Here are the different ways to make your podcast advertiser-ready.
If you’re reading this, it probably means you’re ready to start earning from your podcast. Or maybe you want to find out what it takes to get some form of sponsorship – whether monetary or in kind. Whichever your reason, here’s what you need to know about what advertisers are looking for from a podcast.
Know your audience inside out.
Advertisers will want to sponsor your podcast because of your listeners. They are potential consumers, and they need to be relevant to the product or service that will be promoted on your show.
You need to be able to share demographics information – age, gender, location, etc. as well as some psychographics ones i.e. what are they like? what beliefs do they have, why do they listen to your show.
An analytics platform like Podmetrics can provide you some of this data, but you will also need to comb your social media following for other ways to profile your listeners.
Get more listeners. Size matters.
Now that you know who your listeners are, there needs to be A LOT of them to make advertisers sit up and notice. They would want to know how many they are, how many of them listen to your show and to each episode. More importantly, they want to find out if they’re increasing i.e. more and more people are listening to your podcast over time.
So, spend time growing your base if it’s not ready yet. Join a network, push communications out on social media. Get good consistency on listeners and downloads for each episode.
Make the most out of social media (and whatever you have at your disposal).
Aside from your podcast show, look at how you might make the most out of your social media platforms. Remember that when brands advertise, they want to see how they can use other ways to reach their consumers (touchpoints). So a pre-roll can be more powerful if you can repeat this message or offer on your show’s Facebook page or Twitter.
You can also package these other touchpoints as “value-added” media to the advertiser.
Price sponsorship for your podcast accordingly.
Advertisers will usually pay for how many listens/downloads your podcast episodes get, and this is usually in increments of 1,000 and is referred to as CPM or ‘cost per mille (thousand).’
Industry averages vary per country, but most sponsors would want to see at least 2,000 downloads per episode before they consider sponsoring unless you have a very niche audience that you have a pretty good influence over.
According to AdvertiseCast, the industry average rates (in the U.S.) for podcast advertising are $15 for a 10-second ad CPM, $18 for a 30-second ad CPM, and $25 for a 60-second ad CPM.
If you think you have a chance at sponsorship, you can explore co-marketing activities with Podcast Network Asia.
Have an idea of what offer you want to pitch to advertisers
Nothing’s worse than finally having interested advertisers get in touch with you only for you to draw a blank when asked, “So, what can you offer us?”
Come prepared with what you think would be interesting for the advertiser and their brand. Often, they’re either looking to share information about a new product or service, or they want to get specific audiences to try this new product or service. For example, your podcast is about DIY Homes and your potential advertiser would like to push an arts and craft trolley cart on a shopping platform. You can ask for an affiliate marketing link or promo code that shoppers can use when they check out their shopping cart and maybe do a review of the arts and crafts trolley in one episode.
Advertisers would appreciate that you took the time to see how your show and its listeners can be valuable to them.
For other ways to get more value out of your podcast, do check out Podmetrics, a performance and monetisation platform for podcast creators and their shows. Do follow Podmetrics on Facebook so you never miss out on new monetisation opportunities.