As you well know, podcasts are on the up right now. From fiction, to journalism, to comedy, to everything else, podcasts have become a rediscovered medium in recent years with an ever-growing audience welcoming new shows with open ears. With so much new competition it’s crucial for podcasters to market their podcast effectively.
The 4Ps of marketing is a model designed to enhance the components of the marketing mix, which is the way a new product or service is taken to market. It helps to define marketing options in terms of price, product, promotion and place to meet a specific customer need or demand. This traditional marketing method is widely used by marketing companies and branding agencies. Here we look at how it can be applied to podcast marketing.
The 4Ps marketing mix
When it comes to marketing your podcast the 4Ps can be applied in the following ways:
1. Podcast
Your podcast is your offering to the world. You will know your podcast inside out and understand what message you want to convey to your listeners, so it’s important to use the same tone of voice in all communications. Take time to define the characteristics of your podcast as if it were a living breathing human being. You can even ask friends, family and listeners to help you with this to get an idea of how others view your podcast.
Then reflect this personality in your logo, font, imagery, title, description, in fact every little detail about your podcast needs to be consistent and match up to what your podcast is all about.
2. Price
Whether you’re podcasting for the sheer love of it, or you’re doing it to spread the word about your business, it’s important to understand how valuable your podcast is. Podcasting can add great value to your brand by raising brand awareness, increasing traffic to your website, developing influential relationships and creating new opportunities.
3. Promotion
Effective promotion will get your podcast ranking higher on iTunes, Google and featuring more prominently on social media. Think about why your target audience would want to subscribe to your podcast. What’s in it for them? Some podcasters have enticed listeners to subscribe with competitions and giveaways.
4. Place
Here, you need to think about how people find new podcasts and increase your online presence. iTunes is the main platform for listening to podcasts. Optimising your podcast for iTunes will help to increase rankings and target the right customers at the right time.
The extended 7Ps
If you want to explore the marketing mix further, you can look at the extended 7Ps model. The extra 3Ps are people, process and physical environment.
5. People
This refers to everyone who is involved in creating your podcast as well as the listeners. Good customer relationship management will ensure listeners keep coming back for more. Email marketing can be an excellent tool to keep in touch with your fans.
6. Process
The systems and processes of the organisation affect the execution of the service. So, you have to make sure that you have a well-tailored process in place to minimize costs.
7. Physical Evidence
This is the physical evidence of a business’ presence and establishment. A concept of this is branding. For example, when you think of a sports brand, you think of Nike. So for podcasters, the aim is to get your subject matter associated with your podcast.
So to achieve your podcast marketing goals, a plan that encompasses all the elements of the marketing mix will help to form a robust marketing strategy. We’re keen to hear your thoughts about what marketing strategies you’ve implemented and where they fall within the marketing mix.
About the Author
Effective.FM are podcast marketing specialists who know how to build an audience for your podcast using a combination of SEO, social media, iTunes, newsletters and PPC. They have been using some of these skills to promote websites for the last 18 years via sister company www.effective-internet.co.uk
For more information, please check out www.effective.fm
