How to Promote Your New Podcast and Expand Your Business
Last week, we talked about how to plan and brand your podcast. But you didn’t start a show just to talk to yourself! It’s time to spread the word by marketing your podcast.
There are so many ways to promote your podcast, but let’s focus on three primary channels: website, email, and social media.
The Website
Your podcast needs a website.
It doesn’t have to be an elaborate, high-tech experience, but it does need to look professional, intentional, and be optimized for SEO.
Creating a website for your podcast has numerous benefits.
Easy to discover
Should be obvious, but if you want to successfully market your podcast, it has to be findable. By creating a website, you’re more likely to appear in Google Search results, which enables new listeners to find all of your content and links in one place.
Content ownership
While Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and many other platforms are not likely to disappear tomorrow, there is always a chance that they will make changes to their platforms that may impact your podcast.
By housing your podcast episodes on your website in addition to these platforms, you have more control over the content. Plus, you can promote your podcast to any device so listeners aren’t confined to one listening platform.
Get more use out of each episode
Along those same lines, you can maximize the value of every episode since you’re posting episodes on your own site.
For example, if you want to embed a newsletter sign-up at the bottom of each episode page, you can.
If you want to post affiliate links, you can style your page and content to make them more eye-catching and drive more traffic to those links.
You can share more content through a blog, link to your social channels, and sell merch exactly in the way you’d like.
Who doesn’t want that?
Improved accessibility
Don’t forget to make your podcast accessible to all listeners — otherwise, you could unintentionally rebuff potential fans. A website helps you accomplish this vital step.
For example, someone with an auditory disability may LOVE your content, but they aren’t able to experience it in a “typical” podcast setup. By creating a website, you can transcribe your podcasts into easy-to-read articles for anyone who can’t listen to it.
This approach unlocks an added benefit: transcribing your podcasts gives Google more opportunities to review and rank your content, making it easier for new listeners to find you.
If you don’t want to transcribe the podcast yourself, companies like Rev will transcribe it for you at a reasonable price.
Websites aren’t hard to build
We love to create websites with Squarespace because it’s straightforward, user-friendly for our clients, and affordable. Plus, they already have templates designed for Podcasts!
Now let’s talk about using email to promote your podcast.
Email Marketing Your Podcast
Why have an email list for your podcast?
Email is still one of the most effective ways to market a product or service — it boasts the highest ROI of all marketing channels. People who use email to market a podcast can reap these rewards too.
There are three things you should share in each email you send to your subscribers:
The latest episode with audio and transcription links.
The titles of the next three episodes and their release dates.
A request for your audience to leave a five-star review on their preferred podcast platform.
Your email frequency should coincide with your episode cadence. In other words, if you release monthly episodes, share monthly emails too. However, if you run a daily podcast, limit your emails to weekly… daily emails might get overwhelming. (Unless they’re super clever, useful, and short!)
Experiment with your formatting, and don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. The trick to effective marketing is to continuously test and tinker based on how your audience responds. So try out a longer email, a shorter email, different subject lines, leading with different types of content… see what sticks!
Make adjustments, not assumptions.
Social Media for Your Podcast
When thinking through your podcast’s social media strategy, choose your platforms wisely. Like any other product or service, you want to promote your podcast where your audience is already spending their time. For example, if your target audience is women between the ages of 18 and 34, Instagram is a great starting point, and Tik Tok would be a fun experiment!
To market successfully on social, though, you need visual content. Your podcast may be audio, but you need graphics and video too.
Here are our three suggestions to spice up your timelines and newsfeeds to get more eyes and ears on your podcast.
Video, video, video
Video is still one of the most popular mediums for audiences to consume content.
So, record yourself creating your podcast — especially if you’re talking with a guest — and then post it on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels to generate excitement and interest.
Here are a few podcasters who are already doing this:
They each produce distinct types of content, but are all in on video for Instagram and cross-post it across multiple platforms.
Record Live
This is something Morning Brew Founder Alex Leiberman does for his podcast, the Founder’s Journal. Alex records his podcasts while interviewing a guest or sharing his thoughts on LinkedIn Live. He then takes that recording and releases it as a podcast episode.
By recording it live, Alex actively connects with people on LinkedIn while simultaneously promoting the podcast to that audience. Plus, anyone who misses the live video can check out the podcast episode when it’s out.
This method generates interest and drives engagement both for his podcast and his LinkedIn profile.
You can do this on any platform that offers a Live feature - just make sure you record it for future use.
Give your listeners a heads up
Podcasting takes a lot of planning and forethought, so why not roll your prep work into your social strategy?
You know when you’ll release episodes, so tell your followers your upcoming content schedule to build excitement about new episodes. Ask them for feedback, take a poll on future guests, and let them in to see a bit of how the sausage is made.
When your audience feels like a part of the process, there’s a higher chance they’ll tune in to the episodes that they helped ideate!
If you need help with podcast creation or podcast marketing, give us a holler. We’d love to help or connect you to one of our incredible collaborators!