Automation Helps Caspian Studios Scale to 50+ Podcasts

When Ian Faison founded Caspian Studios in early 2020, he set out to create the first company of its kind. Caspian Studios is a Podcast as a Service company, meaning they create and produce podcasts from scratch for companies who want to rise above the noise by creating remarkable content.

Over the course of his career in digital marketing, Ian often noticed  B2B companies wanted to create world-class podcasts and audio content but lacked the skills or resources to create and maintain them. Ian knew he could help these companies create impactful, high-quality content series that would continuously add value to their audiences. Now, with a team of creatives, producers, marketers, and more, Caspian Studios can take an idea scribbled on a napkin to launch in just 60 days. 

Ian’s team at Caspian Studios faces a unique challenge: growing their business while also building the audiences of each podcast they create and manage. One of the main motivations behind publishing a podcast is to create a highly engaged community. Because Caspian creates quality content and consistently delivers value to their customers and their communities, they have a lot of communities to regularly engage with. This means they have lots of lists to manage and lots of emails to send. Ian knew he needed help, and that’s where ActiveCampaign came in.

Starting off on the right foot with ActiveCampaign

Thanks to his experience in digital marketing, Ian was already familiar with ActiveCampaign. “Back in 2020 when I started the company, I knew how important marketing automation was, especially as it related to building a community and a way to communicate with those communities effectively.” One of the biggest challenges the Caspian team faces today is cultivating their own customer base and community on top of the audiences for the dozens of podcasts they’ve launched. Ian knew automation would be key to scaling Caspian’s customer base. “I had used ActiveCampaign in the past and always had an awesome time working with the team there.” 

Using templates to scale email marketing campaigns quickly

Caspian’s marketing team manages dozens of communities, and the email lists and content plans are integrated with the podcast production teams. Building automation templates in ActiveCampaign’s Email Builder has given Caspian the power to launch new podcasts quickly. “ActiveCampaign is a huge part of our ability to scale. We need to be able to build a show in 60 days, do it fast, and then make sure that the emails are getting delivered. We need to know the emails aren’t going to spam, and that they’re going to be high-quality and on time.”

Having reliable templates with high deliverability means the Caspian team can continuously improve their email sequences, making the templates more effective over time. “You can keep iterating and building, saying ‘Maybe we should try this, maybe we should try this.’” One of the advantages of managing so many lists is that Caspian has a lot of room to A/B test their process. “It’s just like running an experiment. Because we have very similar formatting for a lot of our stuff since we’ve tested so much in the past, you can see if a newsletter’s deliverability worsens, the cause is probably the content.” Honing the process allows the Caspian team to focus on delivering high-value content to all their audiences every time, a key component of building highly-engaged communities. 

Building an integrated tech stack with ActiveCampaign 

In addition to templatizing their automation process in order to scale their business quickly, Caspian is leveraging many other key ActiveCampaign features to keep their business running smoothly and their customers’ audiences engaged and growing. One of the first things the team does for a new podcast is creating a microsite for the launch to build community lists both before and after a podcast has launched. Colin Stamps, Caspian’s Podcast Launch Manager, shared “for most of our microsites, we’ll use the Zapier integration to connect Webflow with ActiveCampaign. In certain cases, we’ll also connect it with our CRM system so everything gets tracked.”

From there, they keep the community updated on when the podcast is launching. If it’s an existing podcast, they’ll give new subscribers guidance on where to start. “We have a sequence of emails that goes out after someone signs up. We’ll share which episodes are coming up, or if it’s an existing show, which episodes are most popular. We also ask if listeners have any questions for the host so subscribers are not only getting the new episode drops but also have that consistent connection.”

It was important to Ian to make sure Caspian’s whole tech stack is in the cloud. It’s used by many people across multiple teams, so ensuring everything fast, reliable, and seamlessly integrated is critical to keeping things running smoothly. ActiveCampaign and its integrations are an integral part of that.

Saving time and scaling with marketing automation

Ultimately, leveraging the power of ActiveCampaign has allowed Ian and his team to save countless hours and scale the business in a way that would otherwise be impossible without significantly increasing headcount. “The technologist’s dilemma is that every second we’re actually spending in ActiveCampaign is not really that valuable, it’s all the time that we don’t have to spend in it. We’re able to set up all these automations and then just not have to worry about it the next day. The time we save is what’s most valuable.”

The team at Caspian isn’t just innovating with their tech stack. In addition to their world-class podcast and video production services, they’ve also launched a brand new service producing Hollywood-style storytelling for B2B content, called the Business Thriller. Caspian is making B2B content more exciting by creating out-of-the-box B2B content framed with engaging storytelling. 

Future growth with ActiveCampaign

What’s on the horizon for the team at Caspian? They just launched a Caspian original podcast, Remarkable, where the Caspian team shares content ideas from Hollywood (and beyond!) and translates those into real-life applications on how to improve B2B content. Using ActiveCampaign, Caspian created an email newsletter for Remarkable to share episode highlights every week with their B2B audience. 

“We’re excited to see how we can grow our new Remarkable audience and increase engagement in the upcoming weeks by using ActiveCampaign.” 

If you’d like to see how much time ActiveCampaign can save you and your business, click here to start a free trial today!