Podcasting is the new darling of the marketing world – a genre that’s been around for over a decade, but only now is getting serious attention. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast, this series is for you, on how to market your new podcast.
Posts in the How to Market Your Podcast series:
- Introduction: Should podcasting be part of your marketing strategy?
- Part 1: Getting started
- Part 2: Audience strategy
- Part 3: Content strategy
- Part 4: Twitter tactics for exposure
- Part 5: Measuring success and podcast analytics
Interested in a real-life example? Check out my marketing podcast, Marketing Over Coffee!
In order to achieve your business goals, ultimately your podcast has to have an audience. No audience = no results. So how do you build a podcasting audience? That’s today’s topic.
Building audience is composed of two core components: audience strategy, the who, and content strategy, the what. In the last post, we covered the who. Let’s talk about the what.
The What: Content Strategy
Without good content, no amount of marketing is going to build your audience. Mediocre content will churn listeners as fast as you get them. Bad content won’t even accomplish that. You’ve got to have great content. More important, you’ve got to have several different kinds of content in several different formats to reach your audience reliably.
For example, many podcasts are audio. A few are video. Your audience can’t easily preview either. Thus, you need to have written content to accompany your multimedia. Podcasting old-timers call these “show notes”, but you can call them whatever you like as long as they make sense. Show notes can be literal transcripts of what’s said, or time-based outlines, as we do with the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. As an added bonus, if you’ve got show notes, you can provide additional accessibility to the hearing impaired.
On top of that, there are typically 4 additional media properties beyond the audio/video files themselves. A great podcast probably has an email list so that listeners can receive notifications when new episodes are available. Services like Mailchimp or Feedblitz do this well; simply tie in your podcast RSS feed to the service and it’ll send email every time you publish. If you want to get more sophisticated, you can send out a weekly or monthly recap email as well.
A great podcast should build social media properties associated with it – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are good starting points. Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. if your audience is there. If you’re not sure how to check, read the bottom of this post for a neat trick to find your audience. These social properties are another set of avenues for notifying listeners when a new episode is available for them to consume.
Podcasts focused on growing audiences will have advertising channels available to them. This can be something as simple as AdWords text ads or something as complex as media buys and placements in other podcasts. Remember that you don’t have to spend a fortune for paid promotion; things like sponsored Tweets and paid Facebook posts can cost as little as $5 to start.
Finally, podcasts that want to be found put those show notes onto a website or blog, and that blog is kept up to date and fresh. Search engines cannot reliably index either audio or video yet. I use WordPress for everything, especially since WordPress also automatically creates podcast RSS feeds. Make sure no matter what that your website is mobile friendly.
That’s your content strategy checklist, the assets you’re going to need: show notes, email list, social network profiles, ad buys, and website.
Together, they’re like marketing Voltron, a whole bigger than the sum of the parts. (fun fact, Voltron was originally called Beast King GoLion in Japan)
In the next part in this series, we’ll dig into a couple of tactics that bring these strategies to life.
Posts in the How to Market Your Podcast series:
- Introduction: Should podcasting be part of your marketing strategy?
- Part 1: Getting started
- Part 2: Audience strategy
- Part 3: Content strategy
- Part 4: Twitter tactics for exposure
- Part 5: Measuring success and podcast analytics
Interested in a real-life example? Check out my marketing podcast, Marketing Over Coffee!
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