How to Use Podcasting to Help Your Brand

This article by AJ Agrawal, Founder of Verma Media, published on entrepreneur.com and dated August 16, 2019 helps understand why podcasting has become an important new venue for marketing and why it has its unique flavor of advertising to it for brands.

These two points well taken stroke me as very relevant to republish them here on our blog:

Let Hosts Take Hold Of Your Ads

Podcast listeners tend to describe a surprisingly personal relationship with the hosts of their favorite shows, who often lean into the social element of the medium by embracing a conversational tone and listener participation. That unique emotional engagement goes a long way toward explaining why 51 percent of regular podcast listeners follow their favorite hosts on social media. Similar surveys have shown that more than half of listeners prefer hosts read podcasts ads themselves, and that more than one-third of listeners have made a purchase after being introduced to it via a podcast ad. Just as most people would rather take recommendations from friends and family than from strangers, listeners respond to ads read by hosts they know far more intimately than random voice actors. Furthermore, host-read ads don’t snap listeners out of the overall experience the way ads might when interrupting a television or radio program. Listeners continue paying attention to host-read ads during breaks because they’re engaged with the hosts themselves.

Measure ROI and Target Audiences

A standard critique of podcast advertising is that, while TV has Nielsen ratings and Instagram has a host of engagement and impression metrics, there’s no way to know how many people actually hear podcast ads. Certainly, every medium has ROI-measurement challenges, but Marketing Dive explains how promo codes (checkout coupons that vary for each podcast), vanity URLs (given out by podcast hosts to measure how many visitors they refer) and checkout surveys all help advertisers gauge conversion. Furthermore, advertisers can maximize their ROI by working with podcasts to obtain detailed listener- demographic information. Sites such as Podsurvey help podcasts and brands understand who listens to what shows so they can target their advertisements appropriately.

I can only recommend to read the entire article at https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/337004.