Everything You Need To Know About Podcast Ads
The number of podcasts has doubled in the past eight years, with many podcasters turning into this business. In the past eight years, many people seem to have been excited by podcasts, and the number of listeners has almost doubled in the last couple of years. Whereas statistics show that by 2019, there were more than 500,000 live podcasts, how much these podcasts pay is still a question to many. As podcasting's interest seems to increase sharply, most advertisers are using this trend to market and promote their products and services to the audience.
This article will guide you through everything you need to know about podcast ads and how you can utilize one to make money. Stay tuned!
Why is Podcast Advertising Recently Becoming Popular?
It goes without saying that traditional advertising methods have become outdated and less effective. Over the past few years, many have turned to modern advertising, and with the help of new technologies, many are making money from these channels.
Here are some of the benefits of podcasts over traditions advertising:
- As people listen to live podcasts and have a deep respect for the one hosting the event, they tend to be exited and moved by the show. From there, you can create trust with your audience. It is out of this that you can use the reception to promote and market your brands. The cohesion is a crucial fact towards making sure that the audience endorses your brand. The above is an added advantage for your business.
- Podcasts are the best engaging mediums when it comes to delivering messages to your audience. The interaction between the host and the listeners always provides a chance for the audience to hang on and listen to every word. You can rest assured that you have already set a base to make your brand known to many more, and you will attract more to tune out to your podcast.
How Then is Podcast Advertising Effective?
Over the past few years, podcasts have proved to be more effective than other advertising channels. Podcasts are believed to be capable of generating three times more interaction than tv and radio ads, and more than 60% of their listeners claim to have ordered and bought goods and services after participating and listening to a podcast ad.
By 2019, podcast ads generated revenue worth more than 670M USD, and the projection will exceed 1 billion USD by 2021. It is an indication that many organizations have turned to these modes of advertising to grow their businesses.
While some are still utilizing traditional mediums, many have realized that the old channels do not provide these businesses with the same Return on Investment compared to podcasts, which many companies want to utilize to grow their businesses.
How Then can you Leverage podcasting to get High Return on Investment?
To succeed in this, you will need these elements to make it useful:
- You should create an engaging podcast- A podcast that supports your brand will be in a higher position to engage more audience than just a normal one. To attract more audience to your advertisement channel, you should put in place various strategies to make sure that your audience is up to date about your brand.
- Develop a cost-effective marketing strategy that is cost-effective- To build a sustainable audience, you will need to strategize on the best marketing options that can keep you going and balance expenditures and income to sustain you in business.
While coming up with a stellar podcast might be hard, finding the best ways to market, it can be stressful and complicated. With more technologies emerging in today's world of business, fortunately, you have several options to start and market, pour podcasts, and make money from it.
Who Should try Podcast Advertising?
No matter who you are and the business industry, you can leverage podcast advertising and one of your marketing strategies. As this mode of marketing is new, most of the companies are still figuring out the best ways to use podcasts as their marketing channel. If you have the right strategy in place, you are free to plan and use this medium for your company.
Here is a list of people who can utilize podcasts as one of their marketing strategies to sell their products and services:
- Startups
For most small organizations, the worry has always been how to get their products known to people. While startups may be limited to finances, proper strategizing on using podcasts might work miracles for them. Regardless of your business type, having the best approach towards engaging your audience should be a plus for your business.
Creating the right image for startups is crucial as they seek recognition for their products and services. Therefore, it takes more than creating a podcast to sell your organization out there. Keeping in that you will need to reach out to the right audience, proper research, and selecting the best marketing channel is the key here. Regardless of other factors, podcast advertising should be on your list.
- Brands
Although podcast advertising tends to be used primarily for creating brand awareness for companies, building trust with people is the first thing to consider. That can be done by utilizing the channel to build a highly engaged audience. With more people joining many technology platforms, it becomes easy to use podcasts, taking the advantage that technology has been to solve most problems people experienced before.
At this time, come up with a cost-effective marketing strategy and build content that will excite your audience and make your audience fall in love with your audience. The next step is to approach a podcast who can serve the targeted people.
- Bloggers and Authors
As audiobooks tend to gain more popularity among the younger generation, podcasts have not been left behind. Most of the people who listen to podcasts tend to choose to listen to their favorite genres through audiobooks.
If you’re an author, you can easily create audiobooks and get to market them through podcasts that seem to have book lovers as the listeners. This is a proper way of promoting your audio as you already have the audience. You only need to convince them why they should choose your product.
For bloggers, this is high time you utilize podcasts to promote your products such as digital products and online courses. On the other hand, the podcaster can either sell ad slots, join the blogger's affiliate program, and earn commissions on sales.
How to Create an Effective Podcast Ads Campaign
Most of the small enterprises worry about how they can reach out to new customers and increase their revenue. While over 60% of small enterprises start with a capital of fewer than 30,000 USD, having an effective podcast ads campaign that delivers to new customers is the key to success.
Let’s go through some useful tips that can help you build more audience through podcast ads campaigns:
- Define the Target Audience
I believe you would only want to target only the audience that is interested in your niche. That’s why it is very critical to avoid approaching podcasts that already have a vast audience. Take your time to research and study about your audience before making any decision and making sure that the audience will appreciate your niche and get engaged.
To make sure that this happens, here are some tips for getting the right audience:
- Go ahead, browse the different categories of podcast directories, and see many shows that cover one theme.
- Use Google to search useful topics and the audience the topics target plus the podcast that does the best on the same.
- Go through podcast networks that concentrate on specific shows. Discovered your niche and define how you want to utilize podcasts as your marketing medium. Pick the best system to work with it.
- By using Facebook’s Audience Insights, research on tools and pages that users interact with most. At this point, you should have a clear idea of which podcast you should approach. Make sure that the podcasts you choose are related to topics and subjects to your desire.
- Always be Willing to Pay Attention to Attribution
It’s not just advertising. To justify spending your money on podcast ads, you should be able to track the effectiveness it has to your business. By utilizing some of the following tips, you will have increased the advertisement's effectiveness in your business.
Here are some of them:
- Creating a landing page that has a reference for your podcast ads has proven to be useful for most of the business. This works by driving listeners to these landing pages by convincing them to click on various links that build and increase traffic to these pages. The more the traffic, the higher the chances of sales conversion.
- Share discount codes for your podcast. By distributing specific podcast promotions and discount codes with your listeners, you will be able to track that they visited your site for your discounted products.
- Make sure you add a crucial question that users can answer every time they visit your site. Items such as "how did you hear about us?” and “how would rate us?" can help you track and monitor sources of your traffic.
- Utilize Host-read Podcast Ads
In recent years, the use of host-read ads has been preferred as one of the best ad types for podcasts. According to several studies carried out in the last two years, most of the respondents described these ads to be original, believable, and authentic.
Every time a host reads your advertisement, the tone remains the same for the listeners, and most of them will believe in the host as they have already built trust in the past. It is recommended that you encourage the podcast host to try your product to make it even more useful. This will improve the quality and the authenticity of the ad as it is delivered to the listeners. When the listener is convinced that the host has already tested the product, there are higher chances that they would purchase the product.
What are the Different Methods Podcasts Make Money?
You want to make money, right? Of course, you will have to strategize on different ways to get started and cash from your podcast. Having different channels to monetize a podcast to make money is the best way to avoid loss if disruptions occur to specific revenue streams.
Now, let us take an example you have been monetizing your podcast through YouTube. If you woke up one day to find that the channel has been banned, you would have failed. That’s why it is recommended that you create several multiple revenue channels and make your business sustainable.
Here are some of the preferred methods:
- Through Affiliate Sales
Although affiliate sales might seem similar to sponsorships, the case is, instead of getting paid the number of downloads, you get to be paid for the purchases you make based on the sales you make on behalf of another company.
Affiliate companies such as Audible are the best if you would like to take advantage and make money. Most of the podcasters are already making money from this. When you join Audible, you will be given a unique affiliate link that is unique for you to promote. You will get credit and earn 15 USD every time a user uses your link.
The trick is to make sure that, if you would like to monetize affiliate links to make money, the link given to you by the company is easy to use and understandable by your listeners. An affiliate link that includes your name or brand in it has higher chances of attracting more listeners and increased traffic.
- Through Sponsorships
The use of sponsorships is one of the most preferred ways used by thousands of podcasters. This happens when podcast promotes sponsors during podcasting sessions, and these shows usually plug their advertisers several times in their episodes.
How much you earn mostly depends on the number of downloads for every episode. While most of the sponsors pay between 20 and 50 USD, others that have been in the industry and are popular might pay you more than that. This will require you to strategize on a better way of marketing to make sure you maximize on episodes’ downloads.
Depending on where you place your ads within an episode, you can price the ads differently the way you want. While pre-roll ads run about 15-30 minutes at the beginning of the episode, post-roll advertisements will run the same at the end of the event. Both are worth and serve the same purpose for the advertisers. However, most sponsors prefer mid-roll ads, as they tend to be captive to more listeners at that time. Your sponsor can give the chance to be flexible, while others will provide a script to read in the middle of the episode.
- Direct Support That Includes Premium Content
Direct support involves asking your supporters or fans to donate some money to support your show. So many people out there are willing to support good work. If you have a good personality and provide high-quality quantity, then you are lucky to get some dollars from people out there. This will keep you going and get enough to keep producing more episodes.
This is one of the best solutions that is recommended to new podcasters who are looking to monetize their shows. It is easy to set up and keep you going. It starts by creating an account and then create a page that deeply explains why your show deserves support and to getting money from your fans.
What are Popular Advertising Networks to use?
When you finally decide to invest in podcasting business and grow your audience, you need to choose the best network that can serve you best in distributing your campaigns. You can also utilize the use of sponsors to grow your business.
You can do this by engaging in a sponsorship deal with your sponsor. Your sponsor will serve as the essential guide, and this is the best option for your business for most new podcasters. Below is a list of the best advertising networks that you use and get exciting deals:
- Midroll
- Adopter Media
- Ad Results Media
- True Native Media
- Podcorn
- AdvertiseCast
- PodGrid
- Archer Avenue
- PodcastOne
- Authentic Shows
How Much can you Make on Average for Podcast Advertising?
As we have discussed earlier, the average amount you can make through podcast ads depends on various factors. Majorly, maximizing the use of various methods to make money should be a priority. While you may have different revenue streams, income might differ according to how each stream is performing.
Other factors that will affect the amount of money you can earn include:
- The rate at which your sponsor is paying you is a factor. Some sponsors will be willing to pay you a higher CPM if your audience is overlapping theirs.
- If you happen to have an audience with deeper pockets, they will be ready to support you through Patreon and keep you going.
- The popularity of your podcast and the number of downloads your ads convert.
While you might be making little at the beginning, patience is the key. Stick to your niche, grow your audience, and increase your sales.
What is the Conclusion?
Podcast advertising is becoming one of the most effective ways for businesses and brands to reach and engage with the audience. Keeping in mind that your listeners are your future potential customers, a proper strategy should be put in place to make sure that the audience is enjoying every second of your show. Do this by finding the right podcast to place your ads, find the target audience, and place your ads according to your budget estimation and business goals.
You should always monitor your podcast advertisements attribution for you to know which streams are bringing the most traffic and the ones you need to invest in and make more money. You can utilize strategies such as landing pages, exclusive discount coupons, and surveys for consumers to measure this. Make use of the best and popularly known podcast advertising networks to find the best podcasts and the optimum placement of the ads for you to get the best results.
Being an advertiser, you will need to do thorough research and find your ideal audience so that you can optimize your podcast ads to their needs. Once you care about your audience and their challenges, there is a higher chance that your message will resonate with them, and they will be more likely to be loyal to you. This is the key!
