Five Ways to Grow Your Podcast Audience

How To Grow Your Podcast Audience

There are more than 800,000 podcasts and people spend roughly 16 hours listening to podcasts per week. If you have a podcast, how can you possibly compete? We share five simple ways you can market your podcast and keep those listeners coming back for more.

1.Improve your discoverability on Apple

There are multiple podcast directories but arguably, the most important one is Apple (for now). Avoid categorizing your podcasts into an overcrowded category such as Business, Society & Culture, or Health, three of the most popular categories on Apple. 

If you look at the top podcasts on the Society & Culture charts in the United States and Canada, you’ll see recognizable names like Freakonomics and Brene Brown - podcasts that are really hard to rank against. 

Select subcategories that are less popular so you actually have a chance of charting. Instead of selecting Society & Culture as your main category - how about Self Improvement, How To, or Personal Journals? You’ll also be listed under the main category of whatever you select as your subcategory. You can change your category as often as you want, so don't worry about sticking with one for life.

For a full list of Apple categories and subcategories, click here.


2. Market to attention spans

Retain more listeners by creating an episode your audience will love listening to -- to the very end. It’s more important than ever to shorten your episode and market to attention spans instead of trying to be Joe Rogan or Tim Feriss with a 2 hour plus episode.

Attention is the asset. A listener’s attention is valuable - respect it and avoid the banter and chitchat. Become familiar with the term “insights per minute”, the key metric that a16z uses to measure value on its popular podcast.

Remember, people tend to listen to podcasts during their commute time. If the average commute time is 26 minutes, aim for a 30-minute episode or less to improve listener engagement and content retention. Would you rather produce a 30-minute episode that results in a 100% consumption rate from your listeners, or a 1-hour episode that only achieves a 50% listen-through rate? 

I jump for joy everytime I see a podcast episode that is less than 30-minutes long. Around the 20-minute mark? You’ve stolen my heart. Check out From Founder to CEO, Divine Love Frequency, and The Entrepreneurs for short, yet succinct episodes.


3. Get the greenlight from your guests

The easiest way to convince your guests to share their episode on their channels is to make it as easy as possible. Don’t give them more work to do. Create a ‘Podcast Guest Package’ that contains everything they need to effortlessly post to their own accounts, including:

  • Written social media posts customized by platform. If you write a few different blurbs for each platform, gently suggest that they schedule a few posts throughout the week. Podcast episodes grow in virality, so the more often your guest can share the episode, the more eyes and ears it will get. The Ikonns podcast is a great example of how you can extend the life of just one episode over a whole week through different types of content and posts.

  • Graphics that include the name of your podcast. The world loves quotes so pick out the best quotables from the episode and create graphics from those. Check out the quotes shared on social media from the podcast Meditative Story.

  • Video clips or audiograms (we love Headliner!). The ThinkSpace podcast does a great job of sharing curated audio clips throughout their feed.

If possible, get approval from your guests on the final audio recording, show notes, and assets before they are publicly shared: guests want to share something that they can stand behind! Guests won’t want to share an episode with their entire network if they don’t like how they are depicted or how they look.


4. Create a trailer

Logistically speaking, Apple Podcasts will “pin” your trailer to the top of your podcast page.

Ensuring you have the perfect trailer will help people make the decision whether or not to commit to your podcast. Trailers are the key to securing someone’s attention (just think of TV and movie trailers). Tease the best parts of your show so that they become intrigued, start listening, and hit subscribe.

The music in your trailer should be on-brand and the intro should be succinct, to-the-point, and tell people exactly what the podcast will be about. Trailers should be no more than one minute. We’ve seen some trailers in the three to five minute mark - but that’s risky as it’s unlikely that people will listen to the entirety of anything longer than one minute. Listen to the trailers from Saje Wellness’s Well Now and ThinkSpace, for some inspiration.


5. Invest in show notes (because SEO is sexy)

Show notes are an overlooked part of podcasts. They help you build website traffic, grow your email list, become indexable on Google, and re-purpose the audio content.

Dropping a line in your episode such as “we’ll link to that resource in our show notes” or “visit our show notes to learn more about XYZ topic” is a way to convince listeners to click on your website link in the show description. Building website traffic will help you generate leads and build your email list so you can start to own the listener data from your podcast. 

Plus, SEO is underrated. By creating a show notes blog post for every episode, Google will start to index the content from your podcast. Lastly, some people may not be able to, or want to, listen to a podcast - but they’ll happily read written content at their own pace. Offering alternative forms of consuming the content from your podcast is valuable and show notes is one way to do that.

For good examples of show notes, check out:

Do you have any questions? Contact us and let us know. Interested in one-on-one podcast advisory? Check out our services and client testimonials here.

PodcastsAlice Kopodcasts, audience growth, marketingComment