Proven Podcast Marketing Tips to Grow Your Audience Engagement and Awareness
For most brands that make podcasts, the goal is brand lift or brand awareness. Podcasts are an opportunity to build a relationship with listeners, so that, the next time that listener is in the market for your product or service, your brand is top of mind.
For this reason, the KPI for branded podcasts is not downloads on devices, but engaged listeners – real people who listen to multiple episodes of the show and recommend it to a friend.
One way to find new audiences who will engage with your show is through paid campaigns. When clients have a budget to spend on paid media, I focus on highly targeted podcast-to-podcast ad campaigns. These look like host-read or talent-read ads on other podcasts where our target audiences are listening.
I track conversions on all our campaigns using tracking tools. So I know whether someone was exposed to an ad for a client’s show, and then took an action to download an episode of that show.
These campaigns generate thousands of downloads for our clients. That is great! But they don’t tell me whether those downloads are coming from engaged listeners – audiences who will continue to listen to the show long after the campaign has ended.
That’s because there are plenty of services out there that will generate a lot of downloads on devices – sometimes tens of thousands of downloads for less than USD$10,000.
But as soon as the money stops, downloads can drop back to pre-campaign levels. And the only way to see those kinds of downloads again is to continue to pay thousands of dollars for the service each month.
If this is what you’re seeing with your paid campaign, your paid dollars might not be reaching the right audiences – people who eagerly anticipate your next episode, who leave a review on Apple Podcasts, visit your website to learn more about you, or find you on social media and engage with your content.
So how do you know if your ad dollars are working to grow your podcast audience?
We are currently running two campaigns for clients that are excellent examples of podcast-to-podcast ad campaigns that deliver engaged audiences in spades. Here’s how we know we’re reaching the right people:
➕ Followers
A great podcast marketing tip is that if followers on Apple Podcasts and Spotify increased during the campaign period, I know that listeners not only heard an ad and then downloaded an episode. But many of those listeners liked what they heard so much that they wanted to hear more!
We’re currently running host read ads for our scripted fiction show Handsome Molly on the Gen-Z Media show Six Minutes, as well as Welcome To Night Vale. After examining the podcast landscape, we identified these two shows as podcasts where our target audiences were listening: Younger listeners who are interested in fiction podcasts in the true crime and cli-fi genres.
The campaign has only been live for about two weeks, but we’re already seeing a spike in followers; followers on Apple Podcasts increased about 130% since the start of the campaign.
We know the paid campaigns are mostly responsible for this increase, because the show hasn’t produced new episodes or done much in the way of organic promotion for months.
❤️ Consumption rates
I often see consumption rates increase during and after successful campaigns. This means we’re reaching more people who are really loving our content.
For Amazon’s show This Is Small Business, we looked for shows that spoke to loyal audiences of aspiring and early stage entrepreneurs and side hustlers. That led us to Side Hustle Show and Goal Digger.
For a month or so, hosts for these shows promoted This Is Small Business to their listeners.
Episodes of This Is Small Business that were released during this campaign saw some of our highest consumption rates ever. This indicates that the people who came over from Goal Digger and Side Hustle Show really loved those episodes. If we had a lot of “samplers” coming from the campaign – people listening to a minute or so of an episode and quickly bouncing when they realize it’s not for them – we would see consumption rates for those episodes start out lower than what we typically see.
📣 Reviews
We also saw an increase in reviews and feedback during and after the campaign period. One five-star reviewer even mentioned how pleased they were that the host of Goal Digger, Jenna Kutcher, recommended This Is Small Business. Now we know we’re reaching a REALLY engaged group.
🔥 Downloads per Listener
I use third-party tools to track performance metrics for every podcast-to-podcast campaign we execute for our clients. These are metrics like impressions, converted devices, new converted devices and downloads. So I can tell when a device was served an ad, and then an episode of our podcast was downloaded to that device.
Often, the number of downloads is higher than the number of unique devices attributed to a campaign. If there are, say, three downloads for every unique device, I know our campaign likely reached new people who binged multiple episodes.
Once again, this indicates that we’re attracting engaged listeners via the campaign – not just samplers who listen once, and only for a small portion of an episode.
⬇️ Downloads Do Matter
Downloads are important, too. If a paid campaign resulted in a low conversion rate and a high cost per download, it would be hard to argue it was a “success”. But downloads alone do not tell the whole story!
I hope you use these podcast marketing tips!
Remember:
Key Takeaways
- Successful podcast-to-podcast ad campaigns should:
- Increase followers on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
- Lead to more listener feedback (such as reviews on Apple Podcasts)
- Improve consumption rates and time listened
- Have a high ratio of downloads per attributed listener
- Downloads are important, yes, but should not be the only metric by which to measure the success of a campaign
As the Director of Audience Growth, Liz leads a team of audience growth specialists at JAR, focusing on finding and growing the right audiences for clients. With over a decade of experience in journalism and podcast production, Liz uses data and creativity to create winning strategies. Since joining JAR in 2022, she has integrated audience growth into the production process. Previously, she worked at CBC, Pacific Content, and advised on award-winning podcasts.
