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(By Amy Woods) Do you know what Vincent Van Gogh, Eva Cassidy, and Karl Marx have in common? They were all dead before their talents were recognized to their full extent. In fact, only 11 people turned up at Karl Marx’s funeral!
The point I want to make is I’m sure we’d all like our talents and our message to be heard now, not in years to come or after our lifetime (or worse, never). With that in mind…be honest…do you have a solid marketing strategy for your podcast?
After all, podcasting isn’t easy — likely you put lots of effort into your planning, preparation, recording, editing, post production. Like I said, not easy. Or, maybe you’ve outsourced the production process and you need to find, and justify, the budget.
Some would argue that creating podcast episodes is in fact the easy part. The hardest part is getting found. It’s getting discovered by the people who you want to find you.
There are so many people who focus a considerable amount of time on creating their podcast and not enough time on actually ensuring that people listen to it. The irony.
It’s not just about getting discovered on podcast apps, because I’m sure I’m not the first person to mention to you that not everyone listens to podcasts (to be precise, according to Edison Research 2018 66% of Americans aged 12+ say they have never listened to a podcast).
How do you reach wider audiences and how do you reach non-podcast listeners?
I believe the answer lies in repurposing
Podcast repurposing is about taking your existing content and reformatting and reworking it so that it can reach a broader audience and fit the needs of different learning styles.
When you repurpose your podcast, you are both marketing your podcast episodes to your existing audience AND putting your message into the hands of a target audience who otherwise may have never found you.
If you repurpose your podcast you maximize your return on investment. You squeeze every bit of value from your content.
What do I mean by repurposing a podcast episode? This article provides many examples of ways to repurpose a podcast episode. Here are some ideas:
Show notes/article – Take key points from your podcast and use them to write useful and informative show notes. This is separate to a transcript. Some audiences love to get hold of transcripts, so by all means provide them. Search engine bots find transcripts hard to crawl, so logical, well-written show notes are very valuable.
Long-form blog post – Write a long-form, evergreen article that stands the test of time, not a commentary of your podcast episode but an article based on the key message of your podcast episode. Do keyword research to help with your SEO. In other words you want to write a blog post that will rank with the search engines. What would your target audience type into Google?
Social media posts – Take the highlights from your podcast episodes and write social posts that provide value to your audience with stand-out images or graphics. Tip: Why not use the same images you created for social media and add them into your written articles to bring them to life?
Video teasers/audiograms – Extract audio from your podcast, pair it with an image, and turn it into a short video teaser to share across your social media channels. Not sure how? Here’s an article and some tools that can help you. Tip: Make your audiograms square and less that 60 seconds to suit all platforms, and create some vertical audiograms less than 15 seconds for Instagram and Facebook Stories.
Video – Video yourself recording your podcast and share your video content, for example, on YouTube. Or, if you’re camera shy, take key extracts from your podcast audio and combine them with images to create a trailer video.
Live Video – Take your podcast topic to a live discussion with your audience on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or a live webinar. This is a great form or marketing because it provides your audience with direct access to you and you can build a community. Why not go live at the same time every week, and who knows, you might just create a movement.
Email marketing – If you have already written a blog post or show notes for your podcast episodes, why not transform it into an email to send out to your subscribers? Don’t neglect your email subscribers and don’t just assume that they know that you’ve just published a new podcast episode. We’re all busy, they may not have noticed.
There are plenty of other ways to repurpose your podcast content, my team and I are constantly looking for new and creative ways to repurpose a podcast episode. Most recently we repurposed a live talk into a podcast, into a video, into a blog post, into social media content, and into a comic book!
You owe it to your audience, yourself, and your podcast to repurpose. Market your podcast and make sure as many people know about it as possible. If you have talent and a voice to be heard, don’t end up like Vincent Van Gogh, Eva Cassidy, and Karl Marx; make sure your audience discovers you NOW. You live during the digital age, they didn’t — with websites, social media, search engines, YouTube, etc., it couldn’t be a better time to market your podcast.
Amy Woods is an expert in content repurposing and the founder of Content 10x. Listen to her podcast at The Content 10x Podcast. She can be contacted at amy@content10x.com.