How Your Podcast Cover Art Logo Can Attract The Right Listeners - Proven Advice Every Podcast Needs

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found, and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works Today. Get ready to feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard alongside my co host and partner, Tom Hazard, and we're going to talk about COVID art today. But we're really talking about COVID art from the attraction standpoint. So is your cover art attracting the right listeners? Because at the end of the day, if we don't get the right listeners, then what's our show for?

You know what? I tell this to poditized customers all the time. Your cover art has one very important job to attract attention. That's the first one. And the second one is to entice people to click to give it a try. That's it. And if your cover art, if any aspect of it is either not doing that or actually inhibiting that, then it needs to be changed. And some people say, oh, no, well, my cover art, I have it. It's the way it's been for a long time. And there's this inertia like, oh, I gotta change it. Well, you know what? It's not that hard, not that hard to change. You can update your cover art at any time, anytime.

Absolutely. And don't worry about going back and fixing back episodes. Just change it and move forward. It doesn't really matter because its point is to attract the new people, not to impress the old people. The people who've already joined, who've already chosen you, who've already subscribed. Not that they're old, but you know what I mean, right? They've already selected you. So whether or not your podcast cover art was good or not didn't matter. They chose you. So it doesn't matter about impressing them, and it matters about impressing the people who are coming forward and attracting them to come to you. So here's the problem. People think cover art is branding, and it's not. And that's what I want to get across to everybody today. Cover art is not a branding exercise. It is not about branding. 90% of it isn't about branding. There's about 10% branding on it. Okay? But it's in an ecosystem that is not necessarily your brand, so it's not the purpose of it. You can always have a variation of your cover art. In other places, you can have a variation of your cover art that is more integrated with your brand on your website. You want to still have the basic cover art so people know it's the same thing if they're looking at your website and then they go to the podcasting apps so that they see synergy there, Right? But it doesn't have to look exactly the same, just enough the same for them to get the sense of it. And if you're promoting your show out on social media, there might be a different version of the COVID art that you're using. This is one of those silly things that we always say to people, is like, take the microphone, the RSS logo, the little podcasting logo that people like tend to use. Take that off your cover art. Because anyone who's seeing it is already in a podcasting app.

And to add to that, Tracy, anybody whose name of their show on their cover art within the podcasting apps that says podcast in it is redundant.

It's wasting space.

What's a podcast? They're in a podcast app. The only time there may be a good time to make an exception to that rule is when you're displaying that cover art somewhere else that is not in a context where people obviously know it's a podcast.

So that's where you might want a social version of your cover art that has the word podcast on it or has that little logo in the corner that. That looks like a podcasting icon, right? That thing that looks like a microphone. So you might want that out on social. So it's a variation on it, but you don't need it within the app. And that's the important part.

So the first thing that I want to highlight today, besides getting it out of the mindset that podcast cover art is branding. Okay? It's not branding you. It's a lead generator attractor. And by lead generator, I mean listener attractor, right? So because a listener is your lead, it's your future subscriber. It's maybe the member to your membership groups. It's your fans and followers who are going to come and buy things from you eventually or consume more and become your fans on Instagram, whatever that is. It's a lead generator, not a branding exercise. So first things first. That the second part is I want how you look at your cover art. That's what we're talking about here and needs to change how you review it and how you decide if Your cover art is doing what you want it to do and attracting. The first thing we have to do is look at it from a listener perspective. And so often, many of you podcasters out there, I find this again and again with the more podcasters I interview. Very few of you are actually listeners of shows. And because you're not listening, you're not searching like a listener is, and you're not understanding why your show isn't attracting people, why it especially isn't attracting the right people. So we want to do this as an exercise from the perspective of how someone is searching for the show. So how do you do that?

How do you do that? Well, you got to be really clear on who you want to be listening or who you think is going to be attracted or get value from you by listening. Right? Who are you trying to reach?

Well, and it's the same thing that we do in any search engine, right? We're going to look at the words that that person is going to use to look for a new show. So am I looking for a show on marriage counseling? Am I looking for a show on social media marketing? Am I looking for a show on real estate investing? What am I looking for? What are those top level words that I'm going to search for? Now keep in mind that most people are super search savvy. Like, we've been doing this a long time now. How long have we been using Google? How long have we been using Bing, DuckDuckGo, whatever you're using nowadays.

Well, I was searching before Google. To me, there was a search engine called AltaVista. How many of us back in the day searched on aol, right?

You really have to stop dating us on our show here, okay? Like now everybody knows how old we are. So anyway, but the point is, is that, right, we're all really accustomed to it. And you know, who's the best at googling the next generation? Our kids can Google with the best of them. More importantly, they can get Alexa to do what they want faster than we can. Right? So they know how to dial in and ask and search for the right thing already. We just need to know what those right things are that we're serving and that we're trying to attract. So if we want to be real estate investing, we also want to have the longer tail words on there. Passive real estate investing, real estate investing, condominiums, real estate investing, syndication, like whatever those terms are, we want to utilize them. We want to utilize the ones that are for people in the know. If our show is for People in the know, like we're advanced tactics, right?

But those keyword phrases are not necessarily something that should be in the name of your show or on your podcast cover art. I want to make that clear. Like, for instance, one of the best podcast names that we came up with for a client who intended to launch a podcast about real estate investing in apartments was actually. Didn't say real estate in the name. It didn't say apartments in the name. It was called more doors, less headaches.

Which is awesome because your description is doing the heavy lifting on the search part. But if I type in real estate, investing, apartments or syndication, because that's another term for some of that, and all of a sudden all these shows line up and there's this really cool cover art that says more doors, less headaches, and it's just this cool cover art, I'm going to select that show because it showed up. So that's what I want you to do. I want you to type in your top level thing for the right kind of person. If you're a one on one, your client's newbie, make sure you're using layman's terms, not your technical terms. Right.

Or your industry specific.

Don't use those terms. Use the layman's terms. Use what you think. And if you don't go ask someone, what would you type in? For someone who's new to this, Ask them specifically when they type that in, what shows up? What I want you to do is take a screenshot of like the row. If you do it on your computer, it's better because you can get a bigger row. It's hard to get a good one on your phone and you'll get like two or three. But get a good row of like six different cover arts. The first six that show up, pull them all out. Then what we do is we'll go and I will drop in my cover art and look at it compared to everyone else's. If it's not art already showing up there. I mean, if you're already syndicated, you should be showing up there. But if you're not and you're not showing up in that place, drop it in and say, if someone saw that, would mine be clickable? Would it be worth checking out?

Would it pique my curiosity? Would it build anticipation and get me to click it first among all the others that show up? Or at least be one that. All right, I want to check out this one and that one. I got to check it out. Right?

Right.

So both in the name and what it says, and I' how it looks and jumps off the pitch just to preview.

Right. And that's kind of what you're looking for from a visual standpoint. If it looks exactly like all the others, you're doing something wrong.

Or it may just be that more shows came onto the scene in your category from when you launched it. And it's time for a change, because.

What happens is, especially when you're at the top of the list constantly, everybody copies you. So it's time to make a change. Tom and I changed our cover art for our very first podcast. Five times, at least. Yep. And most often we didn't totally revamp it because ours was still original from that standpoint. But we would change out the colors when everybody else matched up with our colors. And so over time, we went from like teal to bright blue to red to HP blue to blue. Yeah. You know, so we kind of went through modifications of it because it helped us stand out. The logo itself, we'd reconfigure it a little bit. It was essentially still the same. So people could clearly see the synergy of the show.

Yeah, there was some continuity there, right?

Yep. But we kept doing that. So I check my show every single year, I check my cover art, and we make a yearly change. And then if we make a show focus change, we always make a change to the COVID art as well. So if over time I'm starting to realize that this newbie audience I had isn't really newbie, it's actually really advanced tactics, then I might shift the focus of my cover art, the visual impact of it. So that's what we're looking for. Now, the second thing is, once you kind of got this and you've dropped your. The logo, you finally settle on and the one you think, I think I've got this right. Now, here's what we do. So this is something Tom and I learned early on when we were doing product development. If you want to find out if the dogs are going to eat the dog food, you don't ask the dogs. Right. You ask the people who are going to recommend it. So we want to make sure that we're checking with the gatekeepers in the process. So if it's a show for couples counseling and it's got to appeal to the wife or the female in the couple, then that's who we need to ask. Right. We have to understand who's going to recommend the show, who's going to do it. It might be self, it might be exactly your audience that's the person, it's for them. Great, go ahead. But you're going to need to ask the right person, does this stand out? You can't go by what you think. You can say, I think it stands out, but you need to go by what they think. Does it resonate with them? And that's our third thing that we really talk about, a resonating message to both the name, the visual of it. If it's not landing for that right person, then your perception is wrong. And so often we are wrong in what we think we're projecting. Really. This is the branding part of it. Right. This is the small amount of brand. Brand is actually not about you. Brand is about the perception of who you say you are or what you say. This is so what your show is about. It's about how I feel about that or how I receive that. That makes the connection and it will make my deciding to click it clear or not. And that's really, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do when we're trying to attract the right listeners.

So there's a lot of bad advice out there, Tom.

Oh, my gosh. Bad advice and, I think, bad assumptions.

Yeah. And keep in mind, it's because of who you're deciding to let work on your cover art. Right. If we go to Fiverr to have our cover art working, and there's nothing wrong with going to Fiverr, like, there's nothing wrong with having somebody. But remember, you can't expect them to tell you what it should look like. You're going to have to tell them. So if you don't have the skills and you don't have the knowledge to make the right choices, then you're not going to be able to direct that design and development correctly.

I'd like to add to that and say if you don't have clarity on who it is you're trying to reach and what is going to attract them, it's going to make it very hard for you to do a good job with this. And also, if you're just staffing this out and not intending to spend any time on it yourself, participating in that process, thinking about what it should be, reviewing it, providing feedback, it's not going to end up something you're happy with. You need to be prepared to participate in the process, even if you're not a graphic designer, Right?

Absolutely. And so if you're going to utilize a system by which essentially you're really doing it yourself, you're getting someone, of course, to execute it for you. But here's a couple of things that you can do to be more successful. One, take that screenshot that I was just telling you to do before. Take that screenshot of the other shows so that they can clearly see what you want to stand out from. Right. So you're going to say, these all are here. I want to stand out from here. Now, it doesn't have to be in your category, it can be in any other category. Go and make another screenshot and point out what one that stands out that you like looks like so that they understand the concept of stand out from the crowd. Right. Because your definition of standout might be totally different than my definition of standout. I might be like wild and crazy, want the super standout. And you just want to be like, you know, step above everybody else. So making sure that you're clear about what standout means is also helpful to them saying, do not copy this cover art. I'm not telling you what I like. I'm telling you when I look at a row, this one sticks out for this reason, this reason and this reason. And you know, give them three things. Might be the color, the boldness of the font, it might be the clarity of the image, whatever that is, and say that's what stands out. That's the qualities I want and want mine to stand out as well. And then be really clear about what resonates with your audience. So if I want to have a piece of COVID art that attracts women, I'm not going to make it pink, I'm just telling you that right now. But I'm also not going to maybe stick male oriented sports imagery all over it either. Right. Or hard edged geometric kind of graphics in the background. Right. I'm going to give something that maybe has a little more curve, a little softness to it. So I want to be clear about what that imagery is. And so what I like to do is give people options to give them a wave of what imagery I feel is acceptable to my audience. And I usually make sure that clear that with that audience, double check and make sure it is relevant to them. Do they like this? Does it appeal to them? Is this something you would click on? You probably already know from your social media posts. If you went back to some of your most successful social media posts and pulled out the images from those and sent them to the graphic designer instead. These ones work with my audience because you already happen to have that right fit audience. I want more that appeals to that they have something to go from. So those are just Some of the simple ways you can be clearer in your direction of what you're looking for. Now, the last piece, and this is where most people go wrong, is they say it needs to match my website. That word match is a dangerous word.

Right, I agree. It's going to result in too much of the same. And again, having that brand you may have for your personal brand, your business, your website, bleed over too much into your podcast.

Exactly. So we want to use the word synergy coordinate, or we might want it to stand out, but we want it to not clash. So when I choose something, sometimes I found out that the purple was the wrong purple and it clashed with the website, or the red was the wrong red. So I can re guide them and send them into. Obviously my red is a bit orange red. So keep the imagery on that side when you use a red accent. Right. Just so that it has synergy with what's already going on in my brand. But we're not matching the website and making it look exactly like everything else on there. Because what happens then is the show doesn't stand out on your own website. It blends in. And now the show looks like all promotion. Right? It looks like corporate.

It looks a lot of times more about what's in it for you, the host, than what's in it for the listener.

Right. And that's what we're always trying to focus on here.

So those are just some suggestions for how to get more, how to get it revised, how to get it to a place at which it's doing what you want it to do and attracting the listener. Right. And remember, check it. Check what people think. Check for the real listener, not what your internal group thinks about it. When we look at things internally, we don't always have a good review. The last technical thing I want you to do is to make sure that you're not reviewing your cover art wrong. Like the way that you're looking at it when you're making a final decision about it, you must look at it at a half an inch, about that size on a mobile device. So take it, shrink it, put it on your mobile device, look at it, look at two side by side, look at four of them. Whatever it is, we need it small to make sure that it's readable, it's clear that impact that we can see when we blow it up and we're looking at it on screen and going, God, it looks so good, but that it looks good in the way most people will see it first.

Now, I think, Tracy, a half inch is a little small. I know you always say that. And you believe it. You.

I'm a podcast listener.

I know you are. I think three quarters of an inch is probably. Okay. Half inch. That's pretty darn small. Where if there's a little. Some text on there. I don't know, some of us that our eyes are getting older may not be able to read that as well. But I mean, the point is, don't look at it blown up on an 8 1/2 by 11 page. Like that fills it. Oh, that. Look how it looks. Great.

Or your full screen.

Yeah. In your full screen, when you shrink that down to an actual practical application size, a size that is really what people are going to see on their phone. And that's where your point is, Tracy. I mean, when it gets super small, you can think of it like, oh, it's an app icon on your phone. It's not that small. App icons are even smaller. And you notice a lot of times don't have names on them. They don't say exactly what they are. The Facebook app icon has a big F on it. We all know that logo. And that's Facebook. And boom, you click it. Podcast cover art's a little different. But to your point, it really does need to be understandable. Communicate the message. You want to evoke that feeling. Attract people to click when it's quite small.

Yeah. And one more thing that I want you to think about just as you're reviewing this is that you will want to look it on a white and a black background. And the reason for that is most apps are now switching between day and nighttime viewing. So you have that. It's auto switching for you. So you will always have. That icon might look differently on a white background than it looks on a black background. If your cover art is white in the background or black in the background, it's blending into the background and it's actually diminishing its value when you look at a bunch of icons in a row on that. So you'll want to put a strike around it or an outline around it, the type of strike, but put an outline around it of a bright color to give it that kind of. So even if you need to have black or you need to have that dark color or you need to have white because of what you're trying to convey, trying that strike around it can really make a difference for you in terms of making sure that it doesn't look smaller than it actually is because of the blending into the new background colors that are going on. So that's a technical thing that's going on right now. The last thing that I just want to convey to everyone is that sort of old hat, new hat mentality to your podcast cover art. I know you love to call it that. You know that kids book, Old Hat, New Hat, like, it's one of my favorites that all our kids loved. I know you've read it tons and tons of times. And we used to tease Tom because he would like go to the eyeglass place and come back with what looked like exactly the same guy glasses, and we would say, oh, dad did old hat, new hat, right? Like that kind of thing. So everybody's guilty of this, right?

A lot of times people don't like change. You know, we get comfortable, right?

We fall in love with our cover art. We think it's great. We fall in love with our brand. So when it isn't exactly matched to our brand, we have difficulties with things. But keep in mind that this product is not for us. This product is for the listener. So making it relevant for them, we need to let go of that tie to it. So if you need your podcast cover art to have more impact and you know who you are because you know it's not really doing it because you're not sharing it enough, because you're not as proud of it like this happens all the time. If that's the case, get an outside viewpoint. That's why we're here for you within our own client group. So if you're in the client group, you can absolutely drop your cover art up, even if you we didn't develop it for you. Or if it's time for a change. If you're ready to finally take a look at making that up level on your show, go ahead, share it with the group. Ask for the right people's opinion, though. I'm looking for men over 50 who are golfers to look at my cover art, right? Like ask specifically for the right people in your group and get their opinion and view and then decide if it's time for an upgrade.

Yeah, that upgrade is a really good word, Tracy, to use. For a lot of us existing podcasters, there was a time and place where that cover art worked. It made sense. We felt good about it. But it may be time for an upgrade. And then all these things we're talking about today in this episode are things you should consider as you make some decisions about what that upgrade might be.

So if you're ready for your cover art to make some changes, take a listen to this episode. If you want to review anything, don't forget that there's a blog post for this episode@potatize.com under the feed your brand section and you'll be able to find all the details, all the points that we made, be able to review it, stop it, share it with your team and make some progress on upgrading your cover art to attract the right listeners.

All right, thanks for listening everybody. This has been Tom at Tracey Hazard. We'll talk to you next time on feed.

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