8 Creative Tips for Marketing Your Podcast

If you’re thinking of starting a podcast this year, you’re certainly not alone.

In fact, as of January 2021, over 1,750,000 podcasts and 43 million episodes now exist.

Unfortunately, growing your audience can be tricky due to the rising saturation and popularity of podcasts. When you first start a podcast, your growth rate isn’t going to stay the same. On the contrary, your audience is going to stagnate and you’ll need to come up with interesting ways of reaching new people. Yet, using the principles of digital inbound marketing, you’ll be able to generate a consistent and growing audience.

Other than making your podcast available on the most popular streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, etc.), and ensuring that the episodes are all high quality, here are some creative podcast marketing tips to grow your audience:

 

1. Leverage word of mouth marketing

If you’re familiar with inbound, then you know that word of mouth marketing (WOMM) is more than a viable marketing technique because it’s free, and it’s centred on trust. WOMM can effectively increase your audience and your reach because it’s proven that prospects trust peer recommendations over a brand’s. To illustrate, over 90% of consumers trust family and friends’ suggestions over advertising.

Although social media sites don’t necessarily have a word of mouth marketing tool, it doesn’t mean these sites aren’t being used that way. Indicators of successful WOMM over social include whether people recommend your product to other users, tag their friends to try your brand’s products or services, and invite them to follow you. Make sure you drive your audience to your comments section to promote customer engagement and get more follows, as opposed to gauging your following based on likes.

 

2. Target based on content and guests

It can be tricky to target people on social who will be interested in your podcast content itself. That’s why you’ll need to do some strategic thinking about making your ads and content relevant to each potential audience member, leading to higher conversions, listens and subscribers. It really helps to get to know your target audience or the fictional persona that represents your ideal listener, also known as your buyer persona. Once you parse through the characteristics of your ideal listener, you’ll know how to personalise your messaging to appeal to and convert them.

Try to promote the show to people from the same school or background, the same hometown, the same industry, or people with the same hobbies or passions as the people who are featured in an episode, and the relevance will go way up.

 

3. Utilise SEO

You should consider doing keyword research around the various topics that interest you, to understand what people are searching for and are trying to find out more about. Implementing SEO best practices can also help you determine the subject matter of the podcast itself.

 

4. Employ social media

The only way you’re going to reach more people and grow your audience is by mastering your social platforms. Make sure you’re using your social accounts to do the following things routinely:

 

• Post regularly (2x per day)
• Share episode teasers
• Find and connect with online communities
• Interact with listeners
• Seek feedback
• Use hashtags
• Look for influencers in your niche

 

5. Reimagine your audio on Instagram

For many podcasters, posting on Instagram can be challenging because of the platform’s focus on visual content and posts can’t have links out to other sites or apps. However, here are three things you can do to get around this:

 

• Leverage snippets of your best audio content and fasten it to video content (animated, stock, etc.) so that potential listeners can sample your stuff.
• Using stories, you can add a link to deep-link directly into Spotify or other audio platforms for direct access to your podcast.
• Use stories as a marketing push before every episode or as every episode’s launching with an announcement and previews of the content. People can then tap or swipe up and go directly into Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or Spotify to check it out.

 

6. Cross-promote with guests

Your guests will most likely want to promote their appearance on your podcast. This is a great way of leveraging their followers to convert into your own, and vice-versa. Make sure you know why you’ve asked someone to be a guest, and what they bring to the table. You can use information specific to their niche to segment their following and target them based on similar attributes. Include a call-to-action in your podcast, inciting listeners to further engage with your podcast and guest over social media, for instance, in the form of a product giveaway, or inspiring them to create user-generated content.

 

7. Implement email marketing

Another inbound marketing tactic of organically growing your audience, or customer base, is by reaching out to people who have given you their permission and are genuinely interested in your offering. Make sure you collect the emails of contacts who have shown interest in listening to your show. Every time you publish a podcast, send an email to everyone on that list to announce it. Then, give your audience an overview of your schedule in your monthly newsletter, detailing guests, times, and platforms.

 

8. Use paid ads

Using paid ads, like Facebook Ads, can really make a difference to your customer growth rate. Using paid ads enables you to get in front of highly targeted listeners if your campaigns are set up correctly. When you’re able to reach a targeted audience, it can lead to loyal listeners who will leave reviews and tell their friends about the show.

You can also use platforms like Google AdWords, Google’s advertising programme, to help grow your podcast faster. Google AdWords includes several areas of online marketing beyond search advertising – you can run text search ads, display ads on other websites, and even YouTube video ads. All three of these forms of marketing can be effective ways to grow your podcast audience.