If your marketing is feeling like a monthly scramble, even after pouring all of your time and energy into your podcast, then this blog is for you. Every week you record an episode, but then remember that you need to email your list, something for Instagram, and suddenly a new blog post this week as well.
Creating a monthly marketing plan around the content that you’re already producing helps to eliminate that feeling of making five different pieces of content for five different platforms, without even really being sure of how any of them work together.
I’m Kara, content strategist and founder of The Kara Report. My team and I help business owners turn the expertise they’re already sharing on their podcasts into evergreen, long-form content that continues working long after an episode airs.
When you look at your podcast, emails, blog, Pinterest, and social media as being one connected ecosystem, it dissipates that feeling of needing to make separate content that constantly needs to be cared for.
Let’s talk about creating a monthly marketing plan around your podcast so that you know what you’re promoting, what you’re creating, where you’re sharing it, and why you’re doing it in the first place!
Table of Contents
Start Your Monthly Marketing Plan With One Main Goal
Take a look at the bigger picture of your business, which is figuring out what you actually want your marketing to accomplish this month.
A strong monthly plan connects the bigger goals in your business to the content you’re creating every week. Without that connection, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of creating content simply because your calendar says you need to publish something.
Instead, choose one primary goal for the next 30 days.
Maybe you want to:
- Grow your email list
- Book three new clients
- Fill the waitlist for an upcoming launch
- Increase traffic to a specific offer
- Grow your podcast audience
- Build awareness around a new service
If the goal is more specific than ‘get more business’, then it will become easier to decide which marketing activities can take up more of your attention. For example, if your primary goal is growing your email list, your podcast episodes might naturally lead listeners toward a free resource. Your blog posts can target questions your ideal audience is already searching for and point readers toward the same opt-in.
All of a sudden, your podcast, blog and email list are all working together toward the same goal.
Decide What You’re Promoting This Month
When your monthly goal becomes clear, now is the time to decide what it is that you want your audience to do. Here is where offers come into play.
If you’re a business owner using your podcast as part of your marketing strategy, you don’t want to wait until launch week to suddenly start talking about the problem your offer solves. With a monthly marketing plan, your audience can be prepared much earlier.
Figure out specifically what you are selling or promoting this month, and what a potential client may need to know before they are ready to book you. For example, if you are a brand photographer looking for more sessions, branch out into more specific topics instead of just ‘book a brand shoot!’ over and over.
Those topics may look something like how to know when to update brand photos, what kind of brand photos most service providers should have on their website, how to prepare for a brand session, or some mistakes you’ve seen when choosing brand photos.
You’re still creating useful content, but there’s a clear connection between what you’re teaching and what you’re selling, and that’s what we want!
Your marketing shouldn’t feel like 29 days of value followed by one random sales pitch. Let the content naturally prepare people for the next step.
Use Your Podcast as the Anchor for Your Monthly Marketing Plan
Instead of planning separate ideas for every platform, think of your podcast as the starting point, and this will make content creation so much easier. All of your episodes already contain stories, opinions, expertise, examples, and ideas. Instead of letting all of that disappear into your podcast feed after release day, ask how you can extend its lifespan.
One episode might become:
- An email: Share the biggest takeaway, a related personal story, or a reason someone should listen.
- A blog post: Turn the episode into an optimized resource someone can discover through search.
- Social content: Pull out an opinion, tip, story, quote, or key takeaway.
- Pinterest content: Create pins that lead people to the related blog post and ultimately introduce them to your podcast and business.
- Future content: Revisit one point from the episode and expand it into another podcast, blog, or email.
Getting more mileage out of the good ideas you already have is going to be much easier in the long run than coming up with more ideas.
This is also why I’m such a fan of turning podcast episodes into strategic blog content. A podcast episode naturally loses some visibility as newer episodes replace it in the feed. A search-friendly blog post gives that same idea another way to be discovered months—or even years—later.
If writing those posts is the part you never seem to have time for, my team offers done-for-you blog posts for podcast episodes. We take the expertise you’ve already shared behind the microphone and turn it into long-form content designed to continue bringing people into your world.
Choose Your Podcast Episodes Strategically
Not every single podcast is going to have the potential to become so many different pieces of content, and that’s okay. Be selective by looking at what you’re promoting, what your audience is asking about, and what has performed well in the past.
This is also a great time to audit an existing content archive. Look for previous episodes that still get downloads, blog posts that bring in search traffic, and emails that receive lots of replies or clicks. It may be social media posts that create meaningful engagement, evergreen topics that are still relevant to your audience, or stories that would naturally translate into a podcast episode.
You’ve already done so much work creating so many episodes, and your best ideas don’t always need to be brand new. If a two year old blog post still brings new clients to your website, that pretty clearly indicates that people still care about the topic. You can also continue to add new information you’ve learned to the original, or record a podcast episode about it.
You’ve created so much data with your content library, and now is the time to use it.
Build Your Monthly Marketing Plan Around Your Podcast Episodes
When your monthly goal, promotion and podcast topics are clear, you can start filling in your monthly calendar.
If you publish one podcast episode per week, instead of wondering what you should post this week, start with those for episodes, and map the supporting content around each one.
Week One: Podcast episode + email + supporting social content.
Week Two: Podcast episode + optimized blog post + Pinterest content.
Week Three: Podcast episode + email + supporting social content.
Week Four: Podcast episode + blog post + Pinterest content + stronger offer CTA.
Every single week might not look the same, and this is only an example. Not every platform needs something published weekly! Just look at how all of your content connects.
I also like thinking about your marketing in terms of always-on content versus campaign-specific content.
Your always-on marketing might include your weekly podcast, regular emails, evergreen blog posts, and Pinterest content.
Your campaign-specific marketing changes depending on the month. Maybe you’re promoting a webinar, launching an offer, opening a waitlist, or trying to grow a particular freebie.
Separating the two makes your monthly marketing plan much easier to manage because you’re not rebuilding your entire strategy every 30 days. You have a foundation that stays relatively consistent and layer timely promotions on top.
Batch What You Can
While it might seem more straightforward to create everything one day at a time, grouping similar tasks together can make the entire process significantly easier.
For example, outline all four podcast episodes in one sitting. Then on another day, record a few episodes back to back while your microphone is set up and you’re in recording mode. In terms of marketing, write all your emails together, design your Pinterest graphics all at once, or schedule your social media posts in batches.
Templates are going to be your best friend here. If every podcast episode needs similar graphics, show notes, an email, or an intro and outro, don’t reinvent those pieces every week.
Keep in mind that grouping similar tasks doesn’t mean that all of the work falls on you personally for each one. Repurposing can be one of the easiest parts of the system to outsource.
For example, you can batch your podcast recordings and then hand those finished episodes over to my team. With our done-for-you podcast blog posts, we handle turning your episodes into polished, search-friendly articles while you move on to the parts of your business that actually need you.
The best kind of monthly marketing workflow is one where the system creates less work for you, not more.
Check Your Progress Before the Month Is Over
Once you’ve got your monthly marketing plan in progress, set a little bit of time aside each week to check in, and see how things are going. Most people might wait until the end of the month to look at the numbers, but you wouldn’t want to spend 30 days on a strategy that isn’t really working.
What you measure should connect directly to the goal you set at the beginning of the month. If your goal is email-list growth, look at opt-ins. Trying to increase website traffic? Look at traffic sources and which content brings people in. For more inquiries, take a look at contact form submissions, DMs, and sales calls.
With your podcast, check out which episodes get the most downloads, where your listeners stick around, and which topics continue to perform after their initial release.
By tracking those numbers that tell you whether you’re moving toward your goal, you’ll figure out what and where needs attention.
Use the End of the Month to Plan the Next One
Once the month is almost at an end, give yourself some time to review before heading directly into next month’s calendar.
Look at things like:
- What area performed best?
- Which topics resonated with my audience?
- Why did people visit my website?
- How many emails generated clicks or replies?
- Did my content lead people toward the offer I was promoting?
- What took way more time than the results justified?
- Could I repeat or repurpose anything for next month?
Over time, this will be how your monthly marketing plan gets a little easier. You don’t have to start from a blank Google doc every single time, and you’re using real feedback and information from your audience to decide what might deserve another month of your time, and what might not be working.
Create a follow up to a podcast topic that performed well, look for related posts to a blog post that is bringing in traffic, or reuse a CTA that brought in more clicks!
Create a Monthly Marketing Plan That Makes Your Content Work Harder
Your marketing shouldn’t require you to come up with a completely new idea every time you open Instagram, write an email, record a podcast, or publish a blog post. A good monthly marketing plan gives all of those pieces a shared purpose.
Start with a clear goal, and decide what you’re promoting for that month. Align your podcast topics so that they naturally support that, and use those episodes as the foundation for emails, blog content, Pinterest, and social media.
Group similar tasks when it makes sense, keep an eye on what’s working and what isn’t, and apply that knowledge to your next month.
If your podcast is already full of ideas your ideal clients would love, my team can help those ideas get found outside the podcast feed.
Our done-for-you blog posts for podcast episodes turn the expertise you’re already sharing into strategic, search-friendly content that can continue driving traffic and introducing new people to your business long after you hit publish.
You keep recording. We’ll help your episodes work harder.
If you’re ready to get started, learn more about our done-for-you podcast blog posts here. And for more practical strategies for creating content that lasts, follow along on Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
