Whether you’re a new podcaster, a seasoned creator, a large podcast publisher network, or anything in between, increasing your podcast audience engagement and podcast awareness is crucial to maintaining and growing interest in your content.
Different podcasts have different approaches to their growth and engagement strategies but here are 5 basic tips that we feel are valuable for every podcaster to consider:
Know Your Podcast Audience
The first step to increasing your audience engagement and awareness is to actually understand the audience in which you’re engaging. A common struggle with podcasts is gathering and trusting the data delivered regarding their listenership audience. It is very difficult to know if someone has actually listened to an episode, if it was auto-downloaded, whether that listener finished an episode, listened to specific ads or skipped over content.
We strongly encourage our readers to be diligent when choosing your podcast analytics provider and explore tools, such as Backtracks Switchboard™, that deliver verified, transparent, and in-depth metrics that provide an accurate and transparent report of your listener data. This allows you to not only gain insight into listener behavior, but also gain insight into things like which topics, guests, or keywords increase or decrease engagement, which geolocations are more prone to listen to which episodes, what devices are most commonly used when listening to your content, and much more.
Track Trending Podcast Topics
In addition to understanding your own audience, it is also important to gain insight into your potential audience as well. One tip is to follow trending topics and keywords in the podcast space as a whole, or specific categories/genres that compliment your own content.
One easy and free way to do this is to explore Backtracks Charts™. Backtracks Charts provides real-time rankings of trending podcasts and keywords across different categories and subcategories.
Cross Pollinate Podcast Audiences
Cross pollination of audiences is a proven strategy for garnering interest from potential pools of listeners who may have not yet heard of your podcast. Cross pollination comes in many forms including co-hosting an episode, featuring a well known host or frequent guest, being a guest speaker on other podcasts, cross-advertising with other podcasts, covering new topics that have resonated well with other audiences, and much more.
Create Shareable Content
Creating shareable content allows you to tap into a secondary pool of potential listeners by leveraging your audience’s networks. Shareable content can be anything that an audience member finds interesting or valuable enough to share with others. Examples include profound quotes or statements shared on one of your episodes, a public social or blog post spotlighting other people or services, silly memes or gifs, contest campaigns or giveaways.
Learn how to share specific audio clips of episodes across social with Backtracks
Offer Subscriber Specific Content
An overlooked strategy for increasing audience engagement with podcasts is subscriber-specific content. Exclusivity has always been a very enticing marketing strategy for many and it works just as well with podcasts. Subscriber specific content can include anything that requires a listener to be a subscriber to access. Examples include special gift giveaways, unlocking extra content in an episode, exclusive episodes, or free access to other material.
Read about how The Backtracks Player™ works for private and secure content.
Backtracks has released a FREE suite of Podcast Publisher Tools – access yours today!
