Top 5 Podcast Marketing Strategies For More Downloads & Subscribers

You’ve seen these on my Instagram feed, the little squares and IGTV clips that have the waveform bouncing around? These are SO handy to catch people’s attention as they’re scrolling through their feeds! Just a little bit of movement without a lot of effort on their part – because let’s be real, only 9/10 people are actually watching video with sound on! Which brings me to the most crucial element of this strategy, which is to include captions. You can automate this with an app called Headliner (we all know how much I love Headliner!), it will transcribe your audio and animate it for you! You just add the images, colours and fonts, and you’re good to go! SO EASY.

One of the easier podcast marketing strategies, asking your audience to rate review and subscribe takes up little to no time! Not only are you going to get social proof, people are going to LOOOOOVE hearing it when you read their reviews out loud on your podcast! It’s such a powerful way to create a connection with your listeners, and to let them know that you’re paying attention to them and appreciate them. Always ask them to rate, review and subscribe at the end of each episode. I like to add this to my outro!

This can be used for any type of podcast! We use it on my new comedy podcast “Ya Gotta Laugh, An Improv Podcast” (with co-host Alicia Carrick) to generate suggestions for our improv sets, but this is one of the podcast marketing strategies that can be used for any type of business podcast that is working on bringing in new clients. By asking your listeners what kind of advice they need, you can actively create content that is tailored to them, which will deepen that trust and connection they feel to with you when they listen to your podcast. Plus, again, they will LOVE hearing you read out their letters on your show, and talking directly to them! It’s golden!

Without fail you should absolutely have a website where you can direct people. It’s not enough to just have your podcast up on Buzzsprout or SoundCloud, and there are so many resources to build websites now that it’s a no brainer!

Here’s why you want to have a blog post for each episode with the embedded player:

• You’ll direct traffic to your website which means eyes on your products/services/email signups
• More traffic on your site means Google will just LOOOOVE your site.
• With the embedded player at the top, you’ll incentivize people to play the podcast directly on your site, which means they’ll stay on your site longer!
• Again, Google LOVES when people stick around for a while on websites, this tells Google that there’s valuable info on the page and it should rank higher.
• When new listeners search for your podcast, they will find it MUCH easier than if they had to scramble through a bunch of random podcast directory links.

By far, this is the easiest of the 5 podcast marketing strategies I’ll be sharing today. This is such a simple and hassle free way to keep your audience engaged! Plus, if you do it right you only need to do it once! Set up an RSS email campaign in the email provider of your choice (here’s how to do it with Mailchimp) and encourage people to subscribe to your list to get new episodes directly to their inboxes. Wait what? List building without a bunch of grunt work? (Actually, do the grunt work, get Sara Vartanian’s “The List Playbook” because it is magnificent, but you really don’t have to do it with this particular type of email!).