Does a Podcast Fit Into Your Marketing Strategy?
A podcast should work as part of your larger marketing ecosystem. It should improve search visibiliy and attract people to your website. It should help you grow and engage with your email list. It should feed your social media (and drive traffic to your website and email list). And, it should help build relationships through networking, guest appearances, and referals. When a podcast is intentionally integrated and supporting the entire marketing system, it can also increase the speed and volume of sales. Each episode can attract new people, nurture existing prospects, reinforce your expertise, and guide listeners toward the next step in working with you. The goal isn’t simply to publish more episodes. It’s to make your podcast and the rest of your marketing work seamlessly together.
In the last episode, I asked you to take your podcast up to 10,000 feet and look at it from a different perspective. Instead of worrying about your next episode, we looked at the podcast as a whole and asked whether it was attracting the right audience, reinforcing your expertise, and actually doing the job you created it to do.
If you haven’t done that exercise yet, start with Episode 267: How to Think More Strategically About Your Podcast (The 10,000-Foot View). It’ll make what we’re about to do considerably more useful.
Because now we’re going higher.
At 50,000 feet, your podcast almost disappears.
That’s not because it isn’t important. It’s because from this high up, you can finally see everything around it.
Your Podcast Is Not Your Entire Marketing Strategy
If you’re a coach, consultant, expert, or service-based business owner, your podcast is probably just one of many ways people discover or engage with you.
You’ve got your website. Maybe you’re active on LinkedIn or another social platform. You’ve got an email list. You might appear as a guest on other people’s podcasts, speak at events, network in your community, get referrals, and hopefully have a steady stream of clients and prospects moving through all of those different places.
From 50,000 feet, you should be able to see how those things connect. That’s the marketing ecosystem.
The mistake I see a lot of podcasters make is treating the podcast like a destination. They record an episode, publish it, maybe put a post on LinkedIn telling everyone there’s a new episode, then mark it as done and move on to next week’s show.
Technically, they’re doing all the things a podcaster is supposed to do. But they’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.
If your podcast is an important part of your marketing, hitting publish shouldn’t be the end of the process. In many ways, that’s where the opportunity begins.
How Can a Podcast Support the Rest of Your Marketing?
Let’s stick with the example of a coach or consultant. A single podcast episode can feed your email list by giving you something genuinely useful to share with subscribers. It can even help you grow your email list by including a CTA in your episode. It can become social content without requiring you to invent something new every time you open LinkedIn. Your episode page can improve your visibility in traditional search and AI search. You can send a relevant episode to a prospect who’s asked a question you’ve already answered or to an existing client who could benefit from hearing more about a particular topic.
Your podcast can also strengthen your pitches when you’re trying to appear as a guest on other shows because a host can immediately hear how you communicate and what you know. It gives people a reason to visit your website and, ultimately, it can help a potential client become comfortable enough with you to take the next step.
That’s a lot of work from one piece of content.
We often tell clients that their podcast can become one of the hardest-working pieces of content they create. Not because podcasting itself has to be difficult, but because one good conversation can continue doing useful work across your marketing long after the episode has been published. The trick is building the interconnections that allow that to happen.
Your Podcast Should Be Part of the Customer Journey
I’ve talked before about what we call the Podcast Path, which is the journey you intentionally create to move someone from listener to customer. If you’re not familiar with that concept, have a listen to Episode 246: The Listener Path That Turns Podcast Fans Into Clients.
The 50,000-foot view takes that idea one step further. Before someone can follow your Podcast Path, they have to enter your world somewhere. Maybe they:
- Find a LinkedIn post that leads them to an episode.
- Hear you interviewed on somebody else’s podcast and decide to check out yours.
- Discover you after searching for an answer on Google and one of your episode pages appears.
- Meet you at a networking event, look you up afterwards, and discover you have a podcast.
The podcast then gives them an opportunity to spend more time with you. They hear how you think. They learn something from you. They start to understand your approach and, over time, they get a much better sense of whether you’re someone they might want to work with.
That’s where the podcast becomes much more than another content channel. It’s now playing multiple roles in the customer journey.
How Do Your Podcast and Marketing Work Together?
One of the things that becomes really obvious from 50,000 feet is that you don’t necessarily need more marketing. You need the marketing you’re already doing to work together. Does all of your marketing work together?
- When someone listens to your podcast, do they know where to go next?
- When someone visits your website, can they easily discover your podcast?
- When they join your email list, do they continue hearing the same ideas and expertise that attracted them in the first place?
- When they meet you at an event after listening to a few episodes, does your marketing reinforce the person they already feel like they know?
These aren’t separate marketing activities anymore. They’re connected touchpoints.
And when you’re intentional about those connections, those touchpoints start becoming trustpoints.
That’s particularly important when you’re selling expertise. Most people aren’t going to hear one podcast episode and immediately decide to hand you thousands of dollars. They need time to get to know you, understand what you do, see evidence of your expertise, and decide whether they trust you or your product to deliver the outcome they’re looking for.
Your podcast can play an incredibly important role in that process, but it works much better when the rest of your marketing is reinforcing it.
Stop Measuring Your Podcast in Isolation
The 50,000-foot view can also change what you pay attention to. When you’re looking at your podcast on its own, it’s very easy to become fixated on downloads, subscribers, episode frequency, and whether the latest episode performed better than the one before it.
Those numbers aren’t meaningless, but they’re not the whole story, especially if you created the podcast to support your business. From 50,000 feet, you can start asking better questions.
- Is the podcast driving people to your website?
- Are listeners engaging with podcast-related posts on social media?
- Are listeners joining your email list?
- Are email recipients opening and clicking play on your episodes?
- Do clients take action on your in-episode dynamic ads?
- Are prospects mentioning episodes when they book a call?
- Are clients sharing episodes with other people?
- Is your podcast strengthening your authority when you pitch yourself for speaking engagements or guest appearances?
You might discover that an episode with relatively modest download numbers has generated three great sales conversations. I’d take that over an episode with thousands of anonymous downloads that went nowhere. The businesses that see the greatest return from podcasting aren’t necessarily producing the most episodes or building the biggest audiences. They’re often the ones that have built the strongest connections between their podcast and everything else they’re doing.
Take the 50,000-Foot View of Your Podcast
So, if you took the 10,000-foot view after the last episode, I have another exercise for you. This time, don’t just pull up your podcast; look at your entire marketing ecosystem.
Think about your website, email, social media, search perfromance, networking, guest appearances, speaking opportunties, referrals, offers, and sales process. Then look for your podcast inside all of that.
- Where is it connected?
- Where could it be doing more?
- Where are you creating great podcast content that isn’t going anywhere after you publish it?
- And where are you doing marketing that could be considerably more effective if your podcast was supporting it?
Your podcast isn’t the destination. It’s one stop on a much bigger journey.
When you can see that journey from 50,000 feet, you can start building the connections that make your podcast more valuable to your audience and to your business.
Is Your Podcast Getting the ROI You Want It To?
If you’ve zoomed out and realized your podcast is sitting off on its own instead of working with the rest of your marketing, that’s exactly the kind of thing we look at inside the Podcast Tune-Up.
We don’t just look at individual episodes. We look at your podcast as a whole, how it fits into your marketing ecosystem, and where there are opportunities to improve your podcast ROI.
Click here to access my calendar and book your free private podcast coaching call with me. Let’s figure out how to make your podcast work harder for the business you created it to support.
