TMSA Trailblazer Award: Digital Dispatch

2022 Trailblazer Award Winner

ELEVATOR PITCH:

Creating videos and podcasts is hard. But the distribution of that same content is even harder. Using one of the internet's oldest and most remarkable tools, RSS, we were able to automatically create landing pages for every new podcast and video we published resulting in a dramatic increase of new listeners and subscribers. This one website feature has resulted in nearly 21,000 people listening and digesting our podcast.

MEASURABLE RESULTS AND OBJECTIVES ACHIEVEMENT:

I was selfishly looking for a tool to help me create more blog posts as quickly and easily as possible--plus appeal to the desktop nature of a logistics audience. I never expected a podcast automation → blog post feature on my website would result in it being the highest driver of new listens, downloads, and quality of content/guests for the Digital Dispatch podcast. This feature launched in July of 2021 and source-wise, accounts for more than half of all downloads for a two year old podcast that focuses on freight marketing and sales strategy--helping us to reach and build an audience that continues to tune in each and every episode.

BLAZING A TRAIL!:

Marketing your own business is just as important as your client's (a phrase many marketers won't agree with but I still believe to be true). If you're not actively creating content to market your own business, you are missing out on a massive opportunity of not only in-the-trenches experience, but data points that help drive the future of your business forward. Using automation, we can fill the gaps where it makes sense to ease the time-consuming demands of content distribution without losing the effectiveness of the messaging in the content itself. Our podcast automation tool creates a blog post on your website of choice where the audio player is directly tied to your podcast's RSS feed. All plays count towards your hosting provider with additional marketing goals such as plays, stops, completion goals, etc...are all enabled. Along with the podcast player, show notes with description links from the episode's notes in the podcast host are also added to the blog post--creating an SEO advantage where it doesn't normally exist for podcasts. (only podcast episode titles are currently searchable in Google--our tool solves that by indexing not only the show title, but the episode notes as well) As a marketing firm that believes in being in the trenches and practicing what we preach, we're aiming to deploy this tool as a resource for all of our clients creating podcasts.