The Waterfall Effect: How Podcasting Generates Scalable Content with Tobe's Jared Sanders

Lindsay Tjepkema: We are back. It's season six of The Casted Podcast. If you remember in season five, we focused exclusively on our own users. And well, to sum it up, you guys loved it. So, we're continuing with that this next season, which is season six. So, it's safe to say that Casted customers are committed, to say the least. So, not only to podcasting as a key piece of the future of their marketing efforts, but also to the bigger picture of how these shows all fit together into their integrated marketing strategy. I love those words, integrated marketing strategy. So, these customers, these users of ours that we get to work with, they're the most forward- thinking brands that are harnessing the perspectives of experts within their podcasts. But then, they're not stopping there. They're ringing out those interviews to be amplified across all other channels. They're practicing what we preach. And I want you to hear all about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how you can do it, too. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and co- founder of Casted, the first and the only amplified marketing platform for B2B marketers. And this is our podcast. I'm so excited to be bringing you our newest season of the podcast with our first video podcast interview, featuring Jared Sanders of Tobe Agency. This is a really fun treat, because Tobe is known for putting out fun, engaging content for their company and for their clients in the form of, you guessed it, video podcasts. Jared breaks down why podcasts are such an amazing tool for brands to create killer content strategies. And I just can't wait for you to listen in on how Tobe used podcasting to get started in building their company and how they've turned that experience into success for their own clients.

Jared Sanders: My name's Jared Sanders, I'm the creative director and co- founder of Tobe Agency. We are a B2B marketing agency that focuses on creating content, mostly in the forms of video and other rich media, like audio and podcasts.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Awesome. And so Jared, I am so excited to have you here today, because this is the first time that I am recording a video podcast for The Casted Podcast. So, welcome to the world of sight, the people can see you.

Jared Sanders: Awesome.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yes, and hear you.

Jared Sanders: I'm really excited to be here. Thank you.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And beyond that, one, I'm excited to have you on this show as our first video guest, because you guys do a lot of video. And two, I'm excited to dig into this from a little bit of a different perspective. So, you're a Casted a customer, you use video and audio for yourselves, for Tobe agency, but then of course you have clients. So, we're going to get into how you're using all the things and how your clients are using all the things and just your perspective on the marketing world as we know it. So, sound good?

Jared Sanders: Sounds great. Awesome.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Awesome.

Jared Sanders: Ready to share.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Cool. Okay. So, tell me a little bit, to get things started about your perspective on this podcasting and audio- video space. How did you come into it? How did you get started and what does it look like today for you?

Jared Sanders: Sure. Yeah. So, we got started... Well, first off, I'm an avid fan of podcasting. I've been sort of into it roughly on the outer edges since, I don't know 2005, 2006. Whenever it was, pretty early on when it was just a lot of music podcasts and a bunch of random people just putting stuff up that was more like radio, it was like internet radio at that point. So, I've been into it for a while. But as an agency, we sort of stumbled on it relatively quickly, early in our infancy as an agency, because simply we needed to build content. And at the time we didn't have a lot of time or budget to spend, to send money to writers, to write content for us, we didn't have any content writers on staff. And we didn't have the time to sort of build that content ourselves. So Andrew, my co- founder and I, we sat down and were like," What's the quickest way that we can sort of build content at somewhat of a scale or a scalable method? And how can we also make it a little bit more engaging?" And we stumbled across podcasting. So, this was maybe about four or five years ago when we kind of first started. We recorded our first podcast. It was he and I sitting in a bedroom with one mic in between us and a terrible sound environment. So, no quality, but we recorded our first podcast, it was about 45 minutes. And from that podcast, we learned that we were able to get a few other pieces of media. We got a blog post out of it, just doing simple things like converting it into text. Then we were able to pull some, what we call micro content out of it, which were just," Let's clip some highlights or hot takes from our conversation. We can put those on social. We can put those into our, into other blog posts that expand on those ideas." So, we really quickly figured out that if we record a podcast regularly, we're able to create this mass amount of content at scale with just two of us and we didn't need a lot of extra help. So early on, this was really important in our agency just to get content out. So, fast forward to today, we're on the podcast train 100%, whether it's with video or audio only. We obviously are big proponents for video as well, just because you can open up a lot more channels if you're using video with your podcast. But we sell it as a service in our agency. So, we're providing this for our clients as well as using it for ourselves. And in fact, right now, we're in the last stages of building a course on sort of how to get started in podcasting, which is been another interesting avenue to kind of share the knowledge that we've learned over the three or four years. So, that's kind of where we are today. And yeah, happy to sort of answer any other questions regarding just how we feel about podcasting.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Of course, that's what we're going to talk about this whole show.

Jared Sanders: Cool.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. So, I think it's really cool that you have, for the last few years have been doing what we're advocating, which is why we hit it off so early, which is like," No, I know it's so much more efficient and more effective and more engaging if you go right to the source." Like so today, my source is you. And we're going to tap into all of your expertise and your background and then give our audience the opportunity to consume it visually, on audio. And even to dive deeper into a couple of articles that we're going to pull from it and also promote it on social media. And then also, how can we use clips from this and other shows to bring them all together and provide even more value on a different perspective, digging deeper into some of the topics that we cover. So, if you're not already take note, because this is how it all works. And I really believe that this is the future of content marketing and going directly to the people that your audience wants to hear from and just ringing it out, amplifying it across all channels. So, okay. So, you're doing it for inaudible the agency, right? At what point did you start to say," Okay, we can turn this around and start to use this approach for our clients too." Or was it kind of from day one?

Jared Sanders: So, I want to say at some point early on we did think," This could be a service." We just weren't sure how we were going to scale it or be able to provide it in a valuable manner. So, as much as I love to say, every business should have a podcast or everybody should have a podcast, that's not all true sometimes. But for the most part, we do believe that any business can fit in the realm or at least build content in the realm of podcasting. And the main reason we think of it in that as a strategy is, we're not all going to be Joe Rogan's, right. We're not all going to be the most popular podcast. But what you just laid out, just talking about the micro content and actually what Casted offers as a service really leads itself and pairs itself nicely with a content marketing strategy. So, you need content to fill all these channels, whether it's sales, whether it's marketing, whether it's customer relations or customer success and podcasting and using interviews or storytelling methods in a audio or video format are really compelling ways to build engaging content that you can use across those channels. So, your goal may not be to have a million subscribers. Maybe your goal is to get 10 leads from one podcast episode-

Lindsay Tjepkema: Especially B2B.

Jared Sanders: ...Right. And especially B2B. Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep.

Jared Sanders: So, what you were doing with written content is exactly how we feel like rich media, as we call it in the agency, we feel this content lends itself even better, especially in a place like a sales sequence. I can make it a lot more personalized. I can show case studies. We can even have the customer on, like we are right now.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Exactly.

Jared Sanders: So, that's sort of where it fits in the realm of how we think about positioning it to our clients. And I think that was just a natural progression, just going back to your question, I think it was a natural progression over time that we were already sort of doing for ourselves. And then we were like," Well, light bulb. Why wouldn't we do this? We do it well and it's working, why wouldn't we do this for our clients? We just need to figure out what the right strategy is for them." And that's sort of what led us to our strategies today.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I like it. So, that's perfect segue. In a nutshell, how would you explain that strategy? Where do you think people should be thinking, what's that mindset as they approach kind of this way of thinking with their content?

Jared Sanders: Sure. So, I think it still goes back to the fundamentals of marketing and content marketing like," Who's your target audience? What's your goal of the campaign, if you will?" Even though we know podcasts are really not a campaign there, they should be a ever going thing.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep.

Jared Sanders: But what are these goals and what are you trying to achieve? So again, as we are forming the content or the funnel early on and we're trying to think about an interview series, maybe we're going to line up eight guests or eight interviews or eight audio stories that align within that marketing funnel. And that'll be a strategy for one version of the podcast. And because it's a podcast, just like a blog, it can continue to live on. So obviously, oftentimes the content is evergreen and you can go seasonal. So, maybe season two is focused on something else. But that's usually how we sort of focus our strategies. We attack it just like a normal content marketing strategy. We just instead of writing," Let's write 10 blog posts, let's do 10 episodes."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jared Sanders: Production obviously is a little bit more involved. Post production is obviously a little bit more involved, but the final product is so much richer than what you would get out of just a blog post or an interview series of blog posts. It's well worth the time. And just going back to our original thought process, which is where we aligned with Casted so well, using micro content and cutting these small hot takes or clips out of these interviews. We're creating content that's built for a six month or nine month or 12 month cycle out of 10 episodes, because we have so many pieces and little nuggets that we can share throughout it. So, the end version of what you get out of a piece of rich media of 30 minute, hour interview is so valuable.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So valuable. And one thing that I love kind of what you said and I think that scares a lot of marketers away, is that they think of like," Oh, adding one more channel. And I'm already doing all this stuff and then I have to add a podcast onto it. What if it's a video podcast, then it's two more channels?" And it's like," No, no, no, no, no. Flip the script. Start there, start with that-

Jared Sanders: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: ...And then everything else that flows out of it is so much easier." And to your point, so much richer, because you're not aiming for keywords, you're mining for the gold that's in every single conversation, which is going to be naturally keyword rich. Right?

Jared Sanders: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So, I love that approach. And is there anything, what advice kind of in summary, would you give to some of those marketers that are kind of stuck in that mindset of like," Yeah, but it's adding another channel and it's adding one more thing." kind of how have you talked to some of your clients about kind of thinking about it a little bit differently?

Jared Sanders: Yeah. That's a great question. And I think the way that we sort of approach that usually is, just like what you said, it's really like," Flip your mindset, if you do this first, everything else waterfalls from that and it becomes a lot easier." Sure again, it may take a little bit to turn the boat upfront, to kind of restrategize and reconfigure, rethink things. And there's going to be pain points like production, right? You got to get people lined up.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So, getting used to it, new processes. Yeah.

Jared Sanders: Yeah. It's a new process, but once and especially since we control a lot of that process for our clients, so that in reality and this is normally what we tell them, we want them to be the star. I don't want them to worry about production. I don't want them to worry about post- production. Usually the only thing we ask for them for help on is like," Hey, can you give us some guests that you'd like to talk to and some topics and we'll kind of figure out the rest for you." So, we try to make it as easy as possible in that transition. but it is a transition, because it's something new. But again, the benefits that you get out of it in the longterm success, whether you continue the podcast or not and you only go 10 episodes, you're still going to get a wealth of content out of it that you would never get out of almost the same timeline that you would spend writing blog posts.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Absolutely.

Jared Sanders: And trying to figure out and formulate that and trying to attack keywords and things like that, you don't have to do a lot of that work, it's done in real time, which is the best part.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It is. And if for some reason, especially as turning the ship, if that is super important to you and that keyword, that rush to the keyword that raced to the keywords, if that's super important you can still leverage that podcast content as starter resource content just makes it so much easier. Right?

Jared Sanders: Right. And I'll even go one step deeper into that. So now, Google is obviously king of the search algorithm and in the world of the internet. Well, number two is YouTube. So, if we're adding a video component to it and you're indexing on YouTube, you're also going to index highly on Google, because Google owns YouTube and of course, they're going to want you to watch their videos. So, that's a strategy that we usually play into a lot if we're talking about a video podcast. We encourage the building of a YouTube channel, or at least the start of a YouTube channel. A lot of companies that may not think they're built for YouTube or sexy for YouTube. Again, the way you have to frame it is, well of course, you're not going to be whatever YouTube channel that you see. You're not going to be like the Logan Paul's of the world, right, we're not going for that. All we're going for is the ability to host your content, make it searchable, but again, you want to be able to link people back to it. You want to be able to send people into that funnel and YouTube just becomes another great channel that you can serve up an audience while Google and YouTube are also serving you up an audience.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Right. Exactly, it's about accessibility and findability. And really, I mean again, if you are capturing a video like we are today and publishing that on YouTube and on your website. And you're capturing the audio and publishing that on Apple, Spotify, Google and on your website. And you're publishing the transcript and you're creating additional content. I mean, not even double- dipping, that's four, right? Four X, the discoverability, which is, I mean, it's not an algorithm. It's not not gaming the system. It's simply giving your audience multiple ways to consume great content, so it has to be good. And that's what Google is trying to do. They're trying to give their audience, their are all shared audience the ability to find what they're looking for fast, right?

Jared Sanders: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And if you help Google do that, they're going to reward you. That's just, no matter what the algorithms do, no matter how they change things, that's always going to be their goal. And so, if you seek to serve your audience first, they'll come alongside you. They just will.

Jared Sanders: Yeah. And there's even another side of that with the audio component. And I know you guys at Casted will know this a lot better than actually we do, because we sort of only scratched the surface. But the searchability functionality that's happening within Apple Podcast now, within Spotify and Google, because Google has now launched their podcast platform, they're serving up podcasts in search, just like they would a YouTube video.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Finally.

Jared Sanders: Again, this is just another way that and it's another channel that they're going to serve you up to your audience.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Absolutely.

Jared Sanders: And again, all you have to do is hit record and speak what you want to speak about.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Exactly. Exactly. So, without getting into too nitty gritty, I'm interested in your perspective because we get asked this all the time. What does success look like? I'm sure your customers want to know, like," Hey, if I'm going to do this, how do I measure it or what do I look for? How do I know it's working?" How do you kind of approach that and say," Here's what we're looking for, here's kind of how we define success with this whole approach."

Jared Sanders: Yeah. That's a great question. And we do get asked that, always at the beginning and then at the end like," What did we actually get out of this?" So again, going back to something that I touched on earlier, defining your goals ahead of time is really important.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So important.

Jared Sanders: Again, if you want to be the influencer or if you want to be the person who's the top dog and in the podcast realm, that's a whole different avenue that you need to start.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Completely different model.

Jared Sanders: You've to got to start down a different road, right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Totally different. Yes.

Jared Sanders: First off, you have to be really, really compelling and you've got to be able to polarize and drive people to you.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Mm-hmm(affirmative).

Jared Sanders: So, that's a whole, it's a talent, right? That's a talent.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jared Sanders: But for the normal B2B customer, we usually start with, again like," What's the goal of a specific campaign or what's the goal of a specific sales cycle that you might be running into or a marketing cycle." How do we attack that goal using this media? It's not the other way around," Let's create a bunch of media and figure out what the goal is." So, the goals could be really small. So again, you may want to just get more leads for your business. Okay. Well, that's great. So, now we can put a bunch of content in different places to help get more leads for your business that drive them back to your landing page. And maybe that's the goal. And maybe the goal is only a 100 leads in a quarter or whatever that small goal is, it doesn't have to be very big. So again, we're not pitching the podcast as this big, sexy thing that's going to turn your business around-

Lindsay Tjepkema: Make you famous.

Jared Sanders: ...and make you a rockstar. Yeah, we pitch it as like," Use this as a tool to facilitate the sales team, the marketing team, the business development team, your customer success team. Use this as a tool to help give them ammunition to do what they're already doing great." And then, I think that just that softens the blow on like," Okay, so what are we going to get out of this? What's the ROI out of this?" You start to calculate it in quite a different method than you would if you were just looking at download numbers or unique listeners or any other of the vanity metrics that a lot of people sort of kind of get caught up in.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jared Sanders: Now, if you're looking for ad revenue to run against your podcast, those become obviously a lot more important. Because you've got to show the advertiser how many ears or eyeballs you're driving to the channel. So, it just becomes a question of," What is your goal and how can we achieve that using this as the vessel?"

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's so important. And I'm so- so glad that you you're talking about this, because it's not everything. The goal is not everything. Just like for anything else, right? You think about anything else you do in business or specifically in marketing, you've got to have a specific goal. You've got to define success, if you want to measure success. It can't just be like," Well, we want to be the best podcast and drive a billion leads and generate customers and sell ads and become famous." You got to be really clear about who it's for, why you're doing it, how you're going to measure it.

Jared Sanders: Yeah. And I mean, there's even ones on the outskirts, like being the founder of a company, you may just want to show people that you're a thought leader and you have a little bit of a soapbox to stand on for your cause. Right? And a great place to do that is a podcast. In fact, we just launched one of our podcasts, the second of three in our small network-

Lindsay Tjepkema: I love the name.

Jared Sanders: ...Where Andrew talks about entrepreneurship and how much it sucks. And the idea is really, he just wants to tell his story and our story of sort of how he got to where we are today and why there's a lot of trouble. But again, the goal is like, how do we attract other entrepreneurs who might think in the same method so that then maybe they can use a podcast?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And for you it's not 12 million listeners.

Jared Sanders: No.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's a handful of the right people that become your raving fans and look to you as their trusted advisor. Right?

Jared Sanders: Yep.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jared Sanders: Exactly.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Another thing we haven't gotten to yet that I really want to talk to you about, because we haven't actually talked about it on the show really a little bit, is networks. I know that's a big thing for you and for Tobe Agency. So, let's talk a little bit about that. Tell me your perspective.

Jared Sanders: Sure.

Lindsay Tjepkema: First of all, let's just level set, let's not assume everybody knows who we're talking about. What is a network in your perspective, what is it? And then we'll get into like why and how.

Jared Sanders: Yeah. So, a network just like any other, I guess, basic word of a network in podcast realm, is just a group of podcasts that sort of share some type of similar through- line. Whether it's a similar theme, whether it's views on certain topics, whether it's hosts. It can kind of vary what the network actually focuses on, but we'll take some, that are the bigger ones to give people more of an idea of where we're going. So, Spotify owns quite a few networks. One of them is called The Ringer. They focus on sports and pop culture. And all their podcasts that they build, whenever they build a new podcast, it falls in one of those two categories sometimes it crosses over to both. So that's the idea of a podcast network. So, our thought in the agency is," Well, that's a great idea." And that it works for pop culture places. It works for places like Wonder who are telling great audio stories. But how does that work for a business, a small business? Well, it can work like this. So, as an agency we have a couple of different podcasts. So, one I just mentioned was Entrepreneurship Sucks. We have another podcast called, Lights, Camera, Grow, which focuses on growth and marketing. So, that's more of the nerdy marketing agency type talk. Andrew focuses more on the business talk, but they both connect with a small business. So, if you're an entrepreneur, you can relate to one or the other. If we were going, let's say we were going to open up another podcast for that network, maybe it's around sales. And it's specifically around the nerdy stuff that only sales teams get. Maybe we have one around customer success. And you can start to see what I'm painting a picture here, all these podcasts sort of connect, but they also live in their own kind of silos and their own little versions. And the idea is, at some point we can cross- promote each podcast or anything across all of the network. So, far 3000 or 30,000 feet level, if we want it to sell advertising, we can now go to an advertiser and say," Hey, we have this group of podcasts that now you can get in front of all of these audiences, that crossover that are great for your product."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jared Sanders: That's one realm, right? We can also share the podcast in different channels if we're marketing, or if we're now building different funnels, we can take pieces from each one of them and build a funnel out multiple podcasts. So, that's sort of how we see the business podcast network kind of working. It doesn't necessarily need to get to The Ringer or the Spotify level. But if you have three or four in a pod that really work and compliment each other, it just gives you that much more ammunition.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And that serves the audience so well, because then-

Jared Sanders: It does.

Lindsay Tjepkema: ...if I ever commute again, or if I have a long driver, or if I really like to listen to work podcasts while I'm doing something, doing my expenses or doing the dishes every day. It can be hard to find more of the podcasts that serve up that thought leadership for me. And so, by grouping them together, you're again, it's all about serving your audience first. And if you have a bunch of B2B podcasts, your audience is really going to appreciate that. Because it's different voices and different perspectives, it's not the same thing every single week, it's a little bit of different things.

Jared Sanders: Yep. Absolutely.

Lindsay Tjepkema: What do you recommend for the people listening, there's kind of two questions here, one, kind of how to get into one or involved in one, if you're interested in? And then two, there's also brands that have a network like, Drift has like six shows. So, it's a little bit different, like thoughts on those two things and it's two very different questions, but if you want to get into one, what are your thoughts?

Jared Sanders: If they want to get into a network?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yes.

Jared Sanders: So, if you want to get into your network, first you have to align with your thoughts and your podcast and your position of that podcast in align with the brand to make sure or the network you're trying to get into, to make sure that it fits with the realm of the rest of what they're producing. We like to think of podcasts almost like their own sub brands in a way, because it's so much more than just the content itself. It represents a person who's the host. It may represent the company itself. It may represent just an entire thought that you want to expand upon each episode. So, I guess in a sense, if you're looking to get into network, figure out what your network or the network that you're targeting is really into. Build the audience, you need to build an audience if you're going to go to a network, they won't even look at you a lot of times unless you have some other, something of value to sort of offer and trade off. But most cases, networks are probably going to look for the audience, again so that they can sell advertisement or whatever their other metric goal is. They're going to probably want the attention that you're driving to your feed. So, make sure you build a strong audience, a strong followship. And this always goes back to that 1000 loyal fans, making sure you have that kind of concrete. And make sure you have the entire package. It's really important and I think this may get sort of misled, but podcast networks right now are sort of the record labels of back in the day when small indie record labels were a really niche thing. Now, anybody can kind of be a record label. Podcast networks, they're taste makers.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. crosstalk.

Jared Sanders: And obviously, they want to build the taste that their audience is already sort of wanting or listening to. So, making sure that you fit within that is really important, but also making sure you have the full package. So, don't just go to them with an episode. Don't just go to them with a few episodes. Make sure that you have an entire strategy," Here's a season that we've already laid out. Here's sort of what we've got for listenership. Here's all of our visual artwork." Because that's really important to make sure that it aligns with what they're looking for visually. Obviously have your hosts buttoned up, write a trailer for the podcast. These are all the small intricate things that you really need to kind of package together before you decide to sell your, or bring your podcast to a record label.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Okay. So, let's say you want to become the record label. So, you're a brand marketer or you're a CMO or you're whoever at a brand and you're like," Hey, we should do multiple podcasts. I've heard about podcast networks."

Jared Sanders: Yeah, Drift. This is the new Drift.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And like Drift. And I don't want to speak for them. I don't know if they look at it as a network or not, but companies that have a lot of shows, thoughts on that, like launching a few different shows and kind of using them together as a network.

Jared Sanders: Yeah. Great, great question. So, if you're in the realm of like, you want your business to sort of have a network. Number one, launch the first podcast. Don't get ahead of yourself.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Step one. That is important. I think that's, I mean, it's easy to laugh at, but when you get really excited it's like," Okay. Well we need to launch three podcasts, because if we're going to do it, let's just do all three." And it's like, take a minute, think how your processes.

Jared Sanders: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So number one, launch the first podcast. Make sure you're really good at that. Nail that one, build your audience. If you launch with too many at once, you're sort of casting the net too wide and chances are, it's probably going to flop because it's a lot to keep up with. Podcasts are a lot of work. So, preparation for each episode for one podcast can be several hours as you know.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And then, amplifying them all out like we were talking about, trying to do that for three shows or expanding on three crosstalk.

Jared Sanders: Exactly, so just multiply that.

Lindsay Tjepkema: ...It's a lot. Yeah.

Jared Sanders: Finding guests for your one show is hard enough, if it's an interview style show. So, I would say my best advice for that is first launch the first one. Obviously, always be thinking about other feeds, because I think that's really good, but figure out what you want to do with that first podcast and how you're going to use that as the catalyst for one's moving forward. So example, we launched a podcast called Run With Tobe, that was our very first podcast, did not do very well. We ended up with almost 50 episodes I believe, but we ended up sun- setting that. The content on it it's still really great. So, the great thing about podcasts is it lives forever and you get to keep it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's right.

Jared Sanders: So, we sun- setted, Run With Tobe and then we built Lights, Camera, Grow with a very specific sort of strategy and funnel. And we used our audience that we built in our first podcast to then shift them over to the new one. And now, we've done that again with Andrew's podcast for Entrepreneurship Sucks. Now, we have both podcasts kind of going simultaneously, but it took us like two and a half, three years to kind of get to that point.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And you're an agency and this is what you do.

Jared Sanders: Right. Right. Exactly. We have all the resources, we have the process down.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jared Sanders: But we sort of knew we wanted to launch multiple at some point in time. But to just do that out of the gate, I think it's, it's just really ambitious. And unless you have a ton of resources at your disposal, I think it's really, really, really hard to do successfully. Especially, especially if you don't have an audience to tell," Hey, we just launched this new thing, please go check it out."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. For sure.

Jared Sanders: That's obviously important. And you can start from zero, that's fine. But just know that the growth is obviously going to be a lot slower.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Put your expectations accordingly.

Jared Sanders: But launching one, be really good at it and then add.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jared Sanders: But it's always good to show develop. We try to think of ourselves more like a mini TV studio in that sense. We're always trying to develop new ideas and new concepts for shows. We'll shelf it and see if it's worth anything in a month or six months down the road. If we still like it, then that's a green light to like," Hey, let's dive into this more and see if we have something."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. I love that. And I think that there's, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, there's a healthy balance of like, think about it, make sure you know, what you're getting into and that you have a strategy and that you have a very clear, shared definition of what success looks like. But then also, don't overthink it and just like do it.

Jared Sanders: Right. Paralysis by analysis, right? crosstalk.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Exactly. I mean, everything is an experiment. Everything is trying it. Try it, dip your toe in, do a season, wring it out, see how it goes, do it again. And don't overthink it, but make sure you do think about it before you step in, so.

Jared Sanders: Yeah, that's a great point. Our Lights, Camera, Grow, our main staple podcast, that has been morphed into multiple different formats throughout it's young, or I guess it's older now, but we're in the midst of 30 or 40 episodes. And the first four were just me and Andrew kind of talking. The second four were Andrew and I talking about the pandemic. And then, we sort of threw that out the window and went more into the interview style. still kept the same theme, but we just figured out a little bit of a different style to kind of twist on it. But yeah, the way we always describe podcasts to our clients is, this is a living thing it should always be changing, episode to episode you can always do something better. You can always throw something in the mix. You can always experiment. Experimentation is actually, I think one of the best things that you can do, it's one of the best medias for that.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's true. I think as long as you keep your audience clear, I mean, if it has to change, if it has to morph, cool. But as long as you have it very clear who it is you're serving, give them different things to try. I mean, don't go after one audience and another audience, then you're going to run into even more bumps. But yeah, try new things. Just keep trying to serve that one audience in different ways and try new options. So, love that. Okay. So, as we kind of start to wrap things up, I'm interested in kind of your thoughts and your advice that you would give to marketers that are listening that want to get started with video podcasting or that have one and want to make it better. What kind of broadly speaking would you want them to know?

Jared Sanders: Sure. So, if you're looking to start a podcast, number one, you kind of always have to think about audio first, if it's going to go into the podcast feed, you can't show a bunch of visuals on screen. If it goes in audio, it's going to be a little bit hard to just kind of translate that message. But start with the basics. We have a brief that we sort of put together which is," What's the idea? Who's my audience that I'm going to try to serve? What's my goal?" And then from there, it starts to kind of lay itself out. If you can answer those three fundamental questions, I think it's really important. Missing one of those three is really going to be sort of a tale of," Is your boat going to have a hole in it, if not?" And especially, especially the goal one, just laying that out in a realistic manner is really important. Really, really important. And we obviously, we touched on that earlier. The show idea or the concept of the show, that can morph over time and that can change throughout as you're getting better at sort of formulating the show. but the goals and your target audience are really important. So, create the content that your audience wants to hear and measure yourself in a way that you're not going to be discouraged. Because again, podcasts, it's a long haul thing. It's a lot of work. We often say like, if you don't get past the seventh episode, that's probably a sign that you're not going to make it. Getting to seven episodes is really tough. And it's so, I don't know, it's such a weird statistic that we found, but a lot of podcasts that fail never get past that, that seventh.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. I think once you get through that, once you get into 10 and onward, that's when you start to not only have processes, but tweak them to make them better. And whoever's doing your hosting gets more comfortable. I think you get better about preparing your guests. I think a lot happens after that.

Jared Sanders: Yeah. You start to have data, you actually start to see," Okay. Well, we talked about this at minute 15. Why did this work better than it did when we talked about it at minute 28 or whatever?"

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep. Exactly.

Jared Sanders: So, you start to get a little bit of that data and you can start to tweak and move things around. But yeah, I think it's just really important to lay out your show and get those three bullet points kind of lined out. And then from there, you can think about episodes and guests and things like that. I know it's really exciting to just go for the a list of guests, but that in my mind, I think that should come a little bit later to make sure that, from a B2B standpoint, to make sure that you have your strategy of what you actually want the podcast to accomplish.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. No.

Jared Sanders: And then, to touch on the video component. So, before I would normally say," Well, video is a whole other beast. You really need to think about how do you want it to look? Is it going to be compelling?" But then, the pandemic sort of threw that out the window. Now we're all doing this on Zoom.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. It changed everything.

Jared Sanders: So my advice is, if you're going to hit record and you're doing it on a Zoom call anyway, you might as well record the video. So, it's good to have, even if you never use the full video podcast, it's great breakout material for social, or if you want to go to YouTube or any other video platform that you want to host on, now you have something to actually put on there. Ideally, you'll want to brand it to make it a little bit more identifiable to what your company or your brand stands for. But yeah, you might as well hit record on the video if you you're recording on audio already.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Exactly, exactly. Awesome. Well, I'm biased, but I love what you're doing and I love the approach that you're taking. And I think in summary, don't just stop with that audio or video content, think about all the different things that you can do from it.

Jared Sanders: Yes.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And if anybody wants help, tell them a little bit about where they can find you and what you want them to know about Tobe Agency.

Jared Sanders: Sure. So yeah, if you're interested in podcasting or video podcasting and you just want to talk about it, we can be that hotline for you to go to. You can find us @ tobyagency. co. And we're super into everything that has to do in the realm of podcasting, whether it's networks, whether it's B2B, whether it's you want to be a solo podcaster. And that's sort of what led us to Casted, if I can just kind of jump into that really quick. It's so funny, because we were already kind of doing what you guys were building on our own rights. So, it was just a natural fit that when we found Casted to have the tools that you guys offer at our disposal for anybody in our team to use is the most important part. I don't have to always rely on just an audio or a video editor. I can send the marketing team in there. I can send the sales team in there and they can sort of play around and get great content at their disposal at any time. So yeah, I love what you guys are doing as well. So, I just wanted to give a little shout out there to Casted.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Well thanks, I appreciate that. And yeah, it's interesting, because we were doing, I mean, that's what led me to start Casted. It was we were doing same kind of thing on the agency side, but on the company side trying to say," Okay, we have to do so much more with this great content. If only there was something that could help us do it." So, if you're listening and you're kind of struggling through the same thing, you're not alone. So, check out Tobe Agency because they can help. So, thank you so much for being here Jared. I'm so glad that you were our first video guests talking about video podcasting and other things. Thanks for being here.

Jared Sanders: Cool. Thank you so much for having us.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's our show. Thanks so much for listening and for more from today's guest and some pretty amazing content that they've inspired visit casted. us and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest on all things amplified marketing, B2B podcasting and a lot more...