs. It's we use it.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. But what if instead of putting that at the very center of everything you're doing, you just kind of turned everything on its side and said, what if we started first with conversations? Like the one that you and I are having right now, made that into, yes, a show and then spun all of our content out from there. Our blog content comes from this conversation. Our social media content comes from this conversation.
The way that we're enabling sales and and creating marketing email marketing campaigns all comes out of these conversations that we as brands have with, experts in the areas that our audiences are interested in. So it's it's really just taking in a new perspective, a different perspective on the way that that we're we're addressing content marketing and and reaching our audiences.
Mark Evans: So some people would argue that as the CEO of a podcasting company, you're biased because your take on the fact that podcast should be at the center of our content marketing efforts makes complete sense from your point of view. But does that mean that every company, especially b to b companies, should have a podcast?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Absolutely. And I'm biased. I'm not biased because I I'm in this position of running this company. I started this company because that's the perspective that I have. In my my past role, I was leading brand and content for a large global Martech enterprise SaaS company.
And we in the first year that I was there, you know, I I revved up our content marketing engine the way that I had in the past. And again, you know, focused on written content and, search rankings. And and again, still, it's been pretty foundational for me throughout my career to leverage the voices of experts. But really it was going out and doing interviews and using that to produce written content. And then, you know, the second year that I was there, I was like, know, we need we need a podcast.
So heading into that second year, I leveraged podcasting just thinking, hey, this is the thing that we need to do. We need a voice. It'll be a great way to build a relationship and trust with our with our audience. So we launched a podcast and and started doing this. We started bringing out that podcast content.
Yes, we had a show, but why in the world would we leave so much value behind by just publishing that show? So we started saying, what else can we pull from each and every episode to fuel all the other, types of content that we're already producing? And it made us more efficient as a team. It made us more effective with our content and and resonating with our audiences. But there wasn't really software to help us do that.
We were doing it very manually, which is why we started Casted to say, hey, this is the approach you should take. And by the way, here's the platform you should use.
Mark Evans: So we'll get into the Casted platform, but let's take a little bit of a step back and talk about perhaps some of the workflows or processes that happen as a result of making the podcast the center of your content marketing activities. Though the idea is that you connect with domain experts, who who give you amazing content for all kinds of different things. But what do you do with a podcast conversation other than producing a great podcast? What are the steps that you take to make sure that you leverage that expertise?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Sure. So you're right. Have a great conversation, turn it into show, publish it. That's step one. Right?
And then the the next steps in no particular order, and also depending on the type of organization you're in, whether you're a team of one or you're in a very, very large corporation that has multiple teams doing these things, you you publish that show and then you provide access to it so that other types of content and the people that own those types of content can access it and really amplify that conversation and and the voices of those domain experts across other areas. So what that looks like is you you have this show, you get a transcript. Right? So you you translate this audio content into written content. As long as that content is accurate, that transcript is is accurate.
You can publish that transcript and that gives the audience member something another way to consume that content. It also we're talking about search engine optimization. It's not bad. It's just how you're approaching it. So serve up that content on your website and help search engines and people find what you're talking about by providing the transcript of that conversation.
Then once you have a transcript, how can you pull parts, like literally pull parts of that transcript and dig deeper into them and expound on them and create blog content? So again, leverage that blog, but how can you use it in this new way by harnessing the voices of experts to be amplified through that, that written content? Social media content. So how could you pull clips? How could you pull actual audio clips from this conversation, break it down into smaller little bite sizes and publish them on social media with audiograms, give people something to be excited about that they can find on social media, and hopefully come in and listen to more.
Embedding. So take take a piece of that show and embed it on your website or in an email so that people can find and dig into that content in in those areas. And then also, how can you provide your sales team with clips of that of that content that will resonate with the customers and prospects that they're talking with in ways that they can they can easily share those clips? So again, you can kind of see how turning it on all of its sides to say, what are all of the different channels that we're already using and how can we use this content, by breaking it apart and amplifying it across those different areas.
Mark Evans: So one of the secret weapons, I think, and this is, I think, at the core of of your your approach to content marketing is the ability to tap experts to provide you with insight. There's a whole conversation going on these days about quality content versus quantity content. And if you're gonna be going down the quality road, then the ability to take a conversation with an expert and then leverage it in many different ways, that's gotta be the magic of of a content marketing strategy.
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Absolutely. And and experts too, I think it's really important. We've we've made the word expert mean influencer, author, speaker, like that kind of person. But an expert is your customer. An expert is, you know, people in in the product or engineering team of your of your company.
They're your salespeople. It all depends on who your audience is and what they're hungry for, what they're what they're excited about, what will engage them. So find those people that have that expertise in whatever subject matter, your audience is interested in, harness it, and then why in the world would you stop at simply publishing it in a show? Why wouldn't you do as much as humanly possible with it? You're right.
That's that's the magic.
Mark Evans: So I asked you earlier whether b two b companies should have a podcast, and your immediate reaction was absolutely. So is it too late to get on the podcast bandwagon? I know what you're gonna say, but I gotta ask it anyway. And how do you start? How would a company that's never done a podcast before but is excited about their potential get themselves going?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Sure. So, yes, you knew that I was gonna say, yes, absolutely. Every company should have one. And but here's why. And here's why it's not too late.
In fact, it's the opportunity is is incredible right now. We're talking a lot about blogging. There are over 600,000,000 blogs today. 600,000,000. Yet all of us as companies use them as we should.
You know, our our audiences expect us to have them. But what about podcasts? It feels like podcasts are all over the place. But you compare 600,000,000 blogs with the fact that we just crested a million podcasts.
Mark Evans: That's
Lindsay Chekhkamah: it. That's it. Right? I mean, if you if I just told you that number alone and it was like, oh, there's a million podcasts. How in the world am I gonna cut through the noise?
Well, we're all blogging and we're we're looking at ways to provide better and better and better blog content to cut through the noise of 600,000,000 competing blogs when truly, you know, there's there's a million podcasts and it all comes back to who's it for? Why are you doing it? How can you resonate with the people that you're trying to get excited as as members of your audience? And so that's the that's yes, you should. That's why you should.
How you should. The question that I always tell everyone that asks me this question is to ask yourself, who is it for and why are you doing it? If you're gonna create a show, make sure that, you know, anyone as a marketer knows that the first step is identify your audience as as clearly, as succinctly, as narrowly as possible so you know exactly who you're talking to and then understand why you're doing it. Why are why are you as a brand doing it? What and what purpose does it have?
And then from there you can really start to work backwards to say, okay, what what's going to be most interesting? What does the format look like? Who should host? What kind of what kind of show should it be? How how many episodes should we do in a season?
How often should we produce it? There is no one size fits all approach. So really, really seek to understand what works best for you and what's gonna resonate best with your audience and address it like any other type of content. Try it. Give it a fair shot.
Give it a long shot before you try to make any drastic changes. Just get rolling on it. Seek to serve your audience.
Mark Evans: That's great advice. So let's talk about the story of Casted. How did you go from being a digital marketer to being a SaaS CEO at the at the at the in the eye of the podcast hurricane? Mhmm. And what have you learned along the way?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: I, as I mentioned before, I I was leading brand and content for a global company. When I was there, I started a podcast and, you know, quickly saw the opportunity that I just was talking about. The opportunity that existed for our brand to better connect with our audiences in in in a in a more human to human way. So we launched it. I saw the power of it.
I saw the opportunity that existed because there was no software that existed to serve our team and and myself as a marketing leader in leveraging this rich content in the way that I've been talking about through our conversation. It was really anyone who's doing a podcast knows it's really a a sea of, one off tools and point solutions, some of which aren't even made for podcasting. We just we use them for them. So I said, what if there was a platform that allowed us to leverage these conversations that we're having and work together as a marketing team and also with our agency to, yes, produce great shows, but also use that content in a lot of other ways to provide access to that content to each other as a team and to other people within the company, and then to see what it's doing for our brand. And so we I I left that role.
I partnered up with High Alpha Venture Studios here in Indianapolis and got started. And that was in April 2019, and here we are almost a year and a half later with this platform that's just it's it's finally what marketers need to actually leverage podcasts as the the center of their brand strategy.
Mark Evans: So is it fair to say that Cassid is a one stop shop for companies that want to record, produce, distribute podcasts, and then leverage these conversations into social media, blog posts, and other kinds of marketing?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Yeah. Yeah. So the pot the platform itself says, okay, go create your show. And then when you upload it into Casted, everything else happens from there. And then we do have services on top of that to say if you even need to to go a step further and work with you on the production of that show, we can do that and and help with, ringing out that content in the platform as well.
Mark Evans: One final question. So casted raised about just over $2,000,000 in seed capital early this year. What was that journey like? And and what's the reaction out there to fast growing podcast companies?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: It was, in hindsight, it was it was incredible. And anytime you're in something like that, especially for the first time, it's a lot. But I think as a marketer going through, you know, raising raising around, you have a lot of you have a lot of, experience on your side in presenting and being kind of the representative of the brand and and the face of a company. So that was it was a lot of fun. It was it was a lot of work.
Excited to do it again soon.
Mark Evans: What did you learn along the way?
Lindsay Chekhkamah: What did I learn? Oh, man. Learned that there is again, there is a ton of opportunity in podcasting. There are the questions that we got along the way were either, oh my gosh, why didn't this exist yet? All the way through, tell us what you think the future of of content marketing and podcasting looks like for brands.
And, there's a lot of excitement around it for good reason. The the opportunity is huge for brands to leverage conversations as a way to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their audiences.
Mark Evans: That's great, Lindsay. I really appreciate your insight. I'm with you. I'm I'm on I'm firmly on the podcast bandwagon since I launched marketing smart a couple months ago. I just am amazed by the the potential of podcasts and your ability to connect with really smart peoples.
Lindsay Chekhkamah: Thank you so much for having me. It's fun to be on this side of the mic.
Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Lindsay, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or would like to learn more how I help b two b companies as a fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to Mark@marketingspark.co.
Talk to you next time.
