Podcast Marketing: 20+ Marketing Tips to Promote Your Podcast

Passionate about something and want to podcast about it? Want to promote your new venture with actionable podcasting tips?

Here’s how a typical podcast journey begins:

You do your research and come up with a list of topics. Next, you probably record a few episodes to ensure your audience can get a taste of the good stuff.

As a result of your efforts, you see an initial push in subscribers and downloads. Things are off to a great start!

Now, growing your podcast and reaching a new audience is essential for growing your podcast and reaching the top of the charts.

Once the initial euphoria wears off, you will soon start seeing the challenge – maintaining and growing the number of subscribers and downloads.

So, we took our favorite marketing tips and tricks and tweaked them to relate directly to podcasters.

What you’ll read below are tried and tested methods to promote podcasts that’ll work for your podcasts as much as they have worked for us.

Quality Content Lies at the Heart of Success

It is important to understand that if you aren’t producing quality content, all the marketing and promotion tactics in the world won’t help you.

This is true for any website, but in a niche as dynamic and fast-moving as podcasts, it’s even more true!

The Essential Ingredients of Quality Content

The quality of the content you produce for your podcast should be the product of the following three factors.

Value for the Listeners

People prefer to consume content that they think gives them value. This value can be either new facts, entertainment, or anything you like as long as it offers genuine value.

As such, it is important that you know what your listeners want from your content. If you continue to deliver the goods, they will return for more.

To find out what the audience wants, you can run social media polls or set up short survey forms that directly ask the audience’s preferences.

Uniqueness

Now, you might think that value should be enough for listeners. But the reality is that there are too many content producers creating awesome content every day.

Finding what makes your podcast unique requires thinking about the value listeners get from your podcast.

It might require you to go to listeners and ask their opinion. Once you have one thing that distinguishes your content from the competition, make it one of the central themes of your podcast.

A Personal Connection

Listeners should feel that you have produced the content just for them. If you can make it about them, you will soon have a loyal following.

Creating that personal touch requires you to listen to the audience by engaging them through social media and even the podcast itself.

Start by asking questions that reveal their challenges and pain points. Now, when you discuss these pain points and offer solutions, you start to build that personal connection.

Getting these three things right can help take your content to the next level!

How to Promote Your Podcasts

It is time to discuss the podcast promotion tips.

The good thing about these tips is that they work regardless of the age of your podcast. We recommend mixing and matching these tactics to find the right mix for your podcast marketing strategy.

Here are the 23 different podcast promotion strategies

23 Free ways to promote your podcast

Don’t Be Shy About Asking People to Like and Subscribe

When your episode finishes and a new one (probably not yours) starts playing, you have lost the opportunity to ask listeners to like and subscribe.

This could mean they might not be able to find your podcast again, and we don’t want that!

To avoid this, you could offer discreet prompts to like and subscribe to the podcast at the start and the end of the episode so that the listeners have adequate time to like and follow your show.

These prompts should be both verbal (as a spacer between your intro and the first topic of the episode) and visual (a clickable link as a video overlay) to cater to all platforms.

Word-Of-Mouth Is Still Very Relevant

Asking your listeners to share your episodes with friends and family is a great way of reaching new audiences.

This idea works because birds of a feather usually flock together.

As such, the chances are that the friends and family members of the listeners would also like your content. This is social media on a micro-scale and is just as effective.

Don’t Overlook Podcast Directories

Many marketers overlook podcast directories and aggregators because it seems like additional work.

However, these aggregators, known as podcatchers, are often the primary way listeners discover and play podcast episodes.

While Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify are the top names in this niche, there are other aggregators that help listeners discover your content.

In addition to the top three, we recommend uploading your content to Amazon Music, Audible, TuneIn Radio, and Podcast Index.

Your strategy should be simple: create accounts with all popular podcatchers and submit your RSS feed. This way, your episodes will be included in the listing of popular podcast apps.

Your episodes will be visible in the new content area of these apps, hopefully, with a great impact on your audience numbers.

Publish Before Your Listeners Are Online

When publish your episodes has a serious impact on the growth of your podcast.

The best way to take advantage of this simple tactic is to determine when your audience starts consuming your content. Now, you have the ideal time for uploading your podcast.

When you follow this upload deadline, your episodes are ready when your audience is ready to listen.

So when they log into their podcast apps, they’ll find your content at the top of the list. This increases the chances that they’ll tap your content before they go to the competition.

Check Competitors for New Opportunities

If you start running out of ideas or your current content seems to perform below average, you’ll need to find new content ideas.

Looking at competitors’ published content to discover ideas is a simple yet powerful tactic.

Simply check the top-performing episodes and jot down their main points.

Now, remove seasonal content from the list, and you’ll be left with ideas that worked well for your competitors and could work just as well for you.

When considering these ideas, note that there is a chance that the topics that performed well in the past might not bring in a similar number.

Podcasting Communities Help Spread the Word

You can find podcasting communities on all popular social media platforms.

We highly recommend you join these communities and become an active participant. By helping other members and answering their queries, you’ll start making a name for yourself.

People will start bringing their problems to you, and your status as an experienced podcaster will grow.

As long as your podcast link is in your bio, you’ll see an upturn in traffic because people are more likely to check out the podcasts of popular community members.

Network, Network, Network

Podcasting is a growing community and has plenty of fantastic content creators, each with their own loyal followers.

If you want to tap into audiences beyond your own, ask other top names in your niche for a collaboration.

Since collaborations frequently happen among content creators that share similar interests, you’ll have a chance to impress new listeners with a chance of converting them into subscribers.

Leverage Cross-Promotion to Reach a Similar Audience

You might have heard content creators giving shoutouts and mentions to fellow creators at the start or end of the episodes. Some even include links to channels and websites in the description.

This cross-promotion tactic is fruitful because subscribers trust their favorite content producers to recommend content they might like.

You can start by mentioning the podcasters that you personally follow and admire.

If you find it appropriate, include the public links to their content in the description with a short mention in your intro or a special segment.

This will start the process of reciprocation that would bring your work to the attention of more listeners.

Reach Out to People and Brands Mentioned in Your Show

Another related tactic of taking the mention game to the next level is to reach out to the people and brands you mentioned in your episodes.

Ask them to share the episode with their audience.

With just a simple message or email, you can significantly increase the chances of getting your work featured before people who might not have heard of your podcast.

We recommend you start small with creators you are friends with. Next, continue to go up one level with the mentions, and you’ll see an uptick in the number of subscribers.

Be a Host and a Guest

Guests on podcasts are welcomed because they bring a unique take on the episode’s topic. In one session, listeners can get several expert opinions that help them see all sides of the debate.

If an opinion impresses them enough, many listeners actually seek out more content created by that guest.

In the same vein, when you invite popular names in the industry to your show, you increase the chances of their followers coming to the show to listen.

Not only do these two related tactics increase the traffic to individual episodes, but you’ll also likely see an increase in subscribers.

HARO Is Still an Under-Tapped Opportunity

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a platform where content creators (journalists in particular) can post their queries to get responses from the public.

This is a huge platform that offers the chance to get your work featured in a reputable publication.

We recommend searching HARO for queries that match your niche and areas of expertise.

Answer the question, and if it makes sense, include a link to one of your episodes. The link to your podcast is included in your bio and is often used as your introduction.

HARO is slowly gaining traction in the podcast industry, with brands leveraging the platform to reach new audiences and get their podcast featured on top-rated publications.

Here’s a great podcast episode that you might want to listen to on the topic.

Don’t Forget YouTube

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. It receives more than three billion searches a month!

If you haven’t already, get your podcast on a YouTube channel. Once you have that, you can create a video for each episode.

Now creating videos requires time and effort – something not every podcaster can afford.

We highly recommend a middle way where many podcasters set up a camera while recording the episodes.

This generates a video of the episodes that you can upload to your YouTube channel.

Repurpose Episodes Into Clips and Sound Bites

Social media is a very important aspect of any podcast marketing strategy. However, many podcasters make the mistake of simply sharing the link of the episode with a bland description.

This reduces the chances of click-over because the viewers have little idea whether they would enjoy the episode.

A better podcast social media strategy is to make sound bites from the episode content and post them on social media with the link to the episode.

This way, the users would get a taste of the episode and decide whether they want to listen. You can take the idea further by adding a GIF to create a very attractive package for social media consumption.

Audiograms Are a Great Marketing Tactic

Audiograms are short videos that show animated sound waves or text over a static image. This allows you to market your sound clips on social media platforms.The idea is to post a preview of your podcast episodes on platforms where audio-only content doesn’t do well.

By repackaging your audio into an audio-video package, you get to show related text superimposed on an image that instantly grabs the viewers’ attention.

Podcasters use audiograms for marketing their content on video-first platforms (that’s pretty much all social media platforms these days) with great success.

Celebrity Teasers Are Still a Thing

While they might not be familiar with your podcast, your target audience would surely know the celebrities within your industry.

That’s why it is always a good idea to ask them to record a teaser introduction for your podcast. This could be a general shoutout to your podcast or a specific introduction to the topic.

You can use these teasers as the intro to the podcasts or advertisements on social media.

This tactic works better if the celebrities double as guests on the podcast.

There is always a chance that guests will share the episode from their social media accounts, with a predictable impact on the podcast numbers.

Don’t Forget SEO

Search engine optimization remains very relevant in podcasting because many potential subscribers would discover your content through a Google search.

You need to focus on keyword research and ensuring that your content has all the right keywords in all the right places.

In particular, the podcast description, episode descriptions, and website should have the keywords that your target audience would use to find your podcast.

We recommend using tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to find the best search volume and difficult keywords.

Repurpose Audio Into Blog Posts

Converting the discussion or script of an episode into a blog post is a great way of getting more value from your content.

If you want to go the extra mile, focus on a blog post that takes the discussion and provides supplementary material. These articles could become the point of distinction for your podcast and bring in more subscribers interested in the topic.

If you don’t wish to invest too much in the process, simply upload a transcription of the episode with an SEO-optimized heading structure.

Remember that this is your opportunity to add keywords and increase the chances of getting your content featured higher in Google’s results!

Run Giveaways and Contests

Giveaways and contests bring the spotlight to the podcast and help spread the word.

Giveaways are an excellent tactic for growing your podcasts. Many podcasters offer a free ebook or audiobook in exchange for a review or subscription.

Contests work on a similar principle – you want visitors to subscribe and subscribers to spread the word.

You can host contests where participants win prizes by posting about the podcast on their social networks and commenting on your social media posts.

Here’s an example of The Bystanders, a popular podcast, running a giveaway through Twitter.

Use Your Podcast Website to Leverage Keywords

In these days of tough competition, having a profile on the top podcasting platforms isn’t enough. You need to build a website that acts as the home for your podcast so fans can see episode details and read supporting material.

An excellent idea for your podcast website is adding transcripts with links to the important or interesting parts of the episodes.

Presto Player allows you to add links in your podcast transcripts where listeners can click to the relevant section.

This adds another layer to your marketing initiatives and helps you get the full benefit of relevant keywords.

Send Notifications as Soon as the Episode Is Released

Podcasters can sometimes forget to send out notifications to subscribers in a rush to upload their latest episode.

A simple way to avoid this mistake is to automate the notification process using a social media scheduling tool such as Sprout Social or CoSchedule.

These tools can handle multiple notifications, including browser alerts and social media announcements.

While you are at it, set up notification emails that you can send to subscribers every time you publish.

3 Ways to promote your podcast fast

Consider Paid Mentions and Ads

Paid mentions and ads start where your free tactics finish. The idea is to invest money to grow the curve when you’re reaching the limits of what’s possible with free tools and techniques.

Here’s a pro tip for using podcast paid marketing strategy: start small and increase the budget when (and if) you see returns on your investments.

We recommend you start with paid mentions of your podcast by other leading podcasts and channels. With these mentions, you can buy ad spaces sold by podcasters.

These two tactics help increase the reach and subscribers to your podcast.

A great way to start with paid mentions is to simply ask. Send an email and contact them via social media accounts. Your negotiation skills would be extensively used to seal the deal for the mentions.

When your budget allows for it, you can explore Google and social media ads for better reach and increase in listener base.

Use Your Email List

Your email list is a powerful marketing tool that you can use with minimum effort.

Sending out an email notification as soon as an episode goes live ensures that listeners would tune in to listen.

In addition, regular emails that notify subscribers about upcoming special episodes and events associated with your podcast will make your podcast stick in their minds.

Finally, Mix It Up

Monotony is perhaps the most common reason why people unsubscribe from any content platform.

Fortunately, mixing up content ideas is a simple exercise.

To find out what your audience would like on your podcast, check out the trending topics being discussed on social media channels. You can also directly pose the question to the listeners.

It is always a good idea to have days where you upload experimental content to your distribution channels. Next, watch how this experimental content performs.
If your experiments do well, make them a part of your regular ideas bank.

How to Utilize Popular Podcast Platforms to Your Advantage

There are many popular podcast platforms that you can utilize for podcast promotion. Here we’re talking about the following two.

1. iTunes
2. Spotify

Let’s get started:

iTunes

iTunes is an amazing platform for promoting podcasts among millions of users around the world. 

Follow the below steps to get your podcast listed quickly on iTunes.

• Step 1: Record and edit your podcast
• Step 2: Add your podcast details
• Step 3: Select a podcast hosting platform
• Step 4: Sign in with your Apple ID to iTunes
• Step 5: Click the “+” on the left side of the dashboard to add a new show
• Step 6: Insert your RSS feed address
• Step 7: Hit the Validate button
• Step 8: Click the Submit button

That’s all.

Spotify

Spotify is another popular platform where you can list your podcast. Here are the possible steps to get listed on Spotify.

• Step 1: Register on the Spotify website
• Step 2: Select a podcast hosting platform
• Step 3: Insert your RSS feed link
• Step 4: Open Spotify for podcasters
• Step 5: Write your podcast details
• Step 6: Review and submit your podcast

See! How easy is it?

Apart form these popular media, we recommend to utilize Anchor. It’s an amazing platform for free podcast hosting. You can use this user friendly media to distribute your podcast to the popular podcast platforms with just a few clicks.

Conclusion

Marketing a podcast is a simple matter of coming up to the audience’s expectations.

We discussed several tactics for promoting your podcast to new audience segments. At the same time, the idea is to make sure the existing audience would remain engaged and continue to get interesting content.

In a nutshell, you should make sure the content remains fresh, the ideas vibrant, and the guests funny and insightful.

We hope that you try these podcast marketing tips to reach more subscribers and increase the footprint of your brand. Let us know how it worked out!