Promoting your podcast - how to get more people listening

Updated: July 2026

"How do we get our podcast out there more?" It's one of the most common questions we get asked. Investing in a solid strategy for promoting your podcast is one of the most important steps you can take to switch from being merely a podcast creator… to being a podcast creator with a growing audience of dedicated followers. 

Podcasts are now a firm part of the cultural landscape. The field is big and it’s getting even bigger. So what do you need to do to get your podcast noticed and grow your audience?

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First, do a podcast audit

A good podcast isn’t one that simply adheres to hard-to-pin concepts of originality or presence. It's about how it connects with its audience. Look at the numbers. Are people listening right through to the end of every episode? Are you releasing on a schedule? Are certain days more popular than others with your podcast audience? It is more important to fix the problems you can already see before asking others to take a listen.

Make your podcast discoverable. You can’t just put a podcast on Apple Podcasts any more and expect to build an audience. People are using Google Podcasts (and Google Search), Spotify,  Stitcher, TuneIn, Entale, Pocketcasts, Castbox and so many more platforms to find shows. People want to ask Siri and Alexa to play their favourites. 

Podcast SEO is as much an art as a science, but put simply: clear titles, detailed, keyword-informed show-notes and - ideally - podcast transcriptions, are super important.

This may mean syncing your releases to each of those platforms via your RSS feed (most hosting platforms do this for you but some platforms may need some manual input). It definitely means making sure your podcast is in all the places your audience might be. If you want to invest in promoting your podcast to build a podcast audience, you need to ensure your audience can easily find your show first.

Google is now indexing podcasts. This is huge for podcasting, and it means that if the copy accompanying your podcast (and no doubt in the future, the audio content itself) contains relevant keywords, it will turn up in search results. Podcast SEO is as much an art as a science, but put simply: clear titles, detailed show-notes and - ideally - podcast transcriptions, are super important.

Now that you’ve thoroughly applied the polish to make your programme shine, let’s look at how to take your show into the world…

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Making your podcast go further

Your podcast is a treasure trove of content. Beyond being an excellent episode, each show is an opportunity to create compelling (and shareable) content for your audience. Social media is one of the top ways people discover podcasts so sharing video clips from every episode means your podcast content reaches more people.

There are plenty of easy to use tools that allow you to create clips, with your own branding, and auto-generated subtitles, while many hosting platforms or recording platforms like Riverside have built-in functions for creating them.

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Podcast social media promotion tips

• Create and share at least two high-impact highlights for each new episode
• Always include subtitles on your clips
• Make sure every post has a link back to each episode (ideally a smartlink)
• Pin your best podcast clips to the top of you the most important social media channels posts to your page

You can read more about our expert podcast design tips here.

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Brands, use your special moves! 

If you have a branded podcast, mining your episode for content has an added benefit because all of this is material that freely fits into your existing channels. Promoting your podcast via your social media is one thing, but don’t forget about your newsletters, emails and website. There may even be other places where you could promote your podcast, such as in-app messages, push notifications or even a poster in a store.

There are a lot of avenues out there, and it can be overwhelming to promote your podcast while also producing it, so make sure you’re leaving yourself enough time to promote and pre-promote. At 18Sixty, our advice is often to opt for a bi-weekly release schedule. This gives you enough time to breathe between episodes, while keeping the material fresh enough to stay enticing.

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Promoting your podcast via your audience

Your content is only one side of your resources. The other half is your audience. One recent study showed a whopping 66% of listeners are relying on people they know for new listeners. A friend’s recommendation is one of the most powerful tools you have for building a podcast audience. So how can you increase engagement?

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Build a podcast community

It may sound corny but it isn’t… and it works. Your audience wants to be part of a community that engages with and responds to content. So encourage listeners to check in, ask questions and have a conversation with them.

Spotify knows this. Their new Q&A and Poll functions mean creators can post questions and polls for a specific episode. For Q&A, creators can see all answers to questions and share them with the community. For Poll, this means your podcast audience will get to see how their answers fared compared to other listeners. 

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A far more accessible way to build community is to meet your audience where they already are, on Discord or WhatsApp. Neither needs a new app launch or a scheduled live event to work. Listeners can just turn up and start talking, to each other and to you, whenever they like.

Talking Rubbish, the podcast all about recycling we helped launch with James Piper and Robbie Staniforth, built its Discord from a standing start after launch, and it's now a thriving community of thousands: listeners debate the show's "rubbish or not" segment, posting about their shows on their socials, sharing their own recycling questions, and helping shape what gets covered in future episodes.

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Guest on other podcasts

Another great way to leverage community is to offer yourself as a guest for other podcasts. Podcasters make engaging guests because they are used to being behind the microphone. You also get to put yourself in front of a new audience that someone else has built up, and hopefully bring them back to your show with you.

Think of a story that only you can tell and approach podcasts with that story. Use research tools to find out which podcasts are going to have an audience that will most want to engage with you (or ask us to do that for you), and invite those podcasters onto your show. If they say ‘yes’, make it easy for them to share your episode with their community.

And lastly, what’s the best way to get an audience to engage with your podcast? Ask them! Ask them to tell a friend, share on social media, or leave a nice review. It goes a long way.

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Promoting your podcast with paid promotion

Research has shown that some 78% of podcast listeners are open to ads. While 54% would consider buying a product after hearing about it from a podcast ad. Podcast advertising is now big business and it’s the perfect opportunity to promote your podcast to a cohort of potential listeners who are already switched on to podcasts.

Paid social media campaigns can have their place but if you pay for Facebook ads, not everyone seeing that campaign is going to be a listener. But if you pay to put an ad on someone else’s podcast, 100% of the people hearing it will already be podcast listeners.

There's a newer reason PR matters too: Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, getting your podcast mentioned and recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude, not just found through a search engine. It's known that how often a brand gets mentioned across the web correlates with AI visibility roughly three times more strongly than backlinks do. Being written about in the press, even without a link back to your site, teaches these systems that your podcast exists and is worth recommending.

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And finally…

Be authentic.

Your new fans are waiting to discover your podcast. So go to where they will be. Show the world the most honest representation of your podcast, its values and what it’s about. And your new podcast listeners will do the rest.

If you want to make your podcast grow its reach and engagement, just drop us a line. We like to think we know a thing or two about branded podcasts and would love to help your audience grow.