You have worked extremely hard to create a new podcast.

The first episode was a blast. There was a ton of entertaining discussion, so the value for the audience is certainly there. You nailed it. Now, you need to get the word out.

Chances are you tried sharing your podcast on social media. Don’t be discouraged if it failed to bring a lot of listeners.

Reason? Podcast promotion is hard.

With almost everyone having a podcast right now, breaking through the noise could be challenging. Unless you have a sizable marketing budget or managed to get a movie star as a guest in the first episode.

If neither option is true, still, there’s no reason to worry. There are many low-cost and effective podcast promotion strategies. In this article, let me walk you through them.

Let’s get the word out and get more people to listen and subscribe!

1. Go Live on Social Media

Social media is one of the first online places where you should distribute your new podcast. It’s a good option, but there’s a small problem. Traditional sharing of posts announcing the event is not a good way to promote a podcast, simply because everybody’s doing it.

Going live with your podcast, on the other hand, is a better idea. According to Facebook, people spend “more than 3x more time” watching a live video compared to a video that has been recorded. This suggests that live videos are more relevant and interesting at the moment; for Facebook’s algorithms, it means live videos should rank higher.

Here’s how to do social media live podcasting right:

  • Build excitement. Write a post to inform the reader when the broadcast goes live
  • Improve the viewing/listening experience. Ensure the best possible video quality (don’t broadcast when the connection is poor, etc.)
  • Broadcast during the best time to maximize engagement. Try to broadcast the podcast during the time when your listeners can actually enjoy it (this excludes business hours, for example).

Important: live social media broadcasting is great but limits your ability to generate leads and monitor engagement. That’s why you should go live once in a while and focus on more quality, pre-recorded podcasts. You can still share them later.

Dive deeper:

2. Use Email Marketing

This podcast promotion tip works for those who have collected at least some emails from their subscribers. The idea is pretty straightforward: share announcements about upcoming podcasts in short, sweet emails to your audience.

Here’s how to do it right.

Step 1: Announce the new Podcast in a Separate Email

Send your subscribers an email and tell them the good news. Here’s an example from the Economist.

Step 2: Promote Podcast Among New Subscribers

As new people join your mailing list, try to share the news with them, too. An email like this one should do the job well.

Make sure to include the links to all platforms where your podcast is available for downloading.

Some reviews from happy listeners is also a huge plus for podcast email marketing. Try to include a small section with a positive testimonial to encourage more people to subscribe.

Step 3: Share New Episodes

The only step left is to raise awareness of the new episodes with timely emails.

There are two ways to go about it: separate emails or sections in newsletters. Here’s how Natalie MacLean, a well-known wine expert, mentions new podcast episodes in her newsletter.

Keep these emails going and measure the performance of the podcast after the email campaigns. Many podcasters say that emails are great for podcast promotion and wish they knew that before launching their projects.

Speaking of that…

3. Use Video Templates or Create Videos

Videos are the most popular content type out there. People prefer it to learn about products, entertain themselves, and get new knowledge.

Absolutely, the insane popularity of video makes it the best candidate for raising awareness of your new podcast and bringing it new listeners/viewers.

Thanks to video creation tools, making videos for podcast promotion has become fairly easy. With Headliner, for example, you can create videos based on templates – GiF-based templates, Instagram Story templates, quote templates, and many more others.

The video templates are really easy to use and suitable for every kind of podcast. Here’s an example called “Space.”

If you’re feeling creative, you can also try creating your own video templates. Headliner’s got a great collection of good-looking visuals to create templates specifically for podcast promotion.

Dive deeper:

4. Describe What the Listeners Could Learn with a Short Blog Article

The most important reason why people choose to listen to podcasts is to learn new things. This was the finding of The Podcast Consumer 2029 survey, where 74 percent of the respondents said they wanted more new information.

So, people are eager to learn new things. While you should definitely consider this fact to come up with better topics for discussion during your podcast, it also has some implications for promotion.

For example, why not write a short but compelling preview-style article for every podcast episode? This way, you can describe what the listeners can learn. In turn this can make them more interested in hitting that Play button.

Many people use this strategy for podcast promotion.

The folks at StarTalk, for example, have a blog on the podcast’s website where they share fairly short – about 400 words or 3 minutes of reading – articles to share the information about each episode. So, one doesn’t have to listen to an entire episode to know the details.

Source: StarTalk Radio

Note the descriptive title, too. Instead of having the name of the episode, it features the topic of the discussion. The topic itself is quite a controversial one, too (college athlete pay debate is real and attracts a lot of attention).

Try writing short articles on your blog, too. It’ll help you with:

  • Helping those who seek new knowledge to know more about your content
  • Make you look more professional
  • Attract some traffic from Google.

Besides, having an announcement-style article to promote a podcast is a good way to convince more people to engage and listen to what you have to say.

One More Thing

Now you know how to promote a podcast from the very first episode. There’s only one thing left, though. It’s the one that only can control: user value. If your podcast is engaging, entertaining, informative, and well-edited, promoting such high-quality content will be easier.

While no one can’t help you with the creative part – but you’ll take care of that by yourself – creating well-edited videos is something you can get some help with.

Here’s a guide to creating awesome podcast videos for those of you without video making and/or film making experience.

AUTHOR BIO

Erica Sunarjo is a freelance writer and digital marketer. She is an expert on online blogging for businesses and currently works at TrustMyPaper and GrabMyEssay. In addition to writing, Erica has also been involved with numerous online businesses as a content advisor and planner.