15 Podcast Promotion Tips That Will Help You Succeed

Many podcasters, both amateur and professional, want to grow their audience as much as it is possible. They want their content to go viral and attract new people to their show. It is normal to have such goals. To achieve those goals, you need to start actively promoting your podcast.

Podcast promotion is an amazing method to use as it allows people to discover you. After you have recorded and published your first few episodes, all you need to do is think about how to tell people about them. As we have already stated, every content creator wants their work to be famous and successful. However, you should understand that without proper show promotion, it is less likely that your podcast will grow.

If your business has something valuable to offer your listeners, it is important that you learn a few key things about podcast promotion and how to use it properly to maximize your podcasting efforts and accomplish all your goals. 

Learning podcast promotion tips will help you to stay ahead of the severe podcasting competition. Despite the fact that podcasts are just over 20 years old, the latest data shows that there are over 2 million podcasts worldwide.

But you might ask. How can you promote a podcast efficiently in a sea of competition? How can you reach your target audience among the millions of monthly podcast listeners?

No worries. In today’s article, we have gathered some useful and simple podcast promotion tips you should follow if you want to succeed. So, let’s start.

Things to Consider Before Promoting Your Podcast

Before we get into our podcast promotion tips, let’s take a step back and evaluate our podcast’s basis. We’ll start with the two most important aspects of podcasting: target audience and excellent content. We must ensure that what we are now generating is relevant to your listener’s needs and is worthy of promotion.

1. Learn About Your Target Audience

It would be great if you could create a podcast that everyone would like to listen to. However, it is not possible. You should always set realistic goals. Instead of trying to reach out to listeners, concentrate on people who would be ideal for your podcast and benefit your podcasting show the most.

If you want to create content that converts, you should think about who your buyer persona is.

There are a few interesting stats about demographic groups who listen to podcasts:

A buyer persona is linked to a listener persona in marketing. A buyer persona depicts the ideal consumer, describing their age, interests, hobbies, purchasing behaviors, and so on. Similarly, a listener persona is designed to represent your audience, as in your case, you’re more interested in who is listening than who is buying.

How to identify your listener persona? Consider your target audience and picture one person from the group.

Ask the following basic questions:

  • What age group your listener persona belongs to? 
  • Is it a man or a woman? 
  • Are they students, or do they work? 
  • Are they single or married?
  • Are they financially stable?
  • What interests and hobbies do they have?
  • What priorities do they have?

If your podcast is about skincare, for instance, your listener persona could be young women with a career who love taking care of their skin every day.

You should also ask questions concerning your podcast:

  • Why do people choose to listen to your podcast?
  • What value does your show give to people? 
  • Do they engage enough?

Once you’ve created an image of your listener persona, you can devise a strategy for providing relevant content for your audience. It will also be necessary to promote it to the appropriate target group. Every email, post, or tweet you send should be tailored to your listener persona.

2. Create Compelling Content

If you want to promote your podcasts successfully, they must have good quality and be relevant to your target audience.

It is a waste of time to market a bad product. No amount of money, creative marketing solutions, or powerful strategies will grow a good podcast. Therefore, before you get started, make sure your podcast is worth sharing and promoting.

Let’s concentrate on what makes a good podcast. A good podcast:

  • Gives value- Your target audience expects to get something from listening to your podcast. You may offer some knowledge or tips to them, entertain them, or teach them something new.
  • Has uniqueness – To create original content, you must be yourself and stick to it. Consider hosting interesting people or including music.
  • Grabs the attention of people- You want your listeners to listen to your podcast episodes from beginning to conclusion. If you see that many of your listeners do not finish your broadcasts, you should reconsider your material. Listen to podcasts in a similar niche and consider what is missing in yours.

As you can see, creating high-quality content is the cornerstone of a good promotion strategy. If you make it relevant to your target listeners, you can rest assured that a satisfying number of fans will stick for longer than one podcast episode. After all, you aim to create value by establishing long-term relationships and quality content.

15 Podcast Promotion Tactics You Should Use  

1. Submit Your Podcast to Podcast Aggregators

If you wonder how to promote a podcast, then podcast aggregators should definitely be among your podcast promotion strategies.

A podcast aggregator, sometimes known as a podcatcher, is an app that allows people to listen to podcasts. 

Podcast directories are similar to phone books for podcasts. The collection contains links to podcast episodes and organizes them by genre, producer, playlist, and popularity.

Submitting your podcast to directories is an amazing approach to boost your listener base since they make it easy for individuals looking for a podcast in your niche to find you.

Apple Podcasts, the default podcast app that comes with iOS, is the most well-known podcatcher. But there are lots more, such as

  • Google Play
  • TuneIn
  • Spotify
  • Soundcloud
  • iHeartRadio
  • Podtail
  • Podbay

There are many other directories where you can submit your show. 

Create accounts in each podcast directory and submit your RSS feed so that new episodes are automatically published to each platform. This will expose you to new audiences when they search for new shows to consume on their chosen listening app. This is one of the most powerful podcast promotion strategies available.

2. Publish Consistently

It is well known that consistency is key. Especially if you are just getting started, it is highly important to get your content in front of people as much as possible. In this way, you will get noticed and be able to grow your audience gradually. 

So, one of the podcast tips you should follow is to create content regularly. Once you have launched your first podcast, you should be consistently publishing new episodes to keep your audience engaged. The more you publish, the better. However, it is also essential to publish strategically. You need to choose the best days and times. 

If you are a beginner, it would be great if you looked at similar podcasts to understand when they are usually published. If you notice a particular pattern of publishing, there is probably a good reason for it. So, you should definitely follow that trend until you can get insights from your data and analyze it. After you have enough podcast shows released to retrieve statistics, you can choose the best publishing times and days.

A typical podcast episode lasts less than 40 minutes, which is just enough time to fill a lunch break. If your recording is too long, consider cutting it during the editing process.

Make time to plan your publishing schedule and research the topics you are going to cover. To manage this properly and make your podcast a success, you’ll need a good organizational structure.

3. Publish At Strategic Times

As we have already mentioned, it is important to be best at strategic times and days. In this way, you can make sure that your podcast reaches large audiences and gets the engagement you desire.

Due to the lack of data, you might not be able to predict what days and times work best for releasing a podcast. However, you will face this difficulty only at the beginning of your podcasting career. 

After publishing many podcast episodes, you can export statistics and analyze all the available data. 

But before you get this data, you can follow a certain pattern for publishing. According to the research, Wednesday, Tuesday, and Thursday are the best days to publish. As for the time, the study revealed that podcasts between 2 am and 5 am. 5 am is the best time for your podcasts to receive the maximum number of downloads.

This data is valuable, but you should not stick solely to it. It can give you some ideas, but you should choose a schedule that best fits your podcast.

4. Be Active On Social Media

Those who wonder how to promote a podcast should not forget to leverage the power of social media.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter are great places to reach out to your audience and promote your podcast to new people. 

Social media apps on the screen of a phone

When you create social media accounts, ensure you completely use their potential. It means that you should pay attention to all features, update your bios, add your website information, and choose an appropriate image for both profiles and banners. This is important to do as people usually check out such information to learn more about the page they follow. Besides, social media uses these features to categorize profiles to make sure the right audience sees them.

It is a great practice to create images relevant to your podcast brand or a particular episode and share them across multiple social media pages. You should also include a link to the image so that people know that your podcast is available on several platforms.

Twitter, for example, allows you to upload and play music. Consider recording a brief introduction to your podcast and sharing it with your subscribers. Short audiograms are a popular way to share interesting snippets from your episodes.

You can make an announcement in advance of the launch of your new podcast episode. This is great to make people feel excited and wait impatiently for it. 

Ensure to leverage the power of hashtags on social media platforms, especially on Instagram and Twitter. Hashtags allow people to find the content they are searching for. 

5. Turn Your Podcasts Into YouTube Videos

Making your show available in as many places as it is possible is another podcast promotion tip you should follow for success.

By repurposing your content for YouTube, you can surely receive double exposure for your podcasts. To do so, you need to upload your podcast to YouTube. Convert your MP3 audio file to MP4 format. Then, add a branded picture that will appear during the video and upload it. Include show notes and links to your website, as well as subscription links to other listening platforms and social media, in the description.

6. Repurpose Your Podcasts

Above, we introduced one way to repurpose your podcast content. However, there are some other actionable ways to try. 

Diversifying the format and distribution channels for your podcast content should be part of your podcast promotion strategy. This will allow you to feature your brand in front of as many listeners and viewers as possible.

Take these strategies into consideration when repurposing your content:

  • Turn your podcast audio into a blog post by transcribing.
  • Create interesting and engaging visuals, such as infographics for social media, using graphic design software and tools
  • Post a link to your podcast on any other existing assets you have, such as a website, newsletter, or blog.

7. Grow Your Network

Joining a podcast network is also a great podcast promotion tactic. 

But what is a podcast network? 

A podcast network is a collective of podcasts that come together under a shared brand or platform. It is an organization that offers various services to podcasters, such as hosting, distribution, promotion, and monetization opportunities.

If you join a podcasters network, you can get many benefits. 

Keeping up with new ideas, trends, and approaches is essential for effective podcast promotion. Joining a community of other podcasters is the greatest way to stay informed. They will provide assistance and support and discuss innovative strategies to advertise your podcasts. If you really commit to a community, it can become one of your most valuable resources.

The best places to look for a podcasters network are:

There will undoubtedly be other podcasters with comparable interests to yours. You should spend the most time with them. You should anticipate getting plenty of assistance from more experienced colleagues, as well as some cross-promotion. You can, for example, mention each other in your shows. To begin, discover podcasters with similar audiences and sizes to yours since they will be eager to participate in your promotional ideas.

Begin assisting others once you have gained confidence in your abilities. To interact with other authors, join Facebook Groups or visit Quora. Mention your episodes if you believe they can provide solutions to people’s problems.

8. Optimize Your Podcasts For SEO

If you want many people to notice your podcast, you need to optimize it for SEO. This means optimizing both your website as well as the podcast itself.

One thing you can do to optimize your podcast is to do keyword research and find target keywords. In this way, you can make sure that your podcast will show up when listeners search for a particular topic.

Letters forming the word SEO

Another thing you can do is optimize the titles and descriptions of your podcasts. Use target keywords in the titles and descriptions. 

Additionally, you need to be descriptive about your episodes so that listeners know what to expect from each show. The clearer you are about the content of your episode, the higher your chances are that your podcast will interest new listeners.

Also, make sure to use useful SEO tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or Ahrefs keyword explorer to find search terms your audience is already looking for.

9. Launch a Newsletter

Out of all digital marketing platforms, email marketing has the highest return on investment. The latest statistics show that marketers make $42 for every $1 spent. So, you should definitely use email marketing to reach your target audience.

Collect your listeners’ email addresses on your website and send an email every time you publish a new episode.

10. Host Giveaways

There is no secret that giveaways are great tools for building a loyal audience. So, organize a giveaway and give the winners something associated with your brand. For example, if your podcast is about beauty and skincare, you could give away a box with a few necessary skincare products. Avoid giving away generic things, such as Walmart’s gift card, as random people will participate in your giveaway. Your goal is not attracting random people but attracting those who are truly interested in your content.

11. Create a Website

Despite the fact that listeners prefer to consume podcasts by using different podcast listening platforms, such as Spotify and Soundcloud, creating a website can help you enhance your web presence and link listeners to your podcast episodes.

You can create a blog for your podcast. In that blog, you can share informative and engaging articles related to podcasting and your niche. Additionally, you can create a forum where you can have insightful discussions with your listeners. 

12. Use Paid Advertising

Advertising podcast is yet another podcast promotion method worth trying. After launching your podcast, make sure to run ads on different platforms, such as Spotify.

You can use Spotify as it is a famous streaming platform with 365 million monthly users. Spotify Advertising enables you to promote 30-second audio adverts to non-premium customers throughout the Spotify app. You can run your campaign for as long or as short as you like, based on your budget and the results you want to achieve in a single day.

The platform offers a variety of targeting possibilities, including age, gender, and nation, as well as more specialized areas such as audience interests, music preferences, and more.

Overall, advertising podcast can significantly increase your podcast’s reach and attract new listeners.

13. Add Links to Your Email Signature

It’s one thing to say “Check out X Podcast” in your email signature. It’s quite another to actually include a clickable link in the signature, so the user doesn’t have to do anything except click on it! With one click, customers should be directed to your podcast page on your website or any of the directories where it is listed. This is yet another great podcast promotion tactic to use while running an email campaign.

14. Use Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is about exposing your podcast to new listeners by collaborating with influential people. You just need to find someone whose audience aligns with your target demographic, call out to them, and form mutually beneficial cooperation to promote your podcast.

Remember that this podcast marketing strategy necessitates some reciprocity. If you want to collaborate with an influencer, you must also give something back. You may be required to give them a shout-out on your program, complimentary products, or monetary recompense. 

15. Invite Guests On Your Show

Inviting interesting guests to your own show allows you to create more engaging and fun episodes. However, you need to choose your guests wisely. You cannot invite random people who have nothing to do with your niche. 

Do some research and choose people who can make your show interesting, and share their expertise and opinions.

Summary

Podcast promotion is a trial-and-error process.  You need to test diverse strategies to find the best marketing tactic for your show. It takes time and hard work, but the benefits you are going to reap are worth it. 

Compelling content and patience are the two pillars of podcasting. Keep in mind that no amount of money will help you build a loyal audience. You need to spend time finding the right promotional practices to achieve all your marketing goals.

SEO Content Writer

Diana Aghumyan

Diana is an experienced creative SEO content writer at SayNine. She is passionate about writing and giving value to people with her articles. Her blogs revolve around advertising, digital marketing, and other similar topics.