A great podcast can still be remarkably hard to find.
You can produce a smart, entertaining, beautifully edited show, publish it on every major podcast platform and still struggle to build an audience. Being available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube is not the same thing as being discoverable.
That’s where podcast marketing comes in, and it involves a lot more than posting a “new episode” graphic every week.
Podcast marketing is about creating more ways for the right people to discover your show – and giving them a reason to come back.
What works depends on the podcast. A true crime show, a B2B interview series and a comedy podcast are not going to grow the same way.
The goal is to understand where your audience is, how they discover new shows and which marketing opportunities are most likely to move the needle.
Start With the Podcast Brand
Before you worry about how many times you should post on social media, look at the thing you’re asking people to remember. Does your podcast actually have a recognizable brand?
Open the show in Spotify. Then Apple Podcasts. Pull up the website. Go to YouTube. Scroll through its Instagram or TikTok videos.
Does it all feel like the same podcast?
It should.
Your podcast cover art is part of the brand, but branding goes much further than a logo and color palette. It can also include:
- Episode artwork and thumbnails
- Video graphics and lower thirds
- Social clips and graphics
- Website design
- Writing style and tone of voice
- Podcast intro and outro
- Voiceover
- Music
- Sound effects and sound design
In other words, your podcast should be undeniably yours wherever someone encounters it.
That doesn’t mean every touchpoint has to look or sound identical. It means someone who sees a clip on Instagram today should be able to recognize the same show on Spotify, YouTube or Google later.
That recognition is the point.
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Don’t Forget the Audio Branding
This one gets overlooked in podcast marketing, which is a little strange considering we’re talking about podcasts.
Your intro is part of your brand. So are the music, voiceover, outro and recurring sound design that help establish the tone of the show.
A good intro does more than announce the podcast. In a matter of seconds, it can establish the show’s personality, energy and genre – and create a sound listeners begin to associate with your brand.
A true crime podcast shouldn’t sound like a B2B leadership show, and a comedy podcast shouldn’t sound like a cinematic murder mystery. The audio should tell listeners something about the show before the conversation even gets going.
Redrum’s producers have spent decades creating sonic identities for podcasts, major brands and broadcast audiences. Listen to a few of their custom podcast intros and notice how differently each one establishes the show:
Audio usage notice: This demo reel is provided for listening purposes only. All audio, music, voiceover and sound design featured here are protected works and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, repurposed or used in any project without permission from Redrum Creative and/or the applicable rights holders.
The question is simple: What should your show sound like before someone even hears the host?
That audio identity is another part of what makes your podcast recognizable wherever your audience encounters it.
Your Website Should Be the Podcast’s Home Base
Years ago, at a digital marketing conference in Las Vegas, one idea stuck with me: Your website is home.
Your social media, email, search, advertising and other marketing channels go out into the world, but they ultimately connect back to something you own.
I still believe that. And after looking at a lot of podcast websites, I’m surprised by how many shows are missing this component of their podcast marketing strategy entirely.
Can a podcast build an audience without one? Obviously, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a huge missed opportunity.
A strong podcast brand should have an obvious home and I stand firmly by that.
The website is where people can confirm they’ve found the official show, learn more about it and move deeper into the brand instead of bouncing between platforms that all present the podcast a little differently. And unlike those platforms, your website is 100% under your control.
Spotify owns the platform where your Spotify followers listen. YouTube controls your YouTube audience. Instagram controls how and when your content reaches followers there.
Your website gives you a place to build something of your own.
Listeners can:
- Learn more about the show and its hosts
- Browse past episodes
- Read show notes or transcripts
- View photos, timelines, research and source material
- Discover related episodes
- Join your email list
- Learn about live events
- Buy merchandise
- Join a membership or community
- Find sponsorship or media information
- Contact the show
That’s more than simply another place online to press play.
Give Advertisers More Than Downloads
A strong website can also make the podcast more valuable to advertisers.
Downloads and listens still matter, but website traffic, email subscribers and other audience metrics give potential sponsors a broader picture of the show’s reach and engagement. A website also creates additional sponsorship opportunities beyond the audio itself, from episode-page placements and newsletter sponsorships to branded resources and other cross-channel campaigns.
At that point, you’re not just selling an ad inside a podcast episode. You’re building a media brand with multiple ways for advertisers to reach the audience.
A Smaller Audience Can Still Be Valuable to Advertisers
A large audience isn’t always the most valuable audience. A podcast with 1,000 highly relevant listeners may be extremely attractive to the right advertiser if it reaches a meaningful share of a specific community.
A web development podcast, for example, may not be a great fit for a mattress company. But for a company selling development tools, that highly targeted audience can be incredibly valuable.
Have a Podcast One-Sheet Ready
Be prepared with a simple one-sheet that includes key audience and engagement metrics, major milestones, who your listeners are, relevant interests and behaviors and what makes the podcast stand out. It gives potential advertisers a quick, professional snapshot of the show and the audience they could reach.
Home Base Doesn’t Mean Tollbooth
Podcast marketing complicates the traditional “everything leads back to the website” model just a little.
Your website should support the podcast platforms, not compete with them.
If someone discovers your show on Instagram and wants to listen on Spotify, send them to Spotify. If they find you on YouTube, make it easy to subscribe there.
I’d still make episodes playable on your website, especially for people who arrive through search, but give visitors obvious ways to follow on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe on YouTube.
Think of your website as a home base, not a tollbooth. People shouldn’t have to pass through it before they can get where they actually want to go.
Different channels have different jobs, and your podcast marketing works better when they work together.
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Give Your Episodes Their Own Useful Pages
A show can have 100 episodes and a five-page website.
That’s 100 interviews, stories, cases or conversations that could be creating value online but largely live inside podcast platforms. Giving each episode its own useful page turns more of that content into something people can actually find and explore on your website.
What that looks like depends on the show. Crime Junkie builds companion pages with photographs, timelines, locations and source material. Mel Robbins takes a different approach, with written introductions, topic categories, playable clips and timestamped transcripts.
Different formats. Same principle:
Don’t let all of the value contained in your podcast live only inside the audio or video file.
An episode page might include:
- A substantive summary
- Guest or subject information
- Topics or questions covered
- Timestamps
- Show notes
- Resources and sources
- Photos or other supporting media
- A transcript
- Related episodes
Build the page around the content. A true crime show may need maps, timelines and sources. An educational episode may become an evergreen resource. A narrative show may lean heavily on its transcript.
What you don’t need are hundreds of thin pages with an embedded player and two generic paragraphs because someone said more pages are good for SEO.
More pages are not the goal. More useful, discoverable content is.
Over time, those pages can attract search traffic, earn backlinks and lead people into more of your content – value Apple Podcasts and Spotify can’t create for you.
Use SEO to Create Another Path to Your Podcast
This is where I get especially interested because SEO is my sweet spot – and podcasts create a lot more search opportunities than most people realize.
Social media can put your episode in front of someone who happens to be scrolling. SEO can put it in front of someone who is already looking for the person, case, question or topic you covered.
That’s a very different kind of opportunity.
Start SEO Before You Record
With some podcasts, the SEO work absolutely starts before anyone hits record.
For educational, business and other subject-driven shows, I use Semrush to see what people are actually searching for, how much search demand exists, how competitive the phrases are and what the intent looks like. That research can uncover topics worth covering, questions people want answered or even enough interest around a subject to justify several episodes.
That doesn’t mean handing the host a keyword and telling them to work it into the conversation five times.
Use the data to make smarter editorial decisions. Then let the conversation sound like a conversation.
Revisit SEO After You Record
After you record, take another look at what you actually created. Maybe the discussion followed the plan. Maybe your guest took it somewhere much better. That should influence how you position the episode through the title, description, show notes and website content.
And this is one place where AI can get people into trouble fast.
Ask ChatGPT to “SEO my podcast” and it can hand you a very convincing list of focus phrases and supporting keywords. They may even look great. That doesn’t mean anyone searches for them. I can’t tell you how many times an entire content plan has been created around something AI produced, but had no real search volume.
Without real search data, you don’t know the volume, difficulty, intent or whether the phrase is worth targeting at all.
Podcast SEO goes much deeper than the conversation. Titles, descriptions, show notes, transcripts, episode pages, internal links, backlinks, images and the structure of the website can all play a role. We’ll dig into all of that in part two of our podcast marketing guide.
For now, the bigger point is this:
A social post may give an episode a few days of attention. Search can keep sending people to it months or even years later.
Make Social Content, Not Podcast Advertisements
Social media can help promote a podcast. But there’s a difference between creating content from a podcast and repeatedly advertising the fact that you have one.
You’ve seen the graphics.
NEW EPISODE!
Huge microphone.
Sound wave.
Episode number.
Five lines of text.
Logo.
“LISTEN NOW.”
It looks like a cheap marketing poster because that’s basically what it is. And AI is making it very easy to produce more of them.
Instead, pull something from the episode that deserves attention on its own: a surprising answer, a strong opinion, a compelling piece of narration, an interesting question or an insight worth discussing.
The social content should give someone something even if they never listen to the full episode – and make them curious enough to want the rest.
Then focus on the channels that make sense for your audience. A B2B show may lean into LinkedIn, while entertainment or true crime may have more opportunity on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.
You don’t get extra marketing points for being mediocre on six platforms.
Video Is Part of the Brand, Too
Video gives a podcast more ways to be discovered – especially on YouTube and social platforms where someone may encounter a clip long before they ever search for the show itself.
If you’re creating video for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Spotify, it should look like it belongs to the same podcast. That includes the editing style, lower thirds, captions, framing, thumbnails and other graphics.
Redrum Creative is a good example of what this looks like in practice. Paul, Mike and Joe bring the same production instincts to video that they bring to audio: intentional cuts, graphics that support rather than distract and pacing that keeps the story moving.
Redrum’s video podcast editing can include multicamera editing, branded graphics and lower thirds, synchronized audio, custom audio/video intros and platform-ready video for YouTube and Spotify.
The point isn’t simply to “have video.”
Your marketing and your podcast should feel like the same brand.
Use Your Guests – When You Have Them
Interview podcasts have a built-in podcast marketing opportunity: the guest has a reason to care about the episode.
Make sharing easy by giving them a simple podcast promotional package they can use without having to create anything themselves.
That might include:
- A direct episode link
- A strong short-form video clip
- Branded social graphics
- Suggested social post copy
- Tags and handles
- A link to their episode page on your website
Guests may also link to the episode from their website, newsletter or media page, creating referral traffic and potential backlinks.
Just don’t build your podcast marketing strategy around the assumption that every guest will promote you. They won’t.
And plenty of podcasts don’t have guests. True crime and narrative shows may lean more heavily on search, social storytelling, media coverage and cross-promotion instead.
Different format. Different assets.
Cross-Promote With Other Podcasts
If you want more podcast listeners, other podcasts are a pretty logical place to find them.
Look for shows with audience overlap, not necessarily identical subject matter. A true crime show might share listeners with a forensic psychology podcast. An entrepreneurship show may overlap with leadership, marketing or finance.
Cross-promotion can include promo swaps, feed drops, guest appearances, host recommendations and crossover episodes.
The key is finding a partnership that makes sense for both audiences.
Build an Audience You Own
Your website is one owned asset. Your email list is another.
Spotify, Instagram and YouTube can change. Algorithms definitely change. Your subscriber list gives you a direct way to reach people who have already decided they want more from you.
A podcast newsletter can:
- Announce new episodes
- Resurface strong older episodes
- Share bonus material
- Provide additional resources
- Preview upcoming content
- Drive people back to the website
- Promote events, memberships or other offers
It also creates another path into the podcast:
Search → website → email subscriber → repeat listener
Not everybody who discovers one good episode is going to immediately follow your show. Email marketing gives them another way to stay connected.
Look for PR, Partnerships and Backlinks
Podcast marketing also means getting beyond your existing audience.
That might include media coverage, newsletters, other podcasts, recommendation lists, industry publications, community partnerships or organizations connected to a particular episode.
These opportunities can generate referral traffic and backlinks.
And a strong episode page gives people something worth linking to. Original research, useful show notes, expert insight, case timelines, primary sources and other substantive resources are much more compelling than simply asking someone to “link to our podcast.”
Use Paid Promotion With a Purpose
Yes, you can advertise a podcast.
But decide what you’re paying for first.
More listeners? Followers? Website traffic? Email subscribers? Brand awareness? Leads?
The destination should match the goal.
If you want more Spotify activity, send people to Spotify. If you’re building your email list, send them to the website. If YouTube growth is the priority, send them there.
Paid promotion can amplify a strong podcast marketing strategy, but it can’t replace one.
Measure What Actually Matters
Downloads matter, but they aren’t the whole picture.
What you measure should depend on what the podcast is supposed to accomplish. That may include:
- Audience growth and followers
- Listener retention
- Website and organic search traffic
- Email subscribers
- Social and video engagement
- Leads, memberships or revenue
Look beyond the launch-day spike.
Which episodes keep attracting people months later? Which topics bring in search traffic? Which channels create followers or repeat listeners instead of temporary attention?
Use that information to make the next episode – and the next campaign – smarter.
Podcast Marketing Can Get the Click. Your Show Has to Earn the Next One.
You can build the brand, optimize the episode, cut the clips, send the emails, pitch the press and run the ads.
Marketing can get someone to press play.
Then the podcast has to do its job.
If the audio is distracting, the pacing drags, the intro sounds generic or the episode should have ended 20 minutes ago, marketing can’t fix it.
That’s where Redrum Creative comes in.
Its veteran producers handle podcast editing, mixing and mastering, custom intros and outros, voiceover, music, sound effects, immersive sound design, video editing, show notes and more. Every podcast editing project is founder-led, so the finished episode isn’t treated like just another audio file.
It’s part of your brand.
And if you’re going to spend all that time marketing it, it should sound – and look – worth finding.
About Michelle Jennings
Michelle Jennings is the founder of Propel Digital and a digital marketing strategist with more than 20 years of experience in SEO, content strategy, social media and paid media. Before launching Propel in 2018, she spent more than a decade on the agency side, eventually advancing to the role of president at a Kansas City-based boutique digital marketing agency.
Today, she helps businesses build smarter digital strategies grounded in research, strong content and a clear understanding of how people actually find and engage with brands online. Connect with Michelle Jennings on LinkedIn >>
