1. Tell us about your role at Casted?
As the founder and CEO of Casted, I have the privilege to lead the company and cast the vision of what Casted is now and what we want it to be in the future. Before founding Casted, I was a marketing leader, developing and carrying out ideas and campaigns for the companies I worked at. With my 15+ years of marketing experience, I bring a unique viewpoint to my role as Casted’s CEO and to my vision for the Amplified Marketing category we’re creating. I have lived the life of the individuals and teams Casted is built for. Because I’ve lived through the challenges firsthand, I am able to guide Casted’s vision and create a tool to relieve some of the foundational stressors faced by today’s marketers and help them get a greater return on the effort they’re pouring into creating marketing assets.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
Prior to founding Casted, I was leading a global marketing team as the VP of Content and Brand at an enterprise SaaS company. There, I led the content strategy with a focus on humanizing and growing the brand. To accomplish this, I found a major component to our marketing assets was harnessing the voices and perspectives of the company leaders as industry experts and leveraging conversations with customers and partners. With these conversations came unique perspectives and experiences we could turn into fresh new content. From there, we launched the company’s brand podcast, which hosted many different thought leaders, customers, and partners who could provide valuable expertise to our audience. From there, my team and I took the audio and video from the podcast to drive other marketing efforts. This included drafting blog content and creating social media posts with snippets from the audio and visual assets; it also helped provide the basis for keynote speeches, webinars, and even sales collateral while maintaining that human touch.
From my own experience, I knew that leveraging podcasts and other audio and visual assets was an efficient and effective way to amplify our marketing efforts. Yet, I was shocked that there were no tools to help me or my team make it happen. There was no technology, no platform, and no process to accomplish this amplification of content or way to measure its effectiveness. With that, I set out to “be the change I wished to see” and create the solution that I wanted for my team and others like me. Thus, Casted was born.
3. What do you think is the biggest technological challenge in marketing right now?
One of the biggest challenges in marketing right now is that the technology for content marketers is no longer applicable to their modern needs. Content marketing plays a crucial role in marketing strategies, yet what was used in the early 2000s when, or a decade ago, or even just two years ago is not necessarily cutting it anymore. Many tools simply don’t help marketing teams efficiently create content their audiences actually want to consume – and then measure it in a way that actually matters to the business. The Casted platform aims to solve these issues by providing an updated approach to content marketing with the platform to solve these needs. And allowing marketers to do it with ease. Content marketers have one of the hardest jobs in the game. They are expected to turn out high quality content at an impossible rate. With Casted, content marketers have everything they need to create amazing, engaging content, without spending hours crafting it.
4. How has data-driven approach empowered Martech industry?
We have the ability to understand our audience more than ever before. We know what content topics resonate with them, we understand what channels they prefer, and we’re even getting more and more information about what formats they want most. It’s no longer just about vanity metrics like reach, watches, downloads, which do have a place, but they simply aren’t enough. Marketers now actually have the ability to efficiently and effectively create a wide range of rich, engaging content so the unique members of their audience can navigate their own, unique, perfect buyer’s journeys – all thanks to the data they capture every day through the content they are creating, the channels they are using, and the data that comes with it. What’s more empowering than using data to deliver the best, most customized experience possible while building connections with your audience?
5. Can you explain why interactive content forms such as podcasts are becoming more and more popular?
If you are a human on planet Earth, it probably comes as no shock to you that podcasts are one of the most popular content formats in the world. In fact, there are more than 80 million listeners every week. And where audiences go, so, too, go the marketers – and for good reason! Businesses like Salesforce, Drift, Gong, and HubSpot use podcasts as foundational pieces of their marketing strategies to connect with their audiences and provide that human touch of conversations.
6. How do you define your Platform?
Casted is an amplified marketing platform and the only audio and video solution made for B2B marketers.
Amplified marketing is the next generation of content marketing as it enables and empowers companies with their audience connections using audio and video at the center of marketing strategies. Companies can develop and amplify this initial content across all other channels in their marketing strategies, enhancing blog posts, social media, email newsletters, and more. With Casted, marketers can also gain metrics that can map back to the business and show the impact on their revenue.
7. What tips would you like to give to the marketers to help them enhance their content marketing strategies?
Marketing is not a one-and-done approach. There are multiple ways to use your marketing content and get the most out of your efforts. By taking one conversation, such as a webinar, you can create multiple different streams of content to amplify across your channels. One snippet from the webinar could become a social media post, a topic for a podcast episode, a blog post and much more. The effort that goes into one topic should not stop at a single asset but rather be amplified across multiple channels to reach your audience where they want to consume content and achieve the most significant return of effort.
Additionally, leadership teams should invest in their employees. For marketing teams to garner these insights, create unique campaigns, amplify them across channels, and measure their success, they need proper tools to enhance their efforts and engage their audiences. By providing these tools, employees can produce their best work while also contributing to the overall success of the brand and company.
8. What are the biggest changes you expect to see in the content marketing industry in the next few years?
I think we’ll see the return to creative content over mass creation of content. Content marketers have been overwhelmed and underserved for years. They’re expected to be the experts in everything their business does AND create an extremely high velocity of content. And over the years, the target has shifted from serving audiences to serving algorithms. I expect we’ll see more brands harnessing the power of expert voices (creators, thought leaders, industry experts) as the main perspectives of their content.
We’ll see more brands move away from the traditional blog-centric strategy to a more multimedia, audio- and video-rich content strategy.
9. What advice would you like to give to technology startups?
Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. As a startup, you are facing a lot of firsts and trying to solve something that quite possibly has never attempted to be solved before. It is essential to learn where you can, whether from books or mentors and be open to trying new things and determining the next steps that best fit you and the trajectory of your startup.
10. What work-related hack do you follow to enjoy maximum productivity?
I’m a huge proponent of hiring your calendar to work well for you. To me, my calendar is a living, breathing thing that I have to really pay attention to. When I don’t, my days become very reactionary. But when I take time at the beginning of each week to wrap my head around what each day is going to be like, that’s when I’m able to be intentional.
11. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
Have realistic and grounded expectations and assumptions about what AI means. In marketing, there’s a fear circulating that the future of everything – processes, reporting, even content – is destined to be replaced by AI. But the reality is, AI is an invention meant to make lives easier, not replace actual humans. You might be able to automate processes and reporting, but you can’t automate perspectives, life experiences, and individuality. That’s the beauty of being human. As much as we think things are moving towards an automate-everything mentality, we’re seeing a rise in human-to-human marketing. Because people want to interact and connect with people. That’s not something AI can replace.
12. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
Casted is filled with some of the most passionate people I’ve ever worked with. The team is packed with diverse thinking and brilliant minds, and we believe that differences in opinions and backgrounds are where the best products are born. There is absolutely no better strategy for growing a successful company than hiring great people.
13. What movie inspires you the most?
My all-time favorite movie is an oldie, but a goodie. Love Actually. I love the intertwined storytelling, which was a relatively new concept when the movie was released. I love the way love shows up in many different ways. And I am absolutely obsessed with Christmas, which is when the movie takes place, so that won extra points from me.
14. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
Absolutely! We have grown from 10 people to more than 40 all while being remote during the pandemic. Despite that challenge, I think we have found ways to protect and nurture our culture. But I really cannot wait to get back into an office, which will happen this fall with a hybrid approach to best serve our team.
15. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
With the current state of my life, I have a LOT of apps on my phone! I have apps to manage my business, my personal life, my family life, my health, my audio and video content consumption, and shopping. My most-used apps are probably Slack, Spark, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Audible, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Zoom.
Check Out the New Martech Cube Podcast. For more such updates, follow us on Google News Martech News