Branding Your Podcast

by Apr 23, 2019Blog, Content | Social Media | Email

You’ve put in a lot of hard work to create your podcast. You’ve done the research, you’ve lived and breathed the content for weeks, you’ve even chosen the perfect, impossibly clever name. Your sound is perfect and your podcast is easily found across Google Play, iTunes, and Spotify thanks to your diligent SEO and keyword usage. You’ve finished editing several weeks worth of episodes and you are ready to let a little bit of dust settle on your microphone. It’s time to sit back, put your feet up, and wait for the “Likes” to start pouring in as you pour yourself a cold one. Hold up a minute, it seems that you may be forgetting something.

How do You Market a Podcast?

There is an ever-growing amount of data and advice on how best to market your podcast. From social media contests, buying airtime on traditional radio, to a list of publishing sites as tall as a beanstalk, there’s no shortage of good ideas out there to get your podcast, well, out there. But what happens when you finally catch your target audience’s attention? Will they stay and listen to entire episodes? Will they be pulled in by your headline and graphics? What will they remember about you? Will they recognize your social shares as that funny, informative podcast that had them in stitches last week?

Branding Your Podcast

This is where branding enters the stage. Of course, you’re familiar with this term from running your own business. You may still be curious as to how that applies to audio created from your conversations, your voice, your thoughts. Branding your podcast entails more than crafting the name and picking a nice stock photo to slather around social media. The inherent tone, background music, and other sounds must appeal to your audience, and so too should everything else used to market your podcast.

Consider that the impressions left from your episodes’ titles, descriptions, and visuals should be consistent with what you’ve already established by the content and audio style. Anytime you engage with your audience online (as they comment and share your episodes), be sure your responses stay on-brand and that they sound like they came from you.

  • Make it easy to find your podcast. If you want to grow fans for your podcast, it’s recommended that you set up social profiles for the hosts and for the podcast itself. Most likely, you’ll have a landing page or even a full blown website.
  • Be recognizable everywhere. At the very minimum, you’ll have a logo or mark associated with your podcast. Audit your choices of fonts, colors, photography, icons, and other graphics. Do your visuals sound like you? Would someone reached by a Facebook ad immediately know what your podcast is about? Does it look high energy, funny, serious, informative and does that accurately reflect what they’ll experience if they click to listen?
  • Branding beyond the podcast. The freebies, the goodies, the download-ables that you direct them to are also most successful when they feel like they belong to your brand. If you’re directing your listeners to materials from a partner or sponsor, take care to make that obvious before the click. An unfamiliar looking pop-up or redirect may come off as feeling like spam.
  • Put your logo in unconventional spaces. Some of the beauty of the podcast is its potential to be this wonderful, inspiring medium that rings through our minds and echoes through our thoughts. It’s intangible, but it doesn’t have to be bodiless. Don’t be afraid of applying your podcast’s branding to unconventional products. If you’ve chosen a name that’s difficult to remember or a unique spelling, why not create business cards to hand out when you’re out networking? We all know that swag comes in a variety of shapes and sizes such as stickers, buttons, notepads, and magnets. This can be an opportunity to be creative and share your podcast’s narrative. To tell the deeper story that new listeners may not have discovered yet, or that loyal ones may have forgotten.

Remember that the art of branding is to craft memorable experiences, connect with our emotions, and encourage engagement. When marketing strategy is expertly applied to branding your podcast it can help you grow and retain your audience. You’ll be cracking that cold one in no time.

Check Out More than a Few Words

Looking for examples of podcast branding? Check out our podcast, More than a Few Words (MTFW).

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