With over 160+ million Americans listening to podcasts, the platform is on the rise. While the podcasting platforms are already swamped with new and promising podcasters, it still hasn’t reached the saturation point as YouTube.
As a new podcaster, you can still promote your podcast episodes to an interested audience base through the marketing strategies that we’re going to discuss in this article.
The basics of promoting your podcast don’t differ much from generic marketing lessons. But the very nature of audio platforms somewhat changes the playing field. Here are the best strategies to win podcast listeners and keep them.
Build Social Media Presence
The most critical marketing strategy to hook new podcast listeners is to build a social media presence. As podcasts are generally divided into categories or niches, it’d be easier for you to attract an audience through social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit.
For instance, if your podcast targets the latest gadgets, you may find groups that are already talking about it. You can post your episode links that are relevant to the topic to win listeners.
Social media, in general, doesn’t appreciate shameless self-promotion. If you keep spamming your tech episode links to astrophysics groups, they may not find it informative or entertaining even.
Successfully building a social media presence demands that you use the promotional tools effectively. Post regularly, use graphics and try to keep interacting with your followers. The built-in features like paid ads, hashtags, and mentions are quite effective in luring new listeners in.
Moreover, once you’ve successfully attracted your audience to your social media page and interesting content, you wouldn’t have to worry about sustaining your subscribers. As long as you keep posting relevant, informative, and engaging content, they’ll keep coming back.
Subscribe to Podcast Streams
Several podcast subscription programs are available that empower you—as a podcaster—to introduce your channel to a wide range of interested audiences.
These channels often provide an easy-to-use platform that you can use to upload your episodes without giving your rights away. With live audience interaction, podcast subscription platforms offer great versatility to podcasters for promoting and sustaining their podcasting career.
Make Interesting Content
It’s often not enough to only promote your podcast and bring new listeners in. You have to keep them involved. Otherwise, the efforts are wasted on something that doesn’t help you grow.
Making content that is relevant to your audience’s interest is the only way to sustain them. No one is going to stick to your channel if you can’t offer what they seek.
If you’re offering non-technical episodes on music, don’t jump into uploading about the latest backend technology to attract different users. Your existing ones will bail out.
A rule of thumb to make good content is following what your subscribers want. Interact with your users and encourage them to leave comments on your podcasts. These comments will provide new ideas that your existing audience base wants to listen to.
You also can follow popular Facebook groups and subreddits to get better content ideas. Use the search bar to filter open-ended questions that generate great ideas.
Some of our favorite searches are:
“How to”
“Where to”
“What is”
“Why is”
“Struggling with”
“Help me”
“Suggestions”
“‘Hardest part”
“Struggle with”
Make sure that you get back to these threads and post your content link for better engagement.
Stay on a Schedule
A successful podcast relies on a strict routine. Your subscribers will expect you to upload regularly. Occasional irregularities may not matter much, but you need to adhere to a general schedule.
Since most podcasts strive to offer value to the audience, your subscribers will expect you to maintain a posting schedule. If they’ve grown habituated to listening to you every Thursday, don’t make them lose the streak.
However, if you’re promising daily uploads, it may become overwhelming after a while to keep up. You may also start lacking depth.
Embrace a schedule that allows you to put enough hours into your content and research.
Fall Back on Video Trailers and Podcasts
Why limit yourself to audio when you can leverage the power of video to promote and stream your podcasts?
Implement videos on your channel to reach a greater range of subscribers.
Next time, record yourself talking on the mic and upload that to YouTube with your podcast episode.
You may also use clips from the same recording to make a trailer and promote your content on social media—where videos seize the attention.
However, don’t go the generic path when creating the trailer for your podcast episodes. Focus on the content and highlights more than the visual aspect itself.
Although it’s nice to include video clips and rich visuals to grab attention, your trailer must not revolve around them.
If you’re considering going down the YouTube path, you may need to change your approach a bit. Write your script in such a way that doesn’t leave your video consumers feeling left out. Give them the due recognition and interact with them as well.
Transcribe Your Podcasts for SEO
If you have a website, consider transcribing your podcast understandably and engagingly. Make written content out of it.
Since written content is still the best for SEO purposes, you won’t need to find subscribers anymore—subscribers will find you. Moreover, you can upload video subtitles using this transcription for a better SEO approach and reach more organic users.
Consider Guest Podcasting
Just like guest blogging, guest podcasting is collaborating with other podcasters to increase your reach. Find popular podcasters in your niche and collaborate with them. Through collaboration, you both can help each other by promoting the content on different platforms.
If your guest podcaster is someone who is well-recognized in your domain, they must have an established marketing channel. You can benefit a lot by featuring on their social media pages and websites.
The Bottom Line
Podcast markets are highly competitive and almost saturated for most niches. The ease of content generation and abundance of platforms make podcasting a challenging yet rewarding career. With the mentioned promoting and sustaining strategies, hopefully, you’ll be able to build a growing audience base.
