This is just a data dump of information I collected for digitally marketing a podcast. Some information is recent and some isn’t the links worked when I used them. Hpefully it is somewhat useful.Enjoy!
Why podcasting?
Podcasting has been steadily growing medium with more than 700,000 podcasts and 29 million podcast episodes, up 27% from last year (2019).
One reason for the growth is the number of choices podcast listeners have today. Because of a low cost of entry, in the first ten months of 2019, a record 192,000 new podcasts have been launched. The growth in podcasting is due to the potential income a popular podcast can earn from selling advertising.
According to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PriceWaterhouse, ad revenue reach $679 million this in 2019, and is expected to increase to $863 million in 2020) and over $1 billion by 2021 (pre-coronavirus).
Ad revenue appears to be very fluid at the moment; there has been a noticeable shift upwards from March that indicates that revenues will be back on track. This was wrote during the first wave of coronavirus when ad revenues stopped.
There has been a shift from how people consume their media; one survey has found that 34% of Respondents Have Shifted Social Time From Instagram to Twitter and
22% of brands say they’re spending more on ads, and this could be because time spent with Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all up.
Why use social media marketing for podcasting?
As of 2019, there are 7.7 billion people in the world. 4.2 billion of these people are internet users, more than 2.7 billion internet users are active on social media.
That means that over 64% of the people that surf the internet spend some efficient time on social media.
The average time that people spend on social media is nearly 2 hours.
There is a new social media user practically every 10 seconds (Gary Clyne, 2019).
Introduction
Welcome this is a Digital Marketing strategy best practice Guide for podcasting.
This guide was created to streamline best practices that are tenets of a robust inbound marketing strategy — which is necessary to attract and convert buyers in a digital age, especially in a saturated podcast market.
This guide serves as a first edition template that will be updated to facilitate a more refined marketing strategy as the podcast brand grows. This guide takes what is considered the best digital marketing practices and uses them to corner and refine a niche part of the podcast market.
Best Times to use social media:
Realistically, your socials will tell you the best time to post once you build enough engagement until then you will have to use generic “best times” research.
Facebook: Cracking Facebook’s best times algorithm
Research by https://buffer.com/, states, there is, on average,1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook. For people with lots of friends and Page likes, as many as 15,000 potential stories could appear any time they log on.
The same research suggests that the best time to post to Facebook is between 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. on during the week and Saturdays. Their study also found that engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays(it should be noted that this was pre-coronavirus).
Thursdays and Fridays from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. are the best times to post on Facebook [Hubspot]
Thursday at 8 p.m. [TrackMaven]
Or, 1–4 p.m. late into the week and on weekends.
Twitter: How to take advantage of Twitter’s best Click-through rate times
Research done by thebalancesmb.com suggests the highest average click-through rates (CTR) occurs between Mondays and Thursdays, 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., with no specific peak times. This would be the ideal time to post if your goal is to get people to click-through to your website or landing page.
The worst time for posting appears to be weekend evenings (after 8 p.m.), and Fridays after 3 p.m. These times coincide with the lowest amount of engagement, clicks, retweets, etc.
On using images on Twitter research suggests that the benefits of using images will see:
- 36% more click-throughs
- 31% increase in website visits
- 41% more retweets
- 48% increase in tweets being favourited
- 33% increase in visitor to lead conversions
Instagram: Best times for brand building practises
Later says your best bet is to post between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. The idea is to catch people over lunch and when they’re winding down for the night.
TrackMaven narrows that down further to 7 p.m. on Fridays.
HubSpot suggests rolling with any time other than 3 p.m.-4 p.m. (when people may be deep in work) or considering 8 a.m. on Mondays to catch people starting their workweeks.
Post Planner citing a study from Sprout Social suggests avoiding 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. when people are most likely at work.
Falcon.io suggests posting between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
Purpose: What do you want to achieve by using digital?
Your digital platforms will allow you to create your brand via different social media platforms. These platforms will enable your podcast to penetrate different audiences to engage with our brand, which can then be leveraged into better marketisation and monetisation of your podcast brand.
Plotting successful outcomes:
Possible ideas:
Year 1:
Your podcasts first year aims to grow an engaged audience through our social media
- Aim to produce each social media platforms to 10k in 6 months
- Aim to get 1,500 downloads a week
Year 2:
The Podcast aims to move into a stronger financial position
- Aim for 1000 “true fans” – true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.
- A recognisable podcasting brand
How digital insights improve audience engagement via social listening:
Social listening is the process of monitoring digital media channels to devise a strategy that will better influence consumers.
The benefits of social listening
- Identify opportunities
- Spot Potential
- Risks or Threats
- Understand Brand
Social listening is done through
Insight: Are our activities on digital giving us additional insight into what our customers want or how you can design your products and services?
Awareness: Is our activity showing an understanding of offers, products, services, etc.?
Sentiment: Can we identify a complementary view of how our customers are engaging with us?
Comprehension: If you have complicated products or services, can we see that customers are identifying/searching for features and details that show an understanding of the product/service?
Site Visits: Is our activity resulting in creative traffic to our site?
Earned Media Value: Is our digital activity resulting in earned impressions on top of our paid delivery? This value is found within your social channels (analytics).
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the creation, publishing, and sharing of content to build brand reputation, awareness, and affinity.
Content marketing will allow your podcasts to deliver content that will serve different audience needs through our various platforms and ultimately improve our chances to acquire new customers and clients.
Content marketing allows us to increase our SEO rankings and web traffic, which in turn will enable us to understand interaction with critical audiences analytics.
Types of content:
- Having evergreen (continually “fresh” and lasting) content on our website.
- Helps you rank in Google and other search engines (this can be done through search engine optimisation (SEO, see further down) etc.
- Can build a reputation (helps with credibility in our field.
- Is more shareable and can attract natural links.
- Help keep new readers engaged without much work.
Examples of evergreen content
Time-Sensitive (Topical) Content:
- Help rank in Google and other search engines for a set period
- Helps in building up our brand and boosting our credentials
- Is newsworthy
- Time-sensitive content that is best suited to a particular moment in time
Examples of time-sensitive content
- Industry news
- Current events
Why is content marketing important for podcasting?
Content marketing provides your podcast with the opportunity to build awareness of your brand that lets potential customers know you exist.
Content marketing creates interest which will capture your audience’s attention. This interest will allow us an opportunity for conversion through experience your podcast offers. With the goal of retention by turning our individuals into a “true fan”.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
What is it?
Moz defines SEO “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”
How Search Engines Work
Search engine algorithms are computer programmes that look for clues to give the searcher back precisely what they want, which is done through:
1.Crawling
2.Indexing
3.Ranking
Moz describes it best “Google (or any search engine you’re using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.”
Google’s main algorithm is called Hummingbird. Hummingbird meant Google being more intelligent in understanding the meaning of keywords and being better able to return more relevant results.
In 2015, Google announced RankBrain, which is a sub-algorithm of Hummingbird—making using keywords important in promoting content.
Facebook Page SEO optimisation
Make sure to focus on the first 18 characters because Google will use them as meta descriptions
Next, optimise our Facebook profile:
- About section (essential)
- Description section
- Headline
- Photo captions
- Notes
- Updates
Optimising Instagram
- Turn it into a “business profile”
- Use best times (see Instagram: Best times for brand building practices)
- Include relevant hashtags (see: Hashtag Marketing for social media:)
- Leverage stories
Optimising Twitter:
- Banner Image
- Profile Picture
- Name
- @Username / Twitter Handle
- Description / Bio
- Link
- Pinned Tweet
Use S.M.A.R.T goals to grow your social media to increase your brand awareness (1-6 months) the first six months affords you to get a better understanding of your audience and after six months allow us to tailor our content to see a better return on Investment (ROI).
Example of S.M.A.R.T goals:
Specific — grow our Facebook followers.
Measurable — 5,000 new Facebook followers.
Attainable — yes!
Relevant — B Sides’ goals align with a strong social media following
Time Specific —5000 new Facebook follower numbers in six months
Twitter:
Specific — grow our Twitter followers.
Measurable — 2,500 new Twitter followers.
Attainable — yes!
Relevant — B Sides’ goals align with a strong social media following
Time Specific — 500 new Twitter follower numbers in three months
Your first six months allow you to set a base level of achievable call to actions (CPAs) with your audience from getting followers to converting them to our landing page to becoming a “True fan”.
Categories: #marketing
Robert Geoghegan. 
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