Increase Your Podcast Downloads with these FB Ads Strategies | 121
If you are a podcaster, then you are probably looking at one metric with a microscope: the downloads! With podcasting gaining a lot of popularity, however, it can be tricky to get noticed online. So, how can you increase your podcast downloads and get more listeners? I’ve seen a lot of success in adding Facebook Ads to a podcast marketing plan.
However, these ads are a bit different than typical ads you might run. So, let’s take a look at how you can grow your podcast with ads.
Why Should You Promote Your Podcast With Fb Ads?
Typically when you think of ads, you probably think about making more sales or even growing your email list. However, sending people to your podcast (or any other form of long-form content) can be really beneficial for your business.
By promoting your podcast with ads, you are increasing your visibility and brand awareness. You’re not going to see a direct financial return with this podcast marketing method, but you will be building a warm audience and attracting new people to your podcast. Win-win!
Budget and Expectations for the Ads
The good news about this podcast marketing method is that these Facebook ads are relatively cheap. I usually recommend clients spend about $3 a day or $100 a month when first starting with brand awareness ads.
When running these ads, you are sending listeners to your show notes on your own website. The reason for this is because you can attach a Facebook Pixel to your website and track people who visit that page. Then, you can retarget that audience later for additional ads.
These podcast ads will run for about four to six weeks before you need to update the content. You really don’t want to fatigue your audience, so keep a close eye on the ads performance throughout the month.
Where Do You Start with These Ads?
Start by selecting the podcast episode that you want to drive traffic to. Be really specific and selective with these episodes. You want it to be episodes where you’re talking about a pillar piece of content, so you can make sure you’re attracting the right audience.
For example in my business, Episode 118 would be a great choice for ads, while Episode 112 was really popular, but it doesn’t fall under one of my pillars, so it might not resonate with the right people.
Bonus Tips for Podcast Marketing
Of course, you should promote your podcast outside of Facebook Ads as well. Here’s a couple ways I recommend organically driving traffic to your podcast:
Go on a podcast tour. Guest on several shows and promote an episode of your podcast.
Join a summit or conference, and promote your podcast at the end instead of your social media.
Direct traffic from Pinterest to your show notes.
Repurpose your podcast into YouTube videos, TikTok, Reels, etc.
You can also listen to podcast episode 86 on why your Facebook Ads are so expensive or episode 118 on the three pillars of Facebook Ads marketing for more Facebook ad strategy.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Hello and welcome back to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, Zenzaia, and this is a Saturday strategy session. Today we are gonna be talking about some very specific Facebook ad strategies and something that I think is really important and that is increasing your podcast downloads with Facebook ads and how you can go about promoting your podcast, why they get supported, what the benefits are to it, and just some tips and strategies for doing it. So let's dive in.
First of all, why would you promote your podcast with Facebook ads? Now, you can also do this with video content and your blogs. You can drive traffic to your blogs. If you're going to be promoting video content, I recommend that you create a video view campaign on Facebook, but you can do the same thing.
And the reason for promoting your long form content blog podcast videos is increased visibility and brand awareness. There's not really a direct financial return on this investment for these ads. What you're really trying to do is grow that warm audience. People have heard of you, people who are consuming your content. You're hoping that someone who sees the ad listens to your podcast and then subscribes and starts listening. Or they binge a whole bunch of the previous episodes and listen to upcoming ones as well.
The budget for this can be pretty small, like a hundred dollars a month. You can run these ads without any other ads running. You can run these ads if you don't have anything to sell, though, I don't really necessarily agree with that. The reason that I don't agree with that is you don't want the money to be spent for nothing. I personally like to get a lead generation campaign up and running so that you're getting people onto your email list. Then a visibility campaign like this where you're driving traffic to your podcast and getting new listeners. Once someone listens to your podcast, they then get retargeted with that lead generation ad. So it's kind of like a waterfall. They've never heard of you before. They see the podcast, they're like, “oh, this is great”. Then they start seeing lead generation ads or list building ads. They get on your email list, and then you can nurture them and sell to them through your email list.
But you absolutely could run ads to your podcast if you have nothing else happening, and that will just grow your audience. Your goal with these ads is to grow your audience, get more eyes on it. More ears, I guess, more earbuds into ears. Again, the budget can be small, like a hundred dollars a month. I would say like five to ten percent of the overall ad budget, depending on what that budget is. So we're talking about like $3 a day, right? These are traffic ads.
We're driving traffic to the podcast blog post, the show notes, on your website because you can pixel that. And you cannot pixel the Apple Podcast player. You cannot pixel Spotify. Also, you have no idea what platform the person who sees the ad wants to listen on. So best practice is to drive them to your blog post, which should have the podcast player embedded in it. I highly recommend that you go take a peek at my podcast blog show notes. There's one for every single episode, I think, and there is a pixel. So that is helping, that's what grows my warm audience. If I were to direct them to Apple or to Spotify, or even I have a smart link through Chartable, which when you open it, it gives all of the options, but I can't pixel that, and so then the person is lost. I really wanna get them in that pixel so that I can retarget them with additional ads to get on my email list.
So that's kind of the what and the why and the how piece. The majority of these ads will go to cold audiences. You absolutely can run nurture ads like this, visibility ads to people who are in your warm audience already just to help nurture them. It's part of the omnipresence strategy, the omnipresent strategy where you are showing up everywhere consistently. You're getting that podcast out to your warm audience, as well as cold audiences.
So let's just say that you're ready to get started with podcast ads. Where do you start? First one is to be specific and selective with the episodes that you are selecting. So when I say selective, I mean pick episodes that really align with your pillars and are going to attract the right audience. Not every single podcast episode that you do is going to bring in the right people. I've done some behind the scenes episodes. I've done some guest episodes that aren't going to bring in people who are the right audience, or they might be more interested in that, the guest topic and not so much in Facebook ads. So you always want to be very selective and pick an episode that is speaking directly to your ideal client and aligns with your business.
And if you've been around here a while, you know I like to talk about reverse engineering your success. So you start with what you're selling, create your lead magnet so that it will bring in people that wanna buy and then create your social media content, your long form content, all of that with your lead magnet in mind so that the people who are consuming that content will want your lead magnet. And then because they're the right people, they'll also wanna buy from you. And so you want to be very selective with that content. And also specific, you are going to be running ads to a single episode.
Now you can pick multiple episodes to be running at the same time because you really can only promote them for like four to six weeks before you should switch out the content. Because it's really important to watch for audience fatigue with this type of ad, but you want to be selecting specific episodes, not just like, “Hey, come listen to my entire show”.
There's a couple of reasons for this. First, you'll be able to speak directly to the audience you're messaging. Your ad copy will be much clearer, and also you'll be able to highlight the benefits of listening to this specific episode. Overall, your show is gonna be talking about different things. And if you're just promoting your show in general, it's going to be that you're speaking to no one. You're trying to speak to everyone, so you're actually speaking to no one. You're trying to talk about all of the things, so you're not talking about any of the things. So be selective. Be specific.
Next, I want you to be creative. And in this, you're going to need to test out what works best for your audience. It might be still images, it might be videograms directly from recording. Now I'm not personally recording video working on it, but it is 10:00 PM here. There's no natural light. I'm sitting on the floor in my bedroom. The bed's not made. There's lots of clean laundry in the basket behind me that just needs to be folded. I live in the real world, right? Like I'm not recording this with video perfect. Uh, but you might be, you might record video of your podcast that you can turn into a beautiful videogram, so you could test that out for your Facebook ads.
You could also test out audiograms and then those like selfie videos where you are holding your phone. Arms length the way, and you're just talking to the camera. I've found that those work the best, but you absolutely have to test for your audience and figure out which ones are going to work the best for you. Still images and audiograms don't tend to do super well, but again, you need to test out for yourself, for your audience. And don't be afraid to try. You're only spending a couple dollars a day. This ad is only gonna be up for four to six weeks. So if it didn't work this time, try something different the next time. You have no idea.
And with that, trying something different. Don't be afraid to try different types of audiences. With these nurture ads, you can try out different cold audiences. So those are the interest-based audiences, the ones we love creating where we're like teachers, Starbucks, Pinterest, blah, whatever, right? Just throwing random interests out. Don't be afraid to do that for this. Your goal with these is not warm audiences, but you absolutely can send these ads out to warm audiences.
I love look-alike audiences. And so that's taking the warm audience and making a bigger audience of people who have similar characteristics, but I've never heard of you before.And then, like I just said, trying those new cold audiences, you might find some sort of combination that is perfect. And again, low cost. It's a great way to test out those audiences.
The last thing, and I probably should have talked about this before, but just a tip with the URL. Don't, if you're not already doing this, you don't need to redo it all. But if you are just getting started, you might wanna consider using something really, really simple in your URL that includes the word podcast before every episode. So for example, mine is marketscalegrow.com/121, right? That's this episode. But if you look, when you type that Market, Scale, Grow URL into the Google machine it actually redirects to jenzaiadimartile.com/podcast/episode121, and all of my episodes have that URL as they're main URL, jenzayiadimartile.com/podcast/episode. And then the number. And the thing about that podcast is in Facebook ads, you can actually create an audience of all the people who have been to a URL that contains podcast or jenzaiadimartile.com/podcast.
And that would get anybody who has gone to any of my podcast episodes. Whether it's through a Facebook ad or organically. And so by having a URL like that, it's really, really helpful. Also, I use the redirect, so I use Rebrandly as my redirector to create the marketscalegrow.com/121 or whatever episode number it is for a couple reasons. Jenzaia DiMartile is hard AF to spell. I don't want to have to be spelling it out every single time. And so Market Scale Grow is much easier. It's also branded, so it's the Market Scale Grow, podcast, Market Scale, Grow URL. It all just works really nicely together and people don't really have to think about it.
Okay, so the other thing is you wanna keep your URLs for your podcast simple. So I've definitely seen them before where it's something like Marketscalegrow.com/increase-podcast-download-with-these-facebook ad dash strategies, right where the entire title of the podcast is in the url and you can do that. And I know that there are some website builders that do that by default. My default is something like a FT76. It's a whole bunch of letters and numbers, and I actually have to go in there, erase it and write episode 121. You don't need, and I would even recommend that you don't have the words from your title in your URL because it's gonna make it hard. Because my URL is just market sale grow.com/118 or whatever it is, 121. It's very easy for people to remember it. I don't have to hide the url. I even put it in my Instagram captions now. I say go to market scale grow.com/121 because that is easy for somebody to type into their browser or into their, like on their phone, tippity, tappity. And then, like I said, it just redirects and I create that audience of all people who are listening to the podcast.
Those are my URL tips for you. Take them or leave them. Those are my 10 cents. I also have a couple of bonus ways that you can promote your podcast organically through collaborations. You know, collabs are my fave. So let's start there.
Number one is to go on a podcast tour. And what I mean by your podcast tour is where you are guesting on many different shows, like back to back to back. And I've seen podcast tours that are like 10 episodes, like 10 guests or 30, or whatever it is for you. I've kind of just considered myself constantly on a podcasting tour. And when the opportunity arises, I typically say, yes, I will come be a guest. If there's someone who has a show that I feel like I can serve their audience, I reach out to them. So podcast guesting, being a guest on someone else's podcast.
And if you're listening to this and you don't have your own podcast, you can still be a guest on somebody else's podcast. You absolutely do not need to host a podcast to be a guest, so you can put yourself on a podcast tour. Even without a podcast. But I will say that as a podcast listener, when someone else is on a show, one of the first things that I do is try to find their podcast.
And that's why it's great for promoting your podcast is because you'll have a chance to talk to other podcast listeners about your podcast. And you already know that they love listening to podcasts. So they're more likely to come over to your podcast.
Number two, conferences and summits at the end of my sessions I have started to say the best place to come find me is Market Scale Grow. It's my podcast. Here's a link. You can also be pinning episodes, the show notes similar to how you're gonna run ads to your show notes. If you are using Pinterest, you are likely gonna want to direct the traffic from Pinterest to your blog show notes.
I've heard of people using Reddit. And posting relevant podcast episodes in Reddit threads. And the kind of cool thing about Reddit, if I understand correctly, is it's anonymous. And so you can put your own podcast episode into threads that are relevant without being super spammy. So you can kind of make it like, convert almost. So that's kind of cool.
You can also do videos so whether they're longer form like YouTube. I know a lot of people have started video recording their podcast and then uploading them onto YouTube as well. Or if it's short form, TikToks and reels. Definitely love doing that.
And then the last one that I thought about is networking with your ideal audience in person or virtually. And just making those connections. I talked about this the last time as one of my like interim steps of just making those relationships and those connections and getting to know people. If it comes up saying like, “Hey, I have a podcast. You could listen to it”. If it doesn't come up, maybe you'll find the person on Instagram or they'll find you or whatever, and they'll find your podcast.
And because they've met you, especially if it's in person, they might be more likely to actually give it a listen. So I hope that these tips for growing your podcast downloads using Facebook ads were helpful and I will be back with an exciting interview next week. So, have a wonderful week and happy Saturday.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!