Marketing your Podcast

I launched a How Travel Writers Self-Publish podcast just over a year ago. It was an experiment to see whether my nonfiction book content would work well in the audio format, and as a narrator training ground for turning my books into online courses. I’ve always been adverse to public speaking, but I joined Toastmasters to conquer that fear, and much to my surprise I love podcasting, and can’t wait to start creating my courses. Now I’ve decided I’m in it for the long-haul, it’s time to start getting more strategic about marketing my podcast across social media to build my target audience.

Up until now I’ve used static images to promote my podcast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For each show I create and publish on Podbean I create a blog post with a summary of the episode, and use this url to promote my show on social media.

But these static image aren’t very engaging for an audience who are already inundated with static images. So I went in search of a free tool to create audio clips to post on social media, and I discovered Wavve.

Wavve is also aimed at musicians and radio shows, but I was interested in how a podcaster like me could turn audio clips from a show into shareable video highlights. This way I can entice new listeners to explore my show.

Wavve gives you the power to leverage the audio content to create social videos that drive more reach & engagement around your brand & content. Great for promoting episodes, highlighting guests, and sharing show clips. Did you know that videos are 6X more likely to be retweeted than photos and 3X more likely than GIFs? Source: Wavve

I decided to road-test the success of video clips before committing to a paid premium plan, and signed up for their Free plan. It’s the only one that includes Wavve branding, but that’s fair enough. I’m getting their service for free, so promoting them is the price to pay, and to be honest their branding is pretty unobtrusive. It slides in during your video and slides right out again, so props to Wavve for making it this seamless.

Customizing your design

The first part of the process is to create a Custom design. Wavve do have generic templates to choose from, but if you’re going to the effort of creating marketing materials to promote your brand, it’s important to create a customized design. You can choose different dimensions based on which social media platform you plan on using, so I chose the square design for Instagram, which is also the same shape as my podcast logo.

It’s really simple to create your design. Just upload your image and make whatever edits you like to overlay onto it. I kept it simple and just chose one of the waveform animations. This is how you show you’re promoting audio, and I liked that Wavve allows you to change customize of waveform to align with your branding. The waveform moves when the video plays, and this is what makes these promo videos more engaging and eye-catching than a static image.

Once you’ve created your custom design, the next step is to create your first video.

Creating a promotional video for your podcast

On the free plan you only get 60 seconds per month, but that’s plenty of time to create a show promo and a couple of preview segments using short audio clips.

To create your video, simply upload your audio file and then choose the segment you want to feature in your video. I chose a recent show and created a 15 second generic show promo using my show’s intro and outro, and created a 19 second preview clip featuring my podcast guest talking about book marketing.

Custom Tags and Subtitles

You can add custom category tags, and when you click on the MORE link you can add subtitles to you video so that if your followers have their social media settings set to “sound off”, the text scrolls across the bottom of the video so they can read rather than listening to the audio.

Wavve auto-generates the transcript, and gives you the access to amend what they get wrong. As far as accuracy goes I would say they got my audio about 80% right, but these are short audio clips so making the amendments to correct the transcript doesn’t take long. And having the text and audio version is a fantastic feature.

Here’s my generic show preview:

The generic clip one can be used again and again, so I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of that one.

Here’s my David Penny’s Take on Book Marketing show preview:

I’m really pleased with both of these podcast preview clips. Even though I created the square format for Instagram, I plan on using the same image for Twitter and Facebook. Here’s what my post looks like on Facebook, where you can see an example of the:

• Wavve branding which is only visible for a couple of seconds, and
• Subtitles which appear on a transparent background

Compare this to the static image I used at the start of this article, and I think you’ll agree this one is a lot more engaging. If you saw a post like this in your social media stream, wouldn’t you want to click it to listen? I know I would. Especially and you can see that’s it’s only a very short clip.

If I was enrolled in a paid plan, I’d probably go to the effort of creating the same clip using the optimized dimensions for each social media network, but because I’m road-testing this free plan I decided to choose the format ideal for my primary social media network—Instagram. And this dimension will work for all my social networks.

You can download your videos directly from the website, but Wavve also sends you a download link to your email.

Based on these two videos, I have 24 seconds of video time available on my free plan. I think that’s going to be more than enough to record two more videos.

I publish two podcast episodes a month, so now that I have my generic podcast clip in the bag, I’ll have 30 seconds available for each show per month. I can use that to create one long show excerpt, or a couple of shorter clips per episode. I’m leaning towards the shorter clips because I think those will be more popular on social media.

Also, going with the shorter format fits into my ethos of targeting listeners with limited time available. My podcast episodes are either 10 or 20 minutes long, so creating 15 second show excerpts seems ideal for enticing my social media followers to give it a listen. Who doesn’t have 15 seconds to spare?

This shorter format will also set me up for the future. I want to move to weekly podcast episodes, so the free plan will give me 15 seconds a month per show.

How easy is Wavve to use?

Even for the technophobes out there, Wavve is simple to master. Their user interface is clean and uncluttered, and it’s intuitive to figure out. I didn’t have to refer to the help menu once.

I’m definitely going to continue using the free version of Wavve to promote my podcast. I’m setting up bit.ly links for each social network so I can track the clicks, and if these promo videos are popular and my listener base increases faster than the averages I’ve seen over the past year, it may be time to invest in one of Wavve’s premium plans to create more show preview clips.

If you have a podcast to support your author or writing brand, why not give Wavve a whirl, and post a link to your promo reel in the comments section below.