3 Ways To Use Data For Podcast Marketing
Whether at home in New York City or with my parents in Illinois, there is nothing I like more than putting my headphones in and going for a long walk or drive. If I am not listening to music, then I am likely listening to one of my favorite podcasts about film, art, history, or anything else you can think of. At this moment in time, there is practically a podcast for any topic or niche interest out there. This is comforting for listeners, yet it forces podcast creators to work harder to be seen in such a crowded field existing on multiple platforms. With data for podcast marketing, creators can get a strong sense of their audience, competition, and even the success of individual episodes. Adding web scraping to this process gives you even deeper insight into how to grow your podcast and attract the perfect audience.
If you already know the basics of podcast data, use the table of contents below to find out how to use web scraping to grow your podcast audience.
Table of Contents
What Is Podcast Marketing?
Podcast marketing is the process of researching and promoting a podcast in order to increase your audience. Marketing is an essential part of having a podcast right now since there are so many shows out there. Without the proper marketing strategy, your show is likely to get lost in the crowd and fail to captivate people. By engaging in podcast marketing, you can identify which aspects of your show need work and strategize ways to expand your audience.
What You Can Learn From Scraping Podcast Data
While podcast data may seem straightforward (views, followers, plays per episode, etc), using a web scraping tool can give you even more in-depth information. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from web pages and organizing it into a downloadable format. This process can be done manually, but using a scraping tool like Scraping Robot saves you lots of time and energy. Below are things you can learn by scraping when engaging in podcast analytics.
Understand your audience
Even though it may seem obvious, an important reason to collect data is to find or understand your audience. At the surface level, most podcast platforms provide you with basic demographic data such as age, gender, location, and listening method. Another part of understanding your audience is what content they enjoy the most. By scraping listening data from different episodes, you can directly see which kinds of episodes get the most plays. With this information, you can better decide what stories/content to feature in the future in order to maximize and how to grow a podcast audience. This piece explores how comedians are using podcasting as a way to connect with audiences while live performances are out of the question right now.
Compare rankings
The field of podcasts is just as competitive as many other creative endeavors. When you scrape podcast rank, you can see how you compare with your niche part of the market. If you are a baseball podcast, it is important to know what baseball podcasts are doing better than you. When you replicate the scraping process for competitors, then you can engage in competitive podcast analysis to find out what things they excel at and how you can incorporate their methods into your own show. You should not want to just simply copy those above you, but instead actually learn from their marketing methods or social presence by comparison how you can step up your game when you scrape podcast rank.
Analyze each part of the show
One of the most important aspects of competitive podcast analysis is understanding not just who listens to your show, but how they listen to it. Many podcasts consist of an introduction, a central segment that may include a guest or interview, and a final segment. Certain podcast analytics programs give you in-depth information about how much of an episode people listen to before either skipping ahead or stopping altogether. For example, if you find that most listeners skip your intro, you should either remove it or alter it to be more engaging for guests.
How To Grow Your Podcast
Now that you know more about analyzing data related to podcasts, you need to put that data to use. Growing your podcast is about incorporating all you’ve learned from the data and letting it lead the way. Making informed decisions about growth is essential to success. Continue reading for tips on growing your audience.
Find an ideal audience (and get them involved)
I already mentioned above how to find and analyze demographic information. The process of analyzing that information should leave you with a clear picture of your ideal audience. If you are just starting out or the data is still new to show patterns, imagine what kind of person is your ideal listener and go from there. The best way to grow your audience is directly ask for their involvement on social media. This can be as simple as taking audience recommendations for topics/guests and as involved as asking listeners to send in questions or anecdotes to be featured in an episode. By directly engaging your audience in your creative process, they will feel seen and incorporated into the show instead of just passively listening while they go about doing laundry or walking around their neighborhood.
Collaborate with other podcasts
One of the most common ways to market your podcast is by being a guest on other podcasts. This happens all the time. For example, one political pundit interested in doing an episode on healthcare might ask another pundit with a podcast that focuses on healthcare to be a guest. This is a great strategy because it gives an entire new audience a sneak peek into your voice and content without having to commit to an entire episode or seek you out. For podcasts with similar content, it also helps merge audiences with overlapping interests. In the above scenario, both podcasters benefit by reaching 2 audiences interested in healthcare and politics all at once.
As you use data to improve the success of your show, it is important to continually collect data so you can continue to grow. Below are ways that web scraping can help strengthen the data you already have.
1. Custom scraping solutions expand scraping capacity
While Scraping Robot offers many scraping modules, they are limited in their scope and capacity. By working with us to create a custom scraping solution, you will be able to scrape by the millions (or even billions) and gather data specific to your project’s needs. Additionally, Scraping Robot handles maintenance of proxies, development, and security so you can spend more time on creating great content for your podcast. With a custom scraping solution, you will get more and better data than with basic modules. Having more data makes your analysis more precise since the patterns are backed up by more data. If this seems like a good fit for you, contact us to get started.
2. Discover how to trend
Once you find your perfect audience and marketing strategy, you must continue to keep your growing audience engaged by finding the best stories or guests for future episodes. Scraping Google search results give you the top stories for a given keyword. Once you discover what kinds of stories and people are trending, you can understand how to increase your podcast’s chance of trending by incorporating these trends into your own show.
3. Gather extra data with social media
As mentioned many times in this article, understanding your audience is crucial. But you must go beyond just typical numbers basic information. Being active on social media helps provide you with more data sets than just those associated with the podcast itself. By comparing your listener data with your social media data (which you collect by web scraping), you will have more varied data to work with. You can also analyze which listeners follow on which social media platforms, giving you insight into which platforms to invest your time into.
Conclusion
With the myriad of podcasts available today, it can be hard to stand out in the crowd. Just like with any other field, collecting data for podcast marketing on your audience, topic, and reach can help you identify problem areas and help you grow. By defining your audience, you can begin to plan content or guests that you know will resonate with them. Once you grow your audience, web scraping various kinds of data for podcasters, you can continue your success and find new ways to innovate.
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