Remember if you want to learn more about how to align your podcast strategy with your business goals, visit the resources for companies.
Many people still believe that to distribute a podcast is to put it on the Internet. Spotify and in Apple podcast (Here you can create an Apple account and see some instructions), and since these platforms are massive, one is already in millions of ears. Nothing could be further from the truth. After 6 years doing podcasts, our conclusion is that distributing is equally or more difficult than producing, and consequently, you should have at least the same amount of resources as those spent producing, and by this I mean money, but also time and energy. The question is, how to grow the audience of a podcast?
In this post we're going to tell you everything we've learned about growing audiences for a podcast. We go from the obvious to the less intuitive.
4.1 A podcast is a channel.
When one launches, let's say, an advertising campaign, one launches "with everything", one spends a lot of effort and a lot of money in the "launch", and then, due to the nature of the campaigns, the campaign... is over. A podcast works the other way around. A podcast is not a campaign. A podcast is more like a channel.
What do I mean by this?
Launching a podcast is more like creating a youtube channel, or an account in any social network, and this has two characteristics: (1) the results of the channel will grow progressively and (2) the channel needs to be fed constantly.
Consequently, a podcast is strategic in the medium and long term, which connects to the frequency and enhances the growth of the podcast's audience.
4.2 Frequency
Frequency is king, and it also reigns. Frequency is everything. Every way you look at it, frequency is by far the main determinant of a podcast's success, and the reasons, broadly speaking, are twofold.
First, frequency is key for the platforms' algorithm. That is, a podcast with weekly frequency is more likely to be in the TOP of its category than the same podcast with biweekly frequency.
Second, frequency precedes habit.
It is difficult to measure how loyal a podcast audience is, it is enviable compared to any other channel. However, to achieve that loyalty, we have to turn their listening into a permanent habit and, to build that habit, listeners need a defined frequency. and perseverance.
Once you achieve that, the result is that you have an audience that waits, craves the content and makes it part of their routine. I want us to dimension this: we all have the routine of opening Instagram or YouTube, but we see thousands of content simultaneously, we go in to see what we get. But in the podcast world many listeners do say, "Thursday, 9am, there's a new episode of XYZ and I have to listen to it." Not to mention daily podcasts, which become as commonplace as brushing your teeth.
Finally, if we have the resources and the right mindset, and we know that we are going to comply with a frequency, it is also necessary to have a podcast concept that can live for dozens of episodes. There are shows that due to their concept could only last a certain number of episodes and although some of these series are very successful, it is not exactly the best branding strategy.
As a brand, let's remember: making a podcast is not just a content strategy, it is an effort to open a new channel and, as a channel, it is not efficient to make a lot of efforts so that in a couple of months we lose the audience's rage... I dare to say that it is much better something that starts and iterates, but is maintained over time.
Our numbers with respect to frequency are these:
- – Medium Orange has had 42 shows on the air, of those, the 5 shows with the highest ratings are the ones that for months and even years have maintained the frequency and have always been on the air. Coincidence? I don't think so.
- - When a show has broken its frequency, it falls into a "listening valley" and continues to have downloads but its levels drop. However, when we resume the frequency the audience increases up to 25% or 30%. Again: constancy.
- - Finally, when comparing the audiences of shows with very small marketing impulses and no investment in advertising versus the audiences of shows with big impulses in their launches and even several thousand dollars in advertising, we see that six months later the shows that started small, but steady, have better results. Podcasts are slow-cooked and as I have said several times, the biggest fruits are seen in the medium and long term. Again: perseverance.
4.3 Recommenders
That is, the podcast alone is not going to go out into the world and find its audience in the middle of platforms where the algorithms do not favor us. In this sense, there are many strategies on how to grow the audience of a podcast:
- - If they have other channels with good traffic, such as blogs, YouTube or their networks, they have to talk about the podcast there.. But be careful: it's not like putting a shy message or a lonely post saying: "Hey, we have a podcast". It's about sharing parts of the content, why you're doing the podcast, what's so special about it, who might be interested in it, how to find it and where to listen to it.
- – If you already have listeners, create a bond with them: For example, together with Truora, we are building an incentive plan for the launch of our second season today.
- - Talk to "influencers": I'm not talking about people with Instagram accounts of millions of people, but people who may have some sort of community even if it's small. Tell them about your show, ask for feedback and talk about the possibility of being mentioned in that community.
- - Let's do more blogging with lists or recommendations: not only of our podcasts but of others that we genuinely think are good.
- - Let's cross-promote with other shows: What better way to get to know a new show than a podcaster telling his audience about another podcast they could listen to and the reasons why he is recommending it. Powerful and well done, it's a win-win that we rarely apply, and I wish we did it more often in Latin America.
Here's a tip, don't just think about how to do promos with shows in your category. Someone who listens to a history podcast may very well love a podcast about educational content in technology.
4.4 Content Ecosystems.
What do I mean by that? In the content universe it is common that one ends up looking for what else is good from the same production house. That's why it's common for there to be so much good content in English: because usually whoever launches a podcast has the vision of launching more than one. That said, it doesn't surprise me that a podcast listener in English starts with one and ends up listening to four or five podcasts a day. But in Spanish, things are quite different.
First, it seems that many podcasters do not want to create something beyond the podcast.... The quality of the content, the absence of communities and the illusion that just by uploading it to Spotify or Apple they will have listeners. That is to say: many shows are born with audio, but without a distribution strategy. So, if a novice listener comes to "explore" the app, there is so much regular content that I find it hard to believe that he or she will get hooked on any of it: that's where that listener returns to music or radio, or ends up listening to the two or three podcasts with which he or she "goes to the fixed" and already knows.
So, it's not just that we're not making better brands, it's that by not doing so we're hurting the entire industry that struggles every day to grow the listener pie.
We don't win the game the more pieces of the pie we take, we win it when more new listeners arrive and get hooked on this format that continues to consolidate in Spanish.
4.5 Watch your editorial calendar.
Many times the podcast topics simply "come up", they are the product of topics that the audience has already asked us for and even, for some, the product of an exhaustive research (well, that almost never happens, but it does happen). But what about special dates, are you keeping them in mind?
In my experience, that almost never happens or, if it does, it is very "forced". In an ideal scenario neither should happen.
Not taking into account special dates takes away a huge opportunity to have featured episodes on platforms such as Apple podcast or Spotify and remember that, in a world where there are new podcasts every day, having these spaces of visibility is everything.
Tip: Check your calendar for these important dates (Women's Month, LGBTIQ+ Pride Month, Language Day) and plan RELEVANT episodes for your audience according to what those dates themselves represent.
4.6 Let's build relationships from feedback
There are many levers that depend solely on us as podcast producers. For example, press relations, influencersblogs and so on make perfect sense. Above all, genuinely reaching out to ask them to listen to our content and give us feedback. Lately we've seen very good results by asking for that feedback and listening to it attentively, beyond going directly with a "we made this show you could share" request.
In this aspect, however, the backing of a company or institution always adds a lot: many companies have strong relationships with universities or universities of applied sciences. influencersand it would be easy to make an approach with the new content. This is a very powerful opportunity that is rarely used to generate impact.
4.7 "I mention you, you mention me".
This question is also something that can depend solely on you as producers: see who already has a podcast or a community with which you could promote each other and enrich audiences. In the past, having one podcast mention another was a very natural thing to do in the same audio, but nowadays this kind of promos can happen from more platforms: from a podcast to a TikTok account and vice versa, for example.
Again, the tip to reach them is to get in by sharing the content, asking for feedback and talking about it, rather than coming up with a specific request... What we would call "testing the waters".
And another piece of advice that is not superfluous: no generic messages. If you are serious about collaboration, the minimum is to study and understand the content of the counterpart in order to reach them with a direct and personalized message.
4.8 Behind microphones
Did you know that behind-the-scenes productions of the most successful series and movies have even managed to match their success? That's right, people, we, the consumers, also want to know more about how things are built.
And the truth, as creators 70% or more of the learnings, remain in that behind the scenes... The invitation is to dust them off and bring them to light in the form of (written) content, reelsvideos, live, threads, etc.). Although this does not seem to have a very direct relationship, in the end, it does help to give it much more diffusion and visibility to our podcasts.
Use these strategies, and let me know how they work for you. As I said: they are simple initiatives, but powerful, VERY powerful.