How to get started with podcast advertising
Everything you need to know to run your first podcast ads
Here’s a step-by-step guide covering everything I learnt while producing our first podcast advertising campaign.
It’s worth noting that a lot of this may not be relevant to your brand, industry or market but I trust you’re smart enough to work out what’s helpful and what’s not.
Why podcasts anyway?
Podcasts are sometimes referred to as ‘new media’ but it’s usually by people who work in radio perhaps a little worried about having their lunch eaten by what is now very much an effective, established and scalable media channel with surprisingly more tools for audience targeting and analysis than I’d have expected.
Your ads are literally sent into someone’s brain
Podcasts are a fascinating medium because their audiences are engaged so deeply in the content that advertising is extremely effective. You have the opportunity to literally speak directly to your target customers. So don’t fuck it up like Steven Bartlett and ruin it for the rest of us. Respect these audiences and your brand will grow.
Podcasts can work the whole funnel
Podcasts have the flexibility to influence your marketing strategy throughout the funnel, though my view is that they’re much more effective at driving brand awareness and consideration than driving direct action. I’m sure it varies from one brand to the next but regardless podcasts are a great medium for reaching your audiences.
Scalable and diverse targeting
You might find yourself looking at podcasts because your existing acquisition spend on channels like Meta and TikTok is starting to become less effective. Or you’re looking for a scalable channel to help drive brand awareness so your other performance marketing spend works better. Both very good reasons to look at podcasts.
There’s also a load of them. Hundreds and hundreds talking about any niche you can imagine. Want to learn about the Romans from a bogan Australian historian? There’s a podcast for that. Want to solve a mystery about a missing crypto billionaire? There’s like ten podcasts for that.
My journey to podcast advertising
Diversifying our spend
Over the last year and a bit, we’ve been building our performance marketing muscle at Yonder through Meta, learning about what media buying and creative helps us to drive more reliable acquisition than through the almost entirely organic channels we’d been using before.
So while 90% of our time and energy was spent there, I was also starting to explore other channels that might be able to help us diversify our spend so we could show up in more places. I wanted to give us new ways to grow so we’re never reliant on one particular channel. Audio was something I’d never done before so at the very least I needed to understand it better.
Starting small
We had a couple opportunities land in our lap that presented us with a chance to test into podcasts. Some Yonder members had been running their own podcast so when they reached out we started looking into it.
Their podcast growth was impressive, even though their numbers weren’t huge. So while the CPM didn’t add up right away, their content was great, they loved Yonder and their audience was bang on for who we were looking to target.
So after a period of testing we committed to becoming their lead sponsor for a year and it gave us enough confidence to start looking into more established podcasts as well.
What you need to know before you start
There are different ad formats
When it comes to working with established podcast publishers, you can typically advertise in two different ways.
Host Reads: typically 1-2 minute ads written by podcast hosts (or their teams) and read out by the host on their own podcast. These will only reach listeners on their podcast.
Network Ad Reads: typically about 30 seconds long, also written and read out by the podcast hosts but are programmatically inserted into other podcasts through a publishers network. So you may get the host of Podcast X promoting your brand on Podcast Y.
I’m pretty new to this, so I imagine there are other formats I haven’t come across yet so depending on your goals and who you’re working with there may be other ways to reach your customers worth exploring.
We’ve found it’s useful to do a bit of both.
Host Reads are great for building trust and authenticity, because the host is lending their name to your brand. They’re endorsing you for over a minute to a highly engaged listener who trusts the host. Network Ad Reads are great for driving reach because they appear in dozens of ads and reach a broader audience.
You can work with self-published podcasts or big podcast networks
Self-published podcasts
Typically smaller with growing audiences and lower tech capabilities, self-published podcasts are easier to work with and easier to get started because you’re speaking directly to the hosts who will record your ad for each episode they produce.
So if you listen to episode 1, you’ll hear an ad for whoever was sponsoring them at the time. These are a great way to start out testing podcasts before scaling.
Publisher networks (e.g. Acast, Spotify, Goalhanger, NPR)
These are all publisher networks who own (or have the rights to) hundreds of different podcasts. They have way more advanced methods for creating and inserting promotions. When you work with publishers, you’ll usually work with a team of people who help to get your promotion on to specific podcasts.
They usually have a more advanced integration with these podcasts so that when your promotion is live, it will appear on a podcast’s full catalogue of episodes and not just on the one that was published the week you sponsored them.
How to sponsor a podcast through a publisher
Step 1: Get in touch with a publisher
We’ve worked with Acast now for the last few months, but have been approached by all the major UK publishers to work with them. There may be benefits to going through other channels but I’ve found it’s best to build a direct relationship with them and work with them to create a sponsorship package that worked for us.
Step 2: Work out your budget
We started with a budget of around £50k (incl. VAT) for a 3-month test of how advertising throughout the Acast podcast network might become part of our strategy long.
We landed on £50k for a few reasons. Firstly, we had slowly been reducing our Meta spend and had some excess budget. Secondly, we wanted to work with a national podcast to help drive our national brand awareness so we knew we needed to spend more to land the podcast partner that would do that. And finally, we wanted to spend over a period of time so while the campaign was £50k in total it worked out about £17k a month over three months.
If you want to start smaller:
If you’re looking to start much smaller, then get in touch with a smaller growing podcast and speak to the hosts directly.
I’d aim for something with at least 5-10k weekly listens because anything less than this you may not be able to measure much of an impact. See what their audience demographics are and ask for screenshots of both their Spotify and Apple downloads (trust, but verify 😀).
If their downloads are growing each week and they’ve shown they can consistently deliver a new episode every week then they’re probably worth a look. If you can land a £250 sponsorship per episode to 10,000 listeners, then you’ll have a £25 CPM which is a good place to start.
Step 3: Pick your podcast
I got in touch with Acast and told them I wanted to test out promoting Yonder on a national podcast that skewed male (we already had a podcast that skewed female, so we wanted to balance it out) and they got back to me with several options that we began filtering down based on the following:
Audience: are the audience demographics like age, location, interests and income aligned with your target customer?
Content: is there a natural insertion point for Yonder within the discussion of the episode or will it just feel jarring and irrelevant if we show up?
CPM: is there expected CPM within a range we think is acceptable? We didn’t really know what was good yet but from a bit of research we worked out that for top tier podcasts in the UK we should shoot for £40-£50 CPM.
A final thought would be to think about the host’s reputation. Are they conducting themselves in a way that is representative of your brand values? You’re handing your most valuable asset (your brand) over to a stranger so make sure they’re going to give it back better than when they found it. Terrible analogy. Sorry, it’s December.
We landed on The High Performance Podcast. The hosts had a great reputation in the industry, the audience skewed male and we felt that Yonder’s travel benefits would be a nice fit for an audience of people who saw themselves as aspirational and with a keen eye for good value.
Step 4: Negotiate a deal
I’m not going to pretend to be some negotiating legend. Go download a Masterclass or something if you need help here. I find it’s best to just be transparent about what you want. I was upfront with Acast throughout the process on what I wanted to achieve and I was direct when their proposal was or wasn’t close to what we needed.
I made it clear that if we could make this a huge success, we’d be coming back for more. Acast were fantastic and included a bunch of free advertising in our proposal which ultimately just reduced the risk for me so made it easier for us to get it over the line. Ask for that, they all do it. Sorry, Acast.
In the end we landed on around £20k for the Host Read and another £20k for the Network Ad Read. With VAT it landed just shy of £50,000.
Step 5: Work out your media plan
I’d encourage you to work with a particular podcast for at least 4-weeks before deciding if it’s working or not. Like a lot of brand activity, you won’t see immediate uplift in traffic or growth (depending on your product and offer, I guess) but you should start to see a measurable lift at the end of that period.
With that in mind, I’d do a 4-week buy and spread it out over 8-10 weeks. So you do one week on, then 1-2 weeks off. You’ll be able to extend your brand presence for a longer period of time.
We had both the Host Read and Network Ad Read running at the same time, so within those live weeks you’d hear about Yonder across the Acast network. You could however split them out so you had a Host Read running in week 1, then your Network Ad Read in week 2 etc. so feel free to explore what works for you.
Step 6: Come up with your creative
The beauty of these kind of advertising packages is that you don’t need to produce your own audio ads. If you’re working with Spotify or other publishers then you’ll typically need to record your own ads which is annoying and if you’re anything like me probably quite useless at it.
So that’s why we left it to the hosts because it’s literally their job to do this well.
Before I get into this more, I’m reflecting this with just a hunch. We haven’t yet been able to A/B test our approach here so this is mostly just common sense and not the result of a load of different testing. So don’t shoot me if it doesn’t work.
Our brief focused on a couple things:
Comparing Yonder to Amex: position ourselves as a viable alternative to American Express by highlighting all the ways you can use Yonder points.
Build trust and confidence: we’re a new brand in an established market so I really wanted to address concerns over our legitimacy. We manage people’s financial lives so showing that we’re regulated, trusted and loved by our customers was really important.
Step 7: Set up your measurement stack
Measuring podcast performance is surprisingly more technical and effective than you might expect. But like most digital marketing nowadays, there is no one solution to give you all the insights you need on your podcast spend so your measurement stack should be made up of multiple datapoints. Here’s what we set up:
Podscribe
Podscribe is the Meta Ads Manager of podcasts, if you were to make some sort of comparison. The difference is that it’s not owned by any of the podcast networks. Similarly to Meta you can actually see how other brands are advertising, the ads they’re running and all the podcasts they’re advertising on. So even if you don’t use Podscribe for tracking your own spend, you should use it to do competitor research to see where your top competitors are showing.
Podscribe works by installing a pixel on your website and also within the podcasts you’re working with. When you listen to a podcast, it pings the publisher that sends a specific ad to your phone to play during the specific ad slot and it comes with a pixel. So while it’s not 100% accurate, you can actually track who listens to your ad and then who goes to your website. Genius. Here’s how to set it up:
Create an account, then create a pixel: Install it in Tag Manager or on your website directly. Do this twice, once for page views and once for whatever conversion event you want to track.
Download your Pixel and send it to your publisher. They’ll install it on their side.
How Did You Hear About Us
If you don’t already, then you should consider adding a question in your sign-up flow to ask customers how they first heard about you. If you make it open ended, customers can write in how they heard about you (if they remember).
We do two questions that effectively act as medium and source. So if they click ‘Podcast’ we’ll then ask them ‘Which one?’ so we can get both medium and source.
Again, it’s not perfectly accurate but it’s another data point for you to consider with everything else.
Tracking link with UTMs
We use a landing page in our ads that unfurl into a longer link with UTMs. So for the High Performance Podcast we used yonder.com/hpp which is a shortlink for:
https://www.yonder.com/affiliate/high-performance-podcast?utm_source=high-performance-podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=hpp1124I wouldn’t expect to see much direct traffic to this page but if you take a balance approach to measurement then you can weight direct traffic to this page alongside all the other data points you have.
Brand awareness attribution
We use a tool called Tracksuit for our always-on brand tracking. Part of these monthly surveys is a question that asks “Where have you heard about this brand before?” with several options including ‘podcasts’.
We’ve only just started working with them so we don’t yet have our first data set back but with a £50,000 spend over 3 months, we will expect to see podcasts form a pretty significant part of our overall channel awareness.