Historically, podcasts have been aimed toward shoppers. The worth to be gained in the B2B world is one thing that has been largely untapped.
For Lindsay Tjepkema — who has been entrenched in the world of B2B advertising for greater than 15 years — the chance was huge. So in 2019, she based Casted, an audio and video podcast product aimed toward B2B entrepreneurs.
And now Casted has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Revolution Ventures.
Existing backers High Alpha Capital, Elevate Ventures and Tappan Hill Ventures additionally participated in the financing, which brings Indianapolis-based Casted’s complete raised to about $9.three million since its inception.
2020 was yr for Casted. The startup quadrupled its income, tripled its buyer base and doubled the dimensions of its staff through the course of the 12-month interval. It has a powerful checklist of consumers, together with PayPal, HubSpot, Drift and ZoomInfo. Casted’s platform can also be “the system of record” for Salesforce’s 25+ podcasting exhibits.
And to make issues much more spectacular, that income progress seems extra like 8x yr over yr, based on Tjepkema.
She believes the corporate’s worth prop goes past simply giving firms a technique to get their podcasts on the market. Its means to investigate knowledge and switch that into intelligence for gross sales and advertising is what actually units it aside, she mentioned.
“If you’re a podcaster, and you’re doing it to grow a large audience, monetize and sell advertising, the number of downloads is important,” Tjepkema informed TechCrunch. “But when you’re a B2B company or an enterprise company, the number of downloads doesn’t help. You need to know who’s engaged, how are people interacting with the content and then how is that going to impact revenue and pipeline, and customer loyalty and lifetime value.”
For starters, Casted’s SaaS platform offers advertising groups a technique to publish content material. Once revealed, Casted gives entry to a “fully searchable content archive” with transcription companies and tagging. It then additionally helps the corporate amplify that content material by way of cross-channel distribution. And lastly — largely by integrating with digital advertising platforms corresponding to HubSpot, WordPress and Marketo — Casted’s software program gives analytics on what a selected person is listening to. Those data-driven analytics turns into beneficial info for gross sales and advertising groups in phrases of who to focus on and why.
“Because everything that’s in the platform is transcribed, there are ways to clip it up and share it across other channels and get that into the hands of your sales team so they can use it to make their conversations with their customers even easier,” Tjepkema mentioned.
Revolution Ventures Managing Partner David Golden mentioned that advertising expertise has been a troublesome sector for his agency to speculate in, contemplating the amount of firms offering a wide range of companies corresponding to electronic mail optimization and gross sales automation and enterprise intelligence.
“But what Lindsay and her team was building out was clearly a new category in this space and the sort of slap-your-forehead category. Of course, podcasting for B2B marketing makes all the sense in the world when you look at the evolution of tools that have been available to business marketers, such as blogs, white papers and webinars,” Golden informed TechCrunch. “It was just going to be a matter of time before audio and video would be important pieces of that toolbox, and there was nobody doing it.”
Revolution estimates that B2B content material makes up roughly simply 15% of the podcasting content material on the market right this moment.
“Given the growth on the consumer side, we think this could be up to a $20 billion market by five years from now,” Golden mentioned.
The firm, he added, is only one of a rising variety of martech firms based in Indianapolis, together with ExactTarget (which was acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion).
Looking forward, Casted mentioned the brand new capital will go towards increasing its 25-person staff and scaling the platform with new integrations and partnerships.
