ZipCast

Content strategy

ZipCast Content Strategy

Client ZipCast

Services Fractional CMO / Content Strategy / Growth Strategy / Brand Marketing / Website & Messaging / Operating Systems / AI Workflow Design

The Background

ZipCast is a short-form audio platform that helps organizations communicate with their people through the personal voice of leadership. For schools, the platform combines weekly episode distribution, access to the listening platform, and a growing library of syndicated expert content designed to support parents, teachers, and leaders.

Echo + Ember partnered with ZipCast as a Fractional CMO, supporting everything from content planning and sales strategy to inbound marketing, website development, branding, and design. One of the most strategic priorities was building a syndicated content library for the school vertical and creating a repeatable system to source, produce, and deliver that content at scale.

The Challenge

To make ZipCast’s school offering truly valuable, the company needed more than a small library of recordings. It needed a high-quality, scalable content system built around the real needs of school communities and strong enough to support weekly releases, long-term growth, and expansion into new markets.

That meant defining the right content architecture, identifying pillar topics broad enough to serve multiple school types, sourcing credible expert contributors, and building a workflow that could maintain quality across a large volume of audio content.

Our Approach

Echo + Ember partnered with ZipCast as a Fractional CMO, helping shape strategy across content, marketing, sales, branding, and growth. One of the company’s biggest priorities was building a syndicated content library for schools and creating the operating system required to sustain it.

We developed the content strategy around seven core pillars spanning parenting, family formation, school-home partnership, academic and intellectual formation, spiritual formation, culture, character and student life, beauty, arts and imagination, and citizenship, service and calling. From there, we built a custom AI-enabled workflow to support content creator sourcing and outreach, then created a documented production system with grading rubrics, quality standards, and audio brand guidelines to ensure consistency across contributors. Over nine months, we helped produce 640 syndicated segments in rolling releases, totaling more than 50 hours of audio created with 50 expert partners.

The Outcome

Timeline 9 Months

Deliverables - Content production system

- Over 22 hrs of recorded, PACKAged content

- 2x Revenue over 9 months

- $75K savings in labor cost from automated systems

The result was not just a content library, but a scalable content engine embedded within one of ZipCast’s most important product offerings. As a core part of the school product, the syndicated content initiative became a major value driver for both customer experience and company growth. It contributed to more than $250,000 in revenue, increased listen rates by 37%, and improved open rates by 11%.

Just as importantly, the work gave ZipCast a repeatable system for sourcing, producing, and expanding content into new school markets and audience segments, creating a strong strategic foundation for future growth.