If your podcast promotion strategy consists of a single post announcing your new episode, you’re not going to see much ROI for all of the energy you’ve put into creating that new episode.
As a Podcast Strategist, my goal is to get my clients the most impact possible from their podcast. To do this effectively, the promotion strategy we develop has to include both short-term and long-term components. Today, I’m going to tell you all about my favorite promotion strategies and exactly what I do to promote this podcast. Let’s dive in!
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The difference between short-term and long-term
Short-term promotion strategies are designed to be an immediate “quick win” for your podcast. Instagram is a great example of a platform for short-term promo strategy. You make a post about your new episode, your followers see this immediately, and hopefully you see that convert to podcast downloads. The downside is that after a few days, no one sees your content again. So you have to keep showing up over and over again on the platform to get followers to listen to your podcast.
Alternatively, long-term strategy is a slow build and can take several months before you see significant results from your efforts. My favorite long-term strategy involves SEO. The best way to do this for a podcast is to write a blog post or transcript for each episode for your website that is loaded with popular keywords. This is critical. While Google is smart, it is not able to analyze audio yet. The keywords have to be in written form for Google to find your episode and direct people to your blog post.
The long game
The reason I love SEO so much is because you only have to do the work one time and then it automatically keeps producing results for as long as search engines exist. This is so much more appealing to me than the constant grind of short-term promotion like Instagram. When you put your audio content into writing, the search engines recognize the keywords and they know how and where your content fits in in their search engine. That means that if someone is looking for one of the keywords in your episode, Google will point them to your website.
For this podcast, I write a blog post and I embed a podcast player of the episode into the blog post. That way, whenever someone lands on my post, they can choose which way they prefer to consume the content. When Google directs someone to one of my podcast blog posts, it’s because they have asked Google to search for keywords that I have optimized in my post. I am providing the answer to that question. I am the person that has solved their problem and that converts a cold lead into a warm lead really fast. If you want more tips on how to optimize your SEO, check out this episode from Season 1.
Pinterest for podcasting
The other long-term strategy that I use is Pinterest. I won’t go too deep into Pinterest In this episode, because I already have an episode about this in the last season. In that episode, Pinterest expert Presh Rodgers gave us so many amazing tips on how to drive new listeners from Pinterest to your podcast.
While Pinterest is commonly characterized as a social media platform, it’s actually a visual search engine. Just like Google, it’s all about keywords. Pinterest is also a slow burn where it’ll likely take 6+ months to see any ROI. The upside is that just like Google, once you do the upfront work of optimizing your pins’ keywords, the search engine will continue to drive traffic to your pins forever.
Short-term strategy
At this point, it may sound like I’m not too much of a fan of short-term strategies for podcast promotion, but that’s not actually true. I love the immediate response I see for my downloads from my short-term strategy. It’s an integral part of my overall podcast strategy.
Social media is the most common way to immediately promote your podcast. The key is to find out where your audience lives. For me, that’s Instagram. So every time I have a new episode, I post to my feed, in my stories, and in reels. To get the most eyes on your content from IG, you need to take advantage of all the different content forms available.
While Facebook isn’t my priority because that isn’t where my audience hangs out, I do want to have a presence there. The great thing is that it is extremely easy to repurpose my IG content for FB. It’s actually the exact same content. I encourage you to do this, as well. I also post on LinkedIn from time to time. If you don’t already know, find out where your audience lives and then focus your short-term promo strategy there.
How does email marketing fit in?
Some people say that email is dead but it’s not. Your email list is the only thing you have complete control over and you don’t have to fight against an algorithm. Every person on your list will receive your email, but it’s up to you to make it enticing enough for them to read. This is a huge difference to social media where the majority of your followers won’t even see your post. Take advantage of your email list. Include direct links to your episodes and remind them of old episodes. This is a captive audience.
Where should you focus your efforts?
If you’re just starting a promotional strategy for your podcast, I suggest starting with one form of long-term and one form of short-term strategy. Pinterest only works if you have the content on your website because your pins need to point people somewhere to consume the information. So if you don’t have the capacity to do that yet, start with email marketing and a short-term strategy, like Facebook.
If you feel overwhelmed, please start with only one or two. Build that out well and once you have a solid process in place, you can expand your strategy.
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