Podcasting is a popular and powerful way to share your content with your audience. But how can you make sure that your podcast reaches the right people, at the right time, and in the right format? In this article, you will learn some effective strategies to distribute your content through podcasting, and boost your engagement, reach, and authority.
Before you create and distribute your podcast, you need to understand who your audience is, what they want, and how they consume podcasts. You can use tools like surveys, analytics, and social media to research your target market, their preferences, and their behavior. This will help you tailor your podcast content, style, tone, and frequency to match their needs and expectations.
Know your audience inside out, and that's saying something. The initial act to effectively distribute content on a virtual platform is conducting research through surveys. Get the customer's demographics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, education level, marital status, and location, to understand their journey better. Suppose you fail to target the right consumer, especially in a digital audio platform like podcasts. In that case, your potential customers will be thrown off balance, wondering whether your content is really for them or not. By doing comprehensive research, polls, and with the help of marketing tools, you can get the hang of the platform your target audience spends most of their time on.
Once you have your podcast content ready, you need to decide where and how to distribute it. There are many platforms and directories that can help you host, promote, and distribute your podcast, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and more. You should choose the platforms that best suit your audience, your goals, and your budget. You should also optimize your podcast title, description, cover art, and tags for each platform, to improve your visibility and discoverability.
Your website is a valuable asset for distributing your podcast content. You can create a dedicated page or section for your podcast, where you can embed your episodes, show notes, transcripts, and links to other platforms. You can also use your blog, newsletter, and landing pages to feature your podcast content, and drive traffic and conversions. You should also make sure that your website is mobile-friendly, fast-loading, and SEO-optimized, to enhance your user experience and ranking.
Social media is another powerful channel for distributing your podcast content. You can use social media to share your podcast episodes, teasers, clips, quotes, and behind-the-scenes content, and generate buzz and engagement. You can also use social media to interact with your listeners, solicit feedback, answer questions, and build a community around your podcast. You should also encourage your listeners to share your podcast content with their networks, and use hashtags, mentions, and tags to expand your reach.
? Try and utilise social media to increase UGC around your podcast so that the platform’s algorithm picks it up and shares it organically with more people with similar interests. ? Listen to your audience about their likes and dislikes in your podcast. Conduct engaging Story campaigns in your social media account. Examples : use Questions sticker / Poll options / vote for this or that, etc. ? When you create content with the feedback received from your audience / followers, make sure to thank them and tell them their feedback was most useful - so in future they’ll help you again. Also it’s wonderful when followers feel involved and inclusive and helpful.
Podcasting is a versatile and creative medium that allows you to experiment with different formats and styles of content. You can try different lengths, frequencies, formats, and topics for your podcast episodes, and see what works best for your audience and your goals. You can also repurpose your podcast content into other formats, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, ebooks, and more, and distribute them across multiple channels. This will help you diversify your content portfolio, and attract and retain more listeners.
There are many ways where podcast content can be repurposed into many different formats, for different platforms. There will always be punchy lines that we can pick up and edit into bit-sized content for social media to get the audience's attention and direct them to listen to the full recording. By experimenting with various formats and platforms, we can also leverage on the strengths and audience on various platforms to expand the reach and our audience pool. No one person is active on all platforms, but with a diverse outreach, efforts to produce the podcast can be maximised to achieve the desired results..
Finally, you need to measure and analyze the results of your podcast distribution efforts. You need to track and evaluate metrics such as downloads, listens, subscribers, ratings, reviews, shares, comments, and conversions. You need to use tools like analytics, dashboards, and feedback forms to collect and visualize your data. You need to use your insights to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and adjust your podcast distribution strategy accordingly.