How to market your podcast, part 1: Where to start?

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Podcasting is hot. It’s the latest darling of marketers (again), owing to the dominance of mobile devices and the decline in quality of mainstream media. In this multi-part series, we’ll be learning how to market your podcast.

Posts in the How to Market Your Podcast series:

Interested in a real-life example? Check out my marketing podcast, Marketing Over Coffee!

If you’re thinking about starting a podcast, there are 3 major tasks ahead of you:

Creating the podcast.
Getting people to listen to the podcast.
Getting some business impact out of the podcast.

Guess which category marketers and podcasters spend 90% of their time on? #1. Marketers and podcasters fall victim to the “build it and they will come” mentality around podcasting. It’s easy to understand why: podcasting is a labor of love. It’s incredibly resource intensive. When you’re done creating an episode, you’re so smitten with it that you assume everyone else will be, too. Thus, you invest a lot of time in creation, but give short shrift to marketing.

How should you allocate your time?

I’d say 40/40/20. Spend 40% of your time creating a great show with unbelievable content. That’s important. Spend 40% of your time marketing your show and promoting it. Spend 20% of your time on analytics and measurement so that you know the podcast is working.

Where do you start?

At the end! What are the business goals that the podcast will achieve? You might want lead generation. You might want brand awareness. Back in the day when I did a financial aid podcast, the show was partially about lead generation but mostly about thought leadership. There are lots of business goals you can strive for, but the key is business. Podcasting for podcasting’s sake is fine if you’re doing it as a hobby. If you’re doing it to bolster your overall marketing, then it needs to be tied to down-funnel business impact.

For Marketing Over Coffee, John Wall and I set out the goals of generating revenue through sponsorships, securing speaking gigs, and building a large, reliable database for rainy days. Once we knew what our goals were, we could work backwards to determine the intermediary steps needed to achieve those goals.

For example, generating revenue through sponsorships is all about building an audience that advertisers want. We needed to show that we have high-quality listeners. To build that rate card, we needed data about our listeners. We created a LinkedIn Group which analyzes our audience and presents data that’s useful for rate cards. For example, we can see how senior our group is:

Or what job function they hold:

Since we don’t actively promote the group anywhere else except the show, it’s a reasonable conclusion that the group is representative of show listeners. This gives us a solid rate card to use in marketing the group to advertisers.

Having the framework for a rate card is great, but having a credible rate card requires having an audience. How do you build a podcasting audience? We’ll cover a little bit of that in the next post in this series.

Posts in the How to Market Your Podcast series:

Interested in a real-life example? Check out my marketing podcast, Marketing Over Coffee!

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