Podcast Marketing and How Marketers Can Avoid the Number One Promotion Mistake

Recently,Podcast Marketing Best Practices no media, entertainment, or communications platform has grown faster than podcasting.

According to Podcast Hosting, as of January 2021, there are over 1.7 million podcasts and over 43 million episodes. another report in 2023 found that 75% of Americans are familiar with podcasts. If your company is embarking on a strategy for podcasting, this article will show you how to avoid one of the most costly mistakes that marketers make in efforts to grow listeners.

Marketers Flock to Podcasting

One of the first hot areas for podcasting was helping marketers be better marketers. There is no shortage of marketing experts offering regular series covering best practices, tips, and tools to help marketers succeed. Using the knowledge gained from listening to podcasts, many marketers have launched their own podcasts as a marketing tool to promote their products and brands. They are finding that a podcast strategy can help build their brand in different ways including:

With low costs and low barriers to entry, if marketing teams aren't already using podcasts, they soon will be.

A Plethora of Choice

Marketers love choice. The growing list of podcast hosting services offers precisely that when it comes to production. Popular platforms for creating podcasts include Buzzsprout, Captivate, Transistor, Simplecast, Podbean, and Libsyn. There are dozens of others.

Consumers Podcast Promotion and Marketing Tips and Best Practiceslove choice more than marketers. So when it comes to listening to podcasts, they can do so directly from the hosting service itself or, more likely, from their favorite music or listening app like Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or a variety of others. In addition, you will often find that your iOS listeners prefer one platform while your listeners on Android devices prefer Another. That presents another unique marketing challenge that we will come back to in a moment.

Marketers of course then use a variety of other platforms to promote podcasts and communicate directly with customers and prospects about the subject matter. You know what they are. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and even the old reliable e-mails.

Increasingly, consumers access social networks and email on mobile devices. Mobile devices now consistently account for more than 60% of internet traffic, and that number is expected to grow.

In the podcast world, that number is even higher. Over 65% of listeners access podcasts on their mobile devices and that translates to a preference for podcast apps not websites. Perhaps not surprising but that means the links to your podcast better open the podcast app from different marketing channels or the result will be very low conversion.

If your podcast links are not opening the app, that means you are sending your visitors to mobile website logins and you just wasted valuable time and resources in the final stretch of your podcast strategy. Incredibly, that is exactly what marketers often do in their campaigns for podcasts. They place podcast links behind ads, emails and in social networks that can't open the app which hurts conversion.

Marketing Your Podcast: The Sound of Silence

While we all love choice, this is where the problems start to set in when promoting podcasts.

Different social networks, apps and operating systems make it extremely difficult for users to move from one app to another seamlessly. When a podcast is promoted on a social network like Facebook, marketers go to great lengths to make sure it looks perfect and renders properly on the page. Unfortunately, when users click the link from a Facebook ad or from their feed, the only thing they hear is the sound of silence in the form of a mobile website login.

Podcast Marketing Best Practices: Avoiding that Mobile Website Login

This is all by design because Facebook and other platforms don't want you to leave their app to go to another even if you express strong intent. When a mobile user clicks the link to open the podcast, the embedded browser for the app directs the user to a web login screen, which breaks the connection to the podcast, even if the user knows their login credentials. So you just lost a listener and perhaps a loyal follower too.

This is not only frustrating for your listenters but for marketers too because they can see that people are clicking on their podcast links but the app does not open so people are not listening and now you know why!

The Key to Podcast Promotion: The Deep Fix

There is an easy way to fix this problem. It's called app deep linking. Deep links are straightforward to create, easy to use without needing technical resources and won't break your budget. URLgenius is one of the most popular global app deep linking platforms. The platform even lets you create links and test them for free. Using deep links, marketers and agencies have been able to double or even triple conversion rates on all types products and campaigns including podcast content.

Take this small yet easy step to ensure your users on mobile devices hear your message. Get started and try it right now on an old or new podcast. Follow the steps below and you will be on your way to you acquiring more listeners faster than you ever did previously.

Step-By-Step: Podcast App Deep Linking

To create an app deep link to your podcast, just navigate to your target page on the platform (e.g. Spotify) and copy the link from the address bar of your browser. Then paste that link into the box provided on the URLgenius home page.

When you paste the link, you will see the icon for the app is highlighted. This tells you that URLgenius understands the link type you pasted. If you don't see the icon, it could be that the team at URLgenius just needs to add that app to the platform which you can request. Notice there is a pre-populated field that contains four random characters. You can change this to match the name of your campaign or store.

Podcast Marketing Best Practices: Avoiding that Mobile Website Login


Click the “Compose Deeplink” button which takes you to the settings page where you can copy the link and place in any marketing channel. Return to get the link again any time by clicking console from the menu.

Podcast Marketing Best Practices: Avoiding that Mobile Website Login

Email the link or scan the QR code with the camera in your mobile device to test the behavior of the link. You can also create a customer QR code to promote your podcast in offline channels.

Pro Tip: What if your Android listeners prefer the Spotify app and your iOS listeners prefer the Apple Music App? All you need to do is go to the settings for your deep link and update the app address for iPhones and iPads. If you don't know the address, the team at URLgenius will be happy to help you do that. Also consider where to send desktop users. You may want to change the desktop destination to YouTube for example.

That is it! Now you have a deep link that will open your podcast in the app helping you get more listens and more followers. No more web logins. Make this a standard practice in your marketing and watch your conversion rates soar.

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