This week on the ProfitWell Report, we're tackling a bit of a meta question from Jeremy Bolls at Kindful. He asks: How do podcasts and video marketing impact growth?

The thing is, podcasts and video cost money and take a bit of a financial leap of faith, not unlike the content marketing leap of faith made over a decade ago.

To see if podcast and video marketing are worth the investment, we took a look at the data from 2.4 thousand subscription companies.

Podcasts and video marketing have exploded over the past year with marketers around the globe talking about how intensely powerful rich media can be to their brand, their sales process, and ultimately, their growth. 

First up, let’s look at how podcasts and video marketing impact customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC is up across the board for both B2B and B2C companies, but interestingly enough CAC from customers who come through podcasts or have some level of their attribution from video marketing are actually cheaper. Notice how those customers attributed to podcasts and videos have half the CAC.

This reduction is likely because of the promise of richer media, which is that you have a deeper relationship and your brand is more clearly imbued within your customers and prospects minds.

Further support of this notion exists when looking at the willingness to pay for customers and prospects who’ve consumed a company’s podcast or video content relative to those who’ve consumed only written content or no content at all.

Podcast listeners have roughly 10 to 25% higher willingness to pay while video consumers are seeing a similar 12 to 28% higher willingness to pay, suggesting that this rich media does its job when it comes to nurturing a prospect or customer.

So should you rush to launch a podcast and splash your website with videos? Well, the short answer is yes, but you have to keep in mind there are real costs involved here and you don’t want to do a terrible job, because that’ll negatively impact your brand. As a company who does a lot with media, we recommend starting small and building from there, especially since this’ll help you hone your message and build your audience in the long term. Tracking progress with subscription media reporting is also important to understand how your media efforts are impacting your business.

Well, that's all for this episode. If you have a question for the ProfitWell Report, send over a video or an email to neel@profitwell.com. If you got value here or on any other week of the report, we always appreciate shares on Twitter and LinkedIn. That’s how we measure if we should keeping doing this or not. We’ll see you next week.