Podcasts for Growth: Leveraging Audio Content for Your Marketing Strategy

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-coffee with experts. This is your host, Ranma here. Today we have Curtis, who is the owner of Collideascope with us. Say, Curtis, how’s it going, man?

It’s going great. Great to be here.

Lovely. Curtis, before you move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind them. Why don’t you talk us through your journey thus far and what about your agency? What do you guys do? What do you guys specialize in? And we take it off from there.

Okay, great. Yeah. Collideascope. We’re what you might call a traditional agency, but we operate a little bit untraditional than a lot of agencies out there. I have a deep bench of experts in a variety of digital marketing skill sets, from copywriters to developers, designers, CEO experts. The way we operate is we don’t have an office space, we don’t have payroll. We bring in the right consultants to augment a client’s needs based on where they’re trying to get to. With that, think of us It’s like on a basketball court. We go where the ball is. We’re like an amoeba that can morph for a client where we don’t come in and be like, You’re getting a project manager, you’re getting a creative person on your account, all those other things that go with it. Because a lot of our clients already have some semblance of a marketing team. It might be run by a marketing director or a CMO. They might have a couple of people on their team, but they have some gaps. They’ve identified gaps, whether that’s in analytics, whether that’s in advertising or creative. When we What we try to do is we try to fill those gaps, but fill those gaps with experts, seasoned experts, and plug those holes, but get them to where they want to get to.

We could work with them to achieve whatever goals they have, whether that’s improving their website, improving conversion rate optimization to better performing advertising on Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Meta. Yeah, it’s been a great journey 10 years since I started my agency. Just running another agency 10 years prior to that. Got about 20 years experience in consulting, both in the IT space as well as this digital marketing web space.

Lovely. Quite clearly, you have built an impressive career in digital marketing, wearing many hats actually along your way. What is officially smart that passion for this dynamic and ever-evolving field of digital marketing?

Yeah, I actually have a hat right behind me there. That’s the cowboy hat. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, you would see that on the Bullhorn’s Bullseye’s podcast, which I have a podcast with one of my seasoned experts, Tom Nixon, where we talk about all things digital marketing. I started my career in IT, actually. Going all the way back to pre-2000, I was working help desk at a bank. If you were around pre-2000, we had a catastrophe that everyone thought was going to happen, which was Y2K, that all computer systems were going to shut down and everything when the clock struck midnight in the year 2000. Of course, that didn’t happen, but I worked on a lot of really great projects with a lot of really great network engineers. Then polished my career, went on to work for a couple of other companies, including a large healthcare. Then I decided to take a step into consulting and working with small businesses. That was during the boom of everybody having a handheld device. It started out with the Palm Pilot, then the Blackberry, and we were installing BlackBerry servers, and then Exchange, Microsoft Exchange, and Office and all of these new products starting getting developed.

I really cut my teeth into consulting with businesses to install solutions to help them with their business from a technology perspective. Shortly after that boom was the boom of the CRM, Salesforce, HubSpot. These tools started to come onto the market, and my same customers started to ask for help with those tools. I migrated from that infrastructure side to the software as a service digital marketing marketing area, and we saw a lot of gaps there. My team saw gaps in analytics. We saw gaps in certainly SEO and advertising. Our clients kept asking, Hey, can you guys help us figure this out? We’re spending money doing marketing from a digital perspective, but we don’t know what we’re getting out of it. The common question of, what’s the ROI on this? That was a problem I wanted to solve. I really dug deep into analytics, understanding the Google side of things, understanding paid search, understanding SEO. And so then I started my own agency, which was a core focus in that area. And it’s been great. Yeah, 10 years now.

Lovely. And you have been there for quite some time now, Curtis. I’ve seen enough summer, summer, summer, summer, and winters now. What, according to you, has been some of the major shifts in this space? And this is quite an ever-evolving industry, right? But as for you, let’s say, if you were to pick up your top three, and ask for you, which has been major shifts in this particular space?

Certainly the CRM is a major shift. The CRM really changed a lot of things. Again, that was maybe 12, 13 years ago that HubSpot and Salesforce really came out of the market and people started using CRMs to help to manage. Crms existed prior to that, but the software as a service model and the ability to integrate the CRM with other tools to visualize all that That data. That was a big thing. I think from a web perspective, we chose back in 2010 HubSpot to be… Not HubSpot, I’m sorry, WordPress to be our primarily content management system for building websites. I think that was a good choice because I think over half the internet right now is run on WordPress. In 2017, we switched to Elementor. I think page builders is also That’s the big thing that’s happened in that space where we have less of a need for what you would call that traditional true developer from a web and content perspective. We can build websites now where maybe of the total project scope, you need a developer for 5 or 10% of it. It used to be 40 to 50% of the project you needed a developer.

They were coding and building everything, even if they were still using HubSpot. I would say, finally, we’re in a space right now where that’s all about to evolve and jump again with AI. And so page builders like Elementor are building AI into their platform where you can do things like, build me a website or a page like this page here, and you can give Elementor’s AI another page on the internet. It analyzes the HTML of that page and then uses its own framework to build you a similar with a similar layout, and then you go in and you replace your content and your photos. That’s not perfect right now by any means, but with some fine-tuning, as you do with any AI, over time, will we be saying in a couple of years, how much do we really need a designer? The designer’s role has been in taking content, taking copy, laying it out for a user. But if AI can understand users’ behavior better than an individual, and it can build layouts to help you achieve your objectives using your content, that could be big. We’ll see what happens down the road, but a lot’s changing in the AI space right now.

For sure. Yeah, we touched upon a very important topic, AI and machine learning, kicking in, right? Not only in our industry, but also in our lives, if you see. So talking about your go-to tools, what are they that you use on a regular basis or which is frequently used in your agency?

Yeah, so we are HubSpot partner, and so we use HubSpot as our CRM. So there’s a lot that we’re doing in there. Our email marketing is there. Our quoting and all lead management is in that platform right now. Some tools that I like for my podcast, I’m using Riverside, which I absolutely love. Opus. Opus is a tool where I can take my videos in and it uses AI to build Shorts, so I can take a 30-minute podcast and it builds all my shorts for me with AI. That’s a really good tool. From an SEO perspective, we use Ahrefs. I’ve been using Ahrefs for a really long time. I think once you find a tool and you get all your clients and your data in it, it’s hard to switch. You just become used to how you’re using it. We picked Ahrefs a number of years ago. We stuck with that. But as far as SEO goes, there’s a couple of other tools I think every agency should be using. Number one is Screaming Frog. It’s a desktop client. You install it on your computer. You’re just paying a yearly subscription instead of a monthly subscription.

If you like Excel spreadsheets, this is the tool for you because you can crawl, you can export, you’ve got all your columns and rows, you build out your tables, you analyze all your data, you find things very easily, page titles that need corrected or meta descriptions because they’re too long, they’re too short, they’re not formatted correctly. So great tool. And then seotesting. Com. Nick Swann, who’s a UK guy. I worked with him. We were part of a training group with Backlinco a number of years ago, taking one of Brian Dean’s courses, and we met each other. And he’s a developer, and he’s built a really great tool called seotesting. Com, which allows you to A/B test all of your SEO. As SEOs, when we make a change, we want to know what happens with that change. That is true. Being able to annotate, have the before and after snapshots of a specific keyword, of a specific page, or groups of pages, content groups, really becomes critical. I think one of the biggest areas that it helps is showing your value. I think oftentimes with SEOs, we’re only able to, or clients certainly are interested in clicks, and clicks don’t always come right away, that you can start to move the needle with position and impressions and more ranking keywords and those types of things.

This tool really helps to display to a client the efforts that somebody’s putting in and what the results actually are. I think it’s a great accountability tool. It’s this big one on my list right now.

Lovely. I’m talking about test here with an ever-evolving WordPress platform. As per you, Curtis, what are some of the latest SEO best practices you recommend for businesses to adopt?

Schema. I think if you’re not using schema, you really need to learn schema. Schema has been around for a while. So essentially structuring the data, being explicit to the search engine about the content within a page. I’ve got a website for my podcast. I’m using podcast schema on each episode page. I’m telling Google, this is a page about a podcast. This is the title of the podcast. This is the description. This is a link to the mp4 file. This is is the image for the podcast episode. All those things that you can be explicit about a specific page, you should be doing. It’s really critical to local businesses to make sure you have local business schema. That schema would include your hours of operation, your phone number and contact info, the service areas that you operate in. I do think that’s really critical. Gosh, what else are we doing right now? Really just find opportunities and take care of the low-hanging fruit. Sometimes just overlooked are titles, meta descriptions, your headings. You go and you write an article with assumptions. You publish that off article, and then oftentimes we don’t go back to it. A month later, three months later, after Google’s actually indexed it and now gives you some results.

Oh, here’s what we’re actually ranking for. Here’s what Google’s showing us for. Do You have the opportunity to then fine tune your article now that you have some data that Google’s giving you about that article to redo the page title, redo the H1 heading. Not only could that improve your ranking, but you’re making the content more relevant to searches, so you’re more likely to get a user to engage with that content, which is the ultimate goal, right? I think revisit your content frequently. Set that as a schedule. If you’ve got a publish date for an article, set a A reminder, 60 days down the road to revisit that article. Look at how Google is treating it from an SEO perspective. What queries you’re ranking for? What opportunities do you then have to optimize it?

Absolutely. Absolutely, Gertes. Since we are doing a podcast, that is, and for you as both additional marketing expert and co-host of Bullhorns and Bull Eyes, how do you see the podcast fitting into your overall marketing strategy?

Yeah. The story behind the podcast, I asked my colleague Tom to write a case study. I had been working with a client for seven years. Huge success story. We’d taken that business leaps and bounds above where they were previously. I said, Tom, I need to write a case study on this. Let’s write a case study. Put a blog up on our website about it. He interviewed the client, and an hour and a half interview, he called me up afterwards and said, Look, Curtis, there’s too much here for a blog post. I could write a book about your relationship over the last seven years with Mario. He said, Let me think about this, and I’ll get back to you. He called me back. Now, Tom hosts or is a part of about 12 other podcasts. He’s very familiar with podcasting. He called me back a week later. He said, What do you think about doing a podcast? We do our first couple of episodes with Mario and then look at doing other case studies in a podcast podcast type format. I said, podcast, I started thinking about it. I didn’t jump on board right away, but podcasting is just another form of content marketing.

People might read. Some people might want to read a 2000-word, 4000-word blog post or case study. Other people like to listen to podcasts. Other people like to watch videos. We’re all consuming media in different ways. This was just an opportunity to create content and inform our current existing clients and educate educate them, build out the brand, educate people about what we’re doing. It developed into a podcast. It was slow to develop, I would say, for the first six months. Then we hit some strides. We built a brand behind the podcast. We figured out what technologies we needed to use. We created a schedule. We’re recording two days a week. We release one episode every Tuesday. That’s really helped to create a process, to create some discipline in it. It’s just been great brand ourselves, to do storytelling, to do content marketing. It doesn’t have to cost a lot. Honestly, you get a camera, a decent microphone. I’m glad you said that. Yeah. No, everybody thinks you got to spend $20,000 on lighting and microphones and equipment and have a studio and all that. With tools like, we’re using Zoom here. There’s a dozen other tools you could use to record podcasts remotely.

I mentioned earlier some tools like Opus or Riverside, which allows us to create the shorts. Yeah, the shorts, I think a lot of people really enjoy us taking the snippets out, and a lot of people will consume a 30-second or 60-second clip, and I’ll usually build five or six of those from a single episode. If that’s all somebody consumes and they don’t listen to the entire episode, that’s okay. I’m sure they got some good advice out of the clips, and they’re paying attention, they’re following, and maybe a full episode will grab their attention and they’ll watch that. But no, it’s just It’s been great for branding, like I said, and content marketing.

Absolutely. In this short, if it clicks with them, then they can obviously go on and watch the entire episode if they feel that it is relevant to what they are looking for. I’m totally all came for this short thing because we also promoted and we have seen a lot of traction in those shorts. I’m sure you would have seen that as well across multiple social forums.

Yeah, the shorts definitely get more views than a full episode. The trick was just in getting them easily created. You could send your video to a video producer, which might cost a little bit to get it full production and get all those pieces. There’s a number of tools out there that will take a video, find the content, that appears to be, let’s call it viral, based on what people are saying or those types of things. Then it’s smart enough to tell you, Hey, consider this clip as a short. It’ll give you the segments it thinks, and then you can edit from there and build out the shorts you want, export them in the right format, 9 by 16, get your captions on there, all the best practices you need to do. I think Riverside, we’re paying $29 a month for that. It’s very inexpensive when you think from the grand scheme of things. Absolutely.

Gertrude, so finally, before we wrap this up, one piece of advice that you’d want to give to our, especially young listeners who are trying to make a mark in this digital marketing space. Since you have gone through the grind and I’ve clearly made it big. So a piece of advice for our young listeners today.

Yeah, get a coach or a mentor. That’s the best advice I could give. I’m without a coach or mentor right now. I tell you what, I struggle sometimes with accountability or just encouragement somebody to turn to. But in my career, I’ve had some great coaches in different areas, some great mentors who have helped me in my career. Whether that you’re working for an agency and you’ve got a manager, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or you’re freelancing, you need to find somebody who is somewhat in your career. They don’t have to exactly be doing what you’re doing, but somebody who you can talk to, you can share ideas with, somebody who will hold you accountable, somebody who will help you grow. I think it’s crucial to anyone who’s young. With that, get out and network. There are opportunities. When I say get out, you could I still network online and do some things to network online. But get out face to face, meet people, build your network. I build a business based off of referrals. The coaching, the mentoring, and the referrals, you want people to trust you. You want people to know and like you.

That’s how we do business with each other. We do business with people who we know and trust. That’s just natural human nature. If you can get yourself out there and you can get to know other people, let them get to know you. It’s a little bit easier for business to come to you than instead of you always trying to find business. That’s my piece of advice.

Lovely, Curtis. Talking about mentors for our audiences. If they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

I’m most active on LinkedIn, probably, so you could find me on LinkedIn. Just search for Curtis Hayes. You could find the Bullhorns and Bullseyes podcast. Feel free to subscribe there. Your comment, I’ll definitely reply. The website is Collideascope. Co, so you can find us there or comment as well. Any of those channels would be great.

Lovely. For our audiences, we got him on LinkedIn as well, right? Yeah. Great, Curtis. This has been a brilliant conversation, and I’m sure our audience would find a lot of value in the insights that you have shared today. So thank you so much for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it.

I really appreciate the invite. All the best to you.