If you want to become a successful sports podcaster, there’s a method to the madness. The sports media landscape may seem unpredictable and chaotic at times – and it certainly can be – but there are a few tried-and-true components you can emulate as a podcaster, to build and expand your brand presence.
It’s important to note that success can be quantified in different ways, and in a competitive field like the sports media industry, it’s never a guarantee. Nevertheless, by putting these keys in action, you can ensure that you set off on the right path.
6 Tips for Becoming a Successful Podcaster
1) Define Your Brand, Mission, and Audience
A strong podcast has a strong foundation. Set your foundation by defining your brand, your brand mission, and your target audience. All of these elements are symbiotic with each other. Your audience determines what your brand offering will be. Your brand offering determines who you’ll be able to reach.
Thoroughly define what kind of content you want to provide, and what type of audience will be in the market for this content. Then bridge the gap, and determine how your podcast content can provide value to your audience members and actively fill a need. Once you have this foundation, you can move ahead.
2) Familiarize Your Audience with Authenticity
When you’re starting a podcast, your personality on-screen, or on the microphone, is intricately connected to your brand offering. Your audience members interact with you personally, at a level they don’t get to reach with standard written content. It stands to reason that your personality matters when you’re on the screen.
Familiarize your audience with your personality by being authentic. Be yourself, be honest, be transparent, and make your podcast an environment where you can freely interact and maintain a level of mutual comfort. We’ve written about the nuances of being authentic before, as a media personality – but it all comes down to being yourself in totality.
3) Engage Your Audience On Multiple Levels
Once you move forward with your defined brand offering and commit to being authentic, you can start the process of fully engaging your audience. The podcast format allows you to engage in multiple ways.
The more obvious form of engagement is active engagement, where you directly interact with your audience members to embolden a sense of community. This can be done through mailbags, live chats, call-ins, and polls.
That said, you can also passively engage audience members with detailed, thought-provoking content – enticing them to think actively and spend effort ruminating on the conversation.
That thought engagement isn’t as transparent on the surface, but there’s a clear value transfer there. If an audience member feels as if they’re being stimulated intellectually or gaining knowledge, that increases their incentive to be a regular viewer or listener.
4) Be Consistent and Patient
This is the grueling part, especially early on: You have to be consistent, and you have to be patient. If you’re starting from the ground up, it’ll take time for your podcast to establish its brand footprint and gain a loyal following. Your new episodes need to become an expectation for your target audience, and it takes time to establish that.
Whichever time interval you choose between episodes, be consistent. Come back time and time again and build a catalog of recorded content, so old viewers can remain a part of the conversation, and so new viewers can recognize that consistency and hop on for the ride.
If you have a strong foundation and you stay consistent, your patience will pay off in the long run.
5) Conduct Active and Passive Marketing
While you’re building your podcast brand through content creation, you should also be supplementing that work with active and passive marketing.
Active marketing falls more in line with your standard vision of marketing. You’ll want to promote episodes on various social channels, and you can also livestream on these channels to reach new audiences. You can make graphics advertising your content, and you can cut out compelling clips that might sell your brand offering.
Passive marketing, however, can be just as important. How you interact with viewers on social media is passive marketing – marketing yourself as a steward of your community. You market yourself with your camera and microphone quality, so ensure that you’re equipped to be at your best, on and off the mic.
6) Keep Seeking Out Ways to Evolve the Conversation
If you’re a podcast host, you’re a driver of conversation. The conversation breathes through you, so keep looking for ways to evolve that conversation. The natural progression of a given sports season will give you enough ammunition to work with, but don’t let that progression rationalize complacency.
Keep seeking out ways to improve with the depth of your analysis, the depth of your conversations, and the conveyance of your brand offering. Listeners love podcasts that adapt and bring variety beneath their brand umbrella – so be the podcast that is defined but dynamic.
Your Playbook for Mastering Podcasting
- Define your brand, mission, and audience
- Be authentic
- Be engaging
- Be consistent and patient
- Maintain a marketing mindset
- Seek out ways to evolve
