The way marketers interact and communicate with customers has shifted immensely with the advent of the internet and marketing automation. Today’s marketing is missing the actual dialogue between customer and marketer that has been so essential to successful marketing in the past. Podcasts offer a great way to reopen those communication channels allowing marketers to create better relationships with customers and understand the challenges they face. Casey Cheshire, CEO and Founder of Ringmaster Conversational Marketing joins the show to open marketers’ minds to the amazing benefits of having a podcast such as customer relationships, content creation, and a great forum for learning.   Takeaways: Marketers have moved away from actually talking to their customers and in a time when relationships are the new currency, this is harming brands and limiting the potential success of marketers. Podcasts, by nature, create relationships between the host and the guest. Having potential clients come on your podcast creates a relationship. Customers will be more comfortable discussing their business’ actual challenges on a podcast as opposed to a sales call.  Podcasts can be a great tool for marketers, each episode serves as a great source of content that can be repurposed many times in different media (eg. books, promo videos, clips, blogs, etc.) A conversational style podcast affords marketers much better access to how a customer or member of a group feels about a challenge, product, etc. compared to reading through online reviews or scrubbing social media posts.  Being the host of a podcast is a great way to learn from guests and the host can ask whatever questions they want to really learn a lot. By interviewing experts in a particular subject, you can learn the jargon that their field’s ingroup uses. This means that you can learn how to have a conversation in the ‘language’ that the expert understands best.  Podcasts offer a space where people can come and share a moment together reconnecting in contrast to how social media has a way of tearing society apart at the seams.  A fractional CMO’s job is to make those already at a company more effective, not to take their jobs and work. Fractional CMO’s should coach up the marketers around them to be ready to take over their position when they leave.   Quote of the Show: “I'm not here to create podcasts. I'm here to create human connection.” -Casey Cheshire   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseycheshire/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/caseychesh?lang=en  Company website: https://ringmasterlive.com  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Automation-Unleashed-Strategic-Growth/dp/1599327384    Ways to Tune In: Amazon Music Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fractional-cmo-show/id1592740671 Spotify: https://fractionalcmo.libsyn.com/spotify Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZnJhY3Rpb25hbGNtb3Nob3cuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s dcast YouTube: https://youtu.be/ljHxCZPAy-o