Quick Note: Some of the links in this blog may be affiliate links which will give us a small commission fee (at no extra cost to you).
Learn the best tactics and tools to market your podcast in 2025
Quick Note: Some of the links in this blog may be affiliate links which will give us a small commission fee (at no extra cost to you).
Patience is the key to podcast marketing. Every podcast started somewhere, and most of the ones that see immediate success are usually hosted by someone that already has a significant following.
Everyone wants to have a massive platform for their podcast, naturally. Getting there is the challenge. So, what are the best ways to promote your podcast? This blog offers some suggestions.
Success Is Different for Every Podcast
Before you can craft a custom strategy for podcast marketing, you have to define what success means for your podcast.
Consider this example: If you are a super-famous celebrity, then getting only 15,000 listens of the first episode would be concerning. But if you are someone totally obscure to the wider culture but you manage to get 15,000 listens on your first podcast episode, then that would be a major success story.
No matter who you are, however, measuring success in podcasting does involve looking at certain data points, which are on a list below.
Measuring a Podcast’s Success
Everyone has different goals for starting a podcast; most people have more than one.
Start by defining goals because it can influence your marketing decisions. Who do you want to hear your podcast? If it is titans of industry, then maybe do not worry so much about TikTok marketing and pour more energy into LinkedIn marketing.
If the goal for your podcast is to build brand awareness and build community, focus on engagement (reviews and comments on social media and YouTube).
If you are optimizing the podcast for monetization, then the number of downloads has a direct correlation to the amount of money you can make, based on the current cost per thousand (C.P.M.) listeners of running ads.
Stay Patient and Positive
The truth is, we see so many people start podcasts that run for a season or less then drop off the map because they don’t see immediate R.O.I. or growth.
Growth and success of a podcast rarely happens overnight. If you want your podcast to make an impact, you have to be dedicated to creating high-quality content and adding value.
Again, patience. And if you do end up having success down the line, guess what? Those listens on the initial podcast episodes may go up. Remember this: the amount of listens that you get at first is not destiny.
Below are some actionable ways for you to achieve your marketing goals, but first let’s start with a basic question: what is content marketing?
What Is Content Marketing, and How Does It Help?
Content marketing can include educating, entertaining, inspiring, or simply talking with your audience.
In other words, it is giving away free content for the audience to raise awareness for a brand, products, or services. Podcasts are a form of content marketing.
Key Strategies for Podcast Marketing
Distribution
There are 50+ results in the app store after a search for “podcast apps.” But the majority of listening happens on a few major platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and PocketCasts.
A hosting platform can automatically push the podcast to a lot of these directories. However, some require that you directly submit a podcast RSS feed.
We recommend optimizing podcast growth by putting episodes on as many platforms as possible, including YouTube.
Podcasting on YouTube
In addition to posting a show on all of the major (and minor) podcast directories, we recommend putting your podcast on YouTube because it opens the doors to over two billion monthly users.
However, uploading a “video” of a podcast with just a static image is not an effective way to promote your podcast.
More and more podcasters are adopting the simple format of recording a few simple static shots of the podcast. Switching between camera angles keeps things visually stimulating, hence the use of multiple camera angles.
YouTube will always favor dynamic content over static images. Even adding small .gif-like moving elements to an otherwise static background is an easy way to do this.
And, looking ahead into 2025 and beyond, the boom of generative A.I. means that you will be able to easily make looping videos out of static images.
Learn more about how to make a video podcast here.
Getting on the Featured Pages
This is the million-dollar question that we seem to get asked every day: how do I get on platforms’ “new and noteworthy” pages? The front page of Apple Podcasts is treasured real estate, for good reason: Apple has historically cornered the podcast market.
That’s largely because most people listen on their smartphones, and most people’s smartphones are iPhones.
The first thing to acknowledge is that nobody has a 100% definitive plan to offer for how to get featured by Apple. However, several possible metrics used by Apple’s algorithm determine what gets shared:
In addition, it has become common knowledge that you only can be featured in New & Noteworthy for the first eight weeks after the podcast’s launch.
Because of the time window and the algorithm factors, there are a number of common strategies that people use to boost their potential.
Strategies to Get Featured
The ultimate goal should be to serve your audience with high-quality content – and that will result in growth in downloads, subscribers, five-star ratings, rave reviews, and whatever else gets you noticed by Apple’s algorithm.
Landing on New and Noteworthy would be a huge win for anyone, but worth noting is that Apple is no longer the only major platform to focus on.
Spotify’s podcast homepage and YouTube’s array of thumbnails are two other significant places for audiences to discover podcasts.
This leads to the next imperative: optimizing podcast content for podcast directories.
Get the Algorithm’s Attention with Episode Titles and Descriptions
S.E.O (search-engine optimization) is integral to our internal marketing strategy as a company.
Content marketing paired with S.E.O. can build a large audience and drive growth.
Just as you can optimize website content for Google or videos for YouTube, you can optimize a podcast for better performance on the podcast directories.
All it takes is staying sensitive to the ways of the algorithm, and paying attention to what that algorithm rewards. Trust us, that is actually harder than it sounds.
How to Write Better Podcast Episode Titles and Descriptions
A good episode description should grip the reader and explain what the episode is about in the first sentence.
But it should also be pretty long. A recent study conducted by Dan Misener of Pacific Content reveals that “Half of all podcasts use less than 163 of the 4,000 characters available.”
This seems to be a huge waste of the potential for podcast apps, Google, and all search engines to see what a podcast episode is about. Take episode descriptions up a notch by making them longer.
Adding Show Notes to Episode Descriptions
One simple way would be to post show notes within the podcast description.
One of the main appeals for show notes is pushing listeners to a website that tracks their visit, asks for an email to grow the newsletter, and send them to social media accounts. In other words, getting a listener to a deeper level of engagement.
Try writing a separate long-form episode description or simply exclude part of the show notes to push listeners to the website.
Properly Formatting Episode Descriptions
Properly format episode descriptions using basic HTML.
An episode description may look good in a podcast host (e.g., Buzzsprout), but that doesn’t mean that it will look good on an iPhone X in Apple Podcasts.
For this reason, make sure to format the episode descriptions to fit on each platform.
Episode-Specific Artwork Can Be Helpful
Another way to improve podcast S.E.O. is to create episode-specific podcast art.
Although this is not supported by all podcast directories yet, it is becoming increasingly popular.
Spotify, for example, shows episode-specific artwork in the mobile app. This creates a feeling of “newness” for listeners and increases the clickability of each episode.
With episode-specific art, each episode feels like a new episode rather than just another episode.
Social Media Is a Key Avenue for Growing an Audience
Strategizing for social media can lead to more podcast listeners. Consistent activity on social media, such as posting about the release of new episodes, can be helpful.
To see the value of social media, take a look at these user stats:
Each social platform has its own unspoken rules and expectations, and these are constantly in flux. For this reason, it pays to pay attention to what kind of content performs well on each platform.
Optimizing content between each platform can boost your engagement and impact.
Promote Your Podcast with Resonate Recordings
Partnering with Resonate Recordings means you work with a podcast-production company that can offer you expert advice and even content for promoting your podcast.
Reach out to us today to get started!
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