You Need More Than One CTA in Your Podcast

Calls to action are important to have in pretty much any piece of marketing copy that you put out into the world. That’s as true for your podcast as it is for your blog post and your sales pages and everything else.

After somebody consumes the content that you’ve created for them, you usually want them to do something.

What you want them to do is going vary based on your business and your goals, and the thing that you ask them to do should be different at the different places in your podcast.

Possible CTA Placements

There are a vareity of places you can have a call to action in your show, and different ones work best in different places. High level we’ve got:

• Pre-Rolls
• Welcome
• Body/Ad Spots
• Pre-Outro
• Sign Off

Let’s look at each of these.

You can have a pre-roll where you let some people know what’s going on at the beginning of the show. Maybe if you’ve got a time sensitive event – that can be really interesting to put as a pre-roll that plays on all of your episodes.

Then you’ve got your welcome to your audience, maybe after your intro or after you’ve welcomed the guests and you say: ”Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us here on the show”. This can be a great time to ask for something small and easy, like: ”Hey, make sure you don’t miss any episodes because they’re awesome. Subscribe on your favorite platform.”

Then you’ll have the body of the episode. If you have ads and sponsors there, you can also (or instead of!) have a calls to action, ads or promotions for your own things tha require a little more discussion or information.

The most common place for a CTA is the one that feels the most natural – the end. 

You’ve got two spots to have a call to action towards the end of your show. There is the pre-outro call to action, and that’s when you’re saying goodbye to your guest or you’re wrapping up your final thoughts if it’s a solo show. That is a great, and the most popular place to ask for something, ot tell people about something. 

And then you’ve got the very end of the sign off – that’s typically the ”Share and subscribe, leave a rating and review” that you hear at the end of episodes.

When we are conducting the State of Business Podcasting Report, we look at the different places CTAs can be and what they are. Over the year’s we’ve been doing this, we’ve noticed something really interesting.

The bigger the ask, the more embedded in the content it should be.

The CTA’s at the beginning and the very end of your show – the welcome and signoff – should be easy for someone to do. They should be frictionless. It should be subscribe. It should be share. It should be leave a rating and review. Something that people may or may not do. And it’s not a huge deal to you whether or not they do it.

But if you’ve got something big like a new course, a book launch or an event you want people to attend – this is something that you’re going to want to embed more in the content and make more personal. Or, if it’s time sensitve and you want to make sure absolutely everyone hears it, then it can be a pre-roll.

You also want to do it before the very end of the show (the signoff) when a lot of people have already clicked off or mentally moved on to the next thing that they’re doing anyway.

So make sure that you’ve got calls to action at different points within your episodes. You can invite people to join your email list in your welcome, talk about your book launch in a body-ad, and ask for ratings and reviews in your signoff. 

Now, you might be thinking: ”Right, wait a second, I don’t want to repeat myself too much. I don’t want to come off as completely salesy.”

Don’t worry about it.

You don’t want to make every other thing you say a call to action, of course, but you can mention 2 or 3 different things over the course of a 40 minute episode without sounding like a broken record. And if you’re so shy that you don’t want to bother people with promoting your own stuff and sharing your own activities and getting people to connect with you in different ways – well, then they’re not going to know you want them to do it. You have to ask for what you want. No one is going to feel obligated – if they don’t want to do it – they won’t.

It is perfectly acceptable in the show that you own and pay for and produce to talk about your own stuff.

Watch: Where Should CTA’s be in a Podcast Episode?

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