The CX Insider Podcast is a B2B storytelling podcast created and sponsored by ACF Technologies that aims to create a community of Customer Experience professionals sharing knowledge and innovative ideas. The podcast invites industry leaders to create conversations about the latest trends, stories, challenges and opportunities in the world of customer service and experience.
The target audience are CX professionals from Europe within the retail, banking, technology & fintech sectors who listen to industry podcasts. With listeners now spanning 40+ countries, we believe we are reaching our community and can demonstrate this strongly with our engaged following on our fast-growing LinkedIn page.
Challenge
Let’s be honest. Who wants to listen to corporate talks in their free time? Given the niche audience and LinkedIn’s anti-company page algorithm, we needed to find creative ways to reach and convert the audience into regular listeners, grow the podcast and make the content feel more fun and personal. We have always known that we compete directly for people's valuable minutes of content time per day, so we wanted to provide podcast episodes that are, firstly 'Valuable' and secondly 'Entertaining'. This is now even harder on YouTube especially, when there is so much amazing content to be found.
Objectives
Making the leap to YouTube
The CX Insider Podcast has always been an audio-only form of content available on traditional platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcast or Google Podcasts. To meet our new objectives, the production team decided to expand the podcast reach to YouTube and start recording full video episodes. While our YouTube account has existed since 2019, it was an inactive channel without any presence. Therefore, this new initiative required more talent and resources to make it a success.
Execution
The first video episode went live in June 2022. In the period between the first video episode and the end of the year 2022, we published 10 video episodes that were repurposed into 105 pieces of audiovisual content including chapters and shorts.
With guests based near London, we produced the podcast in a recording studio, which massively improved the quality of our output.
We knew that people’s perceptions of B2B content often come with a very formal and serious impression. To add entertaining value, we shifted from the traditional corporate setting while still providing educational insights to our audience. This resulted in creating funny thumbnails with informal facial expressions, adding memes in the post-production process and producing more content with casual rapid-fire questions to create a personal connection with the audience.
The podcast has so far introduced guests from global brands like Santander, Selfridges, Monzo, Hotel Chocolat and Volvo, which increased our credibility overall. We continue to drive this with confirmed guests very soon from HSBC, LLoydsBank, and Well Pharmacy.
We ran promotional campaigns on LinkedIn and YouTube to raise awareness about our new type of content with the slogan “Less Corporate, More Fun”.
Last year, we decided to start producing bolder, funnier, more diverse content on YouTube to expand our reach. This resulted in substantial podcast growth, gaining credibility and having large UK banks and retailers booked on our podcast till mid-2023.
