If you’re passionate about podcasting, you must focus on the best ways to market your podcaster to grow your audience. Whether you’re creating your first or tenth podcast, the goal is always the same—spark a conversation around a topic and build a community of listeners passionate about the issues you cover and your interests.
The most discouraging experience for a podcaster is putting content out there that no one can see. And if people don’t know your show exists, they will never listen to it and will have no shares or mentions.
Even if your podcaster is gathering some attention, you likely want to increase the number of downloads you get per episode. Luckily, you have come to this post. Here we highlight the best strategies for marketing your podcast to grow your audience. However, before that, let’s look at the pillars of podcasting.
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Pillars of Podcasting
No matter the effort you put into promoting your podcast, you won’t see any tangible results if your content is not worth listening to. For the sake of this post, we shall look at the two primary pillars of podcasting: Quality of the content and time.
Content Quality
The results you get from your marketing are as good as the product you are marketing. Before promoting your podcast, ask yourself whether the product you are marketing is worth it. In other words, it doesn’t matter the money you spend on marketing or the strategies you apply; if your product is not worth marketing, you won’t see positive results.
But how will you know if your podcast is worth listening to? Here are questions to ask yourself:
- Does your episode provide value? People will only listen to your podcast if it offers value. Before marketing your product, ask yourself whether your episode teaches a new skill, drives curiosity, or entertains your audience. If your answer is “yes,” start marketing your product.
- Are you offering something unique? Your podcast should add something unique to the topic you are discussing. When building your podcast, focus on differentiating your podcast from others in your niche.
- Does your podcast capture attention? Apart from being valuable and unique, your podcast should capture your audience’s attention; otherwise, people won’t listen to the end. Study strong podcasts from other podcasters to identify their formats, content structure, and features that you can include in your project to make it sticky.
For your podcast to succeed, it must provide value, be unique, and capture the user’s attention.
Time
Another factor to focus on when marketing your podcast is time. Even with a great product, you require time to grow your audience. Uploading your podcast and expecting to get increased listeners within a short time is unreal. Sometimes, you may wait up to six months without seeing any significant outcomes.
Don’t be discouraged, though. Instead, be persistent, focus on providing value, and invest in the best promotional practices to achieve results over time.
Best Podcast Marketing Strategies
Like any other form of marketing, you need a unique marketing strategy to market your podcast. When choosing your strategy, focus on the type of audience you’re trying to reach. Remember, no matter how valuable your podcast is, it cannot be for everyone.
While getting more listeners is the ultimate goal for podcasters, you should focus on reaching the right audience—listeners who can see value in your content and take action. Everyone builds a podcast for various reasons. Whether you aim to get subscriptions or make more product/service sales, target listeners who can contribute to your bottom line. Once you’ve defined your target audience, you can focus on the strategies outlined below:
Define Your Unique Angle
Like any other form of content creation, the first step to creating and marketing your podcast is understanding your why. Ask yourself what need you want to fulfill with your podcast.
In addition to defining your why, you must clearly define your goals. Do you want to gain subscriptions, make sales, gain backlinks, downloads, etc.? Understanding this will help create more target campaigns to promote your content and provide a way to measure your progress.
Release A Few Episodes During the Launch
As a new podcaster, your goal should be finding ways to capture your audience’s attention and remain in their minds. Remember, you’re competing with other podcasters in your niche, some of whom have been in the game for a long time. Release at least three episodes on launch day to ensure your podcast doesn’t get lost in the sea of other podcasters.
By releasing a few episodes during launch, you have a better chance of capturing your audience’s attention than when you release a single episode.
When you have more episodes, listeners have more reasons to subscribe to your podcast. And when they subscribe, they will be notified when you release a new episode and probably take some minutes to listen to it.
This will provide an excellent opportunity to grow your channel, especially if you create high-value and sticky content. Another benefit of releasing a few episodes is that your audience won’t judge you from only one episode.
Start/Update Your Website
Creating a website and starting a blog for your podcast is a great marketing step. If you’re yet to start your website, we recommend starting one, and if you have it already, update it to ensure it is user-friendly.
Having a blog for your podcast provides double opportunities to reach your audience—through your podcast and via blog. The best part is that you can host your podcast on your website based on your podcast host. However, you can still embed your podcast content on your site to keep everything in one position if you want.
For example, you can create a landing page where users can access information about your podcasts. You can also create a few pages about your podcast and encourage people to listen. In addition, talk about your product or services and their benefits. But don’t make your pages about your product but the benefits users get upon using them.
Invest in SEO
To reach a wider audience and appear on search engine results pages (SERPs), you should optimize your podcasts for search. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves optimizing your content to show up in search engines for related terms.
One of the areas to focus on when it comes to podcast SEO is on-page factors like episode titles and descriptions. This involves including keywords that your audience is likely to use when searching for podcasts in your niche naturally in your podcast titles, URL, and descriptions.
In addition to optimizing your episodes for SEO, your podcast titles and descriptions should tell potential listeners what your podcast is all about. Titles and descriptions for each episode should let your listeners know what to expect when they click on your podcast.
Many podcasters make the mistake of including only a number as their episode title, for example, episode 5, episode 10, etc. However, nothing special about that title will prompt listeners to open it. Instead, create a descriptive title, for example, Episode 3: How to Boost Your ROI with SEO. After that, include a proper description that lets users know what to expect beforehand.
Submit Your Episodes to Podcast Aggregators and Directories
Podcast aggregator apps like Apple Podcasts are apps that play podcasts. Submitting your podcast to these podcatchers can be a great way to gain new listeners.
The best approach is to create accounts with these podcatchers and submit your RSS feed to publish your new episodes on the platforms automatically.
In addition to Apple Podcasts, other podcast apps to access a new audience and grow your podcast include Google Play and Spotify.
Take Advantage of Your Guest’s Audience
Interviewing guests provides a great marketing opportunity, especially if the guests have huge audiences.
Make it easy for your guests to share your podcast content. One way to achieve this is by creating snippets, quote images, links, and status updates that they can share and promote to their audience.
To get the most from this strategy, send your guests a note when their podcast goes live and ask them to share it with their audience.
Encourage Your Listeners to Share and Leave Reviews
As with your guests, your listeners and subscribers present an excellent marketing opportunity. Word-of-mouth marketing is a great promotion strategy that provides significant results.
When you create a new episode, encourage your listeners to subscribe and share your content to reach a wider audience. Also, ask your listeners to leave a review after listening to your podcast.
Be honest with your listeners and let them know that you will gain more subscribers and grow your channel when they share your content.
Promote on Social Media
In addition to having a website for your podcast, create social media profiles for your podcasts. A strong social media presence provides an excellent opportunity to share an update when you publish a new episode. But don’t just post a link to your latest episode on your social media. Use social media as a conversation starter or even discuss one of your earlier episodes to encourage engagements and discussions.
For example, you can create 10-second soundbite clips and share them on Twitter. You can also use audiograms to publish teasers for your latest episodes and add a simple graphic video with captions to grab users’ attention.
Create a YouTube Version of Your Podcast
Repurposing your content into a blog post or YouTube video will help promote your content. When repurposing your content to YouTube videos, a good approach is converting your MP3 file to an MOV file. If you don’t have the neutral stock footage for your YouTube podcast, use a thumbnail alongside your podcast logo and include links within the video.
There are many benefits of repurposing your podcast into a YouTube video. These include:
- YouTube is a search engine
- Google shows video content in search results
- You can optimize titles and descriptions for YouTube
- Users can easily share YouTube videos on social media
To learn more about how to include video in your marketing, check out our latest article on YouTube marketing ideas for business owners.
Connect with Other Podcasters
Good marketing is about staying on top of the current trends and what’s working. Interacting with other podcasters is the best way to stay on top of your game. Connecting with like-minded people provides a platform to discuss your challenges and the best way to handle them.
Networking with other podcasters also comes with an opportunity to cross-promote your podcast. Ideally, this involves reaching out to other creators with a similar audience and asking to promote your content and vice versa.
Mentions are a great marketing tactic, and if your content is valuable and you have a reasonable audience, other podcasters will be happy to partner with you.
Be a Guest to Other Podcasters
Like guest posting, appearing on other people’s podcasts is a great way to promote your podcast. Guest appearances on relevant podcasts will allow you to talk about your new and earlier episodes to a new audience.
In addition to appearing on other people’s podcasts, invite other creators to your podcast. Once you publish the interview with your guests, notify them so they can share it with their audience for double reach.
Resources to help find podcasters to network with include Radio Guest List, Facebook groups, and r/PodcastGuest Exchange.
Reach Out to People You Mention
To better benefit from word-of-mouth marketing, contact the people or brands you mention in your podcast to let them know. In your message, share the quote where you talked about them or their product/service, and ask them to share your podcast.
Send them a link to your episode so they can share it with their social media audience and email subscribers. This will be a huge boost, especially if those people have a huge social media following.
Do a Giveaway
Discounts and free stuff can help boost your marketing efforts for your podcast. For example, you can do a giveaway asking people to subscribe to your channels or share your content with their social media audience.
Depending on your budget, here are great options for giveaway items:
- Product discounts
- Stickers
- T-shirts
- Podcast hosting
- Microphone
If your budget is low, you may consider these options:
- A few minutes’ guest post on your next episode
- A shout-out within the show
- Mention in the show notes
Giveaways are a great promotional tactic when done right. It can help gain more reviews and subscriptions, and new listeners.
Run Paid Ads
Most of the steps discussed above are geared toward getting organic traffic to your podcast. And like SEO, this requires patience, although the results are long-lived. To draw instant attention to your podcast, consider investing in paid ads.
Options to consider when running paid ads for your podcast include Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, etc. But don’t rely on paid ads only. Combine the two strategies to benefit from both worlds.
Podcast Marketing Strategies—Conclusion
Those are the strategies you can use to market your podcast. However, before you invest in any of these strategies, ensure that your podcast content is worth listening to and sharing. If you provide high-value content to your audience, the above marketing strategies should deliver results. If you have any questions or need help marketing your podcast, contact us today, and we’ll point you in the right direction.
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