The Podcast Life is a newsletter by Deanna Chapman that helps you create a great podcast.

This week’s episode!

Arielle Nissenblatt joined me to talk all about podcast trailers. Check it out on YouTube below or your audio platform of choice here.

Bonus content!

Arielle and I both spend a lot of time thinking about podcasts, so I wanted to get her thoughts on what we can expect to see shows trying on the marketing front in 2025.

Deanna: I wanted to talk to you about what this year has looked like for podcasting. A lot of people are like, podcasting is such a crowded space and the boom is kind of over. I have seen many people and places wanting to start podcasts still, I think overall 2024 has been a pretty good year for podcasting. I know election years are also a little rough in the advertising space in particular because political ads take over so much of both audio and video airwaves.

Arielle: A lot of brands don't want to put their content on a show that talks about politics so divisively. So it's tough.

Deanna: Yeah. A thing that I have noticed with the political shows I work with, it's either long term sponsors, or they end up promoting other podcasts.

I work on a few shows with The Daily Beast. They launched [The Daily Beast Podcast] with Samantha Bee and the chief content officer, Joanna Coles. To promote the show, they kept dropping it in the other Daily Beast show feeds. They don’t drop the full episodes, but they pull out an excerpt of one of the interviews.

So for instance, John Oliver was on the podcast. The John Oliver interview got posted on the other podcast feeds. I think people have tried a lot of new things in 2024 just to figure out the promotion.I'm seeing a lot more feed drops. Is that something you've seen a lot more of this year as well?

Arielle: People are getting more savvy when it comes to collaboration. The general marketing knowledge is being heard around the podcast world that in order for your show to grow from nothing, you need to get in front of existing audiences that might have some look alike characteristics to your potential audience.

One way to do that is promo swaps, another way is guesting opportunities, and another way is feed drops and feed swaps putting an entire episode of your show somebody else's feed, maybe with an intro from them about why this episode is great, or a snippet of a recent episode of yours in their feed that contributes to their message and makes sense with their audience.

So, yes, people are understanding more about this concept of borrowing audience from each other. And more people are listening to podcasts, which means that they're hearing these things in action and then wanting to try them out for themselves.

Deanna: I've always encouraged smaller podcasters to find other similar shows and hit them up and be like, "Hey, do you want to do a promo swap?" If it's a show that has guests, do you want to Guest or fill in as co host if a co host is sick or something one week.

Looking ahead to 2025, what do you think is going to be a big focus in the podcast industry, either as a whole or specifically with marketing? Are there some new tactics you're seeing that people are starting to try out?

Arielle: Yes, maybe this isn't a prediction, but what I think people should do in the coming year is if you have a show that you are planning to make a limited series, find a way to elongate that in some way beforehand after, and even in the middle.

What I mean by that is drop your trailer, drop a teaser. Those can be separate episodes. Drop the first episode, do a talkback episode where you interview a fan and ask them what they thought. There's a lot of ways to make content. It's hard. It's expensive to make more episodes, but if you want any chance of elongating the marketing on ramp, you have to have more episodes.

If it's six weeks, it's just not enough time for you to make a real impact. You have to decide what you want your impact to be. In 2025, people should get clearer about why they are making this show. And I'm saying show and not just podcast, because there's gonna be a lot of overlap between video and audio with all of these new announcements from Spotify.

We need to be thinking about where we want our impact to be. Does it matter if it's on YouTube? Does it matter if it's on TikTok? Does it matter if it's mostly on the podcast?Does it matter that it just exists at all, that impact?

Deanna: Yeah. Almost every single podcast could do some sort of mailbag episode, even if you're a fiction show if you have listeners who have questions about the process of making a fiction show, that is something you can put in one episode. And if someone asks a single question, you could give a detailed enough answer to make that its own episode.

When I started this podcast, I knew I wanted this to be a podcast that covers a variety of topics, like everything about making a podcast. But I wanted the episodes to be very specific. So like we did just podcast trailers. That was it.That was the whole episode.

I did pre-production, ads, and mixing. You can do multiple episodes on all of those things. I thought about what would be the most evergreen way to do this podcast. In 2025, we're going to see people get a lot more specific with not only their podcasts, but their episodes in general, too.

What are your thoughts about miniseries? Do you think we're going to see a lot more of those in 2025, especially in the fiction space?

Arielle: We talked about this in our episode about podcast trailers, but it's another marketing opportunity if you're able to break up your content and create personalized visual identities for those miniseries and then create social assets specifically for those miniseries.

That's great, it also allows you to potentially consolidate with other creator production studios and do miniseries where maybe you have a the host of a show, like a voice talent of another show, another well known show, be the voice talent on your show for a miniseries. Like this series is starring this person.

That's a fun way to further differentiate your miniseries from others. It's not that I'm skeptical that this will happen. It's just that I advise every single year, there should be more miniseries. So I don't think 2025 is going to be any different.

I think it's all about who listens to these shows, do they want to do what they want to do or do they want to listen to people who are giving marketing advice and change the content to potentially reach new audiences? It's about a balance between content marketing. Like creating content reaches a potential desired audience and then making what you want to make. And there's a balance.

If you enjoyed this newsletter and really want to level up your podcast, I interview the smartest people in the business. I’m always looking for the best ways to help you grow your podcast. So be sure to subscribe and share this with a friend! And if there’s something you’d like to see covered, reply to this email.