How to Turn Your Podcast Into a Marketing Pipeline

Strategies to turn your branded podcast into a marketing pipeline

Branded podcasts are here to stay.  According to CoHost’s recent State of Branded Podcasts 2022 Report, 70% are still active. However, using your podcast as an effective marketing tool is unfortunately not as easy as simply hitting the upload button. The hard part is funneling your audience to transform them into engaged listeners and potential customers. 

That being said, let's dig into some strategies to transform the listeners of your branded podcast into leads and customers. 

Make Your Podcast Part of Your Larger Marketing Strategy 

While it’s tempting to think of your podcast as completely separate from your other marketing channels, resist the urge! Your podcast should be an integrated part of your larger marketing strategy and work in tandem with other channels to cross-promote and drive traffic, think an omnichannel approach. 

If you have a marketing target, product launch, events booked, or whatever it may be, your podcast can be a useful tool to communicate company happenings to targeted audiences.  Let us drop a reminder that your brand should avoid an excessive amount of promotion on the podcast. Put yourself in your listener's shoes (or headphones), they won’t want to listen to that. But that’s the power of podcasts, your brand doesn’t need to be promoting itself throughout the entire episode because the entire podcast is bringing awareness to your company via the content, the host, and the branding.  

Another crucial element of this strategy is to make it as easy as possible for your listeners to find your brand or products/services on other platforms. Many listeners engage with podcasts passively (think listening while on a walk), so making your other channels easily accessible is paramount. Make sure any links are added to your shownotes and that if it’s relevant, you mention them at the beginning and end of each episode. 

Leverage SEO

It might be strange to think of SEO and podcasting together at first, but optimizing keywords is just as crucial in podcasting as in written content. Just like you would with traditional SEO content, use keywords to develop episode titles and topics. You can then use these keywords to promote that episode across your other channels. 

Posting the show's transcript, or a section of the transcript is another great strategy for using keywords to your advantage. 

Quick Tip: CoHost automatically generates transcripts, so you can easily leverage SEO and increase accessibility. 

Linking your podcast to your website and social media platforms can also help your podcast’s ranking in search results, and vice versa. If your podcast is performing better than your other channels, making your audience aware of their presence can boost visibility. If it’s not performing well, promote it in places where your audience is engaged. 

Know Your Audience

While there are always trends within the podcasting space, it’s important not to jump on them simply because they’re there. If you begin including content your audience is not interested in, they likely won’t stick around. It’s loyal listeners who are the most likely to turn into leads and customers. 

Stick to your niche and the content you know is performing well. Being the expert in your niche and having engaged and active listeners is better than having a larger audience of inactive listeners who aren’t interested in your brand or product. 

The bottom line: Providing high quality and topical content is what keeps your audience loyal and funels them into potential customers. 

Use Call to Actions Strategically 

Using call to actions is something marketing teams hear over and over. And there’s a reason for it.  Well thought out, strategic CTA’s can amplify the success of your branded podcast. As previously mentioned, not all listeners will stay engaged until the very end of each episode and might miss a call to action at the tail end. 

Use analytics to your advantage to see where your listener drop off points are, and strategically place CTA’s at those times. Remind listeners where to find any other channel you mention and rate and review your podcast. Reviews and ratings are a great indicator of engagement and can help you gauge how effective your CTA's are. 

Answer Questions (and provide solutions!)

Many listeners tune into branded podcasts because they want to learn more about an industry or have specific questions that they think your brand can help answer. Lean into these expectations and answer questions while providing practical solutions. Or better yet, predict the questions that your audience might have during an episode or about a topic being covered. It’s a marketer's responsibility to know who their audience is and leverage that, it’s no different for podcasts. 

This creates a great opportunity to direct listeners toward products, services, or other resources like webinars, reports, blog posts, etc. that address the needs that your brand can satisfy. 

It All Comes Down to Data

Branded podcasts represent a great opportunity for brands to generate leads and reach new audiences. However, this doesn’t come automatically. Luckily, there are actionable things your brand can do to turn your podcast into an effective marketing pipeline. 

Remember, analytics are a marketer's best friend. Using podcast analytics, like those provided by hosting platforms, to evaluate what channels are performing well will help you develop the marketing strategy that works best for your brand.