How to get started with podcast advertising

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