This post is part of a series of guest posts sharing reflections on the 2024 Podcast Marketing Trends Report.
This post is from Jennifer Han, CMO at Ausha, a podcast hosting platform that is building out a suite of tools to help podcasters grow, most notably, their PSO panel.
In studying the 2024 Podcast Marketing Trends Report, one of the most striking insights that jumped out at me was this:
There is a major disconnect between the strategies that podcasters identify as effective for growing their audience… and the channels listeners say they use to discover new podcasts.
Which presents an interesting question…
Who’s right?
On the one hand, podcasters are the ones doing the work, running marketing experiments, tweaking their show messaging, packaging, and content strategy, and then measuring the results.
On the other hand, marketing attribution—ie. tying results to the specific actions that cause them—is notoriously difficult, especially in a medium like podcasting.
So often, an uptick in listeners in December is actually the result of a cumulative series of small actions and changes that started in February.
Most podcasters already know this intuitively.
Despite the work they put into marketing their shows and tracking their downloads, 42.5% of podcasters in the Podcast Marketing Trends Report mention “understanding which specific strategies are effective” as their single biggest marketing challenge.
So if our personal hunches and experiences as podcasters might not be the most reliable measure of what works, what can we learn from listeners?
As it turns out, The Podcast Host recently published a complementary study—the highly insightful podcast discovery report—where podcast listeners broke down exactly how they find new shows.
And there’s a lot we as podcasters can learn about how to optimize our shows for discovery.
As the data makes clear, listeners overwhelmingly turn to podcast apps as their default channel for finding new shows.
The question for us, then, is how do we optimize our shows to take advantage of this listener behavior?
Success on podcast apps hinges on three pillars:
- Applying to and being featured by the platforms
- Ranking highly in the charts and categories
- Leveraging Podcast Search Optimization (PSO) to improve your visibility
While all three strategies can and should be a part of every podcaster’s marketing strategy, optimizing your show’s search discoverability in search is the most immediately actionable.
By focusing on intent and leveraging the unique algorithms of platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, PSO transforms these apps from simple directories into dynamic engines for audience discovery.
While PSO is often compared to traditional SEO for websites, podcast apps each have their own unique search algorithms, each with different rules for success.
At Ausha, we’ve spent the past few years studying each of these algorithms closely, and have developed an intimate understanding of how each platform’s search functionality works, and what podcasters can do to optimize for it.
You can learn more about how to boost your discoverability with our Apple Podcasts PSO Guide and Spotify PSO Guide, but the core of the strategy across all platforms is as follows:
First, identify the primary keywords or phrases listeners use when searching for a show like yours.
Then, include those keywords in your:
- Show title
- Show description (multiple mentions of the keyword is even better)
- Episode titles
- Episode descriptions
Of course, a core aspect of the PSO strategy is researching your competitors and understanding which keywords you have a chance of competing for.
Trying to rank for a broad keyword like “Business” for example is almost impossible.
A longer tail, more specific keyword like “High-Ticket Coaching Business” on the other hand may be ripe for the picking.
Nailing your PSO will take some research, testing, and monitoring of the results.
But once you nail it down, you’ll be setting yourself (and your show) up to meet listeners where they’re already looking for shows like yours, boosting both your discovery and new-listener acquisition in the process.
