How to advertise your Podcast on Facebook and Grow Your Audience

As podcasters, we know the struggle of growing our show. Every week, every episode means creating new social media posts, writing show notes, creating video clips, and the list goes on and on.

Podsqueeze already makes promoting our podcast a lot easier by creating social captions, emails, blog posts, show notes, and video clips at lightning speed. We use Podsqueeze for our podcast Roadmap to $1 Million to help us spread the word about new episodes by creating show notes for SEO, emails to send to our list, and video clips to post on Instagram and Facebook.

The reality is that if you want your show to impact the masses, marketing is an essential part of that but relying solely on organic social media is like growing your show on quicksand.

It’s getting harder and harder to get in front of your ideal audience by simply posting on Facebook and Instagram.

“Over 2022, the average reach rate for both platforms has decreased dramatically - to 9.34% on Instagram and only 4.32% on Facebook,” according to Social Insider. And according to Hootsuite, the average engagement rate of an organic post on Facebook ranges from 1.52%-2.58%.

As a busy entrepreneur and podcast host, I wanted to find a way to significantly grow our audience and email list without having to post 3 reels, 2 stills, and 1 Instagram Story every single day. I also wanted to ensure my best content attracted quality leads for my business 24/7 while I was focused on creating content or taking time off.

I saw a big opportunity to significantly increase our podcast audience in half the time and with half the effort of posting on social media by running Facebook ads to significantly grow the podcast.

For our marketing podcast Roadmap to $1 Million, we leverage the power of Facebook and Instagram ads to increase the podcast's reach and grow our email list with a targeted audience of leads who would enjoy our content and increase sales for our marketing consulting company.

Your podcast content is a goldmine of valuable information, you just need more people to see it and that's where Facebook and Instagram ads come into play.

Running Facebook ads for your podcast can get you thousands of new, targeted listeners so that you have more people to sell your products and services to.

Here are a few tips to help you grow your podcast with Facebook Ads:

Tip 1: Elevate Your Best Podcast Content

Not all of our episodes are hits (and that’s okay!). If you’re analyzing your podcast data, you will find that some episodes get more downloads and listens than others. You don’t need to run ads for every episode of your podcast. You just need to pick the top episodes that will capture new listeners and let your content turn them into loyal fans.

Relying solely on individual metrics might not give you a full picture of your podcast episode's performance. That's why it's a good idea to consider a combination of factors when determining your best content. For instance:

• Listens: This metric shows how many times your episode has been played, but it does not tell you how long each listener stayed or how much they enjoyed it. Therefore, it may not be a good indicator of the satisfaction your listeners. However, it can be useful for showing the interest and demand for your topic, which may help you target a specific niche or audience.

• Completion rate: This metric shows the percentage of listeners who listened to the entire episode or a significant portion of it. This indicates that they found your episode valuable, relevant, and engaging enough to keep listening. Therefore, it can be a good indicator of the quality and effectiveness of your episode.

You can use tools like Podder or Chartable to track and analyze these metrics for your podcast episodes. You may want to choose an episode that has a high number of downloads and listens, as well as a high completion rate and positive ratings and reviews. This way, you can showcase the popularity, interest, quality, and satisfaction of your podcast to potential listeners.

Once you have identified the top episodes, you can use them as the basis for your advertising campaigns. You can create ads highlighting the main topic, value proposition, or hook of your best episodes and directing listeners to them.

For example, if you have an episode about the 3 Big Marketing Mistakes Keeping You from Growing Your Sales Long-Term, you could use that title as your ad's headline and create a reel calling out the mistakes, with a call to action to listen to the full episode. You could also use an audio video clip from Podsqueeze as your ad creative to give a quick preview of what's inside the episode.

Pro Tip: Use AI tools to repurpose your show notes into Facebook ad copy to give the audience a brief overview of what they’ll get from the episode.

Tip 2: Use Your Podcast Content as a Lead Magnet

If you create a series on your podcast that gives your audience a specific result, why not turn that into an audio guide? For example, we took some of our top episodes that help CEOs understand what marketing strategies to focus on to significantly grow their sales and created the Ultimate Marketing Playbook for Online Businesses.

We run ads to this lead magnet and collect email addresses in exchange for the podcast series and a handy workbook to go with it.

This is also an effective ad strategy if you have a private podcast!

To create an audio guide, you need to:

• Identify a series of episodes that address a common pain point or desire of your audience
• Edit and optimize the episodes to make them consistent, relevant, and engaging
• Create an introduction and conclusion for the audio guide that explain the purpose, benefits, and instructions for using it
• Design a landing page or opt-in form that showcases the audio guide and captures the email addresses of interested listeners
• Promote the audio guide on your podcast, social media, email list, and other platforms

By creating an audio guide, you can leverage your existing podcast content and turn it into a powerful lead magnet. You can also use it as an ad strategy to attract new listeners who are looking for a specific solution. You can run ads on Facebook that direct people to your audio guide landing page or opt-in form. This way, you can grow your email list, increase your podcast downloads, and build trust and authority with your audience.

Tip 3: Avoid Boosting Posts

It is very tempting to click “boost post” after you post your podcast content on social media when Meta tells you that you can “spend $5 to reach 758 more people” but don’t do it!

Boosted posts are a waste of money! They’re a waste of money because all they are designed to do is show your post to people who are more likely to like, comment, or share your post.

Not go to your podcast page to actually listen to the show. Not download your private podcast.

Engagement doesn’t pay the bills so instead of boosting posts, take advantage of the vast ad tools that Meta has available in the Meta Business Suite.

The Meta Business Suite is a platform that allows you to create and manage ads across Meta’s family of apps and services, such as Meta (Facebook), Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Audience Network. With the Meta Business Suite, you can:

• Create ads that match your podcast marketing goals, such as brand awareness, traffic, conversions, or catalog sales
• Create ads that target your ideal podcast audience based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, or location
• Create ads that showcase your podcast content in different formats, such as images, videos, carousels, stories, or audio
• Create ads that optimize your ad delivery and budget based on your campaign objective and bid strategy -Create ads that measure and improve your ad performance based on various metrics and insights

My course Maximize With Ads teaches online service providers, coaches, and content creators how to run their own Facebook and Instagram ads the right way, not by boosting posts. Maximize With Ads is the roadmap you need to plan, build, launch, and optimize your own Facebook Ad for long-term success – no ad agency required.

We have used Facebook ads and our podcast content to increase our audience size and grow our email list.

If you want to know exactly what it takes to successfully grow your podcast and business with Facebook Ads, go watch my free video training.