How to Market Your Law Firm’s Podcast

Count­less lawyers and law firms have dived head-first into pod­cast­ing to lever­age one of the fastest-grow­ing con­tent plat­forms in the world. If you are among them, con­grat­u­la­tions! But now comes the hard part.

Grow­ing your audi­ence, avoid­ing the “pod­fade” phe­nom­e­non, and gen­er­at­ing returns on your invest­ment quick­ly become pri­or­i­ty one. After all, you like­ly set ambi­tious goals and strate­gic objec­tives that need to be met, and the only way to do that is to keep build­ing upon your ear­ly momentum.

As pop­u­lar as the medi­um is, pod­cast­ing is not a field of dreams. You must do more than build it to rea­son­ably expect that “they will come.” It takes mar­ket­ing, per­sis­tence, and cre­ativ­i­ty to stand out and stand the test of time. Here are some sug­ges­tions to help you mar­ket a pod­cast and grow your audience.

Create Micro-Moment Gateways

If you are pro­mot­ing your pod­cast on social media and via email — which you should be! — I urge you to be care­ful and cog­nizant of what we’re ask­ing your audi­ences to do. Busy exec­u­tives, find­ing mere moments between tasks, quick­ly scan social media feeds or skim inbox­es look­ing for rea­sons to inter­rupt their flows. Or, more like­ly, they are avoid­ing those interruptions.

Be hon­est: How like­ly is it that some­one thumb-scrolling through LinkedIn is going to see a post about your pod­cast, stop what she is doing, click a link to open and/or down­load a new app, and lis­ten to your 20- to 30-minute pod­cast right then and there?

Not very.

But what she may be will­ing to do is watch a 60-sec­ond video/audio snip­pet of an episode, to get a taste of what your show cov­ers, check out the qual­i­ty of your pro­duc­tion and con­tent, and make a deter­mi­na­tion as to whether it’s worth her full atten­tion going for­ward. She may even book­mark it to return to later.

Over time, those micro-impres­sions will aggre­gate and fos­ter con­ver­sions to full-episode lis­ten­er­ship and even subscriptions.

While you may not get every one of your con­nec­tions to instant­ly sub­scribe to your first episode, you can offer micro-con­tent to serve as the gate­way to a future, longer and more immer­sive engage­ment with your pod­cast. If you don’t offer up the appe­tiz­er, you may nev­er get the chance to serve the full meal.

Seek Syndication

If you fol­low our advice by focus­ing on a nar­row­ly-defined audi­ence niche, this next step becomes a whole lot eas­i­er. If you’re pro­duc­ing valu­able con­tent on your pod­cast, and that con­tent offers true insight and exper­tise to a giv­en seg­ment of some broad­er indus­try, that con­tent holds true value.

It is like­ly that the niche mar­ket you’re look­ing to influ­ence has its own set of con­tent com­mu­ni­ties, trade asso­ci­a­tions, web­sites, media, and even social media groups. Such web­sites, media, and con­tent com­mu­ni­ties are look­ing for great con­tent to serve up to their audi­ences to rein­force their own val­ue propo­si­tion before the same con­stituents you are look­ing to serve.

If you have great con­tent, of gen­uine resource and val­ue to a mar­ket seg­ment, and you’re not overt­ly sell­ing your ser­vices in your con­tent, who wouldn’t want to tap into that exper­tise and serve it up to its mem­ber­ship or audience?

Look for those oppor­tu­ni­ties. Find the con­tent gate­keep­ers. Reach out to them to see if they might be inter­est­ed in syn­di­cat­ing an episode or two (or in per­pe­tu­ity, if they wish). And be sure to con­tex­tu­al­ize for the gate­keep­er why you think their audi­ence might ben­e­fit from lis­ten­ing to a par­tic­u­lar episode. You just might be sur­prised who is will­ing to syn­di­cate your pod­cast, before an audi­ence way larg­er than you could hope to build on your own in a short peri­od of time.

Use Visual Stimuli

Sim­i­lar to the video snip­pets ref­er­enced above, any­thing you can do to inter­rupt the pat­tern of mind­less feed scrolling or glazed-over eyes skim­ming an inbox is worth your time and effort. We live in a world of con­stant overstimulation…one fea­tur­ing a wealth of infor­ma­tion but pover­ty of atten­tion. No mat­ter what kind of con­tent you’re look­ing to call atten­tion to, it’s not enough any­more to sim­ply post a link and fea­ture a trite stock image along­side some meta text. There’s just too much of that out there for the next one up to effec­tive­ly com­pete for an audience’s attention.

This is espe­cial­ly true of long-form pod­cast­ing con­tent, which is com­pet­ing in an are­na of micro moments. It takes time and effort to record, edit and final­ize a sin­gle episode. Sim­ply post­ing a link to an episode online and allow­ing it to wash away in the stream­ing onrush of infor­ma­tion is a trag­ic missed opportunity.

Instead, use visu­al cues to cap­ture the eye and stim­u­late the atten­tion of the user on the oth­er end of the device. Use graph­ics to dis­till a com­plex con­cept that you might spend 10 min­utes on in your pod­cast but can visu­al­ize graph­i­cal­ly in an instant­ly acces­si­ble way that will jump off of the prover­bial page. Even bet­ter, cre­ate ani­ma­tions that are sure to call spe­cial atten­tion and stick out in an oth­er­wise sta­t­ic, two-dimen­sion­al news feed.

If you can get some­one to stop and take notice, you’ve accom­plished the crit­i­cal first step toward engag­ing a lis­ten­er and ulti­mate­ly build­ing your audi­ence. There’s just too much noise out there to leave those engage­ments up to chance…or to allow a com­pet­ing voice to win over your con­stituents in the same way.

Invite Guests

Many peo­ple over­look the oppor­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness devel­op­ment that hav­ing a pod­cast offers, such as allow­ing you to reach out to prospects you might oth­er­wise avoid cold call­ing and invit­ing those prospects to be guests on your pod­cast. Being strate­gic about your guest list also allows you to grow the pod­cast itself.

When you pub­lish an episode fea­tur­ing a guest, it’s like­ly that your guest will help to co-pro­mote the episode, shar­ing it on social media feeds, post­ing it to a web­site, or email­ing a link to sub­scribers. This broad­ens your reach and expos­es your con­tent to an entire­ly new audi­ence that might not oth­er­wise dis­cov­er your podcast.

Think about who you’re invit­ing to the show. Guests should offer unique and valu­able per­spec­tives and insight to your audi­ence. Ide­al­ly, they’ll have large plat­forms of their own. For any prospec­tive guest, con­sid­er: Do they have a large audi­ence? Are they influ­en­tial among the cir­cles you wish to influ­ence? How big is their mega­phone? Seek out great guests that will enhance the qual­i­ty of your show, but also turn an eye toward “influ­encers” when build­ing out your desired ros­ter of poten­tial guests.

Pod-Fame, Not Pod-Fade

Yes, build­ing an audi­ence for a pod­cast is a chal­leng­ing endeav­or. But if it was worth your time to pro­duce audio con­tent, it’s cer­tain­ly worth your time to attain audi­ence affin­i­ty for it. Unless you’re already famous, your pod­cast will launch large­ly unno­ticed. Whether it stays that way is up to you. Your will­ing­ness and com­mit­ment to mak­ing the extra effort to pro­mote your pod­cast beyond the intu­itive and low-hang­ing-fruit tac­tics avail­able to every­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion might just be the dif­fer­ence between pod-fame and pod-fade.

SOURCE: JDSupra