We recently realized that we have a blind-spot when it comes to marketing our podcasts, and it’s all because of a choice every podcaster makes when they first submit their show to directories.

When you launch a show, you need to choose which category or categories it should be listed in. (Within Apple Podcasts, your podcast can only chart in your primary category.) You can choose to be an Arts show, a Business show, a Society & Culture show, etc.

This is obviously really helpful, as it helps audiences find shows about the topics they are interested in.

Sometimes, though, when we are working on a new show, choosing the primary category can be challenging because the show straddles more than one topic. Once this dilemma presented itself a couple times, we realized that adjacent categories were actually new opportunities for audience development in disguise.

Marketing-wise, the problem is that once you choose your show’s primary category, it’s very easy to get stuck in the mindset that your show only fits in a single category. We discovered that we were often blinded by the primary category we had chosen for the show and were solely focused on marketing to audiences for that topic. What we realized (duh) is that different categories of shows attract different listeners, and if our podcasts were relevant in more than one category, we should promote that podcast to multiple audiences.

For example, the show we produce with Mozilla, IRL: Online Life Is Real Life with Veronica Belmont, is about the issues that affect the future of the internet. It’s listed as a Tech News podcast. However, as the title implies, online life is ALSO real life — who can imagine today’s society and culture without the internet? And so, we also initially discussed the Society & Culture category. Marketing to both fans of technology AND society & culture makes perfect sense for this podcast.

Another example: Dell’s Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson is clearly a business podcast and has been marketed as such since it launched. However, each episode is also a history lesson in the evolution of a particular industry, and Walter has written seminal biographies of historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and most recently, Leonardo da Vinci. We are just now realizing that this would be a FANTASTIC podcast for fans of history and education podcasts… and we haven’t told them about it yet.

We’ve learned our lesson. From day one, we are going to think about adjacent categories for our shows and make sure that we aren’t limiting our audience development based on which of Apple’s pre-defined categories we’ve chosen. We’re going to find ALL the relevant categories where people might enjoy our shows and create strategies to let them know about it.

Sign up for the Pacific Content Newsletter: audio strategy, analysis, and insight in your inbox. Once a week.