Samantha Carey March 24, 2021 4 min read

How a Recurring Video or Podcast Series can Fuel other Content Marketing Efforts

John Bonini is the Director of Marketing at Databox, an analytics software company where you can track the metrics from all the different tools/apps your business uses in one place. He’s back for a second season with us and is ready to discuss his podcasts more in depth and how they can fuel your content marketing strategy with video series and podcast efforts.

Learn more about how he came about creating podcasts, content repurposing, and measuring the success of his series.

Listen to the Podcast version of this episode:

Guest-at-a-Glance:

Name: John Bonini

What He Does: Director of Marketing at Databox

Find John on the Web: Databox | LinkedIn

Top Takeaways:

How Important is Passion in Business?

“I think that passion is an ingredient and that focus and passion go hand in hand,” John said. “I think people associate passion with ideas and I think if you can focus your passion on a specific area and focus on being consistent and showing up with the same level of intensity and level of quality, time and time again, that is where the magic is.”

John continued to explain that he doesn’t think passion alone is enough. For example, when he’s recruiting people he’s not only looking for that passion piece, but also for people who will be disciplined. The marriage of those two things is critical.

“Finding someone who’s super passionate, has a learner’s mindset, and is going out and learning new skills on their own is exactly what I’m looking for,” John said. “Then when they come to work, they’re able to focus that and use discipline, and when they find an area of need, they can really apply that in a focused way and be disciplined about it.”

How Did You Come About Creating Podcasts?

John has a huge passion for creating podcasts and it has had a large impact on his life. While he was reaching out to friends and leaders in the industry in order to learn more, he realized that others could probably get value from their conversations too. This led to his very first podcast.

As he worked his way into his first job in software at Litmus, John continued his interview-like conversations, asking things like “how they got started” and “how they got to where they are.” When he joined Databox, he kept his personal podcast going, but when he realized that the series was tired, he wanted to create something better: aligning the podcasts with blog posts.

The podcast shifted from 45 minute career-spanning-interviews, to 15 minute episodes that asked guests about the metrics they had improved in their company with the greatest impact. With this change, ‘Metrics & Chill’ is now fueling his blog content and it is helping him keep his audience engaged, increasing time on site, and improving SEO.

Expanding on Content Repurposing

John recently posted a Tweet that said: “the sound from your video is not a podcast and the transcript from your podcast is not a blog”. The meaning behind this message is the misuse of content repurposing.

“I like to use a musician’s term here, transposed,” John said. “If you’re playing a song in the key of G, and you want to go up to the key A, you can still use those same chord progressions, you just transpose it. I think of content the same way, transposing a podcast into a blog post rather than repurposing it.”

A lot of brands take the transcript from the podcast and use that as the blog post or they’ll take the video and create a podcast from that. It’s important to think about the way that people consume the content. For example, when someone wants to read the transcript what are they looking for? They probably want to scan and look for the highlights. When you’re taking a piece of content and transposing it to another medium, make sure that it’s natural and organic.

John’s Top Quotes:

[5:25]

“When you have the measurement stuff in place, and have the discipline with consistent approach, and start to understand those things, the topics, the channels, the mediums, the things that work, and dial in on those processes and make them repeatable, that’s where the consistent good quality content really starts to happen.”

[18:01]

“Podcasting had a big impact on my life because I would reach out to people to learn from. Then one day I thought, I should just record these because if I’m getting value from this, other people probably would too.”

[22:36]

“I think we all get mixed up trying to constantly track outcomes from what we are doing. In this case, the output of being able to embed podcasts into a lot of our content. I think the ability to embed and connect the podcast to all of our content, help docs, top of the funnel stuff, is a big result, but not a numerical one. The impact that it can have across the funnel is the reason why we’re doing it. ”

[26:22]

“There’s certain guideposts in video that they’re not going to see if they’re listening to the podcast. It could be the graphics you have on the screen, it could be my facial expressions, but there are certain cues that are going to be missing. So if you just take the audio, rip it out of the video to make it a podcast, your audience is losing those things.”