Audio drama producers, this one's for you!
Especially if you make small, indie shows.
You'll hear from a lot of people that marketing doesn't really work for indie audio dramas, and from even more people that the best way to market is to reach out for feed swaps and just hope you get lucky. Feed swaps are a really easy win and a great way to garner new listeners, but don't knock traditional marketing!
For the past ~3 weeks I've been posting 1. on my previously unused platforms (insta, tiktok, youtube) and 2. far more than I have ever posted during the off-season of Ethics Town. Nothing complicated, in fact, not even videos of me promoting ET, just extremely simple to-camera videos about audio drama.
Within about 48 hours our daily download numbers had doubled. That's not hugely impressive, as when we're not releasing episodes they're generally already quite low, but that's around 100 additional downloads a day.
This month we're set to have our highest monthly download numbers since April 2025 (the tail-end of releasing S2 and all the bonus content/feed drops that came with it). In fact, even if our daily downloads drop back down to what they were previously, we'll still exceed April's number by the end of January.
And while a lot of these downloads are of solely episode one, as people often do when they want to come back to a podcast later and ultimately forget about it, there's been a huge uptick in people finishing the show. Not just finishing it, but combing the feed for bonus content and consuming it. Across November/December I'd say maybe ten people listened to the show in its entirety. In the past month alone, maybe 50?
However, in the past few days I stopped posting. I didn't have any pre-made video content left and while that would usually signal that it was time to make some more I was extremely dedicated to my endeavour of reading The Secret History within a 72 hour window. So I did that.
After a day or so of not posting, download numbers dropping right back down to what they had been previously.
Obviously this is a very unreliable study. People could just be starting new podcasts for new year. Maybe someone posted about the show on reddit and I missed it. But this is something I'm going to try to keep up with all year, so hopefully I can come back to you all with some proper stats at some point.
This is not to say 1. marketing is easy. I've worked in marketing, creative and otherwise, for about seven years now, it is a drag. Or 2. creators need to be hustling for listeners. Obviously they don't. But I also don't agree when people say artists should only make art for themselves. It's art? You might like making it for yourself but we literally created it to share. It's okay to want people to see what you've made.
Anyway, consider this update 1 on marketing audio dramas in a post-twitter society. Findings: people will watch any video. Make some shitty videos to post from your show account.
It's a tough world out there for creators and artists.
