Excerpt from: Podcasting at Work: 25 Questions to Ask Before Starting

Launching your podcast is always an exciting time, but without a solid promotional strategy, you may struggle to build an audience. We recommend leveraging your existing channels to promote the show and build that base of subscribers. Your email list, social channels, website, and internal channels should all be leveraged towards promoting the podcast and encouraging your ideal audience to subscribe/follow.

Subscriptions/follows are key. Whether on YouTube, Spotify, or other podcasting apps, the subscription model is one of podcasting’s greatest strengths. Research shows that someone who subscribes or follows in an app is more likely to stick around for the full episode, and more likely to listen to subsequent episodes - compared to someone who just clicks play on a website. 

And that makes sense doesn’t it? Pressing play on a website means you’re stuck at your computer along with all the distractions that entails, and then you have to remember to check back every so often to see if there’s new content available. Whereas in apps you’ll get notifications every time a new episode drops, and you can listen in the car, at the gym, or while doing chores etc… So whenever you promote your new podcast, encourage listeners to subscribe or follow!

We also recommend starting an email list for your podcast if you don’t already have one. Like apps, an email list gives you the opportunity to notify your audience directly every time new content is published. And unlike podcasting apps, social media, YouTube, Spotify etc… When you have an email list, you own your audience, with no intermediary. Sure, you’ll be using a service like MailChimp to manage it, but you can always download the list of emails and take it with you to another service – try doing that with your YouTube subscribers!

You need a launch plan for the series as a whole,
but also for each episode. 

Make a big splash when the series kicks off and put everything you’ve got into a campaign focussed on collecting email addresses and pushing audience growth through podcasting apps. But don’t leave it at that. Maintain momentum with a repeatable series of marketing tasks every time a new episode drops.