A short YouTube conversation (Tracy and Tom Hazzard) explaining that podcast cover art's primary purpose is to attract attention and entice clicks from new listeners. They argue cover art is a lead generator rather than a branding exercise, recommend updating art as needed, and suggest creating contextual variations (e.g., social vs. in-app) while avoiding redundant podcast labels/icons inside podcast apps.
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, and 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, you know, some people say, oh, no, well, my cover art, I have it. It's the way it's been for a long time. And, you know, 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. So, and, you know, don't worry about going back and fixing back episodes. Just change it and move forward. Like, 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've already subscribed. Not that they're old, but you know what I mean, right?
That you.
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 even it is, 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, you know, 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, there might be a different version of the COVID art that you're using. You know, this is the. 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. It'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. You know, 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 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 is, 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 come in, you know, what, consume more and become your fans on Instagram, whatever that is. It's a lead generator, not a branding exercise.
