You Ask, I Answer: Advertising Your Podcast?

In today's episode, Lindsay asks, have you ever done any spends to increase podcast reach? Is there anything like a Facebook boost for podcasts? Um it's a good question. There isn't a thing that will boost an individual podcast episode in a podcast directory in the same way that you would vote boost a Facebook post, but as long as your website for your podcast is you know halfway decent and then there's an obvious page to get people to subscribe to it, then you can treat it again, just like any other web page on your website. So that means you can run Facebook ads, retargeting ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, the works.

The challenge is to make sure that you're running uh campaigns that are appropriate to what a podcast is. A podcast is a subscription, right? It is a it's it's similar functionally to an email list. So whatever advertising tactics you would use to get people to subscribe to your newsletter, you would do to get them to subscribe to your podcast. Uh so that means spending some time doing the market research.

Treat it like treat it like search ads. What category uh does your podcast fit in? If you're a coffee podcast, uh, you know, how much search volume is there for coffee podcast? Uh, what are all the term and variations? If you do the work to uh optimize your podcast website for for SEO for surge engines first, you will get a lot of the background data you need in order to make effective ads for your podcast because you'll know the category, you'll know the related terms.

You may potentially uh consider changing or adapting the name of your podcast, right? Um very early on uh with marketing over coffee, uh, which you can find at MarketingOvercoffee.com. Uh John and I were uh looking at the name of the show, and you know, something super simple. We changed the name to Marketing, you know, Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast. It's a little clunky, a lot clunky, um, but it is one of the things that allowed us very early on to be found for people searching for a marketing podcast.

Uh little things like that help inform the ads and make them much more effective. Because especially with Google ads, there is that whole quality score score algorithm in the background. So there is the ad copy, the keyword, and then the landing page. And if they're not in sync from a context and content perspective, uh your ads will cost more and they'll perform less well. One of the other things to make sure that you do is you do engage in retargeting and reminding people, because even if somebody subscribes to your podcast, that doesn't necessarily mean they listen to it, right?

So if you go over to the Trust Insights website, go to TrustInsights.ai, um, you can find the podcast on there, and the podcast landing page has like the last I don't know, 10 or 15 episodes on it. Even if you've subscribed on your your smartphone, for example, uh, people drift off, right? They forget, they stop listening, and it is not a bad thing at all to run ads to existing subscribers, reminding them to check out the latest show. Ideally, ideally, it doesn't cost you a ton of money because the ad gets served up, but then if they're already subscribed, they pull out their mobile device, which is the where the vast majority of podcasts are listened to these days, and they just open up their podcast app and they they start listening again. Well, that doesn't show up as a click in your ad, right?

So you don't you don't if you're paying on a cost per click basis, you're getting the brand awareness and the reminder for people, but you're not necessarily getting incurring the cost because they don't have to click. Uh they can they remember I subscribe to that show, I should go listen to that show, I should go listen to in ear insights or marketing over coffee. So there's awareness ads, then there's the subscription ads, or the sort of the two big ad plays you're gonna want to do for your podcast. You will want branded search ads for sure. Um advertising your podcast name.

Again, if you think about the way people use Google and you think about the layout of the homepage uh in Google results in particular, there used to be a lot more organic search slots, but now with one box and featured snippets and all this stuff, the amount of real estate that's there that any one thing can have is less. So having your branded search listing and your unbranded search listing be on the same page at least gives you two two bats, two at bats, right? That's not necessarily true if you're just relying on organic alone. So having that that branded podcast advertising uh be running all the time, you don't have to spend a ton. I don't think you know marketing over coffee spends more than like a hundred bucks a month on it.

And that's funded obviously through sponsorships. Um is there a Facebook boost for podcasts on an individual episode basis? No. Should you be retargeting people uh to get them to listen again or to subscribe for the first time? Absolutely.

The other thing I will say is that and this is an additional channel it's worth paying attention to. If your podcast does not have a newsletter, you're missing a huge opportunity. Send out a newsletter every week, every month, whatever the case may be, that features your most recent episode and get people to subscribe to it, right? Get people to subscribe to the newsletter because it gives you an additional outreach uh channel, and it's one that doesn't cost you as much money as ads, uh, and it's a little more reliable. Even if you just you know say here's the last five episodes of the show and and the short you know transcripts or abstracts or or briefs of what each episode is about, that helps retain your audience so much better and keep them listening.

If you are in the business of selling subs uh sponsorships to your show, podcast downloads is one thing, but downloads plus being able to show web traffic plus being able to show email subscriptions means you have a package deal that you can offer to an advertiser to a sponsor and demonstrate that you can reach a lot of people in their target audience by having all three you can really show some good results, even if it's a corporate podcast, right? Even if you're not an independent show, if you're a corporate show, if you're doing it on behalf of your brand, your brand is still the sponsor, and you still want to be able to demonstrate all three results to um to your stakeholders or whoever is is uh allowing you to do the podcast. Here's the website traffic the podcast has driven. Here's the newsletter subscribers we have just for the podcast alone. Here is the number of downloads we receive.

Having that information makes it easier for stakeholders to defend the use of a podcast uh as a marketing channel. So, covered a lot in here. Um if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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