For marketing and promotion, I decided to reach out to charities linked to the conditions I was featuring and asked if they wanted to support and market my podcast as well as giving promotion to their charity through my product. I also reached out to a podcast promoting company called ‘The Big Light’ for the same reasons as the charity and to find what help they could offer in terms of further promotion.
I decided that my main form of promotion was through an Instagram account. I also intended to use the charities that I’m liaising with to promote my content through their social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and their websites.
Contact charities
I decided that one of the best ways to market this project was through using charities and their reach and influence. The charities would be directly linked to the issues that were being discussed in each episode. I also knew that people who follow or keep up to date with these charities would be a potential audience as they’re more likely to listen and support something that relates to them or a family member.
One of the charities I knew personally, so I contacted them straight away to see if they’d like to be involved. I’ve worked with the Chair on previous projects and have a good relationship with him so I thought he’d be a great charity to reach out to where we could have a mutual beneficial promotion. I also wanted him to recommend somebody who would be willing to share their story on the podcast. I felt it was best to discuss this with him either over the phone or in person.
For the charity I knew personally, we had scheduled to meet up but unfortunately this was rescheduled multiple times which was out of my control so promotion on this part was significantly delayed.
Eventually after getting nowhere with meeting with in person, I decided to call him to discuss the project. I then asked him to put me in contact with someone. He said he’d have a think about someone and get back to me. A few days later he gave me the name and number of someone to contact her about recording an episode. We texted a few times, had a call and then set a date to record her episode.
As one of the episodes was about endometriosis, I also emailed a charity relating to this called Endo SOS. I never received a reply from this charity.
The charities didn’t do any promotion for the episodes or podcasts, one didn’t reply to me and the other, who I thought I had a good relationship with, just didn’t do any promotion or show support for it. One of the individuals on the podcast was an ambassador for the charity and I thought this would mean she would promote as I also signposted to her Instagram however this unfortunately wasn’t the case. I didn’t wasn’t to come across as pushy by forcing the promotion and didn’t want to damage the relationship with the charity.
Contact external parties
I also contacted some other people/companies who I thought would be able to aid with promotion and gaining a wider audience.
I decided to reach out to Halina from the ‘A Sonic Hug’ podcast, who I completed my case study on, to see if she could offer any advice or also help to promote my podcast. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive a reply to my email. I did however follow Halina and the ‘A Sonic Hug’ on Instagram and Halina followed back from her personal page.
Another company I reached out to was ‘The Big Light’. This is a production company that has also produced ‘A Sonic Hug’. I emailed to ask if they would be interested in promoting my podcast. I received an email and had a phone call with Flora where she stated there wouldn’t be anything they’d be able to do as they only work on projects that are just a pitch instead of fleshed out. However, she did say to send her a link to it to listen and she would see if there was anything they could do later down the line.
Social media
I decided to use Instagram as my main form of promotion due to my target age range being 16-45. A study conducted by Oberlo showed that the age ranges of 18-24 and 25-34 used Instagram the most with their numbers being at 31.2% and 35-44 being 3rd highest at 16.6% (Instagram Age Demographic (2024), 2024). I wanted to mention the charities on the posts relating to the episodes and also the individuals participating if they wanted this. My intentions for this was so the charity could repost on their accounts and then the episodes would have a wider reach.
I was initially planning on uploading snippets and teasers to Instagram to promote but due to certain issues that took place I was unable to do this. I changed my plan to uploading a post to announce the podcast and then for the 2 episodes, I uploaded the day before each to announce it coming and then a post to announce it was live. It was disheartening as, according to the insights of the page created, the views and interactions didn’t reflect the likes, followers or engagement desired or on the account.
Reflecting back on the project, I wish I had created a TikTok account for this as it would’ve had more reach with the younger demographic. The reason I didn’t create one was because I’m not familiar with it as a social media platform and how to use it.
Word of mouth
Another way that I decided to promote was through talking to friends and family members to show their support of the podcast and to tell people in their lives about it. I felt that this is sometimes the best way of promotion as a lot of things recommended to me or that I have recommended to others has been through word of mouth.
I did reach out to family and friends hoping they would listen to the episodes and either post or tell others about it but unfortunately that didn’t happen.
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