1. Why am I making a podcast?

You need to answer this question to formulate your objective. This questions is much harder to answer than you might think. The key is to be honest to yourself. Why are you making your podcast? Are you making a podcast with your friends because you love hanging out with them? Maybe that’s enough. Stop reading this long blog post. Go have fun with your friends. Are you making your podcast to promote a businessmodel you have? A way to make money? Then the objective should revolve around the businessmodel. It could be as a functional as: connecting with 300 potential customers.

For me the reason was: I want to establish myself as a storyteller. So my objective was not to make money, but to reach as many people as possible with my show.



2. What kind of podcast am I making?

Answering this questions is important, because the answer is your proposition. The promise you make to your audience about your podcast. Again, deceptively hard to answer. It’s hard because you have to pick one - or max two things - you can say about your show. And you can’t use more than one short sentence.

Why? Because there’s so much information coming at us every single second of every single day, that you have to be able to show your potential audience what you’re about as quickly as possible.

Here’s a trick that might help: make a list of single words that describe things your show does really well. Don’t think about it too long, just write down what comes to mind. Then think about your three biggest competitors and make a list of the things that make their show good. Hopefully there’s a difference between them and you. Those words might be good starting point.

The Proposition for my podcast is: An Eight-Part Mystery Podcast. Why? First of all most of my competitors are very long shows, so I hoped to attract people to my unknown show by promising them they wouldn’t have to commit to another multi-season story to experience this mystery. And I called it a mystery show because the most popular narrative podcasts right now are true crime shows.



3. Who is my podcast for?

You have to answer this questions to get a sense of your target audience. What people are we trying to reach? The trick here is first find your niche, but then to make that niche as big as possible. Because that will expand your possibilities.

For example, my niche is people who love audiodrama mystery shows. But I can make that niche bigger by extrapolating the reasons why they like those shows. For example: if they like audiodrama shows, they essentially like immersive narratives. That makes the group much bigger. I can reach try to reach people that like narrative video games, new tv-shows, mystery books, etc.

So, first write down what niche you want to own. But then extrapolate the reasons why people love that niche, and you should be able to create a much bigger group for yourself. And thus many more opportunities to communicate to people who might like what you make.

4. What channels do I use?

You probably have zero marketing budget for your podcast. Well, same here. But that doesn’t mean an email newsletter to your friends is the only way to communicate with your audience. Here’s how to identify all the channels you should use:

First, go back to the different interests you wrote down while creating your target audiences. Those should already help you create a whole list of channels. Google is your friend here. Just google things your target audiences would want to find. I searched for ‘mystery shows’, for example, or ‘best story video game’. That way you find things like Facebook groups about mystery shows or a Twitter page writing about narrative video games. All of those are channels for you to promote your podcast in.

Second, look up your competition and make a list of the channels they use. That’s how I found Tumblr. I never thought to use a Tumblr profile, but lot’s of audiodrama shows do.

Now you should have a huge list of channels. What you do to filter that list, is go back to your objective. That’s the answer to the first question: Why are you making this podcast? If the answer is that you want to get more traffic to your app, then you should probably get as much email addresses as possible. And that means your newsletter is very important. If you just want to get as many people as possible to listen to your podcast, then perfecting your website’s SEO is very important.



5. What do I communicate?

Now that you know your objectives, your target audience and you know what channels you’re going to use, here comes the big question: what are you communicating in all of those places?

My advice here is to have fun. Hopefully you are creating your podcast because you love doing that. Well, whatever it is you love about making your podcast, keep doing that while creating your promotion materials. In my case, I love telling stories. So for promotion, I just kept making more stories. A story on Twitter about the journalists that play a role in my podcast. Another story in my newsletter, another one on Youtube. I try to attract people to my story, by telling more stories. That way of promoting is more honest, more fun and more effective.

Secondly, don’t forget you shouldn’t just communicate on all the channels you make for the podcast. You should also use all your personal channels. You probably aren’t famous (yet), so why would anyone listen to your podcast? You name doesn’t carry any authority to most people. The best way to introduce yourself is by becoming an active member in the niche you’re trying to conquer. That’s part of the reason I’m writing this blog, for example.



6. When do I say what?

All of the ideas for content you wrote down while answering the previous question, should be arranged in a calendar. In my case it’s a simple one: pre-season / during-season / post-season. My podcast consists of eight parts, and after the final episode the story is over. For you, the calendar might consists of a pre, during and post-episode structure

Now go back to the first question: the objective. Try to formulate how that objective is best met throughout the different phases on your calendar. So in my case, let’s take ‘pre-season’ as an example. My objective is to establish myself as a storyteller by reaching as many people as possible that might enjoy my show. When looking at the pre-season phase, it’s important to get people to follow my social channels, sign up for the newsletter and subscribe to the podcast. That way my episode premiere will start with a good baseline.

So, I made a video trailer that teased the show. I made social ads that showed the video trailer and targeted it to my target audience. The add referred people to my website. This was a minimalistic version of the website that only forwarded visitors towards the newsletter or the podcast channel. Why have more elements on your website when it doesn’t serve your objective yet? I made a Twitter channel on which a bewildered journalist group revealed talked about mysterious tapes they kept receiving. I set up a campaign to mobilize family and friends to review and rate my podcast channel so it would climb the new and noteworthy lists before even uploading the first episode. I made…. well, you get the gist of it.

Now you know why you’re promoting, to whom, where to promote, what to say and when to say it. You’ve made a marketing plan for your podcast. Get ready grind.

Good luck!









