Podcasting is an exploding content marketing category that has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic. With more people at home and wanting to learn new things and new skills with their downtime, podcasts have become a frequent form of content audiences have embraced.

Podcasting has been a fringe marketing content item since 2015, becoming more mainstream only recently. The latest statistics demonstrate that your target audience knows what podcasts are and if you develop a relevant podcast format, it can extend both your brand reach and customer engagement.

Podcasting Distribution

Recommended Hosting

• Use your own website. When space becomes limited start deleting the oldest episodes and making sure they are on your YouTube channel for historic purposes and possible re-use in the future.
  • If you can do it, you should host your podcast RSS feed on your own website and not through a third party, otherwise you run the risk of losing rights/ownership to the podcast. BluBerry does a great job discussing this importance.
  • If you’re worried about not having enough storage space on the website, upload episodes to YouTube, where they’ll always live there even when you delete old episodes from your website to clear space.

If You Cannot Host on Your Website

• Always read through terms and conditions if you host on Lipsyn or BluBerry to make sure you’re always the rightful owner of your podcast, it’s direction and future. Read the fine print before you commit to anything.

Benefits of Lipsyn Hosting

• Lipsyn has competitive hosting pricing Lipsyn has competitive hosting pricing.
• Lipsyn recommends your podcast to iTunes for a front page feature when you interview big names.
• Multiple publishing features to other podcast outlets, as well as social media.
• Ability to upload 4 different content types to Libsyn (audio, video, PDF and text).
• Offer your audiences extras, blog posts, transcripts, and more.
• Also get statistics on your listeners and their habits, as well as the way they consume your content.

Podcasting Best Practices

Posting Schedule

• Best days to publish episodes
• There really isn’t much variance in podcast release day but Monday releases allow a listener to download the new episode throughout the work week, which are the highest downloading days.
• The highest percentage of download days come between Monday-Friday with Wednesday being the peak day.
  • Most people that are subscribed to a podcast will program their settings to automatically download the newest episode when it becomes available.

Best times of day to publish episodes

• Time of day should be based on where your target audience lives. For example 6am is also 7am in Ontario, Canada, 12pm in Manchester, UK and 8pm in Canberra, Australia. So, keep in mind where your audience lives to find your sweet spot for posting.
• If you’re looking at broadcasting nationally from the west coast, publish episodes between 7am-10am in an attempt to catch people on their morning commutes. (try 8am-11am to try and catch people on the west coast on their lunch breaks, while you’re getting east coast listeners on their morning commutes).
• Adjust your timing based on data tracking metrics of listeners.

Data Tracking

• Podtrac is free!
  • Reports include 24 hour online access, detailed reports (by episode, source and country), Unique monthly audience counts, aggregated data from all podcast sources.
  • Podtrac also offers expert audience surveying. This gathers demographic info and key metrics, such as, age, gender, education, income, job function, company size, industry employed, listening behavior and more.

If you don’t have the internal resources to produce your own podcasts, there are plenty of resources available to help you add podcasting to your content marketing mix.