As branded podcasts become increasingly popular, having a team that understands how to grow your content is key. At the end of the day, you can have an outstanding podcast, content and quality-wise, but if you don’t know how to share it with your target audience then… what’s the point?
Podcasts are unique from other marketing mediums since it’s audio-first, has a much higher average length, and lives on audio-specific distribution platforms. And knowing how to increase awareness, grow your listenership, and strategically identify effective tactics will ensure that your branded podcast is on track for success.
Below we’re diving into how to turn yourself or your team into podcast marketers.
The first step that we always advise podcasters to take is to sit down and make a list of the marketing channels that you have access to. This can be anything and everything that has an audience attached to it, think newsletters, websites, apps, social media, communities, etc.
Your goal here is to get in front of as many eyes and ears as possible. Even if you don’t think a channel has a direct correlation to your target audience, it still may be a valuable tactic for you to use. Word of mouth marketing is still among the top ways new podcast listeners discover shows so even if an audience member within one of the channels isn’t interested in your content, they may have people within their network that are.
This first stage is all about awareness and is an important aspect of your podcast marketing strategy. Especially if awareness is the goal for your podcast, you’ll want to place a deeper focus on this step.
Who is the target audience for your podcast? Your target audience could be different from your company’s target audience depending on what your goal is.
Maybe your goal is awareness, building industry relationships, lead generation, whatever it might be, these are all different target audiences. With that being said, you want to identify where these audiences reside.
Look into different communities, social media platforms, newsletters, etc. and see how you can authentically connect and communicate with them. We often see podcasters make the mistake of finding these communities and then turning into a salesperson and urging audiences to go listen to their podcast because it’ll give them x value.
This tactic may work for a small percentage of that audience, but the majority of them will immediately be disinterested in your offering or alternatively, you may be breaking community guidelines and be kicked out of groups.
We recommend approaching your audience with authenticity in mind. Try to actually connect with them, ask them questions, provide them some sort of value (that isn’t just your podcast content), showcase your credibility, etc.
This strategy is setting you up to build a relationship with this audience which will make it much easier to convert them to listeners later on.
There are plenty of advertising platforms out there and if you are currently working in marketing or have worked in the industry, we can assume you’ve tried out the popular ones like Google Adwords, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram advertising. But when it comes to podcasts, you can definitely go the familiar route, or you can venture into some podcast or audio-specific ad platforms.
We encourage you to test these platforms out since we’ve witnessed some amazing results yielded from channels. Some of the most popular ones consist of:
And then there are podcast marketplaces where you can buy ad inventory on popular podcasts, these include:
And finally, there’s podcast analytics and analysis. Any marketer will know the importance of this stage in your marketing strategy.
If you don’t know your data, you won’t know how to optimize your content and marketing strategy moving forward. Some places you should be measuring your podcast performance are:
Some key metrics for you to be measuring are:
Mackenzie Patterson is the Senior Producer & Content Strategist at Quill Inc, and a Toronto-based writer, and journalist. She's always exploring the latest movies, TV shows and wellness trends.
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