5 Pro Tips on How to Get Started with Podcast Advertising

Ready to break into podcast advertising? Then, you’ve come to the right place. Whether it’s your first or 50th, we make it easy to launch your podcast campaign. We can help you grasp all the moving parts—knowing your target audience, choosing creative, deciding on an ad format—with some simple steps to pull it all together.

So, if this is truly your first rodeo (or you just want some tips), we’ll break down the nuts and bolts of getting started with podcast advertising. By fully developing your ad campaign, you’ll figure out how to reap the rewards from this powerful medium that’s taken the world by storm.

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1. Develop Your Podcast Advertising Strategy

What’s the first step to getting started with podcast advertising? Number one: defining your goals. Defining the podcast advertising goals you wish to hit out of the park is your guiding star in this process.

Do you wish to increase monthly subscriptions? Launch an exciting, new product? Or, drive increased website traffic? It doesn’t matter if you have a single goal or ten—be prepared to define each one and strategize different tactics for accomplishing each goal.

We have a little hack to help you narrow down the specificities of your campaign goals: the S.M.A.R.T. method. So, grab a journal and try out this method.

S.M.A.R.T.

Specific. Don’t leave out any important details, and be as specific as possible about your goals.
Measurable. What key performance indicators will be your yardstick for success?
Achievable. Prioritize the goals that are most realistic.
Relevant. Do the goals make sense for your brand? Is it aligned with your brand’s values?
Time-based. Choose a specific time frame for achieving your goals.

The S.M.A.R.T. method can help you decide which goals are most relevant and important to your brand, narrowing down your objectives to create a more clear path of strategy moving forward.

2. Define Your Target Audience

Don’t let your messaging fall on deaf ears. Defining your target audience is arguably, one of the most important pieces of your campaign. That’s how you’ll know how to speak to them and reach them.

Do you know what your customers do for work? Can you guess at how they spend their free time? Or where they hang on Saturday nights? It’s important to think of your customers in a real and tangible way. The more clearly you can see your audience, the better context clues you’ll have for reaching them.

Learning the ins and outs of your target audience—their behaviors, their distractions, their wants, their goals, and their demographics—will unravel everything you need to know about marketing to them.

Ultimately, the end goal for defining your target audience is to gain insight on their favorite podcasts. For example, are you targeting parents over 40? Then you might find them on The The Rachel Hollis Podcast. Or, what about sports bros over 35? Then, they’re likely listening to Dunc'd On Basketball NBA Podcast. Listeners prefer ads that are relevant to the content they’re listening to, so it’s up to advertisers to place their ads accordingly.

Be careful that you don’t go too deep in characterizing your target audience, or risk alienating/leaving behind potential customers. However, your target audience is the most important relationship for a brand, so treat it with care and respect.

3. Pick Your Podcast Advertising Formats

Before you get into the creative part of the process, you have to understand media buy. SiriusXM Podcast Network has a variety of buy types and ad formats that you can customize to get the solution you desire.

There’s show-level buys, where brands are targeting the audience of a specific podcast show. This type of buy capitalizes on the relationship the host has built with their audience—which can be an invaluable vote of confidence in your brand.

There’s also network buys, where advertisers can take advantage of an entire podcast network and run their ads on multiple shows. This is beneficial for advertisers because their messaging doesn’t get siloed by sticking to one show, but rather, is heard by a wider fanbase.

Advertisers can purchase through a CPM model, which is based on the number of episode downloads. Whether that’s purchasing podcast space through a contracted number of episode downloads or estimated downloads, where you can also purchase podcasts via a flat rate.

SiriusXM Podcast Network also offers podcast purchasing through direct IO or programmatically. With direct IO, you can outline specific campaign terms to the publisher, like ad units, campaign duration, target audience, and more. The other choice is programmatic advertising. With programmatic purchasing, publishers buy and sell digital ads in real time, setting up an automated process to deliver the most relevant ads to a brand’s target audience.

4. Build Your Podcast Ad Creative

Now, comes the fun part. Time to get the creative juices flowing and choose your ad type and creative.

First off, do you know what your ad will say? Your ad’s messaging is the way you’ll connect with your target audience. You only have a couple seconds to grab attention, so don’t bury the lead; mention your brand quickly. Plus, listeners respond best to authenticity, so keep a natural, conversational tone throughout the script.

As you dive deeper into creative, you’ll also decide on an ad type. Do you want to put your faith in a show host or do you prefer to hire voiceover talent? Check out the following podcast ad types to decide on one or a combination of all three.

Host Reads

A host-read ad is when a show host personally advertises your product or services. A host-read can be especially impactful because listeners trust and respect the hosts of the shows they listen to, and that can do wonders for your brand.

Announcer Reads

An announcer-read ad is when advertisers hire voiceover talent to read their brand’s messaging in a style that replicates host reads . Hiring an actor to read your advertisement means you can control the messaging and choose a more relatable voice and tone to connect with your target audience. Announcer reads are a solid choice for advertisers since these ad types contribute to better unaided brand recall.

Brand Reads

A brand-read is pre-produced, giving advertisers the ability to leverage existing creative or develop new ads for the podcast environment. Advertisers have complete control of the ad’s messaging, and they can also adapt the ad to a show’s content. You can get really creative and match the ad to a show’s narrative, which can be especially entertaining for your target audience.

5. Create Your Podcast Advertising Campaign

It’s time to bring it home and place all the puzzle pieces together. Going through each part of building a podcast advertising campaign—goals, target audience, buy type, and creative—will help you reach a fully formed marketing strategy.

Getting clear on the specifics, and making concrete decisions will help you fully take advantage of podcast advertising. Did you know that 91% of podcast listeners take some form of action after hearing an advertisement on a podcast? That’s a solid return on investment that you cannot afford to miss out on.

So, are you looking to break into audio advertising? Don’t wait any longer, and let’s talk.