PodWheels

Supercharging Special Event NTDC 2025 Podcast Series With Social Media Campaign

Background On The Opportunity

Founded by trucking industry veteran and media professional Greg Thompson in 2018, PodWheels is an award-winning podcast network dedicated to highlighting the trucking industry. Since the company’s launch, PodWheels has produced more than 2,400 podcast episodes across some 25 series that have provided coverage for a variety of topics and interest within the trucking industry. With podcast series including the SCF Highway To Hope, the Grawe Pod, Destinations, Safety Matters from Reliance Partners and Road Warrior Entrepreneurs, PodWheels has also been honored for the comprehensive nature of its podcast development work covering various aspects of the trucking industry. PodWheels has placed a total of four podcast series on FeedSpot.com’s Top 100 Trucking Podcasts, including the NTDC 2025 Podcast, which currently ranks within the Top 50 on that prestigious list.

Back in 2019, PodWheels began to establish a relationship with the American Trucking Associations (ATA) through the network’s coverage of the National Truck Driving and National Step Van Driving Championships, known as the NTDC. PodWheels went onsite for NTDC 2019 and recorded interviews and features that were shared as segments released within hours of the recordings. PodWheels also provided a 90-minute wrap-up episode that was released within 10 days from the conclusion of the NTDC 20219. The initial experience was so positive for all involved that PodWheels made early plans to return to cover NTDC 2020. However, due to the COVID pandemic, the National Championships were not held in 2020 or 2021   

When the NTDC program resumed in 2022, PodWheels was once again on hand to cover the onsite event, which is held over four days in August, and the network produced some episodes for release through September and concluding in early October. PodWheels followed the same approach in 2023, producing a heavy concentration of episodes during the event’s August run. The post-event coverage featured more episode releases in September and October. 

As an experienced industry professional who had covered three NTDCs, Greg Thompson knew that the National Championships were the culmination of a competition that began within the state associations across the country, with the earliest of the competitions typically beginning in March. Having produced some 70 episodes across three years’ of limited runs, Greg knew there was more potential for an NTDC Series – especially if PodWheels began its coverage earlier in the year by making the commitment to highlight the people and the stories coming out of the state competitions. Greg also had the good fortune to establish a working relationship with Eugene Mulero, a Senior Reporter from Transport Topics who had co-authored a book released in 2023 that chronicles the history of the National Truck Driving & National Step Van Driving Championships.

In 2024, PodWheels launched its coverage of the NTDCs in January, as Eugene joined Greg for most of the 20-plus episodes that were released prior to the beginning of the four-day run for NTDC 2024, which took place during the third week of August. A couple of years ago, ATA had established a private Facebook Group that featured some 4,500 members by 2024. PodWheels became a member of the private Facebook Group and, in 2023, Greg began posting the episode releases featured on PodWheels.com within the Facebook group. By the start of 2024, the NTDC Podcast was beginning to gain a loyal following. When the competitors met in Indianapolis in August, PodWheels provided extensive onsite coverage of the National Championships while onsite. The post-event coverage extended all the way to December, and PodWheels had produced 50 total episodes in 2024 covering various aspects of the NTDCs. The audience engagement, with download results and length of episode listens, steadily increased throughout 2024 and it positioned the series to expand even further.

Prior to the start of 2025, PodWheels and the ATA had begun discussions about establishing a collaborative agreement in which the ATA would eventually name PodWheels the official podcast of NTDC 2025. Part of the commitment that PodWheels made to the ATA was to increase the number of releases during 2025 to be in the range of 80 to 100 episodes. PodWheels also developed a plan to incorporate audio advertising within the podcast episodes and banner advertising on the portions of the PodWheels.com website dedicated to NTDC.

The advertising campaign sold packages based on overall impressions rather than limiting the numbers on ad plays through downloads. In order to reach and exceed the goals outlined to advertising prospects, Greg knew that PodWheels would have to engage a top-flight social media provider to drive the kind of engagement necessary to satisfy advertisers who would be investing to support the series.

PodWheels had utilized three different social media professional services since 2019. The strategies employed and the results those approaches yielded were shockingly bad, making little to no impact and falling woefully short of reasonable goals. Each one of the three previous services ultimately proved to be a waste of money. One of the issues, Greg realized, was that none of these previous services had little to no experience at all in the trucking industry. Greg did not want to get burned a fourth time, especially with client advertising money on the line.

Greg had met Be Social Founder and President Bethany Ahlm through a mutual contact in the trucking industry. Greg had learned that Bethany not only had extensive experience with social media content development and placement, but, most importantly, her company had its roots in the trucking industry. From what Greg could see, Be Social had the right mix of work ethic, creativity that could engage audiences, experience in trucking and, above all, the ability to deliver results

Greg had an initial conversation with Bethany that went extremely well. Bethany understood the short-run mission and the long-range vision that Greg was in the process of developing for PodWheels. As a fellow business owner, Bethany understood that the initial budget would be tight because PodWheels had just undergone a branding adjustment that had to be accelerated by several months due to a necessary break from a previous marketing collaborator that had decided to enter podcasting and essentially become a competitor for client spend in the trucking industry.

Plan Of Action That Meets The Moment

While the initial budget was limited, Bethany outlined a strong campaign that would leverage a host of tools that Be Social could provide with creative posts, reels, extended video pieces, tagging state trucking associations, the ATA and the companies of the NTDC participants featured in the podcasts. Bethany also advised (and Greg authorized) the launch of an Instagram account for PodWheels, which had never been established by any of the previous social media providers that Greg had utilized for his company.

Be Social also advised PodWheels to invest in paid promotions through Facebook and Greg authorized the budget that Bethany recommended. Be Social’s initial campaign, which was focused on PodWheels’ coverage of NTDC, would be launched on August 1. This timing would give Be Social three weeks to pull from the content that PodWheels had previously produced from January through July to further heighten interest in the coverage and assist in generating impressions for the advertising campaigns.

In addition to the 15 evergreen episodes chosen by Greg from the first 30 releases produced by PodWheels for the NTDC 2025, Greg advised Bethany that Be Social’s August NTDC campaign would have no shortage of episode content. PodWheels was set up to execute the most active client podcast release schedule in the company’s history. During the month of August, PodWheels would be releasing 27 episodes of the NTDC 2025 series over the month’s 31 days.

With the intense release schedule established for NTDC 2025 and with the existing commitments to other PodWheels clients, Greg and his PodWheels Team needed a social media provider that could be a true self-starter. In Be Social's work with another client, Greg had seen first hand Bethany’s ability to run with an assignment and develop content that was effectively engaging. Greg and Bethany discussed a working plan, with Greg noting some goals and general parameters. Greg kept the scope quite broad in order to allow Bethany the space to allow Be Social’s creativity to flow.

Upon learning that Be Social’s office was located not far from the Minneapolis Convention Center, which served as the host site for NTDC 2025, Greg asked Bethany if PodWheels could book Be Social for onsite work during the event’s “Championship Saturday.” On the Saturday of NTDC Week, the day begins with the March of Champions as all 400-plus qualifiers for the NTDC are welcomed by a standing ovation by the 4,000-plus fans in attendance. The start of Championship Saturday is one of the true highlights of the week, but the festivities begin around 7:00 a.m.

Bethany and Greg worked out the details for the Saturday morning onsite work by Be Social. In the first days of August, it had become clear to Greg that Bethany had constructed a plan that kept pace with, while also effectively amplifying, the large amount of content PodWheels was producing for the NTDC 2025 Series.

Greg was so impressed with the quality and reach delivered by Be Social’s packaging of PodWheels’ content that he essentially doubled the Facebook promotional budget following the first two weeks of the campaign, which had already generated a 400-percent month-over-month increase in overall engagement on the PodWheels FB page, including the addition of more than 40 new followers to the page.

The addition to the Facebook promotional budget, which was authorized five days before the August 20th start of the NTDC 2025 competition, gave Be Social more resources to highlight the onsite podcast content as well as Bethany’s onsite work that would be produced and released during Championship Saturday.

Results:

Looking just at the numbers, the well-executed month-long campaign by Be Social was seen as incredible and awe-inspiring by Greg and his PodWheels Team. Bethany and Be Social built on the momentum created in those first two weeks by delivering the following at the end of August:

• A 515-percent month-over-month increase in overall engagement with the PodWheels Facebook Page.

• There were 118,000 content views in one month, representing a month-over-month increase of 460 percent.

• PodWheels content, bolstered by the effective utilization of the promotional budget by Be Social, reached 33,000.

• The reels created by Be Social generated over 20,000 overall views.

• PodWheels gained approximately 100 new followers to its Facebook page in August alone.

• The average cost per impression for the promoted content was $0.01.

• The Sponsor Spotlight interview videos that PodWheels recorded (and Be Social edited) were an absolute hit with the advertisers who had contracted with PodWheels to support its NTDC Podcast coverage.

• The number of impressions generated through Be Social’s Facebook and Instagram content promotion strategy greatly contributed to PodWheels being able to far exceed the number of impressions the company had promised to its NTDC Series advertisers.

• Bethany’s work onsite during Championship Saturday, including some instant reels and other short videos, drew praise from veterans of NTDC, including some members of the NTDC Organizing Committee.

• When looking at the listener engagement results for the August podcast episodes, Greg cites Be Social’s execution of its social media strategy as one of the reasons that the NTDC 2025 Podcast reached historic levels for downloads in a single month. Following a record-breaking month in July that had tripled the activity seen in the beginning of the year, the download results in August were more than double what had been seen in July. In fact, during the four days of onsite coverage from the NTDC 2025 event, the rolling 30-day results total of downloads for the NTDC 2025 Podcast Series had increased by 112 percent vs. the previous 30 days that dated back to July 20-24.

“It would be the marketing understatement of the decade to merely say that Bethany Ahlm and Be Social exceeded my expectations for the flawless execution and the incredible work that was done in support of PodWheels’ coverage of NTDC 2025,” said Greg Thompson, Founder and Executive Producer of PodWheels. “I knew Bethany is quite talented at what she does and I had seen her company produce excellent work for clients in the trucking space. She really helped me get past a massive hurdle in the memory of the past bad choices I had made with social media providers.

“I am not too proud to say that I had been burned by three social media providers that, when the rubber met the road, they had no idea how to find the right traction in the trucking industry – despite decent resumes and the work examples they had shared,” Greg added. “Those previous experiences really jaded me about social media providers, but, from our first conversation, I knew that I could trust Bethany and Be Social. Bethany has an incredible work ethic and she makes sure that Be Social delivers on what her company promises. To watch Bethany work in person on Championship Saturday was a real treat. She produced a couple of amazing videos editing content onsite right from her phone. I’ve been in the communications, media and marketing industries for over 40 years now, and I’ve seen many things change over the years. With that noted, I had never seen such fast, efficient and beautiful work done onsite in a matter of minutes. The next day when I had a chance to catch my breath from all the coverage and take the time to really appreciate Bethany’s work from Championship Saturday, I found myself in awe of the positive marketing images she had created for PodWheels. It was truly stunning.

“For what our entire team had planned for NTDC 2025, especially with the inclusion of sponsors, PodWheels needed Be Social to be great at everything they did for us,” Greg explained. “From the results that we realized in the sheer numbers we saw and from the impressions that were made with our sponsors as well as all those across the trucking industry who followed what PodWheels has done with our NTDC coverage in 2025, I can confidently tell you that Bethany Ahlm and Be Social were more than great. They were incredible in every facet of what they have done for PodWheels. While it will be hard to top the heights that Be Social has reached in uplifting the social media reach of PodWheels during our first project together, I am looking forward to working with Bethany and her company for many years to come. Bethany is building something great with Be Social, and PodWheels is both grateful and proud to stand out as a BE Social Success Story.”