The Conflicting Data Behind Paid Podcast Growth Tactics | Podcast Promotion
If you think of all the people and all the businesses that advertise on Meta, I would guess 95% lose money on it.
Justin:It's tough when you have a very clear business funnel. And Yeah. With podcast listeners, it's just a much more difficult sell.
Jeremy:There are ways to advertise to get real listeners. So here's the idea. So one of the final questions that I ask everybody in the annual podcast marketing trends report, it's near the end of the survey, and they just submitted a bunch of information about their show and their experience marketing. And I follow-up with this question. If you could wave a magic wand and have your number one marketing wish be granted, what would that be?
Jeremy:And there's a bunch of things that people respond with, and they'll say things like, you know, I wish I had more BudgetTire team. I wish there was better tools for this. I wish there was education on this topic. But always, every year, it's either the number one or the number two kind of cluster of responses. I wish I had a budget for paid advertising.
Jeremy:And it's a little bit interesting because within the same report, I also ask a question. What have been the most and least effective things you've done in the past year? And consistently, everybody who does advertising ranks it only second to social media as the least effective thing that they have done. And so it's clear that there's a big disconnect here between the people who have not advertised, who see it as this thing that will just immediately save their show and get it out in front of people. And then there's the people who have advertised who kind of say this is it doesn't actually work for growing a podcast.
Jeremy:So I think it's actually a good idea for us today to dig into maybe some of the realities of advertising both within podcasting as well as beyond podcasting, what makes it work, when to use it, and ultimately, if this is something that people should actually be focusing on. So Yeah. To kick things off, I'm curious about your personal experience with advertising either for Transistor or for past projects, creative projects, podcasts, things like that?
Justin:With Transistor, it's been limited. We've really not done a lot of paid acquisition. In other jobs, for other startups, I've used Google AdWords, promoted videos on YouTube, some YouTube ads, some podcast ads, both for products and for shows, newsletter sponsorship, event sponsorship, and some experience with other ad networks, like Carbon ads and things like that. So I've I've done a fair amount. What about yourself?
Jeremy:Yeah. I would say over the past several years, I've probably spent something like 20 to 30 k on advertising. So a decent amount, it's not actually that much in the big scheme of advertising. That's a tiny drop in the bucket. And you start to look at people who actually have advertising running, and they're talking about spending, you know, 50 k a month or a hundred k a month.
Jeremy:And that's usually because the ads are profitable and you're earning more than that so you can spend almost infinite amount and which is some one of the dynamics we're gonna get into here. So over several years, 20 to 30 k, I've experimented quite a bit. Most of that has gone into two buckets of Meta or Facebook and newsletter sponsorships. Those have been the two I've done quite a bit of newsletter advertising of my newsletter, of other lead magnets, of a Ben Sideburn, things like that, and then also, Facebook and Instagram ads. And then I've done a couple other things.
Jeremy:Sparkloop is a platform that was acquired by ConvertKit, now Kit, that is a kind of newsletter advertising marketplace. And so people can you can set a cost per acquisition for each subscriber. And so I've said, you know, two per subscriber, who meets these criteria. And so usually that's they stay subscribed after a certain amount of time. And then anybody can basically say, yep.
Jeremy:I'll promote that newsletter for that amount. And you kind of don't know how much you're gonna end up spending at the end of the month. You can put a cap, but whoever wants to promote it does. And then I've done a little bit of YouTube promotion as well. This was actually based on your recommendation, which, has some interesting side effects.
Jeremy:I don't know that I would say it was a success or that it was worth it, but it was an interesting experiment. So Mhmm. That's that's my kind of experience. And actually, the one update here on my experience is I did in early twenty twenty four, I did a bunch of meta ads. I probably did $7,000 worth or something like that.
Jeremy:And I did it directly to my scrappy podcasting newsletter and actually got a pretty good cost per acquisition, CPA as we're gonna be referring to it, here. And I never knew, though, like, is this worth it? I run a business. I'm advertising my newsletter to get people into my business to get customers. And for a long time, it just looked like I threw $7,000 away.
Jeremy:And then somebody in another community that I'm in, actually in Jay Claus', The Lab, asked a question about Facebook ads running them to a newsletter. And I was like, actually, I should check-in on that. How did that go? And recently, I went back. I looked at all my customer data, and I realized that actually my ads had broken even eighteen months after I had started running them.
Jeremy:And so this is another dynamic that's interesting to look into. But for me, this was the big win that I'd always sought of, like, ads that actually broke even, which if nothing else means you get those free email subscribers. And so this is my experience. I'm curious, like, when you think about, like, ads as a marketing practice, what are your kind of thoughts in general about paid acquisition? Do you have impressions of it?
Justin:Your experience, I think, mirrors a lot of people's experience, which is if you're lucky and you have some sort of paid product, in a lot of cases, podcasts subscribers don't fit in this whole model. But a lot of businesses that advertise on Facebook and Google, etcetera, they will eventually recoup their investment, but break even is the most common answer. And this can work with some business models, like if you're selling software as a service or subscriptions, then paying back your investment within a year is pretty good if you can keep that subscriber paying you going forward. But it's hard. The most common thing I hear is just like, the people who are good at it spend a lot of money tuning their ads, and so you have to spend a lot of money just to learn.
Justin:And then after you've learned, it might take you three to six months just to learn what you need to learn, and that might cost you thousands of dollars. And then you can start actively leveraging those ads or those techniques that work to acquire customers, etcetera. So, it's tough when you have a very clear kind of business funnel. And with podcast listeners, there's just always been this question in my head of like, man, that's just a much more difficult sell. It's not like this, you know, snap your fingers purchase.
Justin:A podcast is a bigger investment. So
Jeremy:And, you know, I see that you shared this state of SaaS marketing report. This was from Corey Haines from Swipe Files. And in the report, it mentioned so one of the questions was which channel had the biggest impact on growing revenue. So this is very similar to the podcast marketing trends report. Only 7% of people responded ads.
Jeremy:And this is kind of interesting because I feel like ads are the sexiest thing in almost any field, I think. Because I think people just think, oh, if I only had the budget, then I just push the button and it would roll in. And I think it's kind of easy to think like, well, you know, I don't have that. And so that's part of the reason why maybe I might be stuck, which, you know, their budget certainly helps. But it's interesting that in SaaS in particular, where I think that feels like a medium or a platform or a business model that is just entirely like, oh, yeah.
Jeremy:If you can just spend money at it, like, you'll grow. It's just not true there either. And so I think that this is one of those things that the more experience you have with advertising you know, you mentioned the typical result result being breakeven. I
Justin:think Yeah.
Jeremy:Breakeven is actually a hugely ambitious result for advertising. If you think of all the people and all the businesses that advertise on Meta, I would guess 95% or even more lose money on it. I think it is almost guaranteed for somebody who does not have extreme understanding of the platform and how the kind of payback time and everything works to actually even break even, let alone, you know, be profitable with it. So I think, it is a tall mountain to climb. And that said, I do know people who have figured out a way to use ads effectively.
Jeremy:I hope to be one of those people one day, because I think there are a lot of opportunities in advertising if you know how to leverage them. And I think that there's some interesting stuff that we could talk about, in relation to podcasting. And I've actually had some ideas recently that maybe, we can talk through about how podcasting might play a role in advertising, even if you're not advertising directly to the podcast.
Justin:Love it.
Jeremy:Let's, kick things off here just with a little bit of context about some of the terminology here and the ways that advertising works. And so I think, like, the all important number for advertising is return on ad spend. You'll see this, abbreviated as ROAS. And essentially, this is, you know, you spend a dollar, how much do you get out of that? Like we've mentioned, most people are probably gonna be in the negative.
Jeremy:But if you're in the positive, that's a good thing. But if you can get, you know, two times or three times or four times, then you're looking really good. But that's, you know, one of the the hard things to get to. There's a billion acronyms in advertising. What are some of the other common or most important ones to be considering here if we're thinking about this?
Justin:I mean, generally, it there's cost per acquisition. So how much does it cost you to get a paying customer? How much does it cost you to get a subscriber? And then how long does it take you to recoup that investment? So the payback period.
Justin:You can see why this works with e commerce. So it's like, okay, it costs us $10 to acquire the customer. And then they bought a pair of shoes, and so we broke even on that. But often the payback period also includes this idea of, when are we gonna make profit from this customer? And that might not be, in the case of e commerce, until the second, or third, or fourth purchase, right?
Justin:So those are the two big ones, cost per acquisition and payback period.
Jeremy:Yeah. The other one that then actually plays off that payback period is the lifetime value or the LTV. And so I think that that's another thing that when you start to get into advertising, like these are numbers you you should basically know your lifetime value of a either customer or a lead. And so I've done a lot of advertising to not paid products, but to my email list because I always assume, well, they're gonna, you know, probably read the newsletter for six months to a year before they buy something. But if I can get people in, like, eventually, I know my newsletter does convert clients.
Jeremy:I get people out of that. And so I have a calculation in the back of my mind that I've roughly done, you know, in various ways over the years where I have at some point, I think the the number I haven't done this recently, was around, like, $50 per newsletter subscriber was the typical, like, lifetime value of a subscriber. And so this is accounting for 99% of people or more will never buy anything from me, and then there's 1% of people who might spend a lot of money with me, and that gets averaged out across everybody. And so now I know as an advertiser, well, if I can get somebody in, they are worth $50 to me. So I can spend up to $50 for my advertising to be effective.
Jeremy:It just might take me four years or five years to reach that level. These kind of benchmarks are worth having in mind, understanding about your audience. And I think that this is one of the things with podcasting. Most people are not very clear on what their business model is or how their podcast relates to it. And so that's why I get a little bit hesitant whenever I hear somebody talking about, like, running ads.
Jeremy:And so let's maybe dig into some of the specifics. These these kind of numbers that we've talked about are general across all advertising, but let's dig into the specifics of podcast advertising. And let's start off with, like, what are some of the ways that you could advertise a podcast? You could pay to get your show out in front of more people.
Justin:Yeah. I mean, you could advertise it on Google using Google AdWords. You could also advertise it on YouTube, and they have a variety of products there. So you can get a suggested video in the sidebar, that's one product. You can have an ad play before a video, that's another product.
Justin:You can have a promoted video. So, lots of products in there. There's, of course, social media, so you can advertise to have something play on an Instagram story. You can have, an ad in the feed, an ad in the sidebar. That's a really common one that's
Charles Duhigg:been around for a long time, kind
Justin:of those banner ads. What are some of the other ones you're thinking of?
Jeremy:Yeah. I mean, some of the podcast specific ones are you can advertise on other podcasts, And so you can pay another show. You can either approach them directly or maybe they have, some kind of advertising agency that they're working with. And so that's something that is, I think, pretty interesting, but not a lot of people actually take advantage of. There's also the podcast apps.
Jeremy:This is something that a lot of people, might have experimented with or at least are aware of. There's, you know, Castbox. I think Overcast does pocket casts. I don't know if
Justin:they do advertising. Yeah. Pocket casts.
Jeremy:So there's several there. Spotify, actually, you can advertise on Spotify as well. And then there's a couple other podcast specific ones. So there's some kind of these, like, almost tool y tech solution type things. IntroCast is one.
Jeremy:Podroll is another. There's a few others. And then there's, like, podcast promoters, which there's, like, spammy LinkedIn podcast promoters who are people. And then there's other companies that they're not really a tech solution per se. I mean, they kind of are on the back end, but they feel a bit more like an agency almost.
Jeremy:And so that's another way that, you know, you can pay money to get impressions of your show and probably listeners as well. The quality and accuracy of those listeners, may be dubious in some of these cases, and maybe we'll dig in, a little bit more, to that. And then, yeah, the the last one, you know, that I'm just thinking about here is going way back to, like, original web advertising is there could be a website that is in your niche on your topic. You could pay that website to get banner ads directly on their site, which actually, I think that could be pretty interesting for some shows.
Justin:I think this is gonna be a theme throughout the whole episode is your approach to this really depends on the topic of your show, who you're trying to reach, where that audience hangs out, and then the dynamics of that ad marketplace. So, crafting an ad for Reddit is going to feel very different than crafting an ad for Instagram stories. Then one more layer underneath that is, that's a whole skill unto itself. And so, you could hear someone say, Well, I tried Reddit ads, it didn't work. First of all, was like, Well, was their product market fit?
Justin:Was that the best place for you to put your ad? And then, what was the ad? How skilled are you at creating a compelling ad? And this is why it's so hard. You got to find fit in all these places.
Justin:And then you have to craft a really good ad, which is like an art and a science unto itself.
Jeremy:And this is why they made the show Mad Men because advertising is creative and sexy. And Yes. I think advertising as an industry gets a bad rap for many good reasons. But it's also interesting that there are you look at, like, the types of people who are in advertising. These are some of the most highly talented creative people in the world who their job is to come up with an infinite amount of ideas that are hopefully interesting ways to get in front of people and create something that's compelling to get people to take some action or remember a brand.
Jeremy:We, as creators, are also some of the most creative people in the world, hopefully, but it's like you're competing with a really high tier of quality, and, your ad might be showing up next to Ford's or Disney's or Apple's or whoever else in like, this is what viewers are comparing this to because Apple can spend, you know, money to show up in somebody's Facebook feed, and so can you. People are inundated with all the same stuff in their feed, and so the the bar for standing out and getting attention is quite high. It's not just, you know, boosting a post and having that immediately people clicking into it just because there's more visibility.
Justin:And I think if you're interested in that art and science, the show recommendation would be under the influence with Terry O'Reilly, who's a Canadian broadcaster. The show is fantastic. If you just want to dig into what makes a great ad, and you want to learn the craft, that's one recommendation. But just realize, you're signing up to become good at a craft. Is not something that you can kind of do haphazardly on the side.
Justin:This is something you have to really commit to getting better at. And just know that that's what it's probably gonna take to actually have an effective campaign.
Jeremy:So we talk about a bunch of different places you can advertise. And there is this article that I came across. I think it was back in 2023. It was from Katie Lohr. Shout out to the Canadian podcast ecosystem.
Jeremy:She runs the newsletter Pod the North. And, she had this interview with Tobin Dalrymple, who is a the founder and b to b content marketing expert at the podcasting studio Pilgrim Content. And so he ran a bunch of different advertising experiments specifically for podcasting, and he then reported back in this article in Pod the North on some of the numbers. And, the numbers are frankly kind of hilarious. And this is a guy who's a smart marketer here and who has experience with advertising.
Jeremy:And so he basically advertised on four platforms. So it was the Acast Network, on Overcast, on Podcast Addict, and on Spotify. And he spent on each platform on Acast spent $1,400, Overcast $1,600, Podcast Addict $1,580, and then Spotify six hundred dollars. And basically, if we look at how many new subscribers he got here, on ACast he got a 43 for his $1,418. On Overcast, he got 65 for his $1,600.
Jeremy:Podcast Addict, he got 87 for his $1,580. And then on Spotify, for $600, he got four subscribers. And so we look at some of these, like, average cost per result here. And this is a little bit interesting because the platforms measure different things like a follow versus a listen or whatever. But I think the average here was something like $211 per new subscriber, which is just kind of hilarious.
Justin:This is something else we didn't mention when we're talking about the the acronyms or metrics you might track. Another thing, that you're gonna track is those metrics within a cohort. And so my immediate thought when I look at this is like, you got 143 new subscribers or downloads. In that cohort, how long does the subscribers stick around? How many episodes do they actually listen My feeling is that these are very generally trend towards lower quality subscribers.
Justin:You're paying a lot of money for a cohort, a group, that may not stick around, that may not actually eventually buy something from you. And this is something else you kind of want to track is of that group that we paid to acquire, what happened to them as compared to our average of organic listeners. I think these numbers are sobering. If you're thinking about spending money to acquire a podcast listener, subscriber, or download, look at these and just know what you're getting into. The other thing that's come up in the news a lot is a lot of these advertising networks will deliver downloads to you, and they will deliver subscribers to you.
Justin:We see this all the time on Transistor. Someone will hire an agency to boost their download numbers, and they'll run ads. And these ads almost always deliver bot listens or not legitimate listens. So on Transistor, we're filtering out duplicate listens, and filtering out listens from bots, and people go, what happened? I paid all this money.
Justin:They told me I got 20,000 downloads, but you guys said I only got 1,500. And we said, well, we're deduping everything that was a repeat lesson. We're removing anything that was a bot. And what you have left over is kind of what we can say is an actual download. And what we're seeing is people just being very upset.
Justin:You know, they spent all this money, and really, they got downloads, but they weren't real downloads. They got subscribers, but they weren't real subscribers.
Jeremy:This is something that I've seen a lot with my clients too where I was just doing an audit of a client's stats, the other week, and he had done a lot of different advertising experiments, which, you know, I'm all for the experimenting mindset, and I've certainly experimented with advertising. And so it's one of those things where you don't really know. You want to test it for yourself and see if it works. And the problem that became very, like, frustrating in hindsight was basically his his entire show data was unreliable now because he had this huge amount of downloads that was still coming from Castbox even though he's pretty sure he's like, those are not real listeners anymore. I think those are auto downloads.
Jeremy:And he was pretty certain that, like, this was not a a real thing. And so we could subtract the Castbox downloads. But he'd also done an advertising experiment with Apple Podcasts where he was getting Apple Podcast followers. And so now it looks like he's got a bunch more followers on Apple Podcasts, but that's not really accurate anymore either because the campaign was designed to get followers. He paid for those followers, and that's what he got.
Jeremy:But they're not real listeners. And so then what happened is now he has basically all of his consumption data at the episode level just tanked and is super low. And so now he's getting, like, 50% or below on many episodes, which that doesn't seem accurate based on some of the feedback he gets from listeners. And so now there is all this data that could be useful to us to diagnose some of the potential opportunities or problems with the show, but all that advertising kinda messed it all up, and now we can't really make any sense of that. And so Mhmm.
Jeremy:It's it can be frustrating beyond just, like, spending the money to not get the listeners, and it can actually hurt you in the long run too if, you know, you're advertising on some places that I think are I don't know that I wanna say even less reputable, but it's like they're gonna deliver what they promise. But it's it's almost like just too good to be true.
Justin:And some of these are not reputable. Yes.
Jeremy:It's like Some of them well reported,
Justin:like, these networks were making, you know, mobile game players listen to an episode order to get to the next level. It's like, okay, sure, that's a real download according to the IAB, but that's not what you want as a podcaster. You don't want people listening to your episode in an interstitial so that they can get to the next level of a game, that's pointless. Right? And so, what this really shows me is, A, how hard it is to get a podcast listener.
Justin:But B, how valuable a genuine podcast listener really is. There's such a big threshold to get them over, but once you have a podcast listener, if they're subscribed to your show, you're gonna show up in their queue, theoretically. And so, yes, it's hard getting a new subscriber. Expensive if you're advertising for it. But once you get them, this is can be a very high value relationship to build with somebody.
Justin:And if a podcast listener does become a customer, there could be a lot of value there depending on how your business works.
Jeremy:And I think that a lot of these advertising platforms, are willfully not owning up to this because this would be bad for other parts of the podcast ecosystem. But a lot of these platforms essentially exist to help big shows that have sponsor impression guarantees hit those marks when they're falling short. And so Mhmm. Let's say that you have Airbnb on as a sponsor, and they have, contracted you for a million impressions of the show. And you're coming up to the end of your period, and you've only reached 800,000.
Jeremy:And so now you either need to bump a sponsor in the future in order to keep running your Airbnb ads so you can reach your million downloads or impressions that you've guaranteed them. Or you go to one of these services and you say, I mean, I don't care if they're bots. Like, as long as I can send the report to Airbnb, they're not gonna scrutinize this. They don't know what podcast data is. So I've hit my million.
Jeremy:We're good. They're gonna renew. And so this is something that, like, a large part of these services exist to serve that part of the market. And, you know, advertisers either willingly turn a blind eye or you just can't get a sense of it. And so, like, that just exists there, but it's not really, like, what most creators want.
Jeremy:Whether you're a small business owner or a pure creator who wants to grow your podcast, you actually want real listeners. And so a lot of times, there are ways to advertise to get real listeners, but it's typically not you know, you pay this amount to be guaranteed this amount of of listeners. Like, that is never anybody who offers guarantees, I would say that it it is impossible that those are legitimate real listeners who are going to be subscribing to your show and along with you for the long run.
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah. I've just seen people waste so much money, and not a lot of people in the podcast industry talk about it. So, yeah, I think this is important for people to understand. There are opportunities, but have your eyes wide open.
Justin:There's a lot more to this. It's more than just putting money in and getting a bunch of listeners.
Jeremy:Okay. So we've kind of maybe laid out some of the, pitfalls and things to look out for with advertising and kind of come out and said, you know, generally, with advertising a podcast to get in front of more people, I think both of us are heavily skeptical. But I know that people are still gonna do it, and I encourage people to experiment. And, actually, I would shout out, Courtney Kosack. She has a newsletter called podcast bestie.
Jeremy:She has a free version and a paid, Substack version. And in her paid version, she actually does a bunch of advertising experiments and shares the results. So, that's another resource if you're curious about this and to see more data on what's working and what's not. But if somebody's like, okay. I wanna at least dip my toe in the water, experiment with some advertising, putting some money behind my show.
Jeremy:Let's maybe look at some of the best practices or how we would actually go about approaching that in a thoughtful way that's gonna give us the best chances at, success. What What are some of the the first things that come to mind for you?
Justin:I think one thing I'd like to highlight is that an ad that will work is to pick up on something that's already kind of working organically. So let me give you an example. You noticed that your podcast keeps getting mentioned in a certain subreddit. Okay. So that's the hint that something's going on here.
Justin:How could you maybe craft an ad that felt appropriate for Reddit that might take advantage of that existing momentum? Another thought I had is, would I just book an ad on any podcast and get them to talk about my show? No. What are some things that would make it more likely that ad would work? Well, if the host organically mentioned that they listened to the show, then I can reach out and say, Hey, I know you're already a listener.
Justin:I will pay you to specifically promote the show on your show. So, I'm going to recommend that approach to see where there's already organic momentum and then follow it up with some sort of paid advertising.
Jeremy:I would build on that and take that to even the show level and say that I would not advertise something that does not already have existing organic growth. I think if you do not have organic growth, that is a sign that advertising is not gonna help it. There's this old quote from the advertising industry that is nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. And so this is, of course, assuming that you have good advertising, but there's there's kinda two sides to this. So there's, like, you can get a show in front of a bunch of people if you are able to craft good ads that actually work and get people to click into it.
Jeremy:And if the show is not great, if it doesn't meet their expectations, this is something I'm so wary of that I wish more people understood. There's actually a lot of science on this, and usually it's in terms of, how many, like, positive comments it takes to offset one negative one. And so if your boss comes to you and is critical of you in some way, I think it's something that it takes, like, eight or nine or 10 positive comments just to get back to neutral. And I think this is a % true for our podcast where if somebody comes across our show and has a less than ideal first experience, it doesn't need to be outright horrible. It just doesn't meet their expectations.
Jeremy:What I think happens, because I observed this in myself, is they immediately write that show off forever until they have an overwhelming amount of positive experiences with the show, probably from other people telling them they need to listen, that they're okay. I guess I'll give it another chance because their experience has already told them that it's not worth their time. And so Mhmm. This is something where I think if your show's not growing organically, that might be a sign that the show is not ready to get in front of more people. And what we really wanna do is when the show does get in front of people, we want to wow them and it'd be an incredible first experience.
Jeremy:And, you know, you you mentioned before about how hard it is to get a podcast listener, and that that just made me think, it is hard to get a podcast listener. Like, I will have a show that is in my feed that I've heard 10 different friends all talk about. And I'm like, I really should listen. And still, I'm not listening. And so if it's that hard to get somebody to listen to a show with all of those other touch points, how hard is it to get somebody when the first exposure that they have to the show is through an ad entirely cold?
Jeremy:And so Yes. Yeah. Looking for that organic momentum first before you're adding fuel to the fire with advertising is, I think, a, kind of universal principle there.
Justin:Yeah. And even thinking about how are you deploying this ad, meaning at what point of the acquisition funnel are you deploying this ad for? What's its job? And so, in your case, maybe you've subscribed to the show, but the creator might deploy a few ads to remind you to That's the job of the ad, is it's like, we know we got people in the funnel. Know people have followed the But now, what we're trying to get them to do is engage or activate as a regular listener.
Justin:And so, that could be the job of the ad. And getting crystal clear about this. Yeah. Is the job of this ad? The job of this ad is to be someone's first impression of this show, and then get them to convert to a listener, that is not going to happen.
Justin:Going to be so rare. Ads that are working for podcasts, you see this already, like the big networks, what are they doing? They're putting ads up inside of buses, and they're putting some billboards up even, dynamic ads inside of other podcasts, doing cross promos. They're just trying to keep the show top of mind, so you build up awareness, and get to the point where it's like, now I got to listen. And there's going to be some event in that sequence that advertising is supporting, that will eventually get them to convert.
Justin:This is probably more true for podcasting than almost anything else, is it's going to be a sequence of events. And the ad's job is really to come alongside in that sequence of events and support everything else that's happening.
Jeremy:Yeah. You know, I really I I what you mentioned there about potentially a not top of funnel show discovery, but more somebody's had exposure to, the show already. And there's ways you can do this with some of the trackable link platforms, things like that, like Linkfire. You used to be able to do this with Chartable where you can actually insert a pixel, either your Google Tag Manager into those landing pages. And so then, you know, somebody has clicked into your show listing, and now you can retarget them, and you could show them Google Display ads.
Jeremy:That's the the point here is just to remind them of the show existing. It's not to get them to click the ad even. It's like they might have already they know where to find the show, and it's just to keep it top of mind. And that is actually, I think, of the most sophisticated methods of using advertising to grow a show is retargeting people who've already kind of are aware of it and shown interest and just need to be given those repeat nudges. And one of the reasons is that a lot of times, like, Google display ads are super cheap, especially when you're not really trying to get a customer.
Jeremy:You're just trying to remind people. It's just to show up in the sidebar of websites. And kind of those, like, spammy ad slots that are often there, and, like, maybe you don't want your show associated with that. But, like, I think if your creative is good, then I think that's a win. And this is something that I am actually gonna do some experiments with.
Jeremy:I think on this season of the show, I'm gonna try this and see how how much it costs and what the impacts of that are. I think one of the things that will be tricky with it is that the clicks might be meaningless. Because like I said, the point is not necessarily to get people to click the ad and go listen. It's just to remind them. And so it might have a low click rate, but maybe listeners will go up anyway.
Jeremy:So that's something that we can maybe report back on in the future.
Justin:Along all these lines that we're talking about, maybe one tangible example is the Mel Robbins show is just recently become number one in Apple Podcasts. And that's quite an achievement. And my guess is they are employing some of this amplification and multi touch point strategy, which is they release clips from the show. So you've probably seen them on Instagram, and TikTok, and Facebook, and YouTube Shorts. And once a clip takes off, once it has organic momentum, you can then boost that to other platforms.
Justin:So you could run that same clip that went viral on YouTube. You could run it on Instagram, because you already know that it works, with a specific call to action, like check out the show, here's how to find it, all those kinds of things on a different platform. And I think that recognizing when there's existing momentum, and then deploying that in various ways, my guess is that's one way they were able to get up into that number one spot, is saying, Okay, this already has traction here, let's just put that over here, and maybe help give it a boost so that it actually takes off there as well. And then we've seen how the TikTok viral moment led to new subscribers on our podcast. Now maybe we can do that over here on Instagram.
Justin:I mean, that's a big show already that has a lot of exposure. But I think there's something in there that, for example, if you notice that something you talked about on the podcast, you turned it into a LinkedIn post, and that just took off, maybe you can target everybody that engaged with that post, now LinkedIn has video, with a reel or a short that promotes your podcast to those people on LinkedIn. That would be the kind of thing I'd be experimenting with. And this whole, like, multistep process that makes me think about, that's how I think I would start incorporating some of this stuff.
Jeremy:Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting. I'm not an advertising expert. I'm purely a hobbyist experimenting. But my friend Andrew, he is I've been in a mastermind with him for several years, and he used to run a Facebook ads agency, and he had a Facebook ads course.
Jeremy:And I, you know, got him to weigh in on some of the things I was doing. And you hear him talk through how he would this is, like, just basic bread and butter for somebody who's doing Facebook advertising, but they will have multiple campaigns where some campaigns are just designed to get traffic. Then you have your retargeting campaign, and then maybe even you have a tertiary retargeting campaign for a subset of those initial groups. And so for somebody who's actually doing Facebook ads at a high level, that's the most basic starting point. And whereas you look at somebody like you and me, we're just doing one campaign trying to like, okay.
Jeremy:What's my image gonna be? What's my copy gonna be? But then you get into, like, the people who are actually running these really profitably have these multi touch point, and they're like, okay. First, we need to get people here with this creative. Then we need to follow-up with people who took this action in this way and then this thing over here.
Jeremy:And that might even follow people around different platforms on the Internet. And so Mhmm. I think this is just one more example of you have to be dedicated to advertising. Like, it is however hard it is to learn podcasting, advertising is just as much a craft or however much it is to, like, learn the cello. It is not a thing that you just learn in a weekend.
Jeremy:You can certainly get started. But I think when I hear people talking about boosting posts and thinking like, oh, well, that will grow the show. It will get you exposure to that post. It will is almost guaranteed not to get you any listeners. In my opinion, post boosting is essentially Meta's way of milking unwitting users.
Jeremy:Like, it is basically downright kinda predatory because it is doing nothing, and yet it is kinda preying on people who don't really understand how advertising works. And Meta's just like, great. We'll take your money. And I'm guessing that yeah. Again, 99% of people who pay to advertise on Meta, I don't think they make their money back.
Jeremy:And so I think it's something to be cautious about unless you're willing to really, like, study copywriting, study graphic design and creative in advertising, and thinking about, like, how do all these things work together? What is the landing page that people are going to? Which specific episode and why am I sending people to? There's so many different touch points that gets a very complex, skill that needs to be, like, really yeah. I think you have to love it, or you have to have a budget to hire it out.
Justin:Yeah. And I a counterpoint to your point about boosting is I have experienced where, you have a piece of content that already has organic movement. So, maybe I wrote a blog post about this topic, and it went viral on Hacker News. So, know that the topic has some legs. I have found sometimes that you can boost an unrelated piece of content, like maybe I made a YouTube video on it, or a podcast episode, boosting it, and just getting it over the threshold of noise is enough for it to pick up organic momentum on its own, and then carry it up.
Justin:But you have to be very strategic about that kind of content. Right? So you're gonna spend a little bit of money to get it above the noise, and then it has to be able to take off on its own. And I have had that happen with YouTube videos where I'm just boosting it a little bit, and then it gets its own organic momentum that I know is real because I'm getting real comments, real engagements, real shares on the video. It picks up its own life of its own after the promotion has ended.
Jeremy:I think for me, a couple other things that I would throw in here in terms of, like, when to use advertising and how to do it well. Ideally, you have a product, and the higher ticket the product, the better. And so if you have a $5,000 coaching program or $10,000, you are somebody who can probably do quite well with advertising. If you have a solid sales system on the back end and you know a way to get people in upfront, you're not advertising that program, but you know I can get somebody to my lead magnet or low ticket product. And within three to six months, I have a way of converting a certain percentage of people into that program.
Jeremy:Ads will work wonderfully for you. And I think that there's actually really interesting ways that you can integrate the podcast into that where you get somebody into the funnel, and let's say you have a lead magnet focused on one specific topic. And then in the welcome sequence, you might put together a series of emails that links to some of your episodes that are related to that thing. And they can kinda go down the rabbit hole, accrue a bunch of time spent with you, and that's gonna kind of accelerate their time to conversion. That's where podcasting becomes very interesting with advertising.
Jeremy:Less so driving people directly to the podcast, but you actually get the same result out of it. It's going to something else, and then you introduce the podcast to them on the back end. So having that product makes things way easier. And I think the other thing is really having a sufficient budget to be able to test. And so you hear people talk a lot about optimizing ads, and usually that's like over a three or more month period where you're just running a bunch of tests and it's not gonna be profitable.
Jeremy:You're not gonna break even. You're gonna lose a bunch of money. You're just trying to find out which ad combinations are gonna work. So you're gonna have, you know, five or six different graphics for each ad, five or six different pieces of copy, five or six different headlines. Maybe they're even going to different landing pages.
Jeremy:And you're just trying to figure out kind of pruning which of these ad combinations is gonna work best. And I I think you also just have to have in mind that this might just not work. So you have to be willing to lose the entire budget too, which is kind of the the scary part of advertising.
Justin:That's a good framework. I I agree with all of that. I think there are some people listening who are like, no. I just wanna get more listeners for my podcast. And Yep.
Justin:I do think you could run ads for that, but you're just gonna be very creative, very careful. On the flip side, if you do have a product that you're, like you said, that you're driving all this to, I would incorporate then in your post purchase survey and other things, start asking the question, how did you hear about us? How did you hear about the product? What made you change your mind? And see if podcasting shows up.
Justin:And if it does, excellent. I ask every new customer, how did you hear about us? What brought you here today? And I know over the long tail of this company that people do sign up because they built a relationship with us over the podcast because they mention it. Sometimes it takes years for a podcast listener to convert to a customer.
Justin:But you have to ask the question, and then you have to have this steady drip of responses. People that are actually saying, oh, yeah. Dude, I've been listening to your podcast for years. Boss asked me about this, and I recommended you, and so here we are today. You know, that's the kind of response you're looking for.
Justin:If it's not working, no responses? No, like, you don't have any evidence that this is helping you at all as a business? Well, unless the podcast is serving another purpose in your business, maybe it's time to take a different strategy.
Jeremy:Now, the last thing I wanna touch on here is we've kind of focused a lot of this conversation on how to do advertising well, more on maybe the social and digital advertising online, which I think it's more trackable. There's a lot more customization you can do. The platforms are quite complex. That's another thing too. There's a steep learning curve there.
Jeremy:And so it's not the most approachable, but I think if you know what you're doing and you have an experimental mindset, there's actually quite a lot you can get into. And, again, I would not advertise the podcast itself unless it's more of a retargeting campaign. But there's this whole other side, and and maybe we we didn't talk about this because we kind of, I don't wanna say debunked it, but there is podcast specific advertising. So there are the different listening apps that, you know, can be worth experimenting with. And in the episode that we, played from Creator Science with Chris Hutchins last year on our feed, we did the feed drop.
Jeremy:Mhmm. Chris talks about doing an ad experiment, I think, on Overcast explicitly to test his cover art and title and combination where he was like, basically, here's the benchmark. If your ad outperforms this, you know you have a good show. And I would say a good show packaging and a good show premise. And so Mhmm.
Jeremy:That is another use for advertising is just assessing, is my show good enough to get out in front of more people? And so you can use advertising for that. And I think that that's actually a really ingenious way of of thinking about it. And then the other thing that we haven't really talked about is advertising on podcasts. And this is actually the thing if I was going to be promoting my podcast, I would be advertising on other podcasts.
Jeremy:Because I think that that's where you're already reaching podcast listeners in a medium where they're receptive to this thing. And I think Mhmm. Part of the problem with online digital advertising is it runs into the same challenge as promoting your podcast on social media does, where you're reaching people on a platform where they're just not in podcast listening mode. And so they might see the show and be like, oh, that's interesting. But they're probably not gonna go click through and listen through.
Jeremy:Maybe they're on the computer and they're not on their phone. You know, it might happen that you get a few people, but I think reaching podcast listeners where they're already listening to podcasts and especially if you can get a host read ad, that is something that I think would be if I had to spend to promote the podcast, that's where I would be doing it. But otherwise, I wouldn't even be doing that.
Justin:I think that's where I would deploy my capital. I'm I'm thinking about this right now, especially in terms of this new show I just started and thinking, okay. Where would I actually spend my money? It would be harnessing existing organic momentum on podcasts. So, I listen to a host, and they mention the show, or I listen to a host, and they mention a topic we covered, and doing the same with newsletters and blogs, and YouTube channels.
Justin:I think I would be just finding where is there existing kind of momentum, and just following up with that, and trying to ride that wave, and first trying to see if I can just do it for free organically, And then Yeah. If not, then paying for that privilege.
Jeremy:Let me just put the question to you more explicitly. Let's revisit one of our, episodes from last year where we did if you had $500 a month, $2,500 a month, and $10,000 a month podcast budget, what would you do with that? I seem to remember one of your answers was just all of it put all of it into TikTok ads. And so I'm curious now. This is not a monthly budget, but you have a $10,000 lump sum right now.
Jeremy:You have to spend only on paid advertising to grow your new show. Specifically, where are you allocating that?
Justin:Yeah. So this new show I started, it's so helpful to have an actual show in mind. So it's for software entrepreneurs, bootstrappers, people doing startups. And I think I would deploy it using this idea of retargeting, but in a different So, for example, it just got mentioned organically in this newsletter. So, it's been mentioned once, but now what I could do is I could follow that mention up with a paid series of ads in that newsletter to say, because people are already aware of it, they've had one impression.
Justin:So, now maybe I can pay for more impressions from, you know, they've already done me a service. They've given me one impression for free. Now I'm gonna follow that up with a bunch of paid ads. And probably doing that everywhere. So every time the show gets mentioned on a YouTube channel, on another podcast, whatever, taking note of that.
Justin:First, seeing if I can do an organic follow-up like, hey. You guys mentioned the show, and we talked about this exact thing you're talking about on our show. Here's the clip. See if I can get a free mention in there, and then following that up with an ad. And you can see from a host read ad how effective that would be.
Justin:Hey, folks. Yeah. You heard us talk about this last week. Justin reached out and actually decided to sponsor the show. So, we're gonna mention his show again.
Justin:I've been listening to it. It's great. You should check it out. If you like the show, can see how that would work. Right?
Justin:So, yeah, I think that I'd be deploying the capital in that way. If people are talking about it on LinkedIn, then maybe I would see if I can follow that organic energy, that organic momentum with paid ads on that platform and seeing if I can continue on with that momentum and see if it delivers Yeah. Results.
Jeremy:So I'm thinking about this myself. I think we've actually covered some of the stuff that I would do. I think the retargeting ads for website visitors, that's the one I'm most interested in and I think is potentially the best kind of use of funds. And, you know, if we're getting a little bit more complex here, I might actually say let's say we're growing this show. And so I might go to the other shows that are on podcasting.
Jeremy:I would run ads on a bunch of them at this exact same time period back to a specific landing page or a series of landing pages for those shows. And, of course, some people are just gonna go in their app and click through to the show there, but I would probably run it to a landing page that I had retargeting pixel on and then running retargeting ads to those people. So we've got podcasts pointing to either a landing page for the show or people can find it just immediately, in their apps, and then getting more retargeting ads for the people who've already had an exposure to the show from a HostRed ad. That would be one thing I would look at. And then the other thing, you know, we talked about this too is that the really the thing that I would do as somebody who has a business that's related to the show, I would be running ads to a lead magnet.
Jeremy:I think I would probably do my, ears audit where you can kind of get an assessment of your why your marketing is or isn't working and where some of the gaps are. I would run ads to that. And then after that, I would curate episodes that fit into and you can get even really fancy with this is I can see, okay, you scored this in your audit, that means you have a gap here. So you probably wanna learn more about this. Then I would be serving those people episodes related to that topic, whereas other people who maybe they're struggling on the sales side of things, then I'm gonna feature episodes or blog posts and things like that there and try to get people into both the show and my other content that way on the back end.
Jeremy:I do actually have one kind of idea that I think I told people in my community last week, but I wanna share it here too because I think there's something really interesting with using kind of micro funnels and podcasting together that I've never seen anybody do. So here's the idea. You run an ad to some kind of, like, low friction, easily accessible thing. Let's call it a lead magnet. Then on the back end, you've got a welcome sequence, but you don't actually share episodes from your main podcast, but you actually create your own mini podcast that leads to a product that is aligned with both that show, a six episode miniseries.
Jeremy:It has a lead magnet that leads directly into the miniseries that's going in parallel with a welcome sequence because not everybody's gonna go to the podcast. You're hoping that they do, but you've got the welcome sequence everybody's gonna get pointing to these, you know, mini podcast episodes. I would do them short, like seven or eight minutes, and so that there's low friction to get people in. And then there's some kind of product offer on the back end of that. Nothing too expensive.
Jeremy:Maybe it's like a hundred, 2 hundred dollars, something like that. And I think that that little micro funnel, everything's in alignment in terms of the theme, could be really interesting in terms of getting conversions off of paid advertising. So it's not an existing show, but it's creating a new show as a part of a kind of advertising funnel for a first step offer in a business. But let me know if you test this out, and I'd love to hear the results.
Justin:I can also we don't typically talk about this form of monetization, but if you had a paid podcast, that funnel also would be interesting there, where you have a mini series that leads into the paid podcast. And that would be interesting to see if you can get paid subscribers out of that mini sequence. So, yeah, that's it. I like that idea.
Jeremy:Like I said, if you test that out, let me know, and I would love to shout out the results, good or bad. Bashame you or praise you publicly. And as always, to, get the full Podcast Marketing Trends report, you can find that at podcastmarketingtrends.com to see all the data on well, we don't have that much data on advertising other than that that's what people want, for their shows, and also that's what people, say does not work. So if we haven't convinced you here, maybe the data will. Again, that's PodcastMarketingTrends.com.
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