The #1 Principle Pro Podcasters Leverage to Grow Their Audience

As podcasters, we know you’re always looking for ways to grow your audience. But podcasts (and audio content in general) offer unique challenges when it comes to reaching your listeners in an effective way. It can be confusing and tricky to wade through the ins and outs of podcast marketing and growth, especially if you’re new to the podcasting world. That’s why we want to share the #1 principle that pro podcasters leverage to grow their audience… …this one thing distinguishes between the amateur and the professional.

The #1 Principle Pro Podcasters Leverage to Grow Their Audience

To start, we need to make an important distinction between hosting your core content versus marketing it. Many podcasters, especially beginners, tend to equate these concepts, or at least consider them closely linked. But they couldn’t be more different.

Hosting Your Core Content

No matter what type of audio content you’re creating, you have to host that content somewhere. If you’re a musician, you’ll host your music somewhere like TuneCore, DistroKid, or CD Baby so that it can be distributed to sales/streaming platforms like Apple, Spotify, and Amazon. If you’re a speaker or an author, hosting your core content looks like putting your books or speeches on Amazon, YouTube, Audible, etc.  If you’re a radio host or part of a corporate media team, your internal servers and website database is where all of your shows will live, along with potentially a podcast or YouTube channel.  And if you’re a podcaster, hosting your content consists of recording episodes and uploading them to a hosting platform, whether it be free like Anchor by Spotify, Youtube, and SoundCloud, or paid like Libsyn, PodBean, or Captivate.fm. Your hosting platform of choice is where your core episodes will be hosted, streamed, and live permanently.

Marketing Your Core Content

It’s common to think that marketing your podcast basically boils down to taking the link to wherever your podcast is hosted and sharing it across social media. Or maybe even distributing it to Apple, Google, and Spotify is enough for many beginning podcasters to feel they are doing enough to get the word out about their new podcast. But that’s not the most effective and impactful way to market your podcast. In fact, this is where we get to the #1 principle that pro podcasters leverage to grow their audience. Pro podcasters understand that, in order to grow your listener base, you can’t just upload your content and hope for the best. You have to actively market it.  The professional also knows that simply distributing their RSS Feed or sharing the link to their hosted podcast can’t be the end of their marketing efforts.

How to Market Your Podcast Successfully

So how do pro podcasters efficiently market their podcast in a way that can substantially grow their audience? They understand that new potential listeners and even loyal listeners need a reason to invest the time to listen to their latest episode. After all, podcasts generally consist of long-form content; and though there are many avid podcast enthusiasts out there, people still value their time. In fact, the popularity of podcasts has ridden on this time-saving feature that you can listen while you do something else. A tried and true practice to attract new listeners is to create an intro explaining what your podcast is all about and who the listeners are, but as your listener base grows this becomes tedious and largely skipped. Then the question becomes, “What is this episode about and why should I listen?” So, what many pro podcasters are doing is sharing highlights and interesting clips from their latest episodes. And even their entire backlog of content.  These podcast “teasers” serve to give listeners a quick glimpse into the value they’ll receive from each podcast episode. And if that fifteen-second, thirty-second, 1-minute or more clip sparks their interest, they could decide to listen to the whole episode.  A popular US podcaster, Joe Rogan, even has an entire Youtube channel of just clips of his sometimes two-hour-plus episodes that are hosted on Spotify, which illustrates this principle of creating interest on social media to drive listeners to your core content. To create their own engaging video teaser clips from just their podcast audio, podcasters are combining audio, images, and text to better engage their listeners. And they optimize these clips to their target audience by uploading them natively to the social media platforms themselves where all the attention already exists. <iframe src=”https://assets.pinterest.com/ext/embed.html?id=662029213976173905″ height=”520″ width=”236″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe> Wavve is an audio marketing tool that allows you to turn your podcast (or any other audio content) into an engaging animated video for sharing on any social media feed. With Wavve, you can find the perfect clips from your podcast and turn them into social videos (just like the one above) that will drive more fans and followers to your show.

Do you want to grow your podcast audience?

Give Wavve a try! You can create a custom-branded animated video for free today.