Gold Dust for Goldcast: 270% Organic Traffic Growth with Search-Driven Content & Community

Author

Hazel Kamath

Goldcast is a purpose-built event marketing platform that allows B2B marketers to run engaging events that drive revenue. The platform offers a range of tools and dashboards for field and event marketers, allowing them to measure the ROI of their events while procuring strong lead qualification insights.

The revenue-driven event marketing platform has used innovative content strategies to up its website traffic and drive leads and revenue. We got in touch with Meisha Bochicchio, the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Goldcast to learn about Goldcast’s latest achievements and winning journey.

Goldcast Success Highlights

Goldcast believes in repurposing event content into on-demand assets and search-driven content. This helps them drive traffic to their events and increase our digital footprint.
They publish a lot of video content in the form of CMO Diaries and Event Marketers Live that focus on candid conversations with marketing and event leaders. The content created helps them attract traffic to the Goldcast platform.
Since they are a fairly new brand, its primary focus is to build trust and authority among its target audience. For this, they celebrate the voices of top event marketers and strive to be the go-to resource for modern event marketers.
For their brand-building content initiatives, their prime focus is to drive people to Goalcast and provide them with an A+ experience. They measure success by the number of stories they’ve shared, audience growth across our recurring shows, an increase in branded search volume, and the number of registrants driven to their events.

In this interview series, Meisha shares Goldcast’s brand-building journey and how they boosted their traffic within a year. She also throws light on how content helped them attract the right audience to their platform.

Thank you, Meisha, for joining us today! We appreciate you taking the time to tell us your brand story at Goldcast.

Could you share a bit about how it all started and your expertise?

I currently work as the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Goldcast. I’ve been in marketing for ten years, both agency-side and in-house.

I started as a Digital Marketing Specialist at a small agency where I learned a range of skills across search engine optimization, paid media, email marketing, and more – but I eventually fell in love with the content and continued my career path in Content Marketing.

I have in-house content experience at PlanSource, a benefits administration software provider, Wistia, a video marketing platform, and now Goldcast, a virtual and hybrid events platform.

When I am not busy running Content Land, I enjoy spending time with my furry friends (a cat named Gatsby and a miniature dachshund named Albus), hiking and exploring New England, and chasing down Boston’s best plate of pasta. I’m also a Graduate Student enrolled in West Virginia University’s Integrated Marketing Communications program, which is a big focus for the next several months.

Tell us about Goldcast and how it impacts your customers

Goldcast was founded in December 2020 by three Harvard Business School students, Palash Soni, Kishore Kothandaraman, and Aashish Srinivas.

It’s no secret that the pandemic changed many aspects of our everyday lives. How companies conduct business and connect with customers is one of those aspects. Almost overnight, businesses had to pivot and adopt a digital-first mentality. While some functions flourished digitally, others floundered.

Events were one of the hit hardest areas. In-person events were put on hiatus for months, even years, and marketers that relied heavily on events for generating revenue scrambled to find a viable replacement, which was a challenge, especially considering the onset of Zoom fatigue and home offices that were filled with new distractions.

Goldcast was created as a solution for revenue-focused marketers to take back events and provide an exceptional event experience for both attendees and organizers. The platform is purpose-built for B2B marketers to build beautiful and engaging events of any size or scale and directly tie event activities to pipeline and revenue.

What’s been your strategy when promoting Goldcast?

As a virtual events platform, events are a large part of Goldcast’s overall marketing strategy. We just hired a Head of Events, and we have three full-time Event Marketing Managers spread across Field Events, Webinars, and Community Events. We are also expanding our reach this year by participating in more third-party events and sponsorships.

The main goal of hosting events across our marketing funnel is to get our audience and prospects into the Goldcast platform experience. Once people attend an event and see what’s possible, they’re way more likely to hop on a formal demo and see if it’s a good fit.

It’s a very slick platform, so it’s fun being at a company where we get to use our product so often.

The Community has been another large focus for Goldcast. We currently host two ongoing video series, CMO Diaries and Event Marketers Live. These shows focus on candid conversations with marketing and event leaders. These events are great because they highlight and celebrate fellow marketers within our community and, again, get folks into the Goldcast platform.

Besides events, our content strategy focuses on repurposing event content into on-demand assets and search-driven content that will drive traffic and increase our digital footprint. We’re very early in our SEO journey, but we are committed to putting in the work and reaping the rewards as we continue to grow.

Our goal is to become the go-to resource and expert for content across virtual and hybrid events.

How do content marketing and SEO fit in with Goldcast’s overall brand strategy?

As a startup, we have to take a very scrappy approach to build our content strategy.

We’re new! No one has heard of us, so our top priorities are to build trust and authority and to get people into our platform experience.

To achieve this, we have two content pillars: celebrate and elevate the voices of top event marketers, which is a brand and community focus, and to become the go-to resources for modern event marketers, which is a search and sales enablement focus.

For the first pillar, we focus on highlighting leaders in our two shows – CMO Diaries and Event Marketers Live and then repurposing that content across our blog and social media. We identify and share customer success stories across case studies and social media. And, we host monthly community events to inspire, excite, and even entertain our audience.

As brand-building content initiatives, we’re measuring success by the number of stories we share, audience growth across our recurring shows, an increase in branded search volume, and the number of registrants we drive for our events. Note that there aren’t any major lead goals here; we’re more focused on building the brand, driving people into Goldcast, and providing an A+ experience.

This approach seems to be working for us. Interestingly, CMO Diaries, one of our interview shows, is a top ten page for us in terms of organic traffic. People are starting to recognize and search for the show, which is a positive sign. We’re regularly seeing more than 100 people attend each live episode, which is also really exciting.

For our second initiative, to become the go-to resources for modern event marketers, we are focusing on an early investment in SEO, creating a robust asset library of free resources for event marketers, and hosting monthly webinars and field events.

For these content efforts, we measure success by how many total keywords we rank for and improvement over time for high-priority targets, time spent on our site and with our resources, and attendance and engagement with our events. Our webinars and field marketing events are more targeted, and we can tie attendance and engagement data back to our CRM to track event influence on pipeline and revenue.

As anyone that works in content knows, SEO takes time. As we’re researching relevant topics and launching new content, we’re starting to see articles rank and pull in traffic, which is huge since we’re at such an early stage.

Our organic traffic is up 270% this spring compared to last spring. Obviously, that’s a bit misleading without context since we had just launched, so we take this success with a grain of salt. But we can also see that our efforts are working.

The webinars and field events have also proven to be a very successful avenue for us to drive leads, sales pipeline, and revenue.

Some folks might not consider events “content,” but remember, we take live events and repurpose them into several other content assets to build a flywheel.

Did you miss the live event? No worries – check out the blog recap, the video-on-demand, a short clip on social, or the audio-only podcast version. This approach takes one asset and massively expands the reach and impact. It makes folks want to attend live events.

And, it’s driven events to be the most successful channel for generating and influencing the sales pipeline.

Is there any piece of content that you own (ebook/ whitepaper/ podcast) you’d like to tell us about?

Yes! We just launched our 2022 Event Marketing Salary Report. We surveyed 205 Event Marketers across the US to create salary benchmarks across titles and tenure. We launched the report a few weeks ago with a Career Workshop Event, and we’re in the middle of a six-week promo campaign for the asset.

The event and report were very well received within the community, and we had a ton of great engagement during the launch. We see this campaign as a way to support the Event Marketing Community, and we are excited to make this report bigger and better every year with even more benchmarks and data.

There’s very little data available about salaries and total compensation for Events teams, so our goal is to break down these barriers and create transparency and equity across the board.

Any advice you’d like to give to marketing professionals, especially in the SaaS domain?

There’s never a dull moment in SaaS marketing. Things move fast, and there’s always some new trend or tool. Don’t get tempted by the new and shiny. Be curious, but stick to your gut and focus on being great at a few things versus spreading yourself thin across many.

There’s a lot of noise in the market, so your challenge is how to stand out from the rest in a way that’s meaningful and memorable.

SaaSy Tidbits from Meisha Bochicchio

Content marketing and SEO are crucial in the virtual and hybrid event space. It helps businesses stand out in a meaningful and memorable way.
The SaaS domain is full of new trends and tools. Though it’s important to ride on these trends, businesses should focus on being experts at a few things rather than spreading themselves too thin.
Building trust and authority through value-adding content is key to getting people into your SaaS platform experience.

It’s heartening to see how Goldcast invests resources into getting their audience on the platform experience. As a SaaS content marketing agency, we too let our prospects experience our services. We find this a perfect strategy to get people to realize the possibilities. Once that’s done, more prospects hop in for a demo or plan channel-wide strategies.

If you wish to learn more about what Goldcast is and how they achieved this feat, get in touch with Meisha on LinkedIn or check out their website.