10 Highly Effective Podcast Marketing Strategies
Everyone who’s into podcasting has something important to say. But if you’re not actively promoting your work with podcast marketing efforts, you risk missing the boat. The odds are good that your content will just get lost in the endless background noise of much more aggressive and marketing savvy streams.
Why Marketing Your Podcast is Important
The answer is simple: no marketing means no audience. No new ears, referrals, growth, sponsors, or rankings. Zip. Zilch. Nada. So unless you like particularly talking into the void in the foreseeable future, check out our battle-tested, market-ready list of podcast marketing strategies that you can implement right now to promote and grow your show.
10 Strategies to Promote Your Podcast
1. Launch strong
It helps to come out the gate with 3-5 episodes already published in your feed. When it comes to audience-building and usage habits, new listeners will want as much content as you can give them before deciding whether or not they want to hit subscribe. So make sure those first episodes are as good as you can make them and then improve as you go.
But great episodes aren’t everything in a successful launch: to get more eyes and ears, you’d be wise to start with an engaged audience who already knows about your podcast well before its live debut. And the more, the merrier. So tell your friends, family, and followers about the show in advance and invite them to listen once it’s online.
2. Invest in your Presence
Your visual identity is just as important as your auditory one. Build out your website, social media channels, and podcast thumbnails with the help of a professional. It helps to have a cohesive and modern front that fully embodies the vibe and look you want to convey to potential listeners. The competition will be stiff so use your visuals as a way to stand out from the crowd.
3. Diversify
Put in as much work into your show’s distribution as you did production. Distribute your show across these key directories to improve your reach and diversify your audience base. Since uploading can be a ton of work on its own, be strategic about it! Only a handful of platforms account for the majority of podcast traffic on the market, so make sure you’re on the right ones. Then, add those links to a dedicated subscribe page on your website so everyone knows where to find you.
4. Be Social
Your social channels are the place where you’ll directly engage your audience members. They’re also where you’ll gain new followers, tease new episodes, host contests, and feature highlights from your past shows, so give them some love! Devote weekly time to answering your fans and incorporate their input into future shows and projects. This will create virtuous loops between your podcast and your socials that will keep your fans coming back for more.
5. Ask for Reviews
While reviews by themselves won’t improve your rankings on many platforms, they do change the way new and existing viewers look at your show. Reviews influence legitimacy and whether or not the show’s worth a listen. Don’t skip out on this incredibly important step. Openly ask for people’s honest opinions. Keep things light by incorporating the request into your shows. Make it a requirement to enter a contest or get a shoutout for a friend. But that’s not all you can do! For more ideas on ways to get more podcast reviews, check out our article here.
6. Repurpose Content
The trick to good podcast marketing (especially if you’re a solo-creator with limited time and a fixed budget) is working smart, not hard. So rather than come up with unique material for each media channel, think of ways in which you can repurpose prime content for different channels and mediums.
One way to do this is to use video editing software to get snippets of your podcasts for social media posts and promos. Another is to create blog posts from your episodes in order to cater to a wider audience and help your SEO ranking on search engines like Google. You can either do this yourself or use a blogging service like Podcast Bloggers (or a Fiverr freelancer such as mediasips) if you want prime results at a fraction of the effort.
7. Collaborate
Contact other podcasters, artists, and makers to collaborate on future projects and initiatives. It’s a great way to expand your professional network and use other creators’ existing audiences to grow your own. The best part is that in many cases you can also share the production work with said collaboration partners, which is a great motivator to host more collaborations in the future.
8. Host Guests
Speaking of hosting, bringing interesting guests on to your show is a great way to introduce new ideas and dynamics into your podcast. However, not all guests are created equal. The very best guests will be those that will appeal to a significant portion of your existing audience (thus fostering high engagement). Not only that, they’ll have a following that is somewhat similar to one or more of your audience segments, i.e. people who would find your content interesting too. Just make sure your guest(s) will promote your podcast to their own followers before their big day for truly excellent results.
9. Optimize
Use platform analytics to optimize your topics, content, keywords, and flow based on the podcast segments, topics, and activities that truly excite your audience. Our personal favorites are SEM Rush, Answer the Public, and Moz. However, the internet is full of online marketing tools for every budget, so shop around. And if something you’re introducing doesn’t work the first time, it’s not a big deal. Just tweak the formula, check the analytics, and try, try again until you get it right.
10. Grow
Gaining traction and popularity may take your podcast in interesting -if unexpected- directions. Don’t fight the need to grow. Instead, go with the flow and either take your show down new and underexplored paths or consider creating spin-off podcasts to better satisfy the needs of a new audience.
Podcast Marketing: Next Steps
Hopefully that’s given you plenty actionable tips and ideas towards getting more eyes (and ears) on your podcast content.
If you’re still thirsty for more podcast marketing strategies then here are 3 resources for you to check out, too.
- Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Audience is the ultimate podcast marketing manual.
- How to Promote Your Podcast is our guide to building your audience.
- Growing Your Podcast Audience is one of many courses inside The Podcast Host Academy, where we also run weekly live Q&A sessions!
