How to Expand your Podcast Audience

In our previous post, Are Podcasts Good for Business? we explored how creating a business podcast can increase brand awareness, contribute to lead generation, position your company as a thought leader, and ultimately increase revenue. While a podcast is always a great asset to have, for it to achieve its full business potential, it’s vital to reach the right audience through podcast promotion.

There are a variety of actions you can take to ensure your podcast gets the listener numbers you’re aiming for. Suppose you have fulfilled the fundamental requirements of good production values and engaging content. In that case, you will have built a strong foundation on which to build podcast success, and from this point undertaking the simple tactics below is well worth the time.

Create a podcast trailer

A podcast trailer serves two purposes: to build a buzz around your podcast and act as an easy-to-digest introduction that helps listeners understand you and your content.

It’s crucial that any trailer you create is concise and invites potential listeners to find out more through snapshots of what your podcast has to offer. You might include snippets from the show, an overview of the topics you explore, or spotlight your guests, giving people a great insight into what they have to gain by becoming a regular listener.

Trailers, by their nature, need to be time-efficient, and it’s best to make sure any trailer comes under the two-minute mark (although many podcast creators find that 30 seconds or less is sufficient). Every Internet user has brands, social media platforms, and media outlets competing for their attention, so offering them something bitesize is often an effective way of breaking through the noise.

Remember to pin your trailer to the top of your social media feeds and within podcast platforms such as Apple and Spotify to increase its discoverability.

Draw up a comprehensive social media plan

Regardless of how many followers you have, social media offers fantastic opportunities for free promotion, as well as the option to use their often surprisingly affordable advertising platforms.

As mentioned above, every online space is highly competitive, and great content is a basic expectation of audiences who are used to seeing sophisticated and inventive social media strategies.

Drawing up a comprehensive social media plan rather than winging it can make a big difference to how many people your podcast ultimately reaches and gain you some new followers. Some things you should include are:

• A schedule of all your podcast-related content. How many times do you plan on promoting the podcast a week? On which days will you be releasing episodes? Planning this early on can save confusion later down the line.
• Your captions and imagery for every platform you use. Every social media platform has a different focus and parameters you have to abide by – for example, Twitter favours brevity while Instagram requires excellent imagery and video. Set aside some time to ensure you have eye-catching visuals and engaging captions that reflect your brand’s best.
• A list of the guests you welcomed and influencers you’d like to reach. Make sure you have the social media handles of your guests to hand so you can always tag them in your content and assets (such as imagery and video) they can use to promote the podcast on their channels. You may also want to think about influencers in your space and consider reaching out to them.
• A plan for paid promotion (if you are going to use it). Using social media for paid promotion can help you reach new people, with advanced targeting tools allowing you to place your adverts in front of highly specialised audiences. Creating a paid media strategy can be as simple as “boosting” one of your more successful posts or as complex as a dedicated, A-B tested, long-running campaign with dedicated copy and imagery. It is always worth researching your options.

Utilise the potential of SEO

It’s easy to overlook the importance of SEO for podcasts, but you should be paying just as much attention to your keywords, titles, description, and content to ensure your podcast ranks well. Having the right SEO can also help podcasts appear in platform-specific feature lists (such as iTunes “New and Noteworthy”), which can catapult podcasts to new success.

It is important to consider that podcast SEO has to serve both Google searches and the inbuilt search engines of each podcast directory. It is also advisable to adapt your podcast to a video format (which can be as straightforward as pairing the audio with a still image and adding an animated element such as a waveform) to be uploaded to YouTube – the world’s second-largest search engine. Remember to include keywords in:

• Your podcast’s name and description.
• Each episode’s name and description.

Repurpose your content

Another way you can make the most of your podcast and increase its discoverability amongst listeners is to create dedicated blogs or pages on your website for each episode. While Google’s search algorithm has become increasingly adept at interpreting video content, it can still read text far more easily than audio. This means that it is worth your time to transcribe your podcasts and create written content around them.

There are programs that can transcribe podcasts for you, which leaves you with the less time-consuming task of checking for inaccuracies in spelling and grammar and ensuring that the text is well-formatted. You can also use the content from your episodes to create short audio snippets (perhaps of funny moments or key insights), infographics, or checklists, for use both on social media or as downloadable packages designed to capture more people for your mailing list.

‍It can also help you show the human face behind your brand and podcast by sharing making-of videos and behind-the-scenes insights. With so many podcasts on offer, fostering a greater connection between you and your audience by demonstrating authenticity is a great way to build a loyal audience.

Consider podcast PR

Reaching out to the podcasting community and creating collaborations with those with their own audience can improve your content and grow your listener base. Similarly, engaging a well-known name as a guest can also draw in new fans and make your podcast more newsworthy in industry, local, or even national press.

At Broadcast Revolution, we have the experience and expertise to assist you in podcast creation, video production, influencer marketing, and podcast PR, giving your business podcast the best chance of gaining an engaged and growing listener base. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch today.