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You've decided that your business needs a podcast! You know what your topics will be and how you will produce the series, but one question remains, how do you ensure the right people hear it? Trint recently partnered with Hubspot to create the ultimate A-Z guide on how to start a podcast; this includes everything from ideation of topics, what equipment you need through to production and general promotion tactics. You can download the e-book here, but read on for more detail on how to promote your business's podcast.
You will have created your customer profiles to learn their key drivers, blockers, and challenges. If you have not already done so, it is also critical to undergo a body of work to get insights into what publications they read, where they consume content, and the social media channels they use.
This work allows you to promote your podcast where your target audience is most likely to be found. Business podcasts will typically be quite niche, so broader campaigns will not be effective and make it harder for you to drive ROI.
Consistency is vital for your organic and paid campaigns, and an important tip is to have a decent number of podcasts completed before the initial release. This gives you tighter control of the cadence and quality.
A way to help build 'stickiness' with your audience upon launch is to release the first two or three podcasts at once. This will help your audience understand the value you provide and ensure they return when you release future episodes depending upon whatever cadence you have decided.
Now we're into the crux of it, how do you build a following and ensure the right people listen to your podcast?
Before we get into specific tactics, it is worth noting measurement and experimentation. Your amplification tactics are a continual work in progress and need to evolve constantly. Test what works and don't be discouraged if a tactic isn't effective, as that is a learning in itself.
Increase your spending on the most effective tactics and dial back the channels that are not working for you. As you refine this process, you will see the ROI increase and your following build.
Owned channels like your social media and website are critical in the success of promoting your podcast. You will already have a core audience of people interested in what you have to offer on social media, and it allows for organic amplification. An excellent example of this is to post it on your company's LinkedIn page and encourage staff to share it with their networks. This amplification works similarly across all channels you decide are important, be it Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok.
If you have hosted guests on your podcast, social media gives a chance for cross-promotion and tapping into their networks. By hosting speakers who have a similar target audience to your own, they will also share and reach people you want to get your message in front of.
It is best practice if you also host each episode you release on your website. This gives your social media posts somewhere to direct their 'call to action' and means you can start reaping the SEO benefits by having transcripts of each episode within the page. A tool like Trint means that getting the transcript is a quick job and you can then index the content of your podcast online, making it much more searchable and more accessible for people to find.
Lastly, for the owned channels is every marketer's favorite old friend, emails. Don't be shy about getting the word out to the relevant people within your database or including it in your regular newsletters.
From the research conducted in your persona work, you know where the best use of your ad spend will be, and now is the time to experiment and tweak until you find the formula that gets the best results.
Your paid outreach will also be able to complement your organic outreach. If any organic posts are driving traffic and getting cut-through, you can promote or boost it with some budget and help amplify it to the specific demographics you set.
Then you can always go direct to the source for the biggest podcast hosting platforms such as Spotify and put money into promoting yourself there.
Next, we get into earned channels; where can you gain recognition, credibility, and amplification due to your work's quality and the value it is providing.
This links back to cross-promoting with guests who share the podcast to their networks, but it goes beyond that. The questions you need to ask include:
Having a PR company will be the easiest way to leverage this and get the benefits earned media brings to help position your company as subject matter experts. There are also tools to help you build a media list yourself, and plenty of guidance online about how to approach people for a PR opportunity. Once more, the better quality your work is, the more chance you have of grabbing someone's attention.
The important thing is finding the promotion tactics that fit your business, budget, and podcast objectives.
