You Ask, I Answer: Podcast Landing Page Best Practices?

In today's episode, Lindsay asks, What are your suggestions or best practices for a podcast landing page? Podcast podcast landing pages are uh really simple and really straightforward. They require a lot less maintenance and thought than say a regular landing page where you have to figure out is somebody going to uh you know not fill out all the form or scroll far enough to read all the exciting copy. Podcast landing pages are much simpler. So you need two things.

Well, three things really. Uh first, and by far the most important, your podcast landing page has to explain in clear, short, unambiguous text why someone should give you the time of day. We are in a world where there are still 24 hours a day, but everybody who's got one of these things has literally millions of choices. There's millions of podcasts out there. There are uh millions of YouTube channels, there are millions of apps in the app store.

You are competing for time with every single thing on here, right? Which means that you have to explain to somebody why in the world should they listen to your podcast for even a minute compared to all the other options they have available to them. So, why? The number one mistake I see for podcast landing pages is that the podcasters spend a whole lot of time talking about them. Hey, here's who I am, here's what I do, and here's how awesome I am, and here's how many awards I've won, and how's how many people listen to my show?

Nobody cares. Nobody cares one bit. They your audience wants to know what's are you gonna do for them? So, short, up front, here's why you listen to the show. Example, the In Ear Insights podcast that I do with Katie Robert.

Less than 30 minutes, you'll get uh a deep dive on some type particular type of marketing and analytics related uh thing or marketing and strategy. If you want to hear uh a balanced perspective of human and technology, you listen to that show. Uh Marketing over coffee, uh the show I do with uh John Wall. In 25 minutes or less, uh catch up on the latest marketing news by two grumpy old guys who just cramp it at at the world and at the silliness of that some marketers do. Those are make very clear what you're going to get.

So make sure that's the case for your podcast. Think of this. Your podcast is a functionally a product, right? So the same effort you would put into product marketing, uh the four Ps, right? Product price, price, place, promotion.

There's no price, obviously, for the most part. So, what is it that is unique and worthwhile listening to your show that somebody can get from your show they're not going to get anywhere else? Okay, so that's number one. Number two, present listening options. One of the things that I have seen done most wrong, and I've done it myself.

I've done it myself, is not to put all the major options for listening on a page. Um so, in fact, let's bring up the the in-ear insights one here. You can see we've got a bunch of different options here, and they're really, really blatantly clear. There's no doubt, uh, based on the giant text here, uh, what it is that somebody can do, where you can find the show. Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube.

Uh, don't forget about YouTube. YouTube is a huge listening platform as well as a video platform. A lot of people forget that YouTube exists uh and can uh be a good distribution channel for your podcast because people listen to things. Uh and if you are super clever, uh you will get your podcast transcribed and closed captioned so that you can put uh that text into YouTube, and then YouTube search engine will do a better job of helping people find your show. These listening options should encompass you know every major podcasting channel based on where your the services that you use for your podcasting uh service distribute to.

So I use Libson, for example, and they can distribute to all these different platforms pretty easily, or the RSS feed. Um you are only limited by what channels you choose to publish your podcast on. So that's number two. Number three on the landing page, and I think this is an optional one, but I think it's still important. You'll notice that on the landing page, all these links go to someplace you don't control.

Not a single one is uh on your site. So you have no analytics on this. What you can do with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics is set up a goal to track outbound clicks from these links and record them as essentially podcast clicks to say, okay, I would I did enough to convince somebody to go to this page and click on one of these things. And in doing so, they may or may not have subscribed, but they probably will subscribe because the mechanisms are all pretty straightforward, right? And I can count that as a goal completion.

Now, is that a valuable goal? Is it as good as someone uh subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a form to download a white paper or webinar? Probably not. But at least you want to know the activity. You want to know, is anybody clicking on these things?

If nobody's clicking on our podcast links, sad sauce, right? We've we've not done a good job. So those would be the three major best practices that I would focus on with your podcast landing page. Make it obvious as to why somebody cares about you. Make it easy for them to subscribe, and then track uh your your messaging.

Bonus, if you set up a podcast listening goal uh in Google Analytics and you use tag manager to track it, uh you can then use software like Google Optimize to do A B testing on the landing page to see if you can do something to increase uh the click-through rates on it and changing copy, changing images, things like that. Remember that a podcast is a product, it is a product and it will do as well as any product would with the appropriate amount of product marketing effort, which means that if you just kind of slap something up, which again, I'm guilty of it. I've done it, I've done it more than I care to count, um, you will get results commensurate with your lack of effort. If you invest the time, if you focus on making things easy, if you focus on the customer, your podcast landing page will do better, it will function better for you. Um the other thing with it's not about the landing page itself, but make sure that in all of your other communications, you are cross-promoting your podcast.

If you're gonna put the time and effort into it, make sure that there's a link in your newsletter, right? Make sure there's links in the navigation on the rest of your website. Make sure that um you are mentioning it in the episode itself. Especially if you put it on like YouTube where there is no feed, put the you know link to the subscription page in your YouTube comments in the in the description on your video and mention it in the show that hey I've got a podcast please listen to it. Right?

I always say at the end of these videos, please subscribe to the YouTube channel in the newsletter. Um because I want you to go find those things if you're listening to this you may want to have a custom domain a redirected domain for your podcast that's easy to remember that's probably the the the simplest way for people to hear. So if you're doing a promo for another podcast um you could say to somebody go to marketing overcoffee.com if that was not your URL and redirect that. So you know your podcast here dot com whatever the case may be. Give those things a try.

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