“We are all salesmen every day of our lives. We are selling our ideas, our plans, our enthusiasms to those with whom we come in contact.” – Charles M. Schwab

What have you done to sell yourself today? 

One of the biggest mistakes podcasters, especially new podcasters, is that they spend all their time, energy, and focus on creating a whizz bang podcast, and no time promoting it. This is a recipe for failure. 

The simple fact is, that to succeed as a podcaster, you need to do more than simply create amazing content that your listeners will want to devour. You need to need to get that stellar content in front of potential listeners all the time. 

Also known as the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. If we apply this rule to podcasting, the 20% of the time that you focus on marketing that excellent show you’ve got in the can, will yield 80% of your listenership and sales.

That’s why it’s so important podcast creators don’t skip the marketing step. It’d be a shame to spend 80% of your time creating a fantastic podcast episode just to have it fall on deaf ears.

Let’s look at 3 steps to effectively market your podcast. 

1. Know Your Audience

Intimately knowing your audience is so vital a part of your podcast journey that it’s shocking that it can be overlooked. And yet it so often is. But this is the step that separates amateur podcasters from professionals. 

Remember, a successful podcast is all about building a close relationship with your listeners. They’re inviting you into the space between their ears. 

How are you supposed to build a relationship and tailor a message if you don’t have a crystal clear vision of who you’re talking to on the other side of the microphone?

You can’t just assume that because you’re interested in a subject, your audience is going to be as well.

The “Customer Avatar” is going to be your saving grace here. Start with a general idea in your head of who you think will be tuning in to hear your voice. Then get specific.

Get really specific. Give the character a name. Where do they live? What language do they speak? Did they go to college? Where do they work? Do they listen to NPR? Do they call their mom every week?

What are their pain points? Their biggest hurdles in life? What websites do they visit daily? Where do they get their news? Do they go to church? Do they vote?

What other podcasts are they listening to?

Once you’ve got a really specific idea of who your listener is, you can figure out where they hang out and how to get in front of them. The more specific you are, the better chance you are going to find a more receptive and engaged audience. 

Once you know exactly who your audience is, what is the next promotional step?

2. Enlist Your Competition

Podcasts are somewhat unique in the content creation world in that your competition is more likely to work with you collaboratively than in most other content mediums. Sure, you are still competing for the same set of ears just the same as a blogger is competing for the same set of eyeballs, but the traits of podcast consumers writ large differ in useful ways.

First off, podcast consumers tend to be voracious consumers. On average they listen to more podcasts and they listen more often.

They also buy products or adopt ideas with higher frequency. That means that there is just more pie to go around between podcast creators. So being a guest on their podcast or having them as a guest on yours doesn’t take anything away from either. 

Instead the two of you have the opportunity to be more than the sum of the parts and actually reinforce that buying instinct in the listener. 

Research with Listen Notes

Since you’ve already started doing market research on your key demographic in Step 1, you can expand on that work here in Step 2. Fire up Listen Notes and start finding podcasts that are similar to yours.

Reach out to the hosts or producers of those shows. Twitter and LinkedIn are excellent social media channels to connect with the decision makers for the podcasts you want to be on.

Create a one sheet media summary that distills your experience, expertise, and benefit as a guest. Then start firing off emails and direct messages to your prospects. Be consistent here. Prospecting takes time to pay off, so you have to keep nurturing the seed.

Start on the smaller size and work your way up to audiences that are larger than your own. You want to start casting that wider net and leveraging increasingly larger guest reach. 

Think about what you would say about your podcast that would be of benefit to someone else’s audience. Remember, you want to push your reach just a bit further. You don’t want to have the exact same audience. Then you’re just preaching the choir and that’s not growth. That’s an echo chamber.

So how do you tweak your message? Through a marketing concept called “splintering.”

3. Splintering Your Content

Splintering is a concept from content marketing that leverages a single piece of content and turns it into lots of smaller pieces of content that can be spread around.

Our old friend the 80/20 rule pops up here as well. 

If you have a great episode on why Red Delicious apples are the best apples in all of creation (spoiler: they aren’t and if you think they are, you’re a monster), then you want to think of how you can take 80% of that message, add 20% new content and create a blog post, infographic, YouTube video, etc. that can get that content out to new consumers.

Maybe you can take your apple message and get it out to home gardener channels. Or a baking show audience might benefit from knowing about the growing conditions of the red delicious apple. Maybe you could go give your apple expertise to a homesteader / prepper audience.

Keep an open mind and broaden your horizons. You never completely know what rabbit hole someone will jump down if you give them the opportunity.

Basically take your content and think of all the subsections that might stand on their own or be of interest to related audiences. 

The trick here is not to reinvent the entire wheel. You want to work smarter on the 20% and live off that 80% foundation. 

Conclusion

Creating a great podcast episode is just one small step in having a successful podcast. Great content is certainly a necessary condition, but you can see pretty quickly that if you can’t get your message in front of listeners, you aren’t going to get where you want to go.

Podcasting is all about establishing a rapport with the audience. If you can keep that in the back of your mind whenever you are working on your podcast then you are more likely to act authentically and build trust with your listenership.

A good host doesn’t just talk at their intended audience. No, a good host fosters a sense of belonging and community within a listener base. They contribute to the conversation and give more than they get.

That’s how a great podcast host puts the “Pro” in promotion.

Do you know exactly who your listeners are? Grab our free Listener Avatar Worksheet to put the flesh on your ideal listener’s bones.

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