How to Increase Your Podcast Audience: A Guide to Podcast Marketing

This podcast marketing guide will assist you in turning your fledgling podcast into a must-listen.

Content:
1. Introduction
2. Why start a podcast? 
3. 8 Podcast marketing strategy for 2022
4. Conclusion

Having a podcast audience is an excellent approach to contacting consumers who are ready to make a purchase. A brand's advertisement on a podcast, according to about 54 percent of podcast listeners, makes them somewhat or significantly more likely to consider making a purchase from that brand (eMarketer, 2019). Podcasting is a fantastic strategy if you're hoping to increase brand awareness, brand affinity, and sales.

Developing a marketing plan and implementing strategies all aimed at expanding your audience and brand exposure is known as podcast marketing.

Even the best podcasts don't suddenly get a large audience. And without extensive advertising, it will never gain a sizable audience. It's possible that you don't know where to begin if you've never marketed a podcast before. In response, we are here. In order to give new podcasters a fantastic place to start and seasoned podcasters a review or upgrade on podcast marketing, we brought up this podcast marketing guide.

Let's explore what a podcast is and some of the factors why you're on the right road if you're trying to create or expand one before we get begun with our guidance on podcast marketing.

The main reason why listeners enjoy podcasts is that they are instructive. In the US, around 75% of podcast listeners claim they do so to explore new things (Statista 2019). Additionally, there are many podcasts available. 

There are approximately 850,000 podcasts available and more than 29 million recordings as of January 2020. This is a significant increase when you think that there were merely 500,000 live podcasts in February 2018.

Podcasts are also being listened to by more people. In the US, users more than the age of 12 listen to podcasts in the year 2019 at a rate of 51%. (Statista, 2019). 

This represents a significant increase from the 44 percent of podcast audiences in 2018.

Recall the prior podcasting statistic? There are almost 850,000 podcasts available. That's a lot of rivalries. You must produce excellent podcast material and effectively market it if you want to increase listenership and expand your audience. However, what goes into creating quality content?

Cross-promotion is an (often) cost-free method of marketing your podcast on some other podcast while also promoting your partner's shoe. 

You establish a connection or collaboration with a podcast that is willing to include your series on their program while you feature their program on your program. 

We advise adopting host-read promos, in which case you as the presenter would read the advertisement for the other podcast in your series while the host of the other podcast would read your advertisement. 

This is because it has been established that commercials read by hosts have a 50% higher buy intent than ads not read by hosts (Nielson).

Even though podcasting is an excellent medium to reach your audience, you shouldn't ignore your audience. Engage with your audience if you want to make a successful podcast. 

For your listeners, provide calls to action so they will know what to do after hearing your podcast. This could be requesting that they share or subscribe to your podcast or give a review. You can't just ask, though. 

You must make it worthwhile to the audience. Why should they promote, subscribe, or rate you (hint: this encourages the growth of your podcast and enables you to create even greater material over time)?

Your podcast episodes should be released at the appropriate time, just as Choosing the best opportunity to share on social media is vital. If you're just beginning to start, you may check out other podcasts to see when they release new episodes by looking at ones that are comparable to yours. 

That would be a wonderful place to begin. You can start uploading more frequently when you have your specific data on when your audience listens to your podcast episodes.

You may optimize the titles and descriptions of your podcast as well as your website.

Improving your podcast series meta description to contain the keywords your potential audience is prone to use when looking for the information you're discussing is one of the simplest methods to handle podcast SEO. 

You may use these suggestions to improve the descriptions of your YouTube videos to create superior podcast series summaries, as podcast SEO is quite similar to YouTube SEO.

Podcast marketing benefits significantly from sponsorships. In 2021, it was expected that spending on podcast advertising would surpass $1 billion. 

With 60% of the podcast listeners having purchased anything as a result of a podcast advertisement, It has been proven to be an effective strategy for growing your podcast, offers, or services. 

Sponsored ad slots entail paying for an advertisement on another podcast. I've seen a few podcasts cost in the hundreds while others cost in the thousands of dollars for sponsored ad spaces. It actually depends on the size, niche, and level of engagement of the audience.

Sharing your podcast episodes on social media is a terrific method to increase traffic to your podcast. Whether you run a society and culture podcast or a B2B podcast, you can't just drop by, give a link to your most recent episode, and disappear, though. 

After all, social media is social. Therefore, you must actively participate in the forums where your intended audience congregates. Yes, you can publish a link to your most recent episode, but you also need to engage with your followers and offer other intriguing content. You need to keep an eye on reviews, messages, or even Facebook Ads comments.

Using audiograms is one of our favorite strategies for piquing listener curiosity in podcast series and teasing upcoming content. A text-based podcast clip is far less attractive than an audiogram, which is a miniature or a short explainer video.

Additionally, you should tailor your posts to each social networking platform and use best social media management software solutions. 

The audiograms we just discussed are effective on Facebook and Instagram but definitely wouldn't be closed as enjoyable on Twitter.

The growth of the community is excellent for podcast growth. Finding similar groups that you can engage in can be a fantastic strategy for podcast marketing, in addition to developing your own community.

Make a list of the communities you're already a part of, including any Facebook groups, Slack channels, offline groups, etc. Then, publish your podcast episodes in the forums that may potentially contain members of your podcast's target audience.

Few places to connect with communities:

You have it now! This podcast marketing guide will assist you in turning your fledgling podcast into a must-listen. It's crucial to keep in mind that the marketing of podcasts is a test-tweak-analyze procedure. Before implementing more ideas, try out one or two of the podcast marketing techniques from our collection and pay more attention to how they perform. You'll soon have a successful podcast that expands the audience for your business and improves your financial situation.