Guide to Planning and Launching a Podcast

Finally, once you’ve created your podcast you need a comprehensive marketing strategy to ensure that your show reaches its intended audience. Creating a podcast is a great way to build your brand and reach a larger audience, with the potential for great returns. Creating a podcast requires patience, determination and creativity but with a good idea and a solid marketing strategy, you can get your podcast in front of your target audience.

Ultimately, a podcast is only as good as its marketing strategy. To reap the full benefits and create an engaged audience for your podcast, you need to make sure you have a clear and concise marketing plan in place before hitting record. Take the time to consider all angles of your strategy and use all the resources available to you to ensure that your podcast can reach its full potential.

Social Media

As part of your marketing strategy, you need to consider the platforms you’ll be using to promote your podcast. Social media is an obvious choice and allows for organic marketing efforts for free, as well as collaborations and sponsorships for additional exposure and reach. Social media platforms are also a fantastic way of interacting with your audience.

You can utilise these platforms to post a variety of multi-media content, like videos, behind-the-scenes photos, audiograms and quotes from the episodes. This gives your followers an opportunity to participate in the conversation and connect with the content.

Audiograms

As previously mentioned, audiograms are a great asset when advertising your podcast online. They allow you to repurpose clips from each podcast episode, approximately 30-90 seconds, turning them into videos that you can use to advertise your podcast.

Audiograms are effective as they provide an eye-catching and low-level commitment for potential listeners that work to entice the listener.

You can make these yourself through the use of video editing software. Alternatively, you could use a service like Reels or Headliner that streamlines the process for ease of use and will typically have a free option for those making only a few audiograms each month which can be perfect for trialling the service.

Once you've created your audiograms, you can share them on your social media pages and website. This can be an effective way of reaching more potential listeners and encouraging them to subscribe to your podcast.

Encouraging the sharing of these audio snippets can also help to spread the word about your podcast and build its online presence.

Podcast Website

Setting up a bespoke podcast website can initially be time-consuming and expensive, however, the benefits are huge.

Not only do they help with search and discoverability, but a podcast website provides a hub for your podcast. It allows you to provide a variety of additional complimentary resources to support your podcast such as a bio on the hosts, links to episodes on related topics and repurpose episodes as blog posts.

Blog posts in particular are a great way to optimise your podcast for search engines.

These blog posts could also be posted to your LinkedIn, Instagram or other social media accounts to further your discoverability, as well as spark a conversation between you and your listeners and advertise the latest episode.

You can even gate content behind paywalls as a way to monetise your podcast, or behind email sign-ups to help you build a mailing list.

Ad Campaign

You could also launch a targeted advertising campaign to promote your podcast. This could be done on social media platforms or even on a podcasting platform.

Advertising directly to podcast listeners is arguably the most effective form of ad campaign to promote your podcast as the only people who will see your ad are those that are already listening to podcasts.

There are a couple of ways of doing this:

Advertising on homepages

Through podcast platforms like Pocket Casts and Castbox, you can get your podcast advertised on the front page of the website. This means that for the duration of the ad, anyone who visits the podcast platform will see a banner promoting your podcast.

However, this can be very expensive, with some podcast platforms having a minimum investment of around £2500. Also, while a large number of podcast listeners will see the ad, they won't all be your target audience and while they may check out your podcast, they may not stick around.

Advertising through Acast

Another option is to use a podcast advertising platform like Acast which allows you to dynamically play your ad campaign during the ad breaks of other podcasts.

The advantage of this service is that the initial investment is much more approachable, with a minimum spend of £250.

Moreover, whereas advertising on podcast platform homepages casts a wide net, potentially getting you many listens over a short period of time, ads through Acast can be targeted to your desired audience.

You are able to set numerous parameters such as age range and genre of the podcast which will help to place your ad on podcasts with a similar audience, increasing the chances of developing your listenership with people who already listen to similar content.

Lastly, whereas advertising on the homepages of podcast platforms limits you to that platform, this is not an issue when advertising through Acast, you are not restricted to a particular platform as the advert is dynamically added to the podcast, rather than just the podcast player.

Paid Sponsorships

Lastly, you could consider sponsorships. Sponsoring a podcast can be a great way to increase your reach, particularly if you sponsor a podcast with a similar target audience.

This will get your content in front of potential new listeners and also build credibility for your brand through association.

Moreover, if you have your ad read by the host of the sponsored podcast, you are leveraging the trust their audience has in their host, enhancing your chances of successfully attracting new listeners.

While there are many other ways to promote a podcast, the tips above should give you an idea of how to get started. Make sure to define your goals and develop a strategy that works best for you. Through a mix of organic and paid promotion, a comprehensive marketing strategy will ensure that your podcast reaches its intended audience.