Mike Newman gives a tip about promoting your podcast

Hi, I'm Mike Newman, I'm the VP of Content and Partnerships for Audioboom and today I'm going to give you a tip about promoting your podcast.

I work for Audioboom, who are one of the world's biggest podcast platforms where we host, distribute and monetise podcasts. I look after our roster of UK content, including No Such Thing As A Fish the official F1 podcasts, Beyond the Grid and F1 Nation, Soundtracking with Edith Bowman and lots, lots more. And I'm kind of the link between the three pillars of our business.

So we host, distribute and monetise and it's my job to maintain the relationships with our roster whilst also recruiting new shows to the Audioboom ecosystem. I also frequently work with the listening destinations like Apple, Spotify and Amazon to gain elevation and support for the shows across our network. The hosting is I make sure and chat with our tech team and make sure that all the shows on our platform are happy.

The distribution is obviously part of the tech bit, but also talking to the platforms and then the monetisation is working with our commercial team to make sure that, that, well, everybody gets paid, frankly. So that's kind of my role. And I've worked at Audioboom for almost seven years, but I've worked in audio for more than 25.

So I started out in student radio and my career in radio was mainly commercial radio, both producing shows and running radio stations up and down the country. I've moved house more times than I care to mention, but I've worked at a bunch of different stations from XFM, Free Radio, Smooth Radio, GEM106, and I produced my first podcast in about 2004, 2005, when Ben Hammersley of the Guardian had only just coined the name 'podcast'.

We used to turn our breakfast show highlights into podcasts and that was really the beginning for me of my love for podcasting as a thing, because I often used to listen to other people's breakfast shows that were podcasts and when the opportunity arose to move from radio to podcasts, obviously I jumped at it. And yeah, that was almost seven years ago. The thing for me that I love about podcasting as a listener is just the immersive nature of it.

You know, the deep dive storytelling, the in depth conversations, the debates, they just draw you in. It's a really sticky medium and I think you get hooked and you listen to one podcast and that's a very comfortable gateway into listening to more. And then I think more broadly speaking, the industry of podcasting, I think I love the general uplift in interest in audio and audio creators.

So as somebody who has worked in audio for my entire life, well, my entire adult life, it's, it's nice to have audio at the, at the forefront of so many conversations. And I feel that podcasting has really led the charge there. So that's me, I guess, onto my tip.

And my tip would be around marketing your podcast. And it is really to have a marketing plan and to make sure it stretches beyond your launch. So I think if you're launching your podcast, you need a plan to get it noticed. And that's definitely easier if you have a budget, clearly, and can utilise, you know, outdoor campaigns, TV ads, podcast ads.

But I'm fully aware that, you know, most people don't have access to a budget, and I think because of that, people think that they then can't have a marketing plan. But I would urge you to do it. Figure out who you have access to and lean into that. That can be the basis of your marketing plan. It's likely to be centred around your network of contacts. So who do you know with the biggest social footprint? Who do you know who already has a podcast?

Which shows can you target and offer yourself to as a guest? So finding different platforms that you can talk about your show on, I think that's really, really crucial and that will form the basis of a marketing plan. You know, where do you put your message and who can you use to spread your message? But I think the really crucial bit about my tip is don't just focus it on your first episode.

Audience growth isn't instant. It's a marathon, not a sprint. So you've got to keep your messaging constant and consistent. You know, episode 110 is just as important as episode number one, if not more so. So with multiple episodes come multiple opportunities to tell your story and share a different reason for why a listener may want to choose your podcast as their next listen. So that's my tip. And you can find me on LinkedIn and audioboom.com is where to head to find out more about Audioboom.

And you can see the links in the show notes.

Thanks for listening to Podcasting People.