Case Study - Create Connected

Background

The Create Connected project was born from a multi-creative community—The Okrēo—looking for ways to increase top-of-funnel awareness and grow its leads. Key constraints included:

A low financial budget, but high time budget
Must be highly branded and build the brand image
Easily produced and syndicated to remain easily delegated
Target frequency of 1-2 pieces of core content per month
Target frequency of 3-5 pieces of supporting content per week for key social channels (Instagram, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn)

Drops

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Objectives

The client, The Okrēo, wanted to achieve the following objectives:

Increase inbound leads and community trials to leverage high in-community engagement and retention rates.
Increase word-of-mouth and organic social referrals.
Raise rolling averages and trends of content performance to stabilize “spikes” of success.
Build brand authority via evergreen content and resources.

Solutions

To achieve these objectives, I identified a few key systems to develop early on:

Guest Coordination

Because guests were to be the lifeblood of the podcast and newsletter content, it was paramount to build a bulletproof process for guest outreach, invitation & recruitment, and interview prep.

Systematizing this helped to make guests comfortable and prepared for their interviews and consequent episodes, leading to:

Higher brand authority and professionalism to guests pre- and post-show
Higher quality of interviews (by identifying flow and topics of interest beforehand)
Improved engagement by guests across social media, increasing overall engagement
Increased chances of positive guest word-of-mouth referrals to give an interview

Episode Production

Because The Okrēo was growing, I wanted to ensure that the time required to produce a video podcast and newsletter was as minimized as possible. This would allow the show to continue as the company scaled its community.

To do this, I created standard process for moving through the three stages of production (pre, in, and post) which included assets such as:

Simple checklists of tasks to prepare guests and interview notes in pre-prod.
An interview “intro” template to begin each interview with a show of good will to guests.
An interview “cheatsheet” template to be used during interviews and get the best points and insights out of guests
A standard set of brand assets and graphics to use for editing in post-production.
Editing templates for each video episode and newsletter issue, pre-filled with placeholders for dynamic content.

Content Syndication & Engagement

Once episodes were created, it was important that publication (to main channels) and syndication (to supporting channels like social media) was as frictionless as possible.

Many companies employ people full-time to create and manage supporting content to post on social media for podcasts. Because The Okrēo did not have staff for this, I prioritized developing a system that helped to:

Rapidly repurpose content from episode videos, audio, and newsletters to social channels.
Export video shorts from the main editing file, heavily reducing the time required to reformat video from 16:9 aspect ratio (horizontal) to 9:16 (vertical).
Identify and target keywords and hashtags across all supporting channels, increasing audience impressions and awareness.

Implementation

I had pre-existing expertise in launching podcasts and newsletters, which I used to rapidly develop and publish the first (pilot) episode of the show. Here are 3 highlights from the buildout:

Zencastr

While doing market research for tools that would help accelerate the show’s production, I found a new tool that helped podcasters host interviews and syndicate podcasts: Zencastr.

I tested Zencastr, prototyping a few workflows around it to ensure its usability in production.

It replaced 2 tools in the workflow — Zoom and Transistor.fm — Saving over $225 per year on production costs.

POSSE Method

Because each episodes’ content was vastly different, the show could lean into repeatable ways of sharing snippets from each episode. I implemented the POSSE method for syndicating varied content types across The Okrēo’s social channels, formatting each piece of supporting content to match the best practices of the target platform.

Time Saved per Episode

As I developed the pilot episode, I kept a running tally of hours that were spent on initial setup tasks (fixed time costs) and per-episode tasks with no assets in place (marginal time costs).

Without any of these systems in place, the time spent solely on the guest coordination, production, and content sharing of the first episode was approximately 14 hours.

After implementing the above systems for the production of the second episode, that time cost dropped to 6 hours: A 2.3x improvement in efficiency.

Results

As my involvement in the project finished, we had achieved the following results:

Developed a pilot episode + assets, systems, and resources in ~65 hours.
Systematized to reduce time-to-create a new episode from 14 to 6 hours.
Saved The Okrēo over $225 per year on podcast tooling.
Gathered over 30 newsletter signups within 4 weeks of pilot episode
Amassed >100 combined full listens per episode across all podcast channels.
Generated 6 inbound leads to The Okrēo within first 4 weeks (avg. 11% CVR).
Increased The Okrēos total all-channel impressions (awareness) by 5x.

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