Over the past years, companies and content creators all over the world have had to transform their strategies and adapt their techniques to constantly emerging new digital trends. Podcasts came about in the early 2000s but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that they reached their current popularity. In March 2020, Spotify informed there were more than 700,000 podcasts available on their platform.
In this article, we take a look at how to organize giveaways, promotions, and contests for podcast listeners and why it’s important to engage your audience outside of streaming platforms.
Podcast giveaways and promotions: why do they work?
All podcasters have the same ultimate goal: to reach as many listeners as possible. It’d be great if everyone would know about your podcast as soon as you launch it. But the reality is quite the opposite; it takes time to attract listeners and gain popularity on streaming platforms.
But there’s also another group of podcast creators: those that already have an established listener base and are happy with the numbers of users that engage with their audio content. Instead of boosting their podcast’s visibility, they simply want to reward those listening to their audio content.
This is where online promotions come into play. Giveaways and contests can do much more than only promote podcasts. They strengthen the community, increase engagement and even reinforce loyalty. In other words, they make your audience feel important. And that’s a good enough reason to organize a giveaway for your podcast listeners.
The great news is that running a podcast giveaway is not as difficult as it might seem. Brands, professionals, and content creators often have active and popular social media channels. That’s where they promote new episodes, engage in conversations with their audience, and often receive feedback from online users. This is why social media is where they can organize giveaways and promotions for their listeners.
Podcast giveaways on Instagram: attract listeners and reward loyal followers
Instagram is one of the most popular social media networks for brands, professionals, content creators, and users. Haven’t we all spent hours scrolling through the feed or skipping through the Stories? Instagram also happens to be a popular channel for podcast creators. This is where loyal listeners gather to find more fun content or discover more about the person behind the show. Engaging in conversation with other fans of their favorite podcast is also a perk.
Press for Champagne Podcast creators that talk weekly about the ups and downs of life – always with a glass of champagne. They wanted to attract more attention to their podcast and Instagram account so they decided to organize a quick comment giveaway. They raffled a $50 Sephora gift card and in the meantime, they expanded their Instagram following.
The Girls Talk Too Much Podcast followed the same steps, however, they specifically looked to reward their followers with prizes attractive to the listeners of millennial pop culture podcast. The organizer collaborated with a nail polish brand and together they ran a random Instagram giveaway. Users followed both organizing accounts, liked the post, and mentioned one friend in the comments section.
But let’s remember that these days podcasts are not all about health, beauty, and gossips. For example, Kryminatorium is one of the most popular podcasts in Poland. Listeners regularly tune in to discover spine-chilling crimes. At the end of each episode, the podcaster invites his audience to visit his social media accounts for pictures of case files, criminals, and interesting facts that weren’t mentioned in the podcast. To engage his audience and increase social media engagement, the podcast creator regularly launches comment giveaways.
In the above examples, five Instagram users had a chance to win a popular book signed by the author. Interested participants had to answer a simple question “What do you think is the most interesting aspect of police work and why?”. In this case, the organizer went through all answers and chose the most interesting ones.
Grow your podcast audience with Twitter giveaways
When it comes to social media, brands always seek the maximum number of followers and possible interactions. That often leads them to organize regular giveaways and promotions, as they boost engagement to levels never seen before. And podcasts profiles on social media have the same ultimate goal: to make the podcast known to more people.
Do you want to drive traffic to your social media channels? Announce your giveaway during one of your podcasts! Encourage interested listeners to become part of your community outside of the streaming platform.
In terms of running social media giveaways, Twitter is probably the most flexible social media network. You can ask users to:
- follow your account
- retweet your post
- reply to your tweets
Above you can see three examples of different podcast giveaways on Twitter. As you can notice, they were all organized by podcast accounts, looking to boost engagement, promote their show and grow their audience.
Do you feel like Twitter is the right social media platform for your podcast? It’s a great idea to drive traffic from other social media channels to your Twitter account. Cross-promote your channel on Instagram, Facebook and directly in your podcast. You will triple your chances of attracting new followers if you organize a fun podcast giveaway on Twitter!
Collect podcast leads with a registration form
Do you have a database of your listeners that you wish to expand? It’s easier than you think! You can run an easy Entry Form Giveaway for all interested participants. All you have to do is describe your prize, configure the participation dates, and then share a link with your listeners. You can add it to episode descriptions, you can promote with social media posts or even ads if you really want to maximize lead generation.
Here’s an example of a giveaway organized by a podcast platform (but if you’re a podcast creator you can easily go for the same format!). The organizers wanted to reward one lucky user with a one-year free subscription to their platform. In order to enter the random prize draw, they filled out a registration form, sharing their contact details with the organizer.
This is also a great solution for anyone looking to promote their podcast on YouTube. All you have to do is introduce a link to your Entry Form Giveaway in the video description!
Have you noticed that we don’t recommend running your giveaways for podcast listeners, subscribers or those that comment directly on the streaming platform? Podcast hosting platforms like Ivoox, Spotify and iTunes, don’t have special tools to pull user information. The best way to reward your podcast audience is to introduce a question in your Entry Form Giveaway that allows you to confirm that the participant actually listened to your podcast. Do you want to ask more than one question? Use our surveys and quizzes and you will be able to raffle prizes among all the participants of your app!
We hope that you have gained some useful information about running giveaways and contests for podcast listeners. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact us via our Live Chat.
