The Marketing Mix: How Steve Cummins Paired His Podcast with a Newsletter
Developing new business in professional services requires conversations. You know, the kind where you talk with industry peers at a networking event over a cocktail. These conversations spark new ideas, which can spread like wildfire within an organization.
Podcasting allows this to happen at scale. But what happens after you record a conversation with someone who would be an ideal client? How do you keep them engaged?
Steve Cummins, founder of Solent Strategies and host of The Marketing Mix podcast, found an approach that helps him stay top of mind with his audience over time, directly in their inbox. Listen to my full conversation with Steve here:
Finding the Right Ingredients for the Marketing Mix
Having launched a podcast as a marketing leader at an IT firm (we’ll get into that later), Steve recognized the immense potential of podcasts in establishing thought leadership for his company, Solent Strategies.
Through insightful interviews with industry experts, sharing his own expertise, and recounting his experiences, Steve positioned himself as a trusted authority, earning the respect and admiration of peers and prospects when he launched The Marketing Mix in April, 2023.
“[The Marketing Mix] really started out almost as a passion project. I just want to talk about marketing, particularly during the pandemic when we couldn't get out to networking events and marketing meetings. So it's evolved into me talking to B2B marketing practitioners, people who are out there working in SEO, or content marketing, or whatever is their area of expertise. And in those episodes, we dig into a specific topic.”
If there’s one silver lining that came out of the pandemic, it was a rapid adoption of video meeting software like Zoom. This led to an explosion of podcasts in 2020 and 2021, illustrated in the chart below from Exploding Topics:
Adding a Newsletter to the Podcast
Just three months after launching The Marketing Mix, Steve realized the importance of keeping the conversation going in the inbox. “The point of the podcast for me was I was talking to a lot of people,” said Steve. “But then how do you stay in touch with them?”
Like a perfectly mixed Rob Roy, Steve paired the podcast launch with the introduction of The Marketing Mix newsletter, allowing him to leverage existing content across multiple platforms. With twice-monthly cadences for each format, he staggers publications so he delivers content every week, in one form or another.
“One week I do a podcast, and the next week I do the newsletter. Basically, every week there is something new going out.” Said Steve. “The newsletter has three things. It's basically a marketing issue or something that I'm interested in, a recap of the podcast, and then this drink of the week.”
The drink of the week in The Marketing Mix is a fun way to add an entertaining twist. “Part of the name behind the marketing mix was this idea of it's the kind of conversation I'd like to have with a marketer over a cocktail,” said Steve. “So the last question I ask everybody on my podcast is, hey, if we're doing this in the real world, what would we be drinking?”
Combining two content marketing frameworks together, like podcasting and an email newsletter, is a powerful way to build a content engine that generates leads for your professional services business. But inbound lead generation isn’t the only use-case for a podcast. What if your firm sells high ticket services to enterprise accounts?
Using Podcasting for Account-Based Marketing (ABM): A Case Example
The Marketing Mix isn’t Steve’s first podcast. In 2021, Steve was running marketing at a firm called Opengear, selling solutions to big enterprise companies. His sales team had a list of accounts they were going after, but some they had trouble getting into. So, Steve launched and hosted a podcast called Living on the Edge: The Network Resilience Podcast.
“I started a podcast where I was interviewing CTOs, CIOs, top level IT folks about this idea of something called network resilience,” said Steve. “I would say, I have this podcast on network resilience. We'd love to interview you about how your company deals with this, pays attention to it.”
“If I could get an interview with somebody at, let's say, PayPal, you immediately get some credibility within that organization because people now are aware of your company,” Steve continued.
“But anybody who works for that person, that CIO or whoever it may be, is probably going to listen to that because they want to know what their boss is thinking. Then, they’ll share it with their network. Suddenly we go from nobody at that company knowing who we are to having all these different awareness points.”
This was pure gold for the sales team, who was able to go to the people they were trying to reach at that company and say, “Hey, we've just done this podcast. Thought you might be interested in it.”
Pair Your Podcast With a Newsletter
As a professional service provider, you too can tap into the power of podcasting to take your marketing efforts to the next level. By following Steve's lead, you can unlock the immense potential for lead generation, thought leadership, and brand building by pairing a podcast with a newsletter.
If you're ready to take your professional services marketing up a notch, simply reach out to learn more about how Red Cedar can support your digital marketing efforts.
