Podcasts are the B2B marketer's new best friend. Podcasts are proving to be far from just a buzzword or short-lived trend, as 44% of senior decision-makers regularly listen to them.
If you're looking to expand your brand into the world of audio, podcasts are an amazing place to begin.
However, as you know, podcasts don't gain traction overnight. You'll need to put time and marketing resources into your podcast promotion if you hope it to become a valuable brand asset.
In this article we'll draw on our insights learned from promoting and syndicating content for leading brands to help you decide on the best way to promote your new podcast.
Without further ado, let's jump into the article.
Benefits of Actively Promoting Your Podcast
Over half of the US population say that they listen to podcasts and the growth in listeners doesn't look like it's going to slow down any time soon.
However, because of this growth it's harder than ever to make your podcast stand out from the crowd.
It's important to capitalize on all available promotional channels and tactics if you want to steadily grow your listener-base and use your podcast to drive business results.
That's why we've created this article. By the end of the next section you'll have eight actionable and realistic podcast promotion strategies that you can put into practice immediately.
Let's jump into the strategies.
Most Effective Podcast Promotion Strategies
1. Email Your Subscriber List
Established brands starting a podcast are always at an advantage. If you have an existing audience and email subscriber list you'll be able to promote your podcast to them.
Email is one of the best performing sales channels and the same applies to acquiring new podcast listeners.
One of the most popular podcasters around, Tim Ferriss, promotes every episode of his podcast to his email subscribers.
Tim Ferriss Podcast:
Inside the email he includes links to listen to the podcast on Spotify, Overcast, and Apple Podcasts, as well as a link to his website.
It's also a great opportunity to share what the podcast episode is about, and spike your audience's interest to encourage more listens.
2. Leverage Your Guest's Following
Many B2B podcasts use an interview-based format, with regularly rotating guests who can provide new insights and opinions.
If you're using the interview strategy, you should be tapping into your guest's following.
It's free leverage, and most guests will appreciate that you're already providing them with 'free' promotion by having them as a guest, and will be happy to share that they're attending the session on their social media accounts or to their own email list.
Interviewing high-profile guests is one of the ways that Growth Everywhere grew their podcast to 100,000+ listens per month.
For new podcasts, it may take some time to grow your interviewee pipeline to consist of established guests with large followings. However, the more interviews you have and the more you can show that you have an engaged listener base, the more likely guests are to want to take time out of their day to join you on your podcast.
If you don't host guests on your podcast, this won't be as useful. However, if you reference industry experts, books, articles, or anything else, it might be worth reaching out to the person to tell them that you referenced their resource and linked to it in your podcast show notes. They'll appreciate it, and you might be lucky enough to get a share from them.
3. Social Media Promotion
Now, we know that every article on promoting anything will recommend promoting something using social media.
But, it really is worth it when promoting your podcast.
Why?
Well, podcast listeners are much more active on social media than the 'average' person. 94% of podcast listeners say they're active on at least one social media channel, compared to just 81% for the entire population.
Sharing on social media is an ideal way to promote your podcast and if you can tap into your personal account and company account, you should be able to see a large reach.
4. Write Optimized Show Notes
You've recorded your podcast and are ready to hit publish. We know what you're thinking... Do I really need to write up everything that was talked about if my audience will listen to it anyway?
Well... yes.
There are a host of benefits to publishing show notes for your podcast.
Firstly, you show value immediately to potential listeners. Take a look at Noah Kagan's podcast (he founded Sumo).
As soon as you open up an episode, you see show notes that contain his notes on what you'll learn in the episode.
If you care about any of the topics mentioned, you're far more likely to listen to it than if there was no content there. You'd need to commit 45 minutes of your time without even knowing what you're in for.
You can also optimize your show notes for keywords that relate to your episode, and use SEO to drive traffic to your podcast episodes.
5. Use Podcast Aggregators
If you want to grow your podcast you should leverage existing networks of avid podcast listeners. Sites and apps like PocketCasts and Stitcher are great places to publish your podcast.
But, you don't need to take our word for it.
Slack grew their Work In Progress podcast and by publishing on popular podcast aggregation platforms they were able to gain 40,000+ listens per episode, and able to gain 1000+ new visits to their homepage per episode published.
Those are great results, and also prove how podcast traffic can drive real customers to your website.
6. Target your ABM accounts
In your Account-Based Marketing campaigns you'll need all of the best content you have to promote your brand as a leader and convince prospects to choose you.
You can use your podcast in your ABM targeting to position your brand as a though leader.
We'd recommend using targeted LinkedIn Ads that are shown directly to your target accounts in their LinkedIn news feeds. A great part of promoting content on LinkedIn is that your audience can engage with it like they would be able to with an organic post, and you may be able to see additional shares and some great engagement on the post.
7. Use Reviews as Social Proof
Social proof is a powerful marketing asset.
When it comes to your podcast, the same applies. As you're likely to host your podcast on Apple Podcasts where ratings are shown publicly every review matters.
Now, you may not want to email your whole audience asking for a review at once, and that's completely okay. Many podcast hosts will ask their listeners directly inside the podcast (usually at the end).
Listeners who listen all the way through your podcast are far more likely to provide a rating than those who drop out after the first 10 minutes. Having a solid foundation of reviews is a great way to prove to new prospective listeners that your podcast is worth their time.
It's important to note that rankings aren't a ranking factor on Apple Podcasts, and your subscriber count matters more than reviews.
Reviews are also a great way to learn what type of content your audience enjoys, and what type of content they don't enjoy. You'll be able to optimize your content plan to match what your audience is tuning in for, and increase your podcast listener loyalty.
8. Find Like-Minded People in Online Communities
Sometimes, 1000 true fans is all you need. The early days of podcasting can be the darkest, as you see little-to-no listeners, and growth is slow.
We recommend promoting your podcast to like-minded people to get the ball rolling.
If you're hosting a marketing podcast, you can post your episodes to community sites like Growth Hackers or a range of other marketing-related communities. If you can show members that your podcast provides real value, and you're not there just to promote your podcast, then you'll stand a good chance of getting some listeners, and potentially some honest feedback.
Conclusion
Growing your podcast is a hard task. When you first launch, the excitement can override the reality, but you'll soon start to notice if the listener count isn't as high as you'd like it to be.
Luckily, there are a range of effective strategies to promote your podcast and get it in front of your target audience.
We hope these strategies will help you grow your podcast and brand.
If you don't have the in-house resources to handle all of the promotion yourself but w ant your podcast to be seen by key decision-makers within your target accounts, then Internal Results can help.
We handle content promotion and syndication for leading brands, and using B2B data and intent marketing we can target decision-makers at the right time, with the right content.
