If Nobody Hears Your Podcast, Does it Make a Sound?
If only conceptualising, developing, recording, editing, and publishing your podcast was all it took to make it a success. The truth is that even with all that work, listeners aren’t guaranteed.
As part of your podcast planning, it’s important to set realistic targets for your potential audience size. Joe Rogan might get 11 million listeners per episode, but be in the top 1% of podcasts you ‘only’ require 5,000. Benchmarking’s cool, and all, but there’s not much point in chasing listeners that aren’t relevant to your communication goals. 100 loyal, well segmented listeners to your industry newswire podcast might be more valuable to you than 10,000 casual listeners to a chat podcast that don’t develop any affinity to your brand. Considering the part your podcast plays in your wider marketing communications plan is crucial when apportioning both time and financial resources to growing your listenership — with that in mind, let’s look at some of the key ways you can make sure the right people find you.
Free and Organic Growth
You might have heard of promotional tactics being split into ‘earned’, ‘owned’, and ‘paid’. Whilst each has a place depending on the tactical implementation of your goals, the great thing about earned, or organic, reach is that it has a fixed cost and an almost limitless value ceiling. Organic growth requires investment, but a focus on organic growth, especially when budgets are tight, is the gift that keeps on giving. Of course, organic reach depends on your audience’s good will — so the quality of your podcast is always the first priority…
Word of Mouth
Over half of podcast listeners find new podcasts to listen to from word of mouth recommendation. It might seem like beyond making the best podcast you can this is out of control, but there are things you can do to influence recommendations! We’ve seen case studies proving that the old faithful ‘remember to like and subscribe’ request on YouTube and TikTok videos does actually increase the like and subscribe rates by around three times from videos that are otherwise like-for-like in terms of length, content, and engagement… asking people to do things works, and it’s as simple as remembering to ask (without bombarding) your audience to consider sharing your podcast with friends they think will enjoy it too.
Social Media
Your own social media sits inside the owned segment of your promotional tactics, but your reach is very much earned. Building a following on social media goes hand in hand with a podcast, as the podcast itself can generate an entire calendar’s worth of content to share on your channels in clips, quotes, and soundbites.
Just like with word of mouth, your secondary social reach — that which is shared by your primary audience to their audiences — can be influenced positively by simply asking for the behaviour you want to see: sharing!
Networking
It’s easy to get caught up in numbers with digital marketing, but for many businesses podcast success isn’t defined in millions but hundreds (or even tens). Simply mentioning you have a podcast when networking with someone in your target audience (or who you share a target audience with) can be very powerful, and taking a minute to whip out your phones so you can show them the podcast playback devices that they already have built in and talk about how your podcast helps you can be an inspiring way to demonstrate expertise that can lead to very fruitful conversations (one of the many hidden benefits of podcasting).
Guesting
Networking amongst other podcast creators is a great way to share and expand audiences — often with a quid pro quo style guest arrangement or at least a recommendation. Most valuable are the types of podcast that are related to your niche without being directly ‘competing’ as they have a lot of crossover, but with the time efficient nature of podcasting it’s often worth the effort to make links with less immediately obvious kinds. For instance, if you’re a boutique life insurance firm with a podcast about far fetched ways people have kicked the bucket throughout history you have the opportunity to talk about everything from the ins and outs of life insurance on a financial podcast, some of the weirder stories you’ve covered on a history podcast, or even how thinking outside the box has helped you reach your audience on a marketing podcast. Just as you’ll be if you have an interview format podcast, other podcasts are always on the lookout for guests!
Traded Ad Spots
Ad reads are an accepted part of podcasting, and they can get expensive. Many podcasters will be open to a quid pro quo trade of ad reads to maximise the value of their podcast while minimising costs — especially when podcasts are smaller and less likely to be primary targets for more lucrative advertising campaigns. In fact, even when larger it’s not uncommon for podcasts of a similar size to utilise this trading tactic to good effect, and it’s a great way to grow together. Just as with guesting, try to identify podcasts that don’t necessarily compete directly but with whom there is a valuable enough intersection in the Venn diagram of your target audiences.
Integrate Your Marcoms
Make sure you’re promoting your podcast on all your owned promotions. Brochures, business cards, mailing lists, telephone hold messages — and it should go without saying your website — are all prime places to make your audience aware of your podcast. The concept of increasing the number of touch points between your audience and brand to maximise your audience’s consideration time of you should be second nature as an experienced marketer, and so making sure your existing audience is as aware of your podcast as your podcast makes your audience aware of you is a no-brainer!
Paid Promotions
When investing time and financial resources into your podcast, it tends to be sensible to maximise its reach with an investment into the promotion of it too. It’s wise not to ignore the power of free and organic promotional tactics of the earned and owned variety, but — especially when starting out and definitely if you’re kickstarting an entire digital identity from the ground up — paid promotions can reach places owned and earned can’t, often in greater volume.
Captive Advertising
We’ve seen that 42% of podcast listeners listen while commuting. While for many people commuting means their car, for many it means public transport: trains, buses, subways, taxis (boats?!). A compelling advertisement presented to a potential listener while there’s little stopping them from following a call to action to give you a try can be a fantastic use of advertising spend.
Dynamic Podcast Advertising
Despite the ‘post privacy’ age heralded in during the late 2010s being somewhat rolled back by legislations and technologies limiting user tracking over the past couple of years, there’s no getting around the fact that at the very least the terms of service we sign up to when we use podcasting apps expose our listening habits, location, demographics and more to those services. Dynamic podcast advertising is one of the more benign ways this data can be capitalised upon, and it allows us as advertisers to target the people most likely to be receptive to our adverts and then allow the platform to serve the ad efficiently. Looking for 25-40 year old males in the UK? Dynamic advertising means you needn’t worry about wasting CPM on 70 year old women in Spain. It works best when used at scale, as it’s most effective when a listener hears your ad multiple times, but dynamic ads can be powerful with the right budget and creative.
Sponsorship and Host Ad Reads
Hopefully sponsorship isn’t a foreign concept in general — but sponsoring a podcast with your own podcast could be a brilliant way to increase your listenership and generate good will at the same time. Especially if you’re a larger organisation just getting started with your podcast, you might find it makes sense to approach multiple smaller, but established, podcasts with an offer to sponsor them. This will not only have the effect of giving you co-opted credibility to the smaller podcasts’ dedicated listener bases, but your support will also generate good will in communities that might otherwise be averse to a larger entity barging into their space.
Host ad reads sit somewhere between dynamic ads and sponsorship. On one hand, they don’t carry quite the same amount of implied trustworthiness as a sponsorship, but on the other they are significantly more personal than dynamic ad insertions. Host ad reads can be delivered in a couple of different forms: one way is for a read to be inserted post-recording, similarly to a dynamic ad insert but with the benefit of you knowing exactly which podcast will be broadcasting your ad. The other method involves a host ad read being included as part of the podcast itself, ensuring that your ad stays on that podcast forever: potentially very valuable if there’s an evergreen nature to the podcast (see What Type of Podcast is Right for You? for more ideas on podcast format), so there’s a bit of a gamble involved in the price you pay now versus what that ad could be worth in future.
Paid Social
Paid social goes hand in hand with your organic efforts. Boosting posts on platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook will give reach that, if done well, will convert into an earned audience and bolster your organic activity potential. There’s more to paid social advertising for podcasting than simply boosting a post, though, and targeting, retargeting, integration with other tactics can really help to maximise the value of your efforts.
The Bottom Line
Don’t let your podcast fade into obscurity before it’s had a chance to flourish! A well promoted but boring mess of a podcast will never catch on, but by the same token a great podcast that nobody hears about is only going to disappoint you and leave your goals on the horizon.
At Remote-CTRL we often work with our clients on both sides of this fence: we help figure out the type of podcast that’s right for them, take care of the production process, and advise and manage the promotional aspect to make sure that they’re not thinking of a podcast as a cost, but a value adding marketing communications tactic — or in some cases standalone product. Why not get in touch and see what we can do for you?
