Podcast Marketing: How To Grow Your Audience
So you've launched your podcast—and now you want to figure out how to market your podcast to find new listeners. After all, you put a lot of work into your show and you know how powerful it is as a tool for sales.
Growing your podcast audience is hard. Finding new listeners is hard.
But that's mostly because podcasters focus on the wrong objectives when it comes to marketing their podcast—and they lack a strategy for how to market their podcast in a way that supports their business goals.
I want to help you avoid those pitfalls, save you a boatload of time, and grow your podcast audience.
It starts by creating your podcast marketing strategy.
Create A Podcast Marketing Strategy
We're going to start with marketing strategy, not tactics. Most likely, you've already read plenty of lists of tactics you can try to promote your podcast. You've probably tried a bunch of those tactics and found them... wanting.
This is not that.
Your podcast marketing strategy needs to encompass the whole customer journey—from first finding out about you or your business, to learning more about how you can help, to making a purchase. It's not just about how to get more people to click "like" on your audiogram.
We'll start with...
The #1 Misconception About Podcast Marketing
Most business owners start a podcast thinking that it's going to be their top-of-funnel, audience growth channel. This is the first thing we talk about with anyone who wants to work with us on production.
Your podcast is not going to grow your audience. And it's not the top of your marketing & sales funnel.
Look, I know there are exceptions to every rule. Some podcasts hit it big and do grow on their own. But that's not a situation you want to plan for. This happens for fewer and fewer podcasts every year.
There are 3 phases to any marketing strategy: growth & discovery, nurturing & engagement, and evaluation & conversion.
A really effective strategy will have a considered approach to each phase, with content and messaging that matches the stage the customer is in. The other thing that needs to match, though, is the medium.
Podcasting doesn't work well as a growth & discovery tactic precisely because listening to a podcast is a significant investment of time. It's rare that someone is going to just find your podcast and start listening to it because they need to know that it's going to be 30 minutes or an hour well spent.
So if your podcast doesn't fit in the first phase of your marketing strategy, where does it go?
Podcasts Are Nurturing & Engagement Marketing
A new listener is going to want to already have an idea of what you have to offer before they give you a chunk of their time and a direct channel to their ear drums. So podcasts predominantly fall in the nurturing & engagement phase of your marketing strategy.
We also use them for evaluation & conversion (i.e. the initial sales pitch) but as a natural extension of nurturing.
Marketing that nurtures is made up of content, messaging, and experiences that help develop your brand relationship with your potential customer. They learn more about what your business is all about, they learn more about their own needs, and they start to discern whether there's a fit there.
Podcasts are perfect for the nurturing phase of a marketing strategy. Your listeners are hearing directly from you, forming a relationship with you and your voice.
The reason that growing a podcast audience is so difficult is because you have to spend time and energy marketing in the growth & discovery phase for the results to drip down to the nurturing phase.
Developing The Growth & Discovery Phase Of Your Podcast Marketing Strategy
When it comes to finding new listeners for your podcast, it might be helpful to think you'll need to introduce your brand to 100 new people to earn 3 or 4 new podcast listeners. Note: that is not an actual statistic grounded in any data but it is a good rule of thumb for building out your strategy.
If you're aiming to grow your podcast audience by 300 more listeners in the next 6 weeks, then you'll need a plan to reach 1000 new people across other platforms over that period.
So how do you do that?
Well, there are some tried and true methods for growing your audience—some take more time and patience than others. So brace yourself.
The first way to grow your overall audience is through social media
Now, when I say you can grow your audience with social media, I do not mean you should plaster your feeds with promotion of your podcast. Instead, you should consider what kind of shareable, easy-to-digest content is going to help you reach new people via social media.
I also don't mean you try to game the algorithms. The best way to reach new people on social media is to create content that people are genuinely excited to share. What content have you created in the past that got shared by others? What content could you create that would have a higher likelihood of being shared?
People do love to share quotes. So great quotes from your podcast guests are a legitimately good way to grow your audience—but keep in mind that it's their words and not yours... so make sure you add your voice with your caption or commentary.
I've also found that distilling ideas from my podcast episodes into mini slide decks has created much more shareable content that's directly related to podcast episodes. Click here for an example.
You can also just experiment with really shareable content that's rooted in your brand voice and values—checklists, short explainers, diagrams, etc...
The second way to grow your overall audience is through search engine marketing
You can create content that's designed to rank well for key phrases that are related to your expertise, brand positioning, or value proposition.
This applies to both written articles and video (YouTube is a search engine).
I recommend checking out Kim Herrington or Meg Casebolt for written content help and Gillian Perkins for YouTube help.
Keep in mind that search is probably a long-term play but it's also a really steady, sustainable marketing channel once it's established.
A third way to grow your overall audience is by borrowing other people's audiences
You borrow another brand's audience when you go on their podcast, do a joint webinar with them, or take over their social media for a day. Those are some common ways—but you can get really creative with this.
One thing I've done that's worked really well and takes almost no time is simply swapping podcast episodes with another podcaster. If you've done an interview on their show and they've done an episode on yours, why not swap and put the episodes in both feeds!
This is a much quicker way to grow a podcast audience because you're prioritizing getting in front of people who are already podcast listeners.
Finally, you can also consider traditional media and PR as a tactic for growing your audience
It's so much easier to get on a morning news program or land a feature in your local newspaper than you probably realize! Plus, there is plenty of national or global media that's interested in what you have to say, too.
The key here is to have a really unique story—whether that's your own or it's someone you work with or it's a point of view on something in your industry.
Outlets do not want to run the same old story again and again. But they're always on the lookout for things that feel different.
Traditional media and PR take time in terms of the process but once it hits, it typically hits big!
Marketing tactics like social media, search engine marketing, borrowing other people's audiences, and PR should center your shareable, digestible content.
But every so often (just how often depends on the frequency of your growth activities), make sure you mention your podcast. It could be a dedicated post, a mention in a caption, or a story about one of your podcast guests in a regional news outlet.
I'm sorry to say that there is no formula for "how to promote your podcast" with graphics, quotes, audiograms, or links. Mention your regularly but keep the bulk of your growth activities focused on growth content.
Let's talk about how to advertise your podcast to get new listeners
You can use advertising to accelerate any part of your podcast marketing strategy. But advertising is not a magic bullet—so helps to have an established approach to growing your audience, nurturing them with your podcast, and presenting offers before you invest in advertising.
Advertising can help you get more of the shareable, digestible, low-barrier-to-entry content in front of new people (and people who will share it). This tends to be pretty inexpensive advertising—but remember that the results will take a while to flow through to your podcast and that you have to reach a lot of people to see meaningful growth in your show's numbers.
Advertising can also help you raise the profile of your show by introducing it to people who have already discovered you (i.e. a warm audience). You can advertise episodes you're especially proud of or that have received a lot of feedback from listeners.
Finally, advertising—of course—can help you make more sales by making sure people who are already familiar with your business know what's for sale.
I work with Rita Barry & Co to handle our advertising for the What Works podcast and corresponding offers.
Now a caution about using advertising to grow your podcast audience.
Advertising is seductive because it's data-driven and it can provide results fast.
But keep in mind that the podcasting ecosystem is going to make getting solid data difficult and it might also slow down your results—so plan for that.
When you advertise your podcast, there's no "best" place to direct people. If you send them to where an episode lives on your website, you get the traffic and can possibly capture an email address or show your visitor an enticing offer—but they can't easily start listening to the episode that caught their eye on their preferred device. If you send them to a podcast directory, you risk choosing the wrong one and you lose out on the traffic... but you definitely up the convenience factor.
So can advertising work to grow your podcast? Yes, absolutely. But you should be prepared to experiment and figure out what works for you—and what level of about your results you need to feel comfortable.
The Anatomy Of A Podcast Marketing Strategy
As I start to wrap up, I want to share what your podcast marketing strategy looks like in practice.
This is the plan we have for my other company (and its corresponding podcast), What Works.
Our growth & discovery channels are advertising, appearing on other podcasts, and shareable content posted to Instagram (some related to the podcast, some not).
These are the 3 areas where it's easiest and most effective to reach new people for us. Each of these channels helps to grow our podcast audience, as well as our email newsletter subscribers.
Our nurturing & engagement channels are, of course, the What Works podcast, as well as our weekly newsletter and free workbooks.
This is the marketing content that is most natural for the way I create—so I spend a lot of time here. We're investing heavily in advertising so that I can focus on what I do best instead of spending lots of time trying to get in front of new people organically.
Finally, our evaluation & conversion channels are advertising, email marketing, and the podcast again.
We know that we don't do a great job of converting everyone who wants to buy into actual buyers. So advertising fills a need there. We differentiate email marketing from the newsletter by creating more evaluation-oriented content or direct sales pitches. And finally, we absolutely use the podcast to share our offers with listeners because we know how invested they are in what we have to offer.
Your Next Steps For Growing Your Podcast Audience
This article might have been more than you bargained for—so I want to make sure you have some concrete homework to do so you know your next steps for increasing your podcast downloads and earning new listeners.
Evaluate the effectiveness of your podcast as part of your nurturing and engagement phase of marketing. Is it helping listeners build their relationship to you? Does your podcast help you use your voice and unique point of view? Are you inviting your listeners to go deeper?
Select one or two activities that you'll focus on to grow your audience overall—so that you can grow your podcast audience with time. What kind of content do you create that's really shareable? What kind of content do you create that's approachable and easy-to-digest? What channels work best for that kind of content?
Simplify. You don't have to post every new episode to every platform you've ever signed up to promote your podcast. Focus on a simple approach to growth, nurturing, and conversion.
And when in doubt? Talk to other podcasters about what's working for them. Too many podcast hosts are isolated and just stabbing in the dark when it comes to how they grow their shows.
If you want to connect with other podcasters as well as an experienced team of producers, join us inside The Standout Podcast Club. It's our training, coaching, and networking hub for both experienced and aspiring podcasters.
We talk about the reality of podcasting and what really works to save you time, grow your audience, and make more money using your podcast.