Podcast Marketing - A Marketing Avenue Your Business Shouldn’t Ignore
Podcast fans are real fans - when they find something they love they stick with it and tell their friends. 75% of Americans over the age of 12 have listened to a podcast. 53% have listened in the last month, and weekly podcast users listened to an average of nine podcast episodes in the last week, up from eight episodes in 2022
So why not help feed their appetites and get your podcast out to the waiting masses? It’s an easily overlooked marketing avenue for businesses, but it can seriously impact your brand reach, recognition, and even customer conversions. So, stick with us at CleanVoice as we take you through podcast marketing and provide the steps you need to set up podcasting for your business! Let’s dive in by answering a simple question.
What is podcast marketing?
Simply put, podcast marketing is about promoting your service or products through podcasting. By creating a podcast for your business, you’re able to effectively tell your brand’s story how you want while building brand authority and reaching new audiences.
And, even though we’ll be focusing on running your own business podcast, you can get into podcast marketing without having to create one for yourself. There are plenty of podcasts out there which are happy to partner with businesses in exchange for sponsorship fees. You can find podcasts within your niche and tap into their already cultivated audience to expand your brand reach. And considering $2.5 billion is expected to be spent on podcast advertising by 2024, it’s an avenue your business shouldn’t pass up!
Why Podcast Marketing is Important?
As a digital medium, podcasts are easy to integrate into a whole range of other digital products like social media and websites, so there are plenty of ways to get your message out there.
With all that hard work being done to market your podcast, you want your listeners to be able to hear it properly! And Cleanvoice is a tool that can help in that regard! We’re an artificial intelligence tool that removes dead air, stuttering, and mouth sounds from your podcast or audio recording, allowing you to engage audiences with clear, crisp audio. We even remove background noise for your remote podcast interviews!
Building an Effective Podcast Marketing Strategy
It’s all about brand awareness. Your podcast may be a standalone thing, in which case it's its own brand, or it may be a small part of your branded products and services. Keeping a consistent look and feel makes marketing easier as it has a recognizable look.
As with any new venture, you’ll need a podcast plan. What’s your subject, and what are you calling it? How many episodes can you produce, who should listen to them, and how are they going to find out about it? Here’s our 10-point plan to get you up and running.
#1: Launch With Several Episodes
Launching with a single episode can set you up for failure. While one episode could be highly engaging, it’s much easier for your audience to fall off and forget about your podcast after they’ve finished listening to it. For the best results, we recommend posting between 3-4 right from the get-go!
Having a bunch of episodes out there means listeners can binge on them and be left wanting more, which increases the chance of them becoming regular subscribers. Plus, it’s a great way to show that you’re serious about podcasting and that you aren’t just ‘testing the waters’.
Additionally, from a production point of view, it gives you breathing space as you don’t need to be immediately thinking up more content. And you’ll be able to get better feedback from your audience so that you can streamline your content for future episodes. It’s a winning strategy that’ll help get your podcast started on the right foot!
#2: Submit Your Show to Every Podcast Aggregator & Directory that You Possibly Can
There are a lot of them out there, and the more of them you’re on, the more discoverable your podcast is. It’s a simple numbers game.
Your hosting platform has an RSS feed for your podcast. You need to manually submit the feed to as many podcast directories as possible, wait for them to be approved, and then you’re up and running. The Big 3 are Apple, Google, and Spotify, but there are dozens more.
Here’s a selection to get you started.
#3: Grow a newsletter
According to Campaign Monitor, “Email is more valuable than ever with an ROI of $42”. It’s cheap and easy to produce an email newsletter using services like MailChimp or HubSpot, and all the major mailing list management packages include newsletter templates to get you started. A newsletter is another way to connect with your fans and gives you a text and image-based medium to talk more about your chosen subject and draw in new listeners.
Give people a look behind the scenes, link to web content, and make your audience feel special. They should be getting extra value by signing up. Keep the look and feel of your newsletter the same as your podcast and website - it’s all part of building a brand.
Remember that to comply with CCPA rules (known as GDPR in the UK and EU), you can’t just send your newsletter to anyone; they have to subscribe to it voluntarily. That’s why a newsletter is part of an integrated campaign across podcasting directories, social media, and your websites, all of which lead back to your podcast.
#4: Promote on social media … in a dozen different ways
Social media posts are a great way to get your podcast noticed with rich media, soundbites, videos, images, teasers, and competitions. Here are a few suggestions
- Pin your iTunes or Spotify URL.
- Grab screenshots and post them on Instagram and Facebook
- Create soundbite clips on Soundcloud, then share them on Twitter.
- Tease episodes ahead of time with hashtags to catch new audiences.
- Reshare podcast episodes.
- Show behind-the-scenes content in an Instagram story.
- Talk about the people that produce the show
- Post images of locations you record in.
Take the Good Mourning Podcast as an example. They regularly post video clips of their podcasts and engage with their audience by asking questions in the form of picture posts on Instagram, which gives them a great jumping-off point when they’re developing new content.
#5: Create a website for your podcast
Make your website the central hub for all things to do with your podcast because this is the most versatile digital presence you have.
Use organic SEO to capture casual browsers, it’s the place to sign up for newsletters, link to your socials, and build a library of episodes. You can add content that relates to your podcast subject and interviewees and even use it for e-commerce, selling your merch.
It’s a marketing one-stop-shop that Twenty Thousand Hertz uses wonderfully. They’re a podcast that focuses on the stories behind recognizable sounds, which is showcased beautifully on their website. They use simple yet flashy artwork to highlight different sounds on their main page, which gives audiences an idea of what their podcast is about while staying on-brand.
#6: Convert your podcast into a YouTube video
This one is really easy, as you don’t need to create a video. Just convert your audio MP3 files into MP4 and upload them with a logo or still image that displays throughout the recording.
YouTube is just another platform where audiences consume media content. Add links to your website in your profile and use the built-in analytics to get information on the user segments of your podcast.
To upgrade, make a live video of your podcast. This works particularly well with interview guests, although it will increase your production budget. Trash Taste, an irreverent podcast focusing on a number of different subjects, uses YouTube to increase their engagement and audience reach by posting podcasts in a video format. This method has worked extremely well for them, as they’ve racked up a hefty subscriber count of 1.5 million subscribers.
#7: Collaboration & Cross-Promotion
Podcasting is a community, so capitalize on that. If other podcasters cover similar topics to you, it doesn’t mean you need to see these shows as competition.
Podcast listeners, like consumers of any media, like to listen to multiple shows on the same topic, so find out who your “competition” is and reach out about collaborations. Working together is a win-win with shared activities like a promo swap where you each promote the other’s show, or co-host episodes to give a broader opinion.
#8: Market Your Podcast With Written Content
AI transcription services make it easy to convert your spoken podcast into text. Once in text form, your content can be shared on text-based media like newsletters and blog posts and it becomes more searchable for SEO terms and better ranking of your website by Google.
This is where Cleanvoice can come into help. By uploading your audio files to the CleanVoice platform,, you can automatically transcribe your podcasts for those that might be hard-of-hearing, or those that prefer to read rather than listen. And the best thing? You can transcribe in multiple languages easily, which can help your podcast reach more international audiences.
#9: Do A Giveaway Or Contest
Ask listeners to screenshot their subscription and tag your podcast on a social media post, then offer merch or other fun prizes that relate to your podcast. Then promote the giveaways on all your channels.
If you’re podcasting about beauty, give away cosmetics from one of your sponsors. If you’re a tech blogger, phone cases and if your subject is true crime… er… maybe a magnifying glass?
Print on Demand (POD) services like Gelato or Printful make it easy to produce limited runs of everything from tee shirts and hoodies to mugs and reusable water bottles, or even jigsaws with your logo or a related image on them.
#10: Think about paid ads
Paid ads do work - they just cost money so need a higher initial outlay to get a decent ROI. As with any ad campaign, you’ll need to create a comprehensive strategy, and place your ads where they’re most likely to be seen by your target audiences.
Social media channels like Facebook and Instagram make ad spends fairly easy to control, but there’s always a learning curve. It takes time and costs money to work out the best demographics, locations, etc to place your ads.
Getting the best out of Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is a science in itself. It might be best to get help from a digital marketing agency, familiar with the complexities of Google Ads when you start out.
Cleanvoice is a smart tool that uses AI to clean filler sounds, stuttering, and mouth sounds from your podcast or audio recording, along with reducing background noise. Sign up here for a free 30-minute trial.
Conclusion
There’s a lot more to running a successful podcast than just pressing “record” and speaking into the microphone. You need to think about publishing, distribution, and marketing as well. Luckily there’s a market for pretty much everything. Just look at the differences between the top podcast lists for Wired vs Good Housekeeping and you’ll see that there's a space for your niche subject out there in the pod-sphere.
Production values are key and a 30-minute trial with CleanVoice will show you how much better your podcast could sound with all the ums and ahs removed by AI.
