So, you’ve decided to create a podcast. Amazing! But here comes the other part – promotion. How are you going to make sure that you that your podcast promotion reaches your audience and they share it with theirs?
We often talk to clients about podcast promotion. Whether you are looking for organic growth for your podcast through your existing networks, or looking to put some paid media spend behind it, there are so many options.
And it pays to have a plan in place before you launch the first episode. You don’t need to have everything in place down to the last social media post, but knowing how you are going to promote it and what assets – trailers, clips, video clips, gifs – you might want to use when promoting are key to making sure you are prepared.
We’ve put together this guide to make sure you have everything you need for flawless podcast promotion every time.
Let’s get giffy – Get the assets ready to promote your podcast right
Before you even think about how and where you want to promote your podcast, think about the assets – images, gifs, short videos if the podcast was recorded that way – that you are going to need to do it.
If you know from the outset what you are going to need then your production team (which we hope might be us?) can get these ready for you alongside the edits of the full episode so you have everything you need when you hit publish.
Gifs can be short – up to 15 seconds – clips of audio from the podcast which are laid over the podcast art with an audio level line across the middle to show that it is animated. They are a great way to share a really short snippet of the podcast, and have something visual that people can get onboard with when you share it on social.
You can also have a short clip of the podcast as a video, even if you didn’t video the recording. We’ve created videos like these, see below, for clients, where we’ve taken a short clip of the podcast, animated the cover art and created a shareable short video that can be used across social.
If you do video the recording of your podcast, you might want to think about creating some short clips, using a vertical aspect (so they fill the whole screen on channels like Instagram, or Tiktok) with subtitles. We’ve all seen clips of our favourite podcasts like this, teasers with something funny or outlandish said to get you to click through and listen in full.
But, as always, a picture says a thousand words, so if you have images of the podcast being recording, the key people who are involved, even images of the projects or subjects that you talk about then these are all great to use and it’s best to collect those together now. If you feature guests, get them to send approved images, their social media handles and a short bio so you are ready to share all about them as well.
Trail your podcast
A trailer is essentially another asset for your podcast. A short 1-2 min clip of audio that gives people a flavour of what to expect from your podcast over the whole series.
The reason that we’ve put it here separately is that it can also be used as a promotional tool in its own right.
As well as being something that you share, you can load up a trailer to your podcast platform ahead of the release of the first episode. This has two great benefits. Firstly, once your podcast is ready on your podcast platform, they will then submit it to all the major podcast platforms like Apple, Amazon and Google. Essentially your podcast is there, ready and waiting for your first episode. As it has already been submitted and approved, any further episodes will appear quickly, as there can sometimes be a short delay when first uploading a new podcast.
Secondly, when you share the trailer and people click through to listen they also have the option to subscribe there and then, or save it to their own list. This means you’re creating an audience before they’ve even listened to episode one!
Make promotion a team effort
When it comes to promoting the podcast itself, it goes without saying that you should share it on all the social channels you have for your business. Using the assets that we’ve spoken about you can create posts to share in the run up to the launch (using your trailer) and for each new episode (using the info about that episode as well as any guests featured).
But don’t stop there. Make sure you use the full reach of any social channels you are using. On LinkedIn you can post your podcast to your company page, and then send around an email to everyone internally with the link to that post asking them to share it on their own profile to their network.
Tag people! Make sure you tag people where appropriate. This could be the hosts, guests, other companies or projects that your podcast talks about. Everyone loves to feel involved and often this means that people will share your post to their network as well which grows your reach.
SEO for your website
Whilst your podcast will be hosted on a podcast platform, don’t miss out on the opportunity to make a highlight of it on your own website. If someone is searching for your podcast by name, the hosts or guests, this is another opportunity for you to appear in search and have people come through to your website.
Most podcast platforms provide you with an embed player – code that you can put on your website so the podcast will play straight from there. You can also add links / buttons to the major podcast platforms that people use – Apple, Amazon, Google – so that they can click through if viewing on mobile to the podcast app of their choice.
As well as the player, use this as an opportunity to talk about the podcast, what you’ve created, why and the conversations you are looking to have. You could create a ‘homepage’ for the podcast series as a whole, and then a page for each episode so you have the chance to really go into depth with these. Think of them as blogs, use keywords in the text and titles to ensure that these pages will appear in search when someone is looking for your podcast.
To ensure that your podcast is accessible you can also transcribe it and provide the transcription on your website. This could be a page for each episode with the embedded player at the top, a short intro for the episode and then the transcript below that.
Use links on these pages to the rest of your website to highlight projects or work you’ve done that is relevant and ensure that people know how to get in touch with you if they want to work with you. You can also link to the hosts, guests and outside projects and ask others to link back to your podcast page as well.
Keep your podcast content evergreen
One of the great things about a podcast is that so often the content that you are creating is what we marketers like to call ‘evergreen’ – which is just a way of saying it is content that you can use again and again in different ways.
Even after your podcast series has ended there are ways that you can use this content again. You might want to make the longer episodes into a series of highlights that could be released separately or hosted on relevant pages on your website.
You might have a section in each podcast – where you answer questions that have been sent in for example – which you could take out and make into a standalone short podcast series.
Perhaps you talk about the same project or subject multiple times across a few episodes, you could edit those together to make new episodes.
There is also scope to revisit topics. You could look at which episodes / guests were the most popular and invite them back to ‘follow up’ and chat to them again about what has happened since the episode was recorded.
As you can see, there are so many ways to promote your podcast. If you are looking to put together a podcast series, or take a new look at yours then do get in touch.
Written by Laura, of Digital Deconstructed, our resident podcast production manager.