When your business podcast goes live, it’s certainly a milestone to celebrate. But the release of a single episode does not automatically ensure weekly listeners. Promotion of your podcast is one of the most important steps to audience engagement. The good news is: it’s much easier than you might think. We’ve put together a few tips and tricks to successfully promote your business podcast to your employees.

First things, first. You have started a business podcast initiative and are ready to get your business excited about what’s to come! Here are best practices for announcing podcasting to your business:

• Send a CEO announcement to your employees. Whether this is verbal or digital, a message from a high-ranking individual in the company will be sure to give the idea extra importance.
• Email blast your employees regarding your new podcast initiative. Let them know why it will benefit them and when they can expect new content to be posted.
• Create some signage - the more reminders, the better!
• Create a launch event. Nothing excites employees more than some free food and swag. Note that it is important to have podcast content created before your launch event.
• Create a small pilot group for your podcast. This can help to both gain feedback and create awareness within the company.

Maybe you already have a podcast channel, but are slowly starting to add more podcast shows to the mix. Keep in mind that any of the previous tactics will work for promoting a new show. In addition to the bullets above, here are some things you can do to promote a new podcast show to your employees:

• Ask your employees to auto subscribe to the new show.
• If you already have one existing show on your channel, add a "teaser" episode of your new show in the existing show. You can let audience members know if they liked the content to subscribe to the new show you are adding.
• Or, simply make an audio note about the new podcast and ask the audience to listen to it.
• Hold some sort of contest for your new show. For example, the first 20 listeners or the first 20 shares could result in a giveaway or an employee perk.

Here are some best practices for promoting new episodes to your audience as they get published to a show:

• Utilize the news channel of your uStudio podcast to help with in-app promotion. The news channel is a feature unique to uStudio. Any of your employees that have push notifications on will receive a notification when a new episode is added to the news channel.
• Note that new episodes will also automatically be added to the user’s unplayed list in uStudio. This will help them to easily find any new content that they haven’t listened to yet.
• Consider embedding share links for new show episodes inside the episode description for existing shows.
• Create user habits and have a reliable release cadence. Employees will be better about checking the app for new content if they have an idea of when new episodes will be posted.

Here are other tips and tricks to help promote ongoing engagement within your podcast:

• Create an office leaderboard with prizes! Competition is always a good driver of motivation.
• Reward employees for the number of episodes or minutes they listened to your podcast.
• Create a team of internal champions to help with promotion. Leverage your management team or sales leaders who can help with incentivizing your employees. Or, have some internal adopters from a peer-level.
• Offer a guest spot on an upcoming podcast episode for those who have high listenership. People love to talk about themselves and employees will feel as if they are part of your company’s story. This should also help your engagement and listen rate as employees will enjoy listening to their office peers.
• Host new and interesting episode guests to keep your employees excited about the new content. This could be a thought leader in the space, a community member or a large customer.
• Ask for feedback on your business podcast. What are sales managers hearing on the sales floor? Could any pain points be made into a valuable podcast episode that employees would benefit from?
• After asking for feedback and comments, read the responses on-air. Employees will be excited to hear their opinions out loud.
• Give episode and show updates in a weekly communications blast to your employees.
• Measure podcast usage with uStudio’s analytics to continually make improvements.

Keep in mind that it is important to continually track analytics and audience growth for your business podcast. The ability to track show and episode appeal will help you to determine what is performing best and is most popular amongst your employees. Making sure that what you are producing is wanted and valuable will help to ensure your employees continue to listen week after week. Learn more about the analytics and reporting options available to you through uStudio podcasting on our website here.

With the above tips in mind, your private podcast is bound to be a massive success! Visit our website here to learn more about uStudio’s private podcast solutions for business or request a free product demo.