Whether your podcast has been live for one week or one year, it’s never too late to attract new listeners to your private podcast. Consistent audience growth requires time and effort, but there are plenty of promotional tactics your company can put into effect today to give your listener count a boost. Check our list below for best practices for growing your podcast listeners.

Utilize Share Links and Promotional Embeds.

Promotional embeds and share links are a unique feature to uStudio that allow podcast administrators to promote their podcast episodes with a visually appealing preview of the episode. Clicking anywhere on the promotional embed will direct the user to the podcast mobile app or podcast web app, depending on what device they are using. Include promotional embeds in your internal email blasts and other intranet systems to get more eyes on the podcast episodes you have available.

We also recommend adding share links to your employee’s calendar invites. For example, ask that your employees listen to a specific podcast as a prerequisite before a meeting or training seminar. Placing a share link in the calendar invite for that meeting can hold listeners accountable and encourage them to create a uStudio account if they haven’t already.

Hold “book clubs” for podcast episodes.

Just like a traditional “book club,” consider having your leadership teams host follow-up discussions on podcast episodes before or after a team huddle. Encourage employees to discuss what they have learned throughout a podcast episode, what they liked or disliked, or any follow-up questions they had regarding the topic or learning. Doing this can not only keep employees engaged with your podcast content but help to get feedback on how employees feel about the podcast program. Here at uStudio, we always recommend partnering with your leadership teams to push podcast adoption, and this is a more subtle way to do just that.

Include your podcast information in your new hire onboarding materials.

No matter what the use case for your private podcast, it is important to get employees engaged with the medium from the beginning of their job tenure. Include uStudio information in your new hire onboarding materials, including our end-user guide which explains how to download and use the podcast application.

Create a promotional trailer.

Just like before a movie release, trailers are a great way to give your employees a sneak peak on what a new podcast show is about. A trailer teasing your podcast launch date is also a creative way to get employees excited about the new medium. There are plenty of ways to create this for your company as a trailer can be audio-only or video. One suggestion is if you already have content recorded, consider slicing up your favorite moments and editing them together with your theme music. Once you have produced your trailer, promote it in as many places as you can. This can include email, internal social media groups, slack channels and more.

Consider publishing a last-minute surprise.

Shortly before a webinar viewing, CCC Information Services decided to upload the webinar content to uStudio instead. They told their employees if they wanted to listen to the important COVID-19 leadership update, they had to log in to uStudio and consume the material via podcast. This one event was instrumental to CCC’s early adoption success.

To continue to gain more podcast listeners, it is important that your content is unique. Consider hosting an interview with someone your employees have never heard from before, or speak on a sensitive topic that you know your workers will be interested in.

Initiate regular promotion of the program.

Just because you have launched, doesn’t mean you have to stop promoting the program. Regular promotion of your podcast will help to grow podcast listeners in a consistent manner.

If you have a monthly all-hands meeting, dedicate a section of updates just to podcast communication. A promotional calendar can help you keep track of your promotional efforts to make sure episodes are getting a frequent boost.

Growing your podcast is a goal for any podcaster and with a little creativity, dedication and consistency you can start to see your audience numbers grow pretty quickly. For best results, you want to make sure you track and measure your podcast usage with enterprise-grade podcast analytics for actionable insights.