Casey Cheshire – Ringmaster

**What happens when B2B marketing stops trying to capture attention and starts creating genuine connections?** In this episode of the Radical Global Marketing Podcast, Steven is joined by Casey Cheshire, founder and CEO of Ringmaster, author of *Marketing Automation Unleashed* and a marketer with more than two decades of experience. Casey's route into marketing is anything but conventional. After eight years in the US Marine Corps, he built a career in B2B marketing and marketing automation before discovering a new passion for podcasting – and ultimately building a business around helping B2B brands use podcasts to create content, conversations and commercial opportunities. At the heart of the discussion is a simple idea: **connection is the new currency**. Steven and Casey explore why genuine conversations can be so powerful for B2B marketers, where technology and automation can get in the way, and why understanding your customer remains fundamental no matter how sophisticated the marketing toolkit becomes. **In this episode...** Steven and Casey discuss: - Why genuine connection can be more powerful than transactional B2B marketing - How podcasts can build brand, create demand and strengthen customer relationships - Why marketing technology and automation should never replace understanding your customer - How AI is increasing content noise – and making human connection even more valuable - Why global marketers need to keep challenging what they think they know about their customers **Do you really know your customer?** Technology gives marketers more opportunities than ever to automate, measure and optimise what they do. Casey experienced that transformation first-hand through marketing automation, gaining the ability to demonstrate how marketing activity contributed to leads, customers and revenue. But more technology doesn't automatically mean better marketing. Casey found that many companies were using only a fraction of the capabilities of the technology they had purchased. Worse, marketers could become so focused on platforms, features and automation that they lost sight of the person they were actually trying to reach. The same problem applies to content. Whether a 17-page report has been painstakingly written by an expensive expert or generated in seconds using AI, the fundamental question remains the same: **What question does this answer for your buyer?** **From go to market to connect to market** This becomes particularly important for global marketers. Pain and intent may be universal, but the people experiencing them – and the way they choose to solve their problems – can be very different across markets, cultures and generations. A buyer persona created ten years ago may bear little resemblance to the person making the same purchasing decision today. And a persona developed for one market can't simply be assumed to work everywhere else. Casey's answer is deceptively simple: keep talking to people. For him, this is another reason podcasting has become such a powerful marketing tool. It creates a consistent reason for marketers and business leaders to have meaningful conversations with the people they want to understand. It also sits behind his latest concept, **Connect to Market**. Rather than simply taking a product *to* a market, Casey argues that businesses should think more deliberately about how they connect with the people within it – through podcasts, communities, partnerships and other human-first approaches. As AI makes it easier to create more content, more quickly, those genuine human connections may become more important rather than less. Because amid all the automation, algorithms and AI-generated noise, great marketing still begins with understanding another person. **Resources mentioned in this episode:** - Casey Cheshire on LinkedIn - Ringmaster - Ringmaster on LinkedIn - Marketing Automation Unleashed - The Hard Corps Marketing Show **Sponsor for this episode...** This episode is brought to you by Brandigo China. We are an independent marketing and communications agency based in Shanghai, China with 20 years of on-the-ground experience in China. At Brandigo China, we work with multinational clients to support their marketing and business growth efforts in China.