All about Podcast Advertising and Sponsorship

What is a podcast?

A podcast is digital audio content available for both online and offline streaming. The listeners can download and play the audio content on their device. The podcast’s content is either in the form of series or single episodes based on different themes. The listeners can choose from wide variety of genres of podcasts such as movies, music, poetry, storytelling, public issues, health care, women oriented etc.

What makes Podcast popular especially among millennials?

The pace of podcast publishing and listening is growing rapidly. Here are few interesting things about podcasts that is making them very popular:

• Help in developing community groups.
• Easily downloadable to any device.
• Subscription option available for latest updates on podcast content.
• Easy to develop and cheap to produce as compared to other mediums of communication.
• Appropriate for individuals, small business, start-ups, mid as well as big size business to create and expand consumer base.

How podcast advertising works?

As podcast is a growing medium to reach large variety of audience, advertisers can pick this medium for better brand reach. To understand how podcast advertising works, let’s get familiar with advertising terms first.

• CPM rate: Cost per mile, here the advertisers pay for every 1000 impressions of the ad. The rate for every 1000 impressions is fixed. Cost per mile is also called as cost per thousand rates. By impressions in podcast, it means number of listens of an ad.
• Host-read ad: The ad is read by the host during the show. The ad is pre-recorded.
• Pre-Post and mid-roll ads. These ads are placed specifically at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the podcast episode respectively.
• CTA: These ads act as tester to measure the impact of any ad played during the podcast. The ads generally provoke the listeners to take some action after listening to the ad. The copy of the ad includes words like ‘ grab the deal now’, ‘offer ends soon’, ‘limited time deal’ etc.
• Downloads: The number of downloads of a podcast episode determines as to how many times the ad listens or impressions made by an ad in the podcast.
• Dynamic Insertions: It is the technique to insert ads in a pre-recorded podcast episode. The ad can be inserted anywhere in the podcast episode without making any changes to the original audio of the podcast. Dynamic insertions are done via specific software.
• Programmatic ad: These ads are inserted in the pre-recorded podcast episode but they do not feature the host of the podcast.

How to choose a podcast for advertising a brand, product or service?

Here are effective tips that would let you choose a podcast that will level up your marketing and advertising game:

1. Understand the podcast audience: Podcast audience is generally adults with affluent and educated background. They have the authority to make purchase decisions, have higher education level, working audience looking for products and services that would make their daily life easier. The podcast audience sticks to an episode for a minimum of 30minutes and that is the time when advertisers can communicate their brand message to the audience. Therefore, to publish a podcast ad, the advertisers must have complete information on the podcast audience such as age, gender, location, likes, socio-economic background etc.
2. Know the standard podcast pricing before hand: When you reach out to podcasters for publishing your ad, you must research on the standard pricing of podcast ads so that you can negotiate and do not appear as an amateur to the pod-casters. The more you will be aware about pricing formulas, the more changes of better negotiation. Research on what ads have been published by a particular podcast earlier, what was its pricing and how was the result of the same.
3. Choose a podcast that matches your brand: one must be careful while selecting the podcast for running ads on it as wrong selection might lead to undesirable ad output. The podcast on which the ad will be run must act as a base for your ad. For instance if you run an organic product ad on a podcast show that talks about latest phones than it will be complete mismatch. But if the same ad is run on a podcast show that talks about organic product and their benefits, then it will definitely be a success.
4. Get inspired: Keep close eye on your competitors to get inspired as well as to analyse their progress. A deep analysis of competitor’s advertising strategy will widen your outlook as to which podcasts to choose, how to pitch and what opportunities are there to explore. Do not try to imitate your competitor rather get inspired. The competitor’s analysis will help you build strong advertising strategy.
5. Pick ad format carefully: Once you have decided the podcast for your advertisement, you should carefully select the ad format that will suit your advertising needs. For podcast advertising you can choose from various ad formats such as native ads, sponsored content, paid interview, product placement, direct response ads etc.