5 Reasons to Host Your Podcast with Wistia

Are you investing in podcasting to support your brand? We love to hear it! If you haven’t settled on a hosting platform yet, we’d like to make the case for why you should host your podcast with Wistia. More than just a host, Wistia can help you grow your show and build brand affinity with a beautiful podcast experience.

In this post, we’ll walk you through five reasons why choosing Wistia is the right move for your podcast marketing strategy. From customizable audio player options to in-depth analytics and more, learn all about Wistia’s podcast features and how your brand can benefit!

1. Fully customizable podcast player

The truth is, your podcast should look as great as it sounds! When it comes to presentation on your website, Wistia’s audio player is fully customizable and responsive for desktop or mobile.

“With just a few clicks, you can ensure all of your audio assets align with your brand (not ours).”

With just a few clicks, you can ensure all of your audio assets align with your brand (not ours). Impress your visitors and listeners with an engaging and consistent brand experience! We’ve also prioritized accessibility with accessible colors, controls, and transcripts.

Here’s a peek at what you can customize:

• Pick a color for your audio player
• Upload your show art
• Add links for easy social sharing
• Insert audio chapters
• Add context with a summary, show notes, or links with the rich text editor
• Order automated episode transcripts
• Modify the size of your embed code

Are you envisioning your podcast in one of these sweet players on your podcast landing pages or blog posts? We sure are!

2. Beautiful Channel pages for your show

Putting presentation first doesn’t stop at a customizable audio player, either. We’ve made it easy for you to show off your podcasts in an unforgettable way with our Channels feature. With Wistia Channels, you can upload all of your podcast episodes and display them beautifully on one page.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or importing your podcast from an existing RSS feed, we assure you that set up is a breeze. You can control the top-level details about your show, indicate the format (episodic, seasonal, or serial), edit information about individual episodes, and publish your content right away or at a later date — all of that’s up to you!

Here’s an example of our Channel for our latest podcast from Wistia Studios, A Better Workplace.

Additionally, you can link out to the show on other platforms. That way, if someone lands on your Channel but wants to hear your podcast on, say, Spotify, they can click on that logo and be taken to that specific platform.

You can also elevate your Channel further with the ability to add video alongside your podcast episodes, which creates a unique and innovative multimedia user experience. Video can be used as trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, or exclusive content.

3. Build your subscriber base

When it comes to growing your audience and connecting your content with your marketing strategy, Wistia has the tools you need to help you reach your podcast’s full potential.

With your audio data in Wistia, you can use Reach & Retarget to create smarter, highly targeted ads for your audience on search and social. If you want to go beyond what other platforms offer for subscribers, you can also collect your listeners’ emails right from your podcast Channel page. When you use our integrations to connect your favorite marketing automation tool, you can automatically email folks every time a new episode is published.

“If you want to go beyond what other platforms offer for subscribers, you can also collect your listeners’ emails right from your podcast Channel page.”

Your podcast can also be distributed to all the top apps like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and many more to meet your audience on their preferred apps. And when it comes to subscribers on listening apps, if you want to switch to Wistia, we’ll help you make sure there’s no interruption to the subscriber base you’ve already built. You truly have the flexibility to create the best brand experience on or off your site.

4. Podcast analytics

As we mentioned, we have some pretty exciting in-depth analytics for podcasts.

In Wistia, you’re able to see a show-level breakdown of where your audience is listening. That’s right! We’ll pull in data from platforms like Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, plus stats from your embedded Channel, to give you a side-by-side comparison of your episode performance. You’ll also see hours played and average session length.

At the individual episode level, you can dive into the nitty-gritty and see engagement rates, play rates, and heatmaps — heatmaps are a neat feature that’ll show you exactly where people listened, replayed, and where they dropped off.

With all these insights, you’ll have everything you need to grow and improve your podcast creation over time. The best part of all is marketers can leverage all of our advanced features to make their podcast performance tie into their other marketing initiatives, like paid social, list building, and lead scoring.

5. Video + audio content in one place

Wistia can truly help you connect with your audience in more ways than one. Whichever way you tell your brand’s story, with video or audio, or both, it’s all possible on our single platform.

You’ll have everything you need to show off videos and podcast episodes side-by-side without sending people off your site to watch and listen. It’s time to control your brand’s audio and video experiences, create a larger owned audience, and set yourself apart from the competition!